Sociological Images

In 2009, 470,000 15-year-olds in 65 developed nations took a science test.  Boys in the U.S. outperformed girls by 14 points: 509 to 495.  How does the U.S. compare to other countries?

The figure below — from the New York Times — features Western and Northern Europe and the Americas (in turquoise), Asia and the Pacific Islands (in pink), and the Middle East and Eastern and Southern Europe (in yellow).  The line down the middle separates societies in which boys scored higher than girls (left) and vice versa (right).

Notice that the countries in which boys outscore girls are overwhelmingly Western and Northern Europe and the Americas.

This data tells a similar story to the data on gender and math aptitude.  Boys used to outperform girls in math in the U.S., but no longer.  And if you look transnationally, cultural variation swamps gender differences.  Analyses have shown that boys outperforming girls in math is strongly correlated with the degree of inequality in any given society.

One lesson to take is this: any given society is just one data point and can’t be counted on to tell the whole story.

Via The Global Sociology Blog.

A new example prompts us to re-post this fun one from 2010.

We’ve posted in the past about the way in which “male” is often taken to be the default or neutral category, with “female” a notable, marked, non-default one. For instance, the Body Worlds exhibit, “regular” t-shirts are men’s, Best Buy assumes customers are male, stick figures on signs are generally male, and default avatars tend to be male.

We’ve collected several more examples of the tendency to present men as the norm, while women are a marked, non-default category. @LydNicholas tweeted us this example of a LEGO product advertised on their website.  Notice that the blue version is a LEGO Time-Teach Minifigure Watch and Clock, while the pink version specifies that it’s for girls:

Jessica J. noticed that Wal-Mart Target helpfully lets you know where to find both neutral, plain old deodorant and women’s deodorant:

Jane G. sent us this photo of t-ball sets, one for girls and the other with no sex specified:

Aline, in Brazil, found these two wall painting kits.  One is just a painting kit and the other is specifically “for women” (“para mulheres”).  The latter, she said, claims to be a special offer, but is actually about $2 U.S. dollars more.

Eric Stoller pointed out that ESPN differentiates between college basketball and “women’s” basketball:

Lindsay H. pointed out that when you go to the U.S. Post Office’s website to forward your mail, it offers you the chance to subscribe to magazines. Those aimed at women (Cosmopolitan, First for Women, etc.) are in the category “Women,” while equivalent magazines for men (Esquire, Maxim) are not in a category titled “Men” but, rather, “Lifestyle”:

And Jane V.S. noticed that REI has various types of marked, “non-standard” sleeping bags, including those for tall people and women:

Renée Y. sent along another example, bike helmets:

 Jessica B. spotted this pair of sibling outfits, coming in “Awesome Girl” and “Awesome Kid”:

E.W. searched Google for men’s specific road bikes and Google asked, “Don’t you mean women’s specific road bikes”?  Because there are road bikes for people and road bikes for women.

Ann C. sent a screenshot of bubblebox, a site for children’s games.  Notice that along the top there are seven options.  The last is “girls,” suggesting that all the rest are for boys.

So, there you have it.  In this world, all too often, there are people and there are women and girls.

CollegeHumor posted a set of fake Puritan-themed Valentine’s Day cards.  They’re a humorous way of reminding us that our intensive focus on romantic love as a driving force for sex and marriage is, in fact, quite new.

When the Puritans landed on the rocky east coast of America in the 1600s, they brought with them the belief that sex should be restricted to intercourse in marriage, hence the sentiment on the left. All non-marital and non-reproductive sexual activities were forbidden, including pre- and extra-marital sex, homosexual sex, masturbation, and oral or anal sex (even if married).   Violations of the rules were punished by fines, whipping, public shaming (yes, with “scarlet letters”), ostracism, or even death.

Alongside religion, there were practical reasons why the Puritans were so darn puritanical.  Colonizing the U.S. was a dangerous job; lots of people were dying from exposure, starvation, illness, and war.  Babies replenished the labor supply, motivating the Puritans to channel the sex drive towards the one sexual activity that made babies: intercourse. Accordingly, having intercourse with your spouse wasn’t only allowed, it was essential; women could divorce men who had proven impotent.  

The Puritans also married primarily to form practical partnerships for bearing children and mutual survival, hence the sentiment in the card on the right.

The idea that love should be the basis for marriage didn’t take hold until the Victorian era, when industrialization was changing the value of children.  Useful on the farm, children were suddenly became a burden in expensive and overcrowded lodgings.  This gave couples a new reason to limit the number of children they had and, because industrial production had made condoms increasingly cheap and effective, they could.  Marital fertility rates dropped precipitously between 1800 and 1900: from 6+ children/woman to 3 1/2 in the U.S., England, and Wales.

In this context, a Puritan sexual ethic that restricted sex to efforts to make babies just didn’t make sense. People needed a new logic to guide sexual activity: the answer was love. Over the course of the 1800s, Victorians slowly abandoned the Puritan idea that sex was only for reproduction, embracing instead the now familiar idea that sex could be an expression of love and a source of pleasure, an idea that still resonates strongly today.

That’s at least part of the story anyway.

Sources:

Bremer, Francis J., and Tom Webster.  2006. Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia. SantaBarbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc.

D’Emilio, John & Estelle Freedman. 1997. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freedman, Estelle. 1982. Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics. Reviews in American History 10, 4: 196-215.

Cross-posted at Work in Progress.

As children, many of us encountered Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do all Day?  A classic kid’s book, it uses animals to represent the division of labor that exists in “Busytown.”  The book is an example of a brilliant piece of analysis by sociologist John Levi Martin (full text).

To oversimplify greatly: Martin analyzes nearly 300 children’s books and finds that there is a marked tendency for these texts to represent certain animals in particular kinds of jobs. Jobs that allow the occupant to exercise authority over others tend to be held by predatory animals (especially foxes), but never by “lower” animals (mice or pigs).

Pigs in particular are substantially over-represented in subordinate jobs (those with low skill and no authority), where their overweight bodies and (judging from the plots of these books) congenital stupidity seems to “naturally” equip them for subservient jobs. Here, see this additional image from Scarry’s book, showing construction work being performed by the above-mentioned swine.

In effect, Martin’s point is that there is a hidden language or code inscribed in children’s books, which teaches kids to view inequalities within the division of labor as a “natural” fact of life  – that is, as a reflection of the inherent characteristics of the workers themselves.  Young readers learn (without realizing it, of course) that some species-beings are simply better equipped to hold manual or service jobs, while other creatures ought to be professionals. Once this code is acquired by pre-school children, he suggests, it becomes exceedingly difficult to unlearn.  As adults, then, we are already predisposed to accept the hierarchical, caste-based system of labor that characterizes the American workplace.

————————

Steven Vallas is a professor of sociology at Northeastern University.  He specializes in the sociology of work and employment.  His most recent book, Work: A Critique, offers an overview and discussion of the sociological literatures on work.  You can follow Steven at the blog Work in Progress.

Cross-posted at PolicyMic.At the end of my sociology of gender class, I suggest that the fact that feminists are associated with negative stereotypes — ugly, bitter, man-haters, for example — is not a reflection of who feminists really are, but a sign that the anti-feminists have power over how we think about the movement.  The very idea of a feminist, in other words, is politicized… and the opposition might be winning.

A clip forwarded by Dmitriy T.C. is a great example.  In the 1.38 minute Fox News clip below, two pundits discuss a North Carolina teacher, Leah Gayle, who was accused of having sex with her 15-year-old student.  One of the show’s hosts suggests that feminism is to blame for Gayle’s actions. She says:

There’s something about feminism that lets them know, I can do everything a man does. I can even go after that young boy. I deserve it… It’s turning women into sexualized freaks.

This clip reveals a discursive act.  She is defining who feminists are and what they believe.  And this idea is being broadcast across the airwaves.

This happens all day every day.  Some of the messages are friendly to feminists, and some are not.  These messages compete in our collective imagination.  Most have little to do with what feminists (who are a diverse group anyway) actually believe and many are outrageous lies and distortions, like this one.

So, next time you hear someone describing a feminist, know that what you’re hearing is almost never a strict definition of the movement. Instead, it’s a battle cry, with one side competing with the other to shape what we think of people who care about women’s equality with men.

The year during which the U.S. will become a “majority minority” is well discussed.  It looks like it’s going to happen sometime around 2050 or earlier. This statistic, however, elides an interesting subplot: the year various age groups will be majority minority.

Over at The Society Pages Editors’ Desk, sociologist Doug Hartmann offered the following table. It shows that children under the age of 18 will be majority minority 32 years earlier, by 2018.  Young people ages 18-29 will join them by 2027.  By 2035, people aged 35-64 will be majority minority.  People 65 and older are quick to follow.

This data reminds us that demographic change is gradual.  The year 2018 is just five years away.  If young people continue to vote in numbers similar to those in the last two elections, their changing demographics could push forward a change that looks all but inevitable in the long run.

In the meantime, we need to be vigilant about how younger people are portrayed.  Today poverty is racialized so as to demonize social programs designed to help the less fortunate.  Can we imagine a future in which public education and other youth-oriented programming is similarly framed: as white people helping supposedly undeserving people of color?  This is likely something that we should be vigilant against in the coming years.

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

One of the subthemes of current discussions about how best to reduce our national debt is that we must rein in out-of-control spending on federal safety net programs.   The reality is quite different.

The chart below shows spending trends in terms of GDP for the ten major needs-tested benefit programs that make-up our federal social safety net. The programs, in the order listed on the chart, are:

• The refundable portion of the health insurance tax credit enacted in the 2010 health care reform law
• Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
• The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Financial assistance for post-secondary students (Pell Grants)
• Compensatory Education Grants to school districts
• Assisted Housing
• The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
• The Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC)
• Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Family Support Payments

As Jared Bernstein explains:

…for all the popular wisdom that programs to help low-income people are swallowing the economy, the truth is that like so much else that plagues our fiscal future, it’s all about health care spending.  The figure shows that as a share of GDP, prior to the Great Recession, non-health care spending was cruising along at around 1.5% for decades.  It was Medicaid/CHIP (Medicaid expansion for kids) that did most of the growing.

The takeaway from this: we need a new health care system (think single payer).

Regardless, the recent explosion in the ratio of Medicare/CHIP spending to GDP is largely due to the severity of the Great Recession, not the generosity of the programs. The recession increased poverty and thus eligibility for the programs, thereby pushing up the numerator, while simultaneously lowering GDP, the denominator.   Moreover, spending on all non-health care safety net programs is on course to dramatically decline as a share of GDP. Even Medicare/Chip spending is projected to stabilize as a share of GDP.

These programs are essential given the poor performance of the economy, and in most cases poorly-funded. Cutting their budgets will not only deny people access to health care, housing, education, and food, it will also further weaken the economy, in both the short and long run.

—————————

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of Economics and Director of the Political Economy Program at Lewis and Clark College.  You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.