Disfavored for the Color of Their Skin: Black Women Workers in the World War II Shipyards of Portland and Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
World War II was a time of great flux for the United States. To take advantage of lucrative defense jobs, workers migrated to the cities and towns that grew around a wide array of defense industries across the country. For Black women migrants, the war represented an opportunity to escape private domestic service and find more fulfilling careers. While these women were able to make substantive gains in some parts of the country, migrants to other areas found little success. In the Pacific Northwest, a combination of community animosity and labor union obstructionism effectively blocked most Black women from accessing war work. This research examines Black women migrant workers in the World War II shipyards of Portland and Vancouver to reveal the specificity of experience at the intersection of race and gender during this crucial moment in the country’s history. Countering the myth of labor shortages, this work shows the lengths to which unions and employers went to keep Black women workers out, creating divisions in the Black community and hindering the war effort. Rather than gaining fulfilling work, Black women workers in the Portland-area emerged from the war largely restricted to the same kinds of devalued work they had done before the war boom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".