Citings and Sightings

Soccer player Hope Solo covers Sports Illustrated in 2011

Title IX has had 40 years to flex its muscles in helping make sport a less gendered venue, and, indeed, more women are participating in and watching sports than ever before.  Oddly enough, the media representation of sports has not followed suit. A new study from sociologists Jonetta Weber and Robert Carini of the University of Louisville reconfirms a long line of research in media representations of athletes by looking at the covers of every issue of Sports Illustrated from the last decade. In an article for the website Jezebel, Madeleine Davies explains the scholars’ troubling results:

Researchers found that of the 716 SI issues published between 2000 and 2011, a mere 35 of them had covers featuring female athletes. That’s only 4.9%.

It’s extra bizarre since 12.6% of the covers from between 1954 and 1965 featured female athletes. And that’s not even the worst part. Only 18 of the recent covers actually had the female athlete as the primary image on the cover—that’s just 2.5%—and only 11 of the 35 issues showed non-white women on the cover. Despite a marked increase in women’s sport participation, one of the best-known sporting news outlets has been gradually phasing out female athletes and their accomplishments.

For more on SI’s troubled history of representing female athletes, check out The Atlantic’s 2011 piece “9 Ways Women Get on the Cover of ‘Sports Illustrated’.”

Might be time for an academic Hollaback! Image by Ihollaback.org.

A recent study has exposed rampant sexual harassment in one of the most unlikely of places: anthropological fieldwork. In his article for Science Magazine, John Bohannon describes the work of Kathryn Clancy, a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After being shocked by the horror stories of her colleagues’ fieldwork, Clancy collaborated with Katie Hinde (Harvard), Robin Nelson (University of California, Riverside), and Julienne Rutherford (University of Illinois, Chicago) to create an online survey that could gauge the experiences of fieldworkers.

The survey results were troubling. About 30% of male and female respondents reported witnessing frequent or regular verbal abuse. A startling 63% of women (and 39% of men) reported personally experiencing inappropriate or sexual remarks. Of the women surveyed, 21% reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact or physical sexual harassment. That means more than 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted during their fieldwork. Bohannon writes:

“Less than 20% of abuses involved people from the community around a field site. Instead, most of the abuse happened within the team of researchers, usually perpetrated by someone higher in the professional hierarchy. Perhaps most troubling, some said that they had been victimized by their own fieldwork mentors.”

It is worrisome, ironic, and frankly embarrassing to think that those perpetrators behind such unsavory statistics are also the ones producing our social knowledge.

One survey participant’s “coat-of-arms” generated by taking the Great British Class Survey. Click for image source.

Step aside, Downton Abbey, the British social hierarchy is astir again. The BBC Lab UK, with Manchester University’s Fiona Devine and Mike Savage from the London School of Economics, has conducted a class study of more than 161,000 people: the Great British Class Survey. In addition to studying each individual’s economic capital, the researchers also looked at respondents’ social capital (their social status and connections) and cultural capital (the nature and extent of their cultural interests and activities). According to Devine, this extensive survey allowed for “a much more complete picture of class in modern Britain” than previous work has captured.

The team’s results found that the traditional model of class was losing its relevance, with only 39% fitting into the working, middle, or upper class. According to the BBC, the team proposes “a new model of seven social classes ranging from the elite at the top to a ‘precariat’—the poor, precarious proletariat—at the bottom.”

The researchers believe the working and middle classes have waned because of the rise of the information age:

They say the new affluent workers and emergent service workers appear to be the children of the ‘traditional working class,’ which they say has been fragmented by de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, immigration and the restructuring of urban space.

In other words, information-age Britons don’t fit into industrial class structures. The people aren’t obsolete, but the categories may be.

One sign, made to be displayed outside the Supreme Court as it hears arguments on DOMA and Prop 8, hearkens back to the days of arguments about interracial marriage, using a photo of Mildred and Richard Loving, who famously won their case, Loving v. Virginia, before the Supreme Court. Photo by Reed Probus via flickr.com.

Last week, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments regarding California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that became a constitutional amendment legally defining marriage as an institution solely for the benefit of one man and one woman. On March 26, Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested the Court might simply dismiss the case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, without a ruling, so as not to dive into “uncharted waters,” particularly when the Court is considering another, related case.

Minnesota Public Radio invited Kathleen Hull, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, to discuss the Court’s apparent willingness to side-step the case. She cited the results of a new PEW study showing that the younger generation was about 75% in favor of legalizing same sex marriage. She confessed:

Increasingly I find it difficult to engage the 18-22 year-olds on the same-sex issue. They are bored by it… They don’t know what there is to talk about.

Hull told MPR that California’s law not only lags behind public attitudes, but also behind the business and entertainment worlds. She also refutes claims that there isn’t enough data to rule on the subject if it’s considered through the lens of child-rearing:

I was a little stunned when one of the justices said something to the effect of “yeah, we don’t have any information on this.” […] We have decades of research now on the effects of same-sex parenting on children and it is all kind of in the same direction: That there is no difference from being raised by heterosexuals.

In fact, there is such a great deal of research in this area that the American Sociological Association went on to file an amicus curiae (that is, a “Friend of the Court”) brief outlining the social scientific consensus around the quality of parenting across different family forms. Interestingly, Justice Scalia then went on the record stating that there is no such consensus; he appears to have taken his cue from another amicus brief coauthored by Mark Regenerus, who has stirred up controversy with his own findings that children of homosexual parents do not fare as well as those raised by heterosexual couples. Clearly, this fight isn’t over.

The CEO and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley Asia, Wei Sun Christianson frequently tops lists of China’s most powerful women (business- and otherwise).

The social status of women in China is receiving a lot of attention again, and this time there might be good news. A study out of accounting firm Grant Thorton’s Beijing Branch claims that the proportion of women in senior management positions has jumped from 25% to a staggering 51%. Of the 200 businesses surveyed, 94% of them had women in these upper level positions. This seems like a great finding for women in China, but Laurie Burkitt of the Wall Street Journal advises that the news should be taken with a grain of salt.

Burkitt cites a new study by National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the New York-based Asia Society. Their findings claim that five Chinese men are in a senior position in the workplace for each one woman that reaches a comparable position. Burkitt also points out that just 10 of the 205 members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee are women. Even Chinese views on whether women should be in the workplace at all have been sliding. In a 2010 survey:

61.6% of men and 54.6% of women said that “men belong in public life and women belong at home,” an increase of 7.7 and 4.4 percentage points respectively from 2000.

It certainly looks like attitudes on women in the workplace are changing in China. The direction of that change remains an open question.

You’ve got to know how your product is used. Photo by FourTwentyTwo via flickr.com.

The era of bothersome consumer surveys and robo-calls may be coming to a close, as these shallow techniques of data collection just don’t cut it in the information age. In a recent article in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood describes a growing trend in market research: big business hiring social scientists to do fieldwork. Corporations have long researched the quantitative aspects of their sales, but qualitative knowledge about the use of the products has been somewhat limited. Social scientists and those business researchers known as “consumer behavior” (vs. “quantitative”) economists—long since part of the business discussions within academia—are now being hired to uncover how products are used, as well as who uses them and how those users feel about the products.

After realizing that they new little about the home consumption of their product, for instance, Absolut Vodka commissioned ReD, a forerunner in what we might think of as anthropological market research, to study the home party scene and the rituals and norms of drinking. One consultant on the project, former Yale anthropology Ph.D. student Min Lieskovsky, noted some party trends that Absolut quickly applied to their marketing:

‘One after another, you see the same thing,’ Lieskovsky told me. ‘Someone comes with a bottle. She gives it to the host, then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of where the bottle came from, and why it’s important.’ And then, when the bottle is served, it goes right out onto the table with all the other booze, the premium spirits and the bottom-shelf hooch mixed together.’

The quality and status of the liquor seemed to be much less important to the consumer than their personal association with it. Despite years of market research, without this use of social science, the social significance and human connection of the product might have gone overlooked—and fewer bottles of Absolut might have gotten sold.

Hey fellas! Craving a little yogurt, but worried about your masculinity in the dairy section? What a dilemma. Luckily, Ned Resnikoff with MSNBC has some great news. A new product, Powerful Yogurt (aka, “Brogurt”), is being marketed just to men. One of the company’s ads heralds a new day in gender equality:

Your wife and sister aren’t the only ones who can take yogurt to work with them. Protein-packed Powerful Yogurt can help fuel you through your workday or even that pick-up game with the guys.

Resnikoff readily admits that he is new to “the sexual politics of fermented milk” and other nonsensical things so he cites an expert on the topic, Sociological Images’ Gwen Sharp, who has been tracking products that reinforce or create irrational gender stereotypes. As can be seen Sharp’s Community Page, Brogurt is just the latest product to be so heartily gendered it looks like a parody. (See also: manly candles in manly scents. For men.)

The proliferation and marketing of these products reinforces a stereotype problem. Needlessly gendered products are clearly trying to capitalize on gender norms we hope are well past their expiration dates.

Photo by Adam Lynch via flickr.com

It seems like there’s never enough time: today’s workplaces demand efficiency and getting more done in less time. Workers cut down on breaks, vacation, and precious sleep. Luckily, Tony Schwartz brings good news in his op-ed for the New York Times:

A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal—including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations—boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

In a country where “more than 50 percent [of workers] assume they’ll work during their vacations,” “an average of 9.2 vacation days [go] unused,” and “sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity,” these midday renewals offer much needed relief. Schwartz cites study after study showing everything from a full night’s sleep improving basketball performance to naps improving memory test results and alertness and reaction time among air traffic controllers. Another study found:

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.

Next time you find yourself joking about needing a nap, pull up that carpet square, kindergarten style. Those kids know what they’re up to.

At 80 years old, Hubert Elliot is North Carolina’s oldest Department of Transportation Worker. Photo by NCDOT Communications via flickr.com.

As the baby boomers age, so does the American workforce. It is projected that by the end of this decade, a quarter of the nation’s workforce will be fifty-five or older. Sociologist Amy Blackstone, of the University of Maine, took interest and undertook a study of this group’s workplace experiences. In a piece for the Bangor Daily News, Blackstone explains the distressing results:

While older workers generally report positive experiences on the job, there are notable patterns in the harmful experiences they report. A significant number of older workers report feeling undervalued and bullied at work. Further, many older workers do not speak up about their negative experiences, nor do those who witness bullying or harassment of older workers intervene on their behalf.

In Blackstone’s survey results, older workers said they felt devalued by their younger coworkers, as though they were useless. They felt ignored and even bullied. One woman wrote:

“After about age 60-65, I began to notice that people would sometimes ignore me as though I had become invisible.”

Blackstone provides a few suggestions for improving employment for older workers. These include educating and reminding employers and employees of the importance of a positive workplace atmosphere, the knowledge and experience older workers may hold, and the need for support and bystander intervention.