Sociological Images

Dmitriy T.M. and Jeff H. sent in a link to Mapping the Measure of America, a website by the Social Science Research Council that provides an amazing amount of information about various measures of economic/human development in the U.S. Here’s a map showing median personal (not household) earnings in 2009:

The District of Columbia has the highest, at $40,342; the lowest is Arkansas, at $23,470 (if you go to their website, you can scroll over the bars on the left and it will list each state and its median income, or you can hover over a state).

You can break the data down by race and sex as well. Here’s median personal income for Native American women, specifically (apparently there is only sufficient data to report for a few states):

Native American women’s highest median income, in Washington ($22,181), is  lower than the overall median income in Arkansas, which is the lowest in the U.S. as we saw above.

Here is the percent of children under age 6 who live below the poverty line (for all races):

Life expectancy at birth differs by nearly 7 years between the lowest — 74.81 years in Mississippi — to the highest — 81.48 years in Hawaii:

It’s significantly lower for African American men, however, with a life expectancy of only 66.22 years in D.C. (again, several states had insufficient data):

The site has more information than I could ever fully discuss here (including crime rates, various health indicators, all types of educational attainment measures, commuting time, political participation, sex of elected officials, environmental pollutants, and on and on), and it’s fairly addictive searching different topics, looking data up by zip code to get an overview of a particular area, and so on. Have fun!

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Sarah P. sent in this stunning video, from the the Wall Street Journal, about how to advise women about investing. The video has a simple message:

Women are women. They’re weird and need their weirdness to be attended to. But they don’t want to think that you’re treating them like women. They want to think that you’re treating them like human beings (whatevs!). So, whatever you do, never let them know that you’re treating them like women. If you do this, you will make gazillions off of them. Go forth!

The video after a short commercial (selected transcription below):

Selected transcription:

We all know women can be a little difficult… no one wants to feel that they are… being treated differently from the men, so what can advisers do to try to connect with women and keep from following that stigma?

In other words, women are different and also more annoying than real people (e.g., men), so you need to treat them accordingly. But they don’t know that they’re different from real people (they’re “difficult,” after all), so you have to work around that.

First… you can’t approach women as women… don’t treat her like a lady, treat her like a person… women need more time, they ask more questions… get to know what motivates her… if you connect with her on that level, not on the basis of her gender, that’s the first mistake most advisers make…

In other words, pretend like you’re treating her like an individual, but know that what you’re really dealing with is a creature named W.O.M.A.N.

Second… she’s gonna triangulate, women seek many sources of opinions… just know she’s gonna do that, why don’t you play along… give her other sources of information that augment the advice that you’re giving her… that’s a good way to play to women’s natural ability and need to triangulate on advice that they’re getting. She’s gonna do it anyway, put that to your advantage.

In other words, the goal here is to manipulate her essential woman-ness to your advantage. Don’t actually help her learn more about investing, just feed her information that confirms what you’re telling her. She’ll never know the difference!

Third… be aware and be prepared to invest. It’s gonna take more to serve her… It takes time, she needs education… she’s gonna ask a lot of tough questions… but if you invest that time up front… she’s a better client… what advisers tell me time and time again: women are more fun.

In other words, women are “better clients,” even though they’re a drag because they’re “more fun”!  Woo hoo!  If women aren’t good for fun, what are they good for!

The conversation just goes on from there… the expert here tries so hard to balance the essentialization of women’s nature and the social construction of gender, but she just really fails because she goes back and forth between both and her interviewer keeps cornering her with questions about how frustrating it is to work with women.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Sanguinity sent in an interesting, if disheartening, report by Insight Center for Community Economic Development. The report looks at the assets owned by women of color and the wealth gap between them and men of different racial/ethnic groups.

An overview of wealth (the value of all assets minus the value of debts) broken down by race/ethnicity and type of household:

Of course, the most striking finding there are the major disparities by race, particularly how much wealth White non-Hispanics have compared to all other groups (largely due to owning more valuable homes). Notice that single White men and women have higher median household wealth than married Black or Hispanic couples. This is astounding.

Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than Whites to have no wealth at all, or to have debts outweigh all assets; again, unmarried Whites are better off in this regard than are married Blacks and Hispanics:

Among single parents, women appear to bear a disproportionate amount of the financial hardships of caring for children. White single mothers with children of any age (second column) have only 57% as much wealth as White single fathers; the equivalent ratio for Blacks is 0.4% and for Hispanics, 5%. Read that again: 0.4% and 5% as much wealth as single fathers from the same race! And take a look at the actual cash value: median wealth for Black women is $100, and for Hispanic women, it’s $120!

But then look at that third column! If you’re a single mother and have children under the age of 18 — who are more likely to be living with you than with their father — your financial picture is pretty dismal. Black and Hispanic women with children under age 18 have a median wealth of zero, meaning half have no wealth at all or owe more than all their assets combined are worth. Even White women, who are absolutely wealthy by comparison, have only 14% as much wealth as White single fathers with children under age 18.

Thinking about the implications of those numbers — the very meager financial resources available to many families, the particularly difficult situation of single mothers of all races, what this means for a family’s ability to cope with a crisis such as a car breaking down or a medical emergency, the ability to come up with deposits for an apartment — is mind-blowing.

The report has quite a bit of other information too, so if you’re interested in this topic, go check it out.

Dmitriy T.M. and Karla K. sent us a link to a story in the New York Times about the increase in the percent of men marrying women who earn more money than they do. A graphic from the Pew Research Center post the NYT article is based on:

While still a minority, there has obviously been a huge jump in the percent of men married to women who make more than them. I found the data on education equally striking, in that the percentages for husbands and wives almost exactly flipped between the two time periods. Scholars have noted for quite a while the increase in the number of women getting college degrees, in particular, such that in many fields more bachelor’s degrees are granted to women each year than to men, with the imbalance getting wider over time (this pattern doesn’t hold as you move up the educational ladder).

This graph shows the median household income, adjusted by family size and scaled to be equivalent for comparison, depending on gender and marital status:

It makes sense that the adjusted household incomes of married men and married women are pretty similar across the time period, since the two groups are pretty much tied to each other, given how recent and still limited legalized gay marriage is. It is interesting that until 1990 unmarried men had higher median household incomes than married men or women but since then have made less, with the gap widening. The Pew report explains part of the cause:

Marriage rates have declined for all adults since 1970 and gone down most sharply for the least educated men and women. As a result, those with more education are far more likely than those with less education to be married, a gap that has widened since 1970.

Aside from education, another major factor in the rise of incomes for married people is that in 1970, for many couples marriage did not mean the creation of a household with two income earners, whereas today most do.

Obviously unmarried women stand out because of their lower median household income relative to any of the other groups. Why would unmarried women have incomes so much lower than unmarried men? A number of possibilities come to mind. Gendered job segregation and the pay gap play a large role in differences in income by gender overall and are surely part of the cause of these disparities. Unmarried women may be more likely to work part-time than unmarried men, and it doesn’t appear that number of hours worked per week is controlled for here. It’s also possible that unmarried men are more likely to be in a household with a partner who earns an income than are unmarried women.

Regardless of the cause(s), it clearly indicates that unmarried women are at a significant disadvantage regarding income compared to every other group. It’s worth noting that the Pew report repeatedly focuses on how men have fared worse than women by comparing the % change in their incomes since 1970. While this is true, it seems somewhat overstated to say they fared worse given that even with smaller % increases, men’s income in general is still significantly higher than women’s.

UPDATE: Reader Philip Cohen adds some more context to this on his blog, Family Inequality:

It’s not clear how to assess the benefits – or losses – that men derive from all this. That recliner-king image assumes that employed wives still do the unpaid work of the household, but the best predictor of how much housework a woman does may be her own income.

That’s why I don’t buy this:

“When you think about it from a guy’s perspective, marriage wasn’t such a great deal,” says Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center. “It raised a household size, but it didn’t bring in a lot more income.”

What about the value of all that work the stay-at-home wife did? Maybe it was more inefficient, but the report also shows with survey data on decision-making, wives get more say-so when they earn more – the price a “recliner king” pays, willingly or not.

Ryan A. sent in this image of a letter (found at Letters of Note) sent to the Postmaster General in 1934, in which men ask for women to be fired so that men can have jobs:

Notice that work is depicted as an oppressive burden for women (“…in place of making slaves of them let them be ladies”). Men, on the other hand, are entitled to take employment from women if they are in need of it to avoid being “bums” (and apparently it’s ok to make slaves of them).

Now, don’t get me wrong: I actually have sympathy for the psychological distress these and other men must have felt at the time. When manhood is highly associated with the ability to support a family on your income alone, job loss and poverty is not just embarrassing, it is a threat to your very identity as a man. The plea for jobs to help young men “make a name for themselves” is partly a call to let them become responsible adult men in good social standing, rather than bums (a term loaded with moral judgment).

So I have sympathy for the men struggling with the feeling of failure that came with joblessness. But it’s still noteworthy that the letter indicates a sense of entitlement to women’s jobs (much like veterans returning from World War II felt toward women who had taken jobs outside the home). Women, presumably, had a husband to support them and it was his duty to not be a bum so that she wouldn’t need to take a job from another man.

The figure below, borrowed from U.S. News and World Report, shows that the wage gap between women and men, for nearly all age groups, has narrowed significantly between 1979 and 2008.  It also shows that the wage gap is smallest for men and women aged 20-24, grows for men and women aged 25-34, grows even further for men and women aged 35-44, and remains steady after that.

These data are for men and women in the same jobs working full time.  So what would explain this change?  Sociologists have found that much of the growth in the wage gap over the life course is due to the fact that women are held disproportionately responsible for childcare and housework (see some data here).  As men and women start to have children, women (whether by choice or necessity) find themselves sacrificing their careers more so than men.  On the flip side, mothers are discriminated against by employers more often than fathers and women without children. (See, for example, this clip of Gov. Rendell commenting that Janet Napolitano is a good candidate for secretary of Homeland Security because she has no family.) That’s why you see the wage gap increasing during prime childbearing years (25-44), but not afterward.

For more on the wage gap, see our posts on the wage gap for college grads, comparing different kinds of wage gaps, the role of job segregation, gender and the wage gap in different professions.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Stephen W. sent us a photograph of a billboard in Rock Valley, IA.  It suggests that keeping your baby, instead of having an abortion, is good for the economy:

Sociologists talk about how nations are invested in reproduction.  Without babies, nations literally disappear; too many babies and nations collapse under the strain of a population they cannot support.  Because nations need babies (but not too many babies), states adopt pro- and anti-natal policies (e.g., the one child rule or medals for mothers) that encourage or discourage childbearing.  This billboard is an interesting example of a call to women to have children so as to help the nation (though it is sponsored by a pro-life organization, not the state).  Women, in this argument, have a responsibility to the nation (perhaps equivalent to military service?) that transcends their individual reproductive preferences.

(See this related post on making babies for the military.)

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.