Archive: Apr 2013

College attendance, access to loans, and higher education are all gendered experiences influenced by inequalities—and so is the significant debt that often accompanies college. In a recent article, Rachel E. Dwyer, Randy Hodson, and Laura McCloud (Gender & Society, February 2013) explore how debt influences dropout rates and how men and women make decisions about each differently.

The authors find that men are less likely to take out student loans and that men drop out of college at lower levels of debt than women. The authors explain these findings by examining the effects of gendered occupational segregation and the gender pay gap. Because women and men face different labor market opportunities, their assessments of whether a college degree is worth the debt also differ.

When it comes to jobs that do not require a college degree, women and men are segregated into different types of work and men make significantly more money than women. For example, female dropouts tend to work in service and clerical jobs, while male dropouts work in higher-paid manufacturing, construction, and transportation positions. The consequences of dropping out of college, then, are greater for women, while it’s a more viable option for men to drop out before acquiring excessive debt.

With a college degree, men and women work more similar jobs and have more similar incomes. Still, even if they stay in college and graduate, women are less able to pay back student loans and get ahead because of the wage gap.

In nearly half of all U.S. states, it is a felony for HIV-positive people to have sex without disclosing their status to their partners. In some places, this law, meant to promote public health, has become a tool of social control. Those who have—or are suspected of having—HIV or AIDS are essentially kept under surveillance and can be criminally sanctioned for various violations.

Trevor Hoppe (Social Problems, February 2013) interviewed 25 health officials responsible for managing “health threat” cases in Michigan, where the laws are particularly strenuous. When new HIV-positive individuals are identified, officials do extensive contact tracing. While surveillance technologies are officially about disease prevention, they are also used to aid law enforcement and to regulate the client’s sexual practices. If an individual is labeled a “health threat,” they may be forced to undergo testing, counseling, treatment, or be quarantined. HIV-positive individuals may not be allowed to have any unprotected sex, even if they have disclosed their status to their partner (and if they test positive for a secondary STI, that is taken as evidence of unprotected sex). The law also treats all types of sex as equally risky, criminalizing even those sexual acts that carry no risk of transmission.

The criminal punishment for non-disclosure also provides impetus for local rumor mills, often setting in motion a “witch hunt.” Community members can call in confidential third party reports accusing individuals they suspect are HIV positive of not disclosing. These accusations often come against already-stigmatized individuals and may be false reports, but they set investigations in motion.

The additional stigma and social costs attached to an HIV diagnosis in states with such legislation may now be reducing people’s willingness to be tested for STIs at all, thus rendering a public health effort bad for public health.

A lot of 2008 election analysis focused on prejudice and race—would white Americans vote for a black president? In his recent Public Opinion Quarterly piece, Seth Goldman turns this question around to ask how the massive reach of the Obama campaign affected racial prejudice. He shows that, in just six months, the “Obama Effect” reduced racial prejudice at a rate five times faster than the average drop in racism over the entire previous twenty years. Because the same people were polled at various times during the Obama campaign, Goldman was able to measure individual- rather than group-level changes.

Unexpectedly, this effect was strongest among McCain supporters, especially those who watched political television shows. The effect was even stronger in states where the Obama campaign aired an influx of television advertisements. Watching TV didn’t change Republicans’ political views or swing their vote. Instead, seeing Obama challenged their expectations of black Americans by offering a positive image and countering stereotypes. Television is where media acts as a point of “virtual” contact between racial groups—and as Goldman argues, it can reduce prejudice as effectively as a face-to-face encounter.

On July 7, 2005, four British Muslim young men from the Leeds area detonated bombs on the London transportation system killing over fifty people. In the wake of these 7/7 bombings, politicians and academics worried that incidents of racism and Islamophobia against British South Asians perceived as Muslim would dramatically increase. Demonstrating a commonsense yet novel methodology, Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley (Racial and Ethnic Studies, January 2013) interviewed forty British Pakistani Muslims to gauge post-7/7 racist or Islamophobic incidents, rather than replicate social science research that measures white, non-Muslim respondents’ changes in attitudes toward Muslims.

Among the findings, Hussain and Bagguley report that instead of outright violent incidents, most manifestations of racism and Islamophobia were much more subtle and patterned, experienced as “funny looks” from (mainly white) non-Muslim strangers. Drawing from the slang British connotation of “funny” as peculiar or slightly hostile, these looks were aimed particularly at young South Asians who were recognizably Muslim, wearing more traditional forms of dress. Women with headscarves disproportionately experienced funny looks, although respondents of all genders drew these looks if they were carrying a bag or backpack in public.

Responding with increased self-policing, many young Muslims said they’d become more intentional about when and where they travelled in order to insulate themselves from hostility and potential violence. Some even stopped wearing traditional dress. Other respondents disregarded these issues as an act of resistance and assertion of their identity as British Muslims. Hussain and Bagguley’s study reminds us that racism and prejudice is often not experienced directly through verbal or physical attacks but rather manifested in racial micro-aggressions that are difficult to quantify.