Archive: Oct 2013

Let’s get down to business: unemployment has been linked to increases in debt, poverty, homelessness, crime, depression, and family breakdown. According to a recent article by Montez and Zajacova, unemployment is also partially responsible for the growing difference in mortality rates of low-educated white women compared to their more highly educated peers.

Between 1997 and 2001, low-educated women 45-86 years old were 1.37 times more likely to die than high-educated women. Compared to mortality data from 2002 to 2006, the gap between groups widened by 21%. To find out why, the authors use complex statistical modeling to investigate the influence of socio-psychological, economic, and health factors on the increasing difference in mortality rates. Along with smoking, unemployment is identified as the factor most strongly linked to this change. The authors speculate that the Internet and the “digital divide” may be playing a larger role in the unemployment of low-educated women, and that the information taught in schools may be becoming more relevant to health.

Having identified unemployment as one of the causes of the growing education gap in mortality, Montez and Zajacova call for social-protection policies geared toward helping low-educated women remain in the workforce. They believe that work-family policies allowing more flexible hours and protected leave will contribute to stemming the divergence.  Their hope is that giving women the opportunity to punch the clock will—in the long-run—give them more time to unwind.

The ability to create your own avatar in video and online games has become increasingly popular, particularly with the increase in online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). With the advent of avatars, players are able to pick and choose how they want their gaming character to look, act, and even feel. As expected, players often attempt to replicate themselves in their avatar. But what happens when your characteristics are not available?

Setting out to determine how race is represented in video game characters, David Dietrich found that only 10 of the 65 games he analyzed allowed for a non-white avatar. Dietrich looked at non-white skin color, hair style/color, and facial features, finding that a majority of these games—including World of Warcraft, which boasts over 10 million players as of 2012 and dominates the online gaming world—to be reinforcing “normative whiteness” by assuming that the default color of their players is white.

The consequence, Dietrich argues, is that these all-white worlds force non-white players to “become white” in order to play while implicitly signaling to the non-white player that they do not belong. While the exclusion of non-white avatar options is likely unintentional on the part of the game’s creator, the simple fact that this was overlooked is evidence enough of the “unquestioned standards of whiteness” in American society. What these games are telling us is that you can be a fairy, a dwarf, or the Primordial Thunder King, but you can only be white.

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