women

Women account for about 7% of the U.S. prison population. Compared to men, they are much more likely to experience poverty, mental health issues, and various forms of victimization prior to being incarcerated. And while they’re in prison, women are more likely to experience mental health problems, chronic medical conditions, and sexual misconduct by staff members. These issues do not disappear after release, but are coupled with difficulty finding adequate employment, public assistance, and health care.

Sociologist Susan Sered was recently featured in Sojourners, which explored her advice to faith communities helping formerly incarcerated women. Drawing on eight years of research with criminalized women in the Boston area, Sered suggests churches and communities of faith can provide shared knowledge and support in the form of information about housing, employment, health systems, and social networks. She believes faith communities can help women make meaning out of their suffering by reframing their incarceration as experience that can provide them with special insight, rather than a reason to blame or ostracize them. Sered says, “criminalized women need to hear these powerful messages from religious communities.”

Read the full article here.

In the wake of last year’s Boston Marathon bombing and a foiled plot to attack a Via Rail train, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told citizens now is not the time to “commit sociology.” Rather than look for the underlying causes of problems like homegrown terrorism, he stressed the power of law enforcement agencies to express the government’s condemnation of violence. While his position was contentious at the time, its efficacy has recently come under fire again, this time from members of Canada’s large Aboriginal community.

After the body of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old indigenous woman, was pulled from the Red River in early August, a vigil was held in Winnipeg in her memory. More than a thousand people gathered at the vigil, renewing calls for a national public inquiry into the cases of nearly 1,200 Aboriginal women and girls who have been reported missing or murdered since 1980. According to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, the vigil’s guide, Wab Kinew, directly addressed the Canadian federal government’s refusal to address the alarming pattern. “Is now the time to make that change?” he asked. “Is now the time we say no more stolen sisters? We say that violence against women must stop. And if we go home and do nothing about this it’s a missed opportunity.”

Yet Harper’s response, delivered in a speech at Yukon College, reiterated the stance he took last year on terrorism. He urged Canadians not to understand missing and murdered aboriginal women as a “sociological phenomenon” and instead, to “view it as a crime.”

The problem with this view, explain sociologist Julie Kaye and public policy scholar Daniel Béland in the Toronto Star, is this:

If the prime minister would take the time to consult even the most rudimentary criminology textbook, he would find that crime is a social phenomenon shaped by powerful historical and social forces. Inequality among different populations in society is one of these forces. In Canada, it is a well-established fact that aboriginal peoples, who face much more poverty and unemployment than the national average, are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than other Canadians…

Harper’s downplaying of “the undeniable and well-documented reality that social inequality and violent victimization are closely linked” takes the focus off differences in perception of state power, as Kaye and Béland note. But, they stress, it is necessary for him to “at the very least, consider that aboriginal women do not want their murders to be solved, they want to live.” We must remember,

Violence against aboriginal women is a crime but a crime rooted in a particular social context, a context the prime minister suggests Canadians should disregard. He does so at the expense of the lives and safety of aboriginal women.

 

Unfortunately, Aboriginal Canadians are not the only minority group with a high victimization rate. To learn more about the “homocide divide” in the United States, see this piece. Also, check out this Citings & Sightings article about press coverage of a study with similar findings.

Finding more lessons from TV (in this case, shows like 30 Rock and Girls), we’re seeing how women are investing more in careers and/or casual encounters than commitments to deep romantic relationships. At face value, this looks like a great example of women’s empowerment as our society comes to terms with the fact that—well—the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin said it better than I can.

But as Leslie C. Bell writes in The Atlantic, this hesitance to pair off isn’t necessarily happening because young women are “masters of their own destiny.” Instead, the trend may be due to a new social norm that “ambitious young women in their 20s shouldn’t want relationships with men.”

Citing work from Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong, who found that young women “believed relational commitments were supposed to take a backseat to self-development” (see their article, with Paula England, in Contexts magazine, Summer 2010), Bell argues that seemingly-progressive norms can cause undue stress when we assume individual interests are always in tension with social needs, and individual needs should always take priority.

Many young and aspiring women with whom I spoke felt as though it were counterproductive to their development to prioritize a relationship with a man.

Confused about freedom and desire, young women often split their social and psychological options—independence, strength, safety, control, and career versus connection, vulnerability, need, desire, and relationships—into mutually exclusive possibilities in life.

Bell’s point isn’t that women should go back to the old priorities either. Instead, they should recognize when it is healthy to balance a human need for social relationships with individual development. The sisters do it for themselves, but they shouldn’t always have to:

I would never advocate that women return to the stereotype of the single woman pining for romance… the successful woman who is in a relationship is not the same as the pining woman. She’s the one who is acknowledging the full range of her desires.

At the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting in Denver, researchers presented their on-going research to colleagues in the field. This week, several news sources have covered sociologists’ findings about how events in the lifecourse (like getting married, divorced, or having kids) are related to health issues.

Medical News Today reports on a study by Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske, finding that moms who work full-time are healthier at age 40 than are other mothers. Particularly concerning is that the least healthy mothers at age 40 are those who are persistently unemployed or in and out of work, not by choice. Consistent work, these findings suggest, may be good for women’s health.

Co-author Adrianne Frech, Assistant Sociology Professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, told the press, work is good for both physical and mental health, for many reasons:

“It gives women a sense of purpose, self-efficacy, control and autonomy.”

“They have a place where they are an expert on something, and they’re paid a wage,” she added.

NBC News details research conducted by Michael McFarland, Mark Hayward, and Dustin Brown exploring how marriage is related to biological risk factors, such as high blood pressure. They found that women who were continuously married for longer periods of time had fewer cardiovascular risks, whereas women with experiences of divorce or widowhood had increased risk factors.

For women, the researchers found, the longer the marriage, the fewer cardiovascular risk factors. The effect was significant but modest, McFarland said, with every 10 years of continuous marriage associated with a 13 percent decrease in cardiovascular risk.

But when marriage is disrupted, it can be hard on the health. Women who were continuously married had a 40 percent lower count of metabolic risk factors than women who experienced two episodes or divorce or widowhood, the researchers found.

Finally, Deseret News picked up on research presented by Corinne Reczek, Tetyana Pudroyska, and Debra Umberson (also highlighted on Citings&Sightings). Their research found that being in a long-term marriage was associated with more alcohol consumption for women (compared to divorced or recently widowed women). In an interesting contrast, however, married men drink less than other men.

Our survey results show that continuously divorced and recently widowed women consume fewer drinks that continuously married women,” they wrote. “Our qualitative results suggest this occurs because men introduce and prompt women’s drinking and because divorced women lose the influence of men’s alcohol use” when the marriage fails.

As these studies indicate, it is essential to consider how social factors may be related to health outcomes, and sociologists are well positioned to contribute cutting-edge research on these issues.

We’ve had two sightings regarding the participation of women in the upcoming Summer Olympics.  To bring you up to speed, Saudi Arabia had announced that it would be sending female athletes for the first time.  But, this spring, there were many doubts about whether Saudi Arabian women would actually be allowed to participate.

This past Thursday, Saudi Arabia agreed to send two women to compete, making this the first time in Olympic history that every country will be represented by female athletes.  In 1996, 26 teams had no women.  However, that figure dropped to three in Beijing four years ago, where women represented 42% of the athletes.  That percentage is expected to increase in London.

The so-called “mommy wars” have apparently made it all the way to the delivery room, according to Jennifer Block, writing for Slate:

For a long time home birth was too fringe to get caught in this parenting no-fly zone, but lately it’s been fitting quite nicely into the mommy war media narrative: There are the stories about women giving birth at home because it’s fashionable, the idea that women are happy sacrificing their newborns for some “hedonistic” spa-like experience, or that moms-to-be (and their partners) are just dumb and gullible when it comes to risk management…

For many parents, home birth is a transcendent experience. …Yet as the number of such births grows, so does the number of tragedies—and those stories tend to be left out of soft-focus lifestyle features.

Debates about home birth have erupted in the media and the blogosphere in recent months, largely focused on the relative risks of home birth versus hospital birth. But at the heart of the issue is who, and what evidence, to trust.

I could list several recent large prospective studies… all comparing where and with whom healthy women gave birth, which found similar rates of baby loss—around 2 per 1,000—no matter the place or attendant. We could pick through those studies’ respective strengths and weaknesses, talk about why we’ll never have a “gold-standard” randomized controlled trial (because women will never participate in a study that makes birth choices for them), and I could quote a real epidemiologist on why determining the precise risk of home birth in the United States is nearly impossible. Actually, I will: “It’s all but impossible, certainly in the United States,” says Eugene Declercq, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at Boston University, and coauthor of the CDC study that found the number of U.S. home births has risen slightly, to still less than 1 percent of all births. One of the challenges is that “the outcomes tend to be pretty good,” Declercq says…But to really nail it down here in the U.S., he says, we’d need to study tens of thousands of home births, “to be able to find a difference in those rare outcomes.” With a mere 30,000 planned home births happening each year nationwide, “We don’t have enough cases.”

And, as sociologist Barbara Katz-Rothman notes, decisions about where to give birth are likely made more on the basis of perceived, rather than real, risk.

“What we’re talking about is felt risk rather than actual risk,” explains Barbara Katz-Rothman, professor of sociology at the City University of New York and author of much scholarship on birth, motherhood, and risk. Take our fear of flying. “Most people understand intellectually that on your standard vacation trip or business trip, the ride to and from the airport is more likely to result in your injury or death than the plane ride itself, but you never see anybody applaud when they reach the airport safely in the car.” The flight feels more risky. Similarly, we can look at data showing our risk of infection skyrockets the second we step in a hospital, “but there’s something about the sight of all those gloves and masks that makes you feel safe.”

As the Summer Olympics draw near, all sorts of messages about women are surfacing.

Some messages pertain to female participation.  In March, we cited an article that noted this year might be the first time each country sends female athletes to participate in the Summer Olympics.  However, a recent New York Times article explained that Saudi Arabian women may not be allowed to participate after all.

Other messages are about what women will wear or how they will behave rather than if or how they will perform.  For example, officials of the International Amateur Boxing Association suggested that women try wearing skirts in competition.

The man in charge of the association—they are always men—said he had received complaints that spectators could not tell women from men beneath the protective headgear. Instead of referring these spectators to optometrists, he referred the boxers to the Ring Magazine spring collection.

Skirts will be optional, not mandatory, as women’s boxing makes its debut in London, though.

“It’s an interesting time for women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “The more they become involved in sport, the more it seems people feel the need to market female sexuality. It’s a tough bind for women—they have to look good and be attractive to the public, presumably a heterosexual male public, and be good athletes. That same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to men.”

Women’s athletic gear is being reconsidered on other fronts as well.  The International Volleyball Federation will permit more conservative outfits for beach volleyball, including shorts and sleeved tops, due to cultural and religious sensitivities.  FIFA (soccer’s governing body) is also reconsidering its ban on the hijab.

However, it remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia will also reconsider the messages it’s sending by continuing to disallow women participants, something some defend by claiming that sports lead to immoral behavior and that virgin girls are too affected by jumping required by sports.

“That women in vigorous activities will upset their wombs, reproductive activity and menstrual cycle—it’s amazing they can put forth these arguments and be accepted with the science we have,” said Forsyth, the Olympic scholar. “My students laughed at that. They were shocked. That’s something we saw a hundred years ago.”