3Q

Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author who writes about gender, culture, art, and politics. She has written for The Guardian, VICE, The Telegraph, Elle, Grazia, The Pool, The Observer, Buzzfeed, Refinery29, Red and Time Out. She is also a Vogue columnist, writing about motherhood under the title Bringing Up Baby. Here, I ask her about her new book, released today: The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions.  You can find out more about Nell at nellfrizzell.com,

KM: Beyond the biological component, are there other ways that you feel like women uniquely feel the pressure from society to have a baby by a certain time and why do you think this is? What do you think society and public policy – and perhaps the men in women’s lives – can do to ease the burden of this pressure and support women both while they are deciding whether or not to have a baby and then once they actually do start child-rearing?

NF: I am amazed by how ubiquitous the expectation that girls will have babies still is today. My 16-year-old sister has a list of her favorite baby names saved onto her phone. I wonder how many boys her age are ever asked what they want to call their children? It’s there in the way we talk about female ambition (as something that will run alongside family life), the way we encourage girls to practice caring in a play setting (playing with dolls, cooking, putting toys to bed in mini cots, pushing prams, etc.), the way we ask the most fundamental and private questions as though they were breezy small talk “So, do you want a baby?” Of course all this could and should apply to people who identify as men, but I fear it is not. We still allow, even encourage, men to consider having children as something peripheral and potential, rather than a reality that they could plan for, hope for or prevent right now, in their life.

There is also the very strong cultural narrative of the ‘geriatric mother’ and the ‘cliff edge’ of fertility after 35. The truth is of course much more nuanced, much more specific to each individual’s biology and lifestyle and therefore, hopefully, less scary. We are very happy to warn women that their fertility is finite without really mentioning the correlated decrease in fertility and rise in congenital illness, quality of sperm, etc. in men.

With regards to policy, well here’s a question. Firstly, let’s actually enact the demands made at the first Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970 at Ruskin College (it’s the anniversary this year!)

• Equal pay
• Equal opportunity
• Contraception and abortion on demand
• Free 24 hour nurseries

That way, the decision to have a baby is a far less polarizing one: it will have a less damaging impact on your career, it will cost you less materially, financially, socially and personally, it will be easier to avoid getting pregnant if you’re not ready or not in the right circumstances to raise a child, it will not affect your opportunities to reenter the public world after you’ve given birth.

I would love to see free childcare for all children under 5. It doesn’t just make sense on a humanitarian level – literally making the population healthier, happier and more likely to contribute to a well-adjusted society – but it makes economic sense not to have half the workforce taken away from their job in order to look after children OR almost half the workforce’s entire income going directly to someone else looking after your children.

Better paid parental leave – for the same reasons as above. A father and mother who have the opportunity to bond with and nurture their child are far more likely to treat that job with the care and attention it deserves; their child is going to benefit from a caring environment, they will be better equipped to navigate interpersonal relationships, if their parent chooses to breastfeed their physical health will be better – the list goes on and on.

I would also like men to just think about having babies. Not to push it to one side while they concentrate on ‘the big things’ i.e. studying, work, sport, friendships, sex, money. But to have it as a question, something to prepare for, or make contingencies for from the moment they are sexually active. Let them take on the burden of contraception, particularly if they don’t want children. Side effect free, hormone-free male contraception and, until that is on the market, let’s talk again about vasectomies. If you are a man who is certain you never want a child or don’t want any more children than enact that decision in your body – have a vasectomy – don’t instead expect women to spend their lives adjusting their bodies to conform to your desire.

KM: You often leverage data and statistics in support of the topics in your articles – from a sociological point of view, in your experiences from thinking about becoming a mother to actually doing so, do you feel there are areas of research in this field that need further exploration to understand this process better?

NF: Yes. The cost of childcare should be much much more widely understood than it is now. I had no idea, until I had a child, that I couldn’t afford to have a child. Also, if more people understood that the average cost of childcare for one child, under 2 in the UK, for someone on the UK average wage, is 43% of their income, hopefully they would agitate to change that before they have a child and are already, well, trapped.

The decrease in male fertility over time. I think we need to start talking much more frankly and openly about male fertility – stop putting the blame, the decision and the burden all on women’s bodies.

Finally, please god could someone do some research – a LOT of research – into the effect of hormonal contraception (actually, hell, all contraception) on female mental health. We know that the pill is literally killing women – driving them into depression and suicide. We all know anecdotally the horrendous side effects of so much contraception. And yet there seems to be so little scientific and sociological research into it.

KM: What made you decide to write a book on this topic? What is the one lesson or advice or insight you want readers to take away?

NF: Partly, honestly, because I’d had a baby I simply couldn’t work in the way I used to as a freelance journalist. I couldn’t pitch three ideas a day while also surviving on 5 hours broken sleep and under 24-hour care of a baby. A book would give me the opportunity to work on one project over the course of months, rather than having to turn around copy every day within hours just to pay the bills.

On a more creative level, I also wanted to write this book because, having lived through The Panic Years and going through my own Flux, I knew what a bewildering, devastating, disorienting and paralyzing time it could be. I wanted to give this thing a name so women everywhere could see their own experience as part of a social and biological phenomenon, rather than a personal crisis. I wanted friends, sisters, colleagues to have a short hand with each other to explain what they were going through “Oh, I think she’s hit her Flux, so maybe we should go over with a lasagna”.

I wanted us to see the ways our gender conditioning, work culture, sexual attitudes and social care were still oppressing us. I wanted to point out the underlying injustice that still exists around fertility, childrearing and contraception.

Also, more privately and personally, I wanted my partner, friends and family to understand what I’d gone through and how it had felt.

Kim McErlean is a Ph.D. student studying Sociology, with an interest in Family Demography, at the University of Texas at Austin.

I was excited to find out that two of my favorite scholars who study the family and gender, Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske, have published a new book about interviewing, The Science and Art of Interviewing. I recently had the opportunity to interview Kathleen Gerson about this book. Dr. Gerson is a sociologist and author of several books, including The Unfinished Revolution, and The Time Divide. In her new book with Dr. Sarah Damaske, author of For the Family? How Class and Gender shape Women’s Work, and the forthcoming book The Tolls of Uncertainty, they discuss the science and art of conducting interviews, the method they most often use to do their own research.

AK: How did you and Sarah decide to write a book about interviewing?

KG: The idea began with James Cook, my editor as well as Sarah’s at Oxford, who asked me over lunch one day how I went about doing my own research. At the time, I responded casually that there’s “a method to the inevitable madness,” never imagining this would prompt him to follow up by asking if I would like to write a book about how to tame the unwieldy process. My immediate reaction was skeptical. How could I find the time? Yet when Sarah and I learned that James had approached both of us, we started to brainstorm about the possibilities for what we could accomplish together. Although neither of us had planned to write a book of this kind, the prospect of working together as teammates began to feel irresistible.

Sarah and I had already worked together closely over the years and knew we shared a passion for interviewing. We also agreed about the principles that underlie successful interview studies. The more we talked, the more excited we became about writing a book together that would explain how and why interviewing is such a powerful method. We kept hearing the same questions from our students and colleagues, many of whom were puzzled about what interview-based research can and should do. How do you formulate an interview project? How do you conduct good interviews? How do you analyze interview material? And, above all, how do you use interviewing to build theory as well as to provide thick description? Since many of the practices that produce great interview studies remain largely invisible, we became convinced that social researchers of all stripes could use a step-by step guide for tackling the conceptual and practical challenges that arise at each stage of formulating and carrying out scientifically grounded interview-based research.

Around the same time, the publication of Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan’s controversial article, “Talk is Cheap,” served as another spur to action. The debate sparked by that article’s limited depiction of what interviews (and other self-reporting methods) can contribute fueled our growing enthusiasm. We saw a clear need to dispel the many misconceptions surrounding interview-based research. From that point on, our mission became clear: first, to explain why and how interviewing is an irreplaceable and indispensable method for understanding society; and, second, to show how to craft theoretically informed and empirically rich interview studies.

AK: Your research examines issues related to families, gender and work. Asking people about their families and the gendered division of labor can often surface resentments and strong ideological beliefs. Do you have any advice specifically for people collecting interviews on especially sensitive topics?

KG: Interviewing is especially well-suited – and, arguably, the best method – for exploring sensitive topics. Good interviews create a “safe space” by removing people from their ordinary contexts and allowing and encouraging them to discuss their most private concerns. Like the proverbial meeting of two strangers on a train, interviews provide a setting where people can discover and explore their most deeply held but rarely articulated thoughts and experiences. Over the decades, countless participants have talked with us about events and emotions they had never before shared with even their closest friends and intimates. The biggest challenge, then, is to create that safe space and use it to make a genuine connection.

To get off to the right start, first put yourself in the right state of mind so that you can then put the participant at ease. At its core, an interview is an exchange. We ask strangers to share their time and their life experiences, and we owe them our undivided attention and unequivocal support in return. This appreciation of their generosity and commitment to accept to what they convey does more than help interviewees feel comfortable; it also sets the stage for listening carefully, following up neutrally, and remaining open to surprises that upend your expectations and preconceived ideas. Interviewers need to resist any temptation to prejudge, assign blame, or reduce a person’s views to some form of false consciousness. Once your preconceptions are set aside, it becomes easier for both of you to stay in the moment and for you to offer any support that may be needed when sensitive issues arise. This atmosphere empowers people to disclose painful experiences, air a full range of emotions, and express controversial and even distasteful views. The good news is that this approach creates a win-win outcome for everyone. Participants can – and, in my experience, usually do – gain new insights about their lives. And you are able to make conceptual breakthroughs by grappling with the unexpected complexity that your interviews elicit.

AK: Do you have any advice for family researchers in particular?

KG: Because families are arguably the most intimate realm in our lives, interviewing offers an especially powerful tool to learn about them on multiple levels. In contrast to surveys with pre- coded answer categories, interviews can delve deeply into the subtle, often contradictory dynamics of private life. And in contrast to ethnographic observation, interviews can obtain information on a person’s inner life, private activities, and past experiences that no external observer can see. Whatever aspect of family life you may be studying, my advice is to take advantage of these strengths. Inquire about families’ many dimensions, including its members’ mental states and behavioral strategies, and then explore the links between these dynamics and the wider social contexts in which families are embedded.

Given the diversity of family circumstances and the many aspects of family life that command our attention, it’s necessary to make some basic choices at the beginning. Sarah and I are in favor of posing a “big” question, which you can then answer by crafting a focused, theoretically informed research design. Since you can only interview so many people in one study, its important to build any necessary controls and comparisons into your sampling strategy. And it’s equally important to construct an interview guide that collects the information needed to answer your questions while also providing an organized, enjoyable structure for each participant. Our book offers techniques for accomplishing both of these goals. We recommend using theoretical sampling, which means defining the parameters for whom to include (and exclude) and then making certain you have the necessary variation within those parameters to make strategic within-sample comparisons.

When it comes to the interview guide, we stress the need to structure the interview chronologically, so that people can relate pivotal events and family histories in order and use this timeline as a scaffolding for talking about their family experiences, practices, hopes, fears, and plans. We also recommend nesting questions in a sequence that inquires about the various dimensions of family life, first asking about what happened and then following up with questions about the responses and consequences that ensued. All in all, this approach makes it possible to trace the interaction between the institutions that shape family life and the actions people take to reproduce or change those institutional arrangements. To borrow from Marx, interviews allow us to discover how people make families, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

[Bonus Question] AK: The one great tip I have always remembered from my grad school research methods class on interviewing was to start by asking people what they want their fake name to be in your project, as an ice breaker, and to reinforce the idea that their answers will be confidential. What is one great tip you have for a brand new interviewer starting out? What about a tip for a seasoned researcher trying to improve their practice?

KG: It’s difficult to limit myself to just one or two tips, but here are a few short and simple ones that I keep in mind and would offer to beginners and more seasoned interviewers alike:

• Choose a topic that inspires your passion and keeps you going when the going gets tough.
• Remain curious. The reason for doing the study is that you don’t yet know the answer.
• Expect things to change along the way.
• Greet surprises in the field as an opportunity to learn rather than as a threat to your earlier
  ideas.
• Be patient and persistent, especially when matters don’t work out as planned and you
  need to make adjustments.
• When you hit an obstacle, remember that where there’s a will, there’s a way.
• Stay confident amid the uncertainty. In the end, all the hard work will be well worth the
  payoff.

Kathleen Gerson is Collegiate Professor of Arts & Science and Professor of Sociology at New York University, where her work focuses on the intertwined revolutions in gender, work, and family life taking place in the U.S. and globally. In addition to “The Science and Art of Interviewing” (with Sarah Damaske), her books include “The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family” and “The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality” (with Jerry A. Jacobs), among others. She is now at work on a book about Americans’ responses to the intensifying conflicts between earning an income and caring for others amid rising economic insecurity and family uncertainty. 

Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the editor of this blog. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg.

In 2017 I interviewed Dr. Alicia Walker about her first book, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife, which was a study of women who have affairs using the website Ashley Madison. In her new book, Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation and Infidelity she reports on in-depth interviews with 46 men who use the same website to have relationships outside of their marriages or long term partnerships. I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Walker about her new book.

AK: Why do men have affairs?

AW: The men in this study believed their primary partners lacked interest in them, both as sexual partners and as people. They perceived their wives as disinterested in the details of their day, their dreams, goals, and fears. They judged their primary partners as disappointed in them, as partners, as people, and as men. The men fashioned their wives as “impossible to please,” claiming they nagged and no amount of effort ever contented them. The men framed their own contributions to household labor as a “favor” to their wife, whom they felt should express gratitude for the effort. However, they clearly placed the blame for this dynamic on the institution of marriage itself rather than something specific about their wives. They explained that marriage trains men to feel badly about themselves.

Further, the men described either sexless marriages or sexual dynamics entirely lacking in the sensuality, passion, and fervor they craved. Many men detailed years and decades of sexual encounters where their wives failed to orgasm. Men internalized all of these conditions as signals of their inferiority. They believed their primary partners’ disinterest in them indicated their own failure of masculinity. In their minds, if they were manly enough, their wives would both enthusiastically engage in sex with them and hang on their every word.

The men in this study made clear that while sexual, their affairs primarily served to boost their self-esteem. Specifically, they sought out affair partners who provided emotional support, relational management, and emotional connection. The men wanted romantic partners who asked about their days, helped manage their emotional life, and made them feel safe and cherished. These affairs included sexual encounters, and they wanted affair partners who enthusiastically participated in prolonged sexual encounters, what popular culture calls “The Girlfriend Experience.” Affair partners who experienced orgasm further validated the men’s sense of accomplishment and skill. These provisions increased the men’s sense of themselves as “masculine.”

For these men, the attention and enthusiasm of their primary partners would prevent their participation in affairs. While the men appreciated the provision of relational management (help managing their emotional lives), emotional connection, interest in them, and enthusiasm in bed gained in their outside partnerships, they wanted most to have all of that from their primary partners. So, while outside partners soothed the men’s hurt egos and sense of themselves as masculine, their lives still lacked what they craved most: approval and attention from their primary partners. While they valued the self-esteem boost from affairs, the men reported feelings of emasculation as a result of the dynamics of the primary partnership, a space where men believed they failed repeatedly to perform masculinity to the satisfaction of their wives.

AK: Your earlier book examined women who have affairs and this one focuses on men. How are men and women’s motivations for affairs different, and how do those differences reflect broader ideas about gender in society?

AW: Initially, the data seemed to reveal gender differences in affair motivations. However, closer analysis revealed that the dynamics of the primary partnership provoked motivation to participate in affairs. Specifically, among those whose primary partnerships lacked emotional connection and intimacy, affairs served to provide those missing elements. This included 7 women and all of the male participants. Conversely, for participants whose primary partnerships provided emotional connection and intimacy, yet lacked satisfying sex, affairs served to provide sexual satisfaction. This proved the motivation among the bulk (the remaining 39) of the women who participated. Essentially, participants sought to outsource whatever facets remained missing within their primary partnerships.

However, among the 7 women who also sought emotional outside partnerships, there remained no mention of internalizing the dynamics of the primary partnership as their own fault. So, the gendered difference centered on the response of the men and the 7 women to the lack of emotional connection and intimacy in their primary partnership. Men experienced their primary partners’ withholdment of relational management, emotional connection, and sexual enthusiasm as evidence of their own failures and inadequacies. Women made no mention of this in our interviews. The men in this study repeatedly emphasized an internalization of their primary partners’ disappointment in them, lack of sexual interest in them, and failure to orgasm as a result of sex with them as their own fault and as evidence of their own lack of adequate manliness. By contrast, the 7 women whose primary partnerships lacked emotional intimacy failed to blame themselves. Rather, they bemoaned their primary partners’ lack of interest and ability to engage on that level as some deficit within their husbands.

This difference functions as a broader effect of gender socialization in our society. The burden of masculinity lies in its continual need to be performed and proven. At no point do men reach a finish line where we proclaim them “manly enough.” Thus, when primary partnerships failed to live up to men’s expectations, they concluded the fault must lie within their own inferiority, specifically, their inadequacies as “men.”

AK: What is one finding that surprised you when you were doing your research?

AW: I found most surprising the fact that men internalize their primary partners’ disinterest, frustration, or failure to verbalize thanks for routine household tasks as disappointment in them, and further assume this as an indicator of their inadequate masculinity. Men believed their primary partners to feel constant disappointment in them based on her failure to inquire about his day, lack of desire in participating in extended sexual sessions, and failure to verbalize thanks. In general, men express tremendous hurt and resentment in response to what they perceived as their primary partners’ lack of enthusiasm in all arenas. Further, they believe their own inadequacies provoke her disappointment. They think that her lack of interest signals a lack of adequate manliness within them. If she fails to orgasm, if she fails to appropriately appreciate his domestic labor efforts, if she seems bored with his stories, they experience injury and upset, but immediately fault themselves. As one participant put it: “Men’s egos need constant pumping up.” Both the reported volume of need for praise and their self-awareness of this need served as the biggest surprise.

Alicia Walker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University, and author of The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity and Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation and Infidelity. Follow her on twitter at @AliciaMWalker1. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the editor of this blog. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg.

Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author who writes about gender, culture, art, and politics. She has written for The Guardian, VICE, The Telegraph, Elle, Grazia, The Pool, The Observer, Buzzfeed, Refinery29, Red and Time Out. She is also a Vogue columnist, writing about motherhood under the title Bringing Up Baby. Here, I ask her about her forthcoming book The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions.  You can find out more about Nell at nellfrizzell.com,

KM: Beyond the biological component, are there other ways that you feel like women uniquely feel the pressure from society to have a baby by a certain time and why do you think this is? What do you think society and public policy – and perhaps the men in women’s lives – can do to ease the burden of this pressure and support women both while they are deciding whether or not to have a baby and then once they actually do start child-rearing?

NF: I am amazed by how ubiquitous the expectation that girls will have babies still is today. My 16-year-old sister has a list of her favorite baby names saved onto her phone. I wonder how many boys her age are ever asked what they want to call their children? It’s there in the way we talk about female ambition (as something that will run alongside family life), the way we encourage girls to practice caring in a play setting (playing with dolls, cooking, putting toys to bed in mini cots, pushing prams, etc.), the way we ask the most fundamental and private questions as though they were breezy small talk “So, do you want a baby?” Of course all this could and should apply to people who identify as men, but I fear it is not. We still allow, even encourage, men to consider having children as something peripheral and potential, rather than a reality that they could plan for, hope for or prevent right now, in their life.

There is also the very strong cultural narrative of the ‘geriatric mother’ and the ‘cliff edge’ of fertility after 35. The truth is of course much more nuanced, much more specific to each individual’s biology and lifestyle and therefore, hopefully, less scary. We are very happy to warn women that their fertility is finite without really mentioning the correlated decrease in fertility and rise in congenital illness, quality of sperm, etc. in men.

With regards to policy, well here’s a question. Firstly, let’s actually enact the demands made at the first Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970 at Ruskin College (it’s the anniversary this year!)

• Equal pay
• Equal opportunity
• Contraception and abortion on demand
• Free 24 hour nurseries

That way, the decision to have a baby is a far less polarizing one: it will have a less damaging impact on your career, it will cost you less materially, financially, socially and personally, it will be easier to avoid getting pregnant if you’re not ready or not in the right circumstances to raise a child, it will not affect your opportunities to reenter the public world after you’ve given birth.

I would love to see free childcare for all children under 5. It doesn’t just make sense on a humanitarian level – literally making the population healthier, happier and more likely to contribute to a well-adjusted society – but it makes economic sense not to have half the workforce taken away from their job in order to look after children OR almost half the workforce’s entire income going directly to someone else looking after your children.

Better paid parental leave – for the same reasons as above. A father and mother who have the opportunity to bond with and nurture their child are far more likely to treat that job with the care and attention it deserves; their child is going to benefit from a caring environment, they will be better equipped to navigate interpersonal relationships, if their parent chooses to breastfeed their physical health will be better – the list goes on and on.

I would also like men to just think about having babies. Not to push it to one side while they concentrate on ‘the big things’ i.e. studying, work, sport, friendships, sex, money. But to have it as a question, something to prepare for, or make contingencies for from the moment they are sexually active. Let them take on the burden of contraception, particularly if they don’t want children. Side effect free, hormone-free male contraception and, until that is on the market, let’s talk again about vasectomies. If you are a man who is certain you never want a child or don’t want any more children than enact that decision in your body – have a vasectomy – don’t instead expect women to spend their lives adjusting their bodies to conform to your desire.

KM: You often leverage data and statistics in support of the topics in your articles – from a sociological point of view, in your experiences from thinking about becoming a mother to actually doing so, do you feel there are areas of research in this field that need further exploration to understand this process better?

NF: Yes. The cost of childcare should be much much more widely understood than it is now. I had no idea, until I had a child, that I couldn’t afford to have a child. Also, if more people understood that the average cost of childcare for one child, under 2 in the UK, for someone on the UK average wage, is 43% of their income, hopefully they would agitate to change that before they have a child and are already, well, trapped.

The decrease in male fertility over time. I think we need to start talking much more frankly and openly about male fertility – stop putting the blame, the decision and the burden all on women’s bodies.

Finally, please god could someone do some research – a LOT of research – into the effect of hormonal contraception (actually, hell, all contraception) on female mental health. We know that the pill is literally killing women – driving them into depression and suicide. We all know anecdotally the horrendous side effects of so much contraception. And yet there seems to be so little scientific and sociological research into it.

KM: What made you decide to write a book on this topic? What is the one lesson or advice or insight you want readers to take away?

NF: Partly, honestly, because I’d had a baby I simply couldn’t work in the way I used to as a freelance journalist. I couldn’t pitch three ideas a day while also surviving on 5 hours broken sleep and under 24-hour care of a baby. A book would give me the opportunity to work on one project over the course of months, rather than having to turn around copy every day within hours just to pay the bills.

On a more creative level, I also wanted to write this book because, having lived through The Panic Years and going through my own Flux, I knew what a bewildering, devastating, disorienting and paralyzing time it could be. I wanted to give this thing a name so women everywhere could see their own experience as part of a social and biological phenomenon, rather than a personal crisis. I wanted friends, sisters, colleagues to have a short hand with each other to explain what they were going through “Oh, I think she’s hit her Flux, so maybe we should go over with a lasagna”.

I wanted us to see the ways our gender conditioning, work culture, sexual attitudes and social care were still oppressing us. I wanted to point out the underlying injustice that still exists around fertility, childrearing and contraception.

Also, more privately and personally, I wanted my partner, friends and family to understand what I’d gone through and how it had felt.

Kim McErlean is a Ph.D. student studying Sociology, with an interest in Family Demography, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Judith Warner is the author of is the author of nine non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, and Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story, plus the multiple award-winning We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. In her new book released today, And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School, she reports on her interviews with middle school children and their parent’s about parenting middle schoolers in today’s society.  I recently had the opportunity to interview her about her book:

AK: As a parent I hear a lot in the media about “helicopter parents” and how they are ruining their children .But I also get the impression that being a helicopter parent (or “intensive parenting”) might be the best way to make sure my kids will succeed in a competitive society. After doing your research, what do you think of intensive parenting?  Why do we do it, and is it really ruining our kids? 

JW: The longer I have been a parent, and the more experts I have interviewed over the past 15 or so years, the more I’ve become firmly convinced that our ability to “ruin” our children is as limited as our ability to create, much less perfect them. That is to say: we can tinker around the edges, but they are who they are, with so much of who they are hard-wired at birth. I find enormous comfort in this, as I think all parents do once they reach this point – usually when their kids are in college, but sometimes before – of understanding the limitations of their power. That said: there’s certainly a lot we can do to make their time at home more or less pleasant or miserable, and there are things we can try, at least, to do to equip them to live their lives with as much strength and resilience as possible.

Middle school really is the time when that issue of equipping them with those tools becomes particularly urgent. After all, it’s a difficult time for most kids – the time that many adults remember as the most painful of their lives. It’s also, and has long been, a very difficult time for parents, and the style in which we parent today – some call it “helicopter,” others “intensive” parenting; I tend to think of it just as enmeshment – makes it far tougher still. For us. Many parents of my generation – the older end of Gen X, though this is certainly true for at least the younger portion of Baby Boomers, too – grew up with more or less “Mad Men”-style parenting. And many of us came out of it feeling kind of under-parented, like we weren’t really seen, and our feelings weren’t validated. So much parent behavior that falls into the helicopter category comes from this, I believe. There’s also, of course, enormous anxiety about our kids’ future (and our own future), stemming from a great deal of status insecurity in the middle and upper middle class. (Lower-income parents deal with all kinds of anxiety and insecurity, too, but they tend not to be accused of helicopter parenting and tend not to have the time to engage in it with the level of frenzy we see among the affluent.)

All of which gets me to the part of your question about success: Experts believe that helicopter parenting is bad for kids – it undermines their sense of self-efficacy, prevents their developing resiliency and “grit,” etc. I’m sure this is true. But there’s a cynical side of me that has come to believe that these parents do, indeed, prepare their kids well for success in the world of the privileged, in that they very often convey the values necessary for navigating a highly unequal and status-driven world where the rules are different for the wealthy and well-connected. Helicopter parents pull out all the stops to make sure their own kids’ interests come first; this usually gets dressed up in the much nicer-sounding phrase, “they advocate for their kids.” Those with sufficient money and time on their hands to spend enormous amounts of time in their kids’ schools, volunteering in the classroom, fundraising, etc., recent studies have shown, do get preferential treatment for their kids. Those who – later on – micromanage their kids’ school work, even, at the extremes, writing their papers, genuinely do get them better grades. None of this is right; none of it is good for kids in a human, character-building, problem-solving sense. But if your goal is success at all costs in a world that runs on knowing how to game every system, then, in a certain sense, you do make your kids more successful.

AK: I went to middle school in the 1990s; my daughters will both start middle school in the 2020s. How will their experience be different than mine? 

JW: The biggest change will, of course, be the ubiquity of social media: whatever sorts of social drama you remember will now be able to play out 24/7, and unless adults in your community (hopefully led by teachers and schools) set rules around access to screens, there will potentially be no escape from it. Another change, depending on the type of school your daughters are in and the type of community you live in, will be, if current trends continue, that the level of pressure middle schoolers are under will be nothing like what you remember. They’ll already be talking about college and what they have to do to get in. They may be studying math at a level you didn’t encounter until high school. They – or their classmates – may already be attracting the attention of college recruiters if they’re exceptional athletes. They’ll be wondering what their special talent is – so on top of the usual and age-old worries about whether they’re good-looking enough and popular enough, etc. they’ll also worry about whether they’re successful enough.

All that said, I also think you’ll see, as I did, that middle schoolers themselves have not really changed. I was surprised to discover this when my own daughters were in middle school in the early 2010s. We’d been hearing for decades how sped-up and racy and dangerous everything had become; that middle schoolers were yesterday’s high schoolers in terms of their sexual knowledge and risk-taking behavior. In fact, reading the news, there was – and continues to be – every reason to believe that they were all but sociopathic. But I didn’t find anything like that at all. I was a middle schooler (though people were in “junior high” then) in the late 1970s, in New York City. It was a time when there was far more sexualization – and unquestioned sexualization – of girls of middle school age. (I vaguely remembered this but re-discovering with adult eyes the way that girls like Brooke Shields were described in the media back then was absolutely shocking.) My world was full of crime and a general kind of urban rot; other adults I interviewed described sex and drugs everywhere, and a lot of parents were out to lunch. My daughters’ world was far safer and more child-like. The kids around them behaved pretty much exactly the way I remembered my peers behaving decades before. If anything, the culture had changed in ways that meant they were, at least on the surface, somewhat nicer: there was an awareness of bullying, and that it was unacceptable. Expressions of racism or homophobia were unacceptable. Studies have backed up my anecdotal observations. They show that in recent years middle schoolers are far less likely to drink, take drugs, have sex or go on dates than they were a generation ago – partly because they’re spending so much time on social media.

My research for the book, which traces how adults have looked at, thought about, and written about kids in the years around puberty for over a century in the U.S., has redoubled my feeling, based on personal experience, that we have to be super-skeptical of any reports on how dangerous or otherwise bad things are among middle schoolers. Adults have been catastrophizing about them since the early 1960s. And the narrative through which they do so is pretty much always the same: these kids aren’t kids anymore. Because of earlier puberty, they’re getting into sex earlier, etc. That, at least, was the predominant narrative from the early 60s through the late 2000s. I think it’s calmed down since. But the panic about sexting and the general evils of social media has replaced it. Once again, social media plays a huge role in middle schoolers’ lives, but that role is not terribly different than the use to which we put analog forms of communication (land lines and notes passed in class) in the past. I think it’s important not to exaggerate the dangers and vilify it, because doing so can actually let adults off the hook from thinking concretely and productively about how to educate kids in handling it. We used to talk a lot about media literacy – we need social media literacy now, i.e. to give kids an understanding that what they view on line is curated, that they need to think critically about what they’re viewing, and whether their own behavior on or around social media serves them well.

AK:  What did you find most surprising when doing research for this book?

JW: As I mentioned a moment ago, discovering how much middle schoolers of my daughters’ generation were essentially just like the sixth, seventh and eighth graders I remembered from the past really was eye-opening. Another thing that really surprised me was discovering that many of the most basic and essential truths about early adolescence were known to researchers back at the turn of the 20^th century. Late 19^th century brain research had shown that kids undergo significant cognitive changes right around puberty, and that those changes were likely due to changes in the brain – not in its size, but in its structure and functioning and, in particular, the nature of its connectivity due to myelination. Educators in the early junior high school reform movement – who advocated separating out 7^th and 8^th graders from their old K-8 schools and putting them in new institutions with 9^th graders where they could enjoy an education specially tailored for their unique needs – knew that kids the same age in the years around puberty varied enormously in their levels of physical, emotional and intellectual maturity, and that this unusually high degree of variability was absolutely normal. They knew that kids at the younger end often appeared not to be good students and were at risk of being seen, or thinking of themselves as “not smart,” but that intelligence had nothing to do with it. For that reason, they advocated very strongly for individualized instruction in what are now the middle school years, using the very same terms of argument you’ll hear today. They didn’t get it – and neither did the proponents of the middle school movement in the 1960s. We still don’t have it today.

I also was surprised at just how emotional my interviews turned out to be. My central interest, when I embarked upon writing this book, was in finding out how people’s middle school experiences lived on in them throughout their lives: what they had experienced, how they had experienced it, and how they had turned their memories into their stories of self afterwards. I wanted to know how middle school and its vicissitudes lived on in adults and impacted them throughout their lives, especially as parents. I was knocked off my feet by the volume of response to my initial queries. If I’d interviewed everyone who expressed interest, I’d still be at it today, five years later. The interviews were one-on-one, and they usually lasted about two hours. Many people cried. I saw that, if you say to someone, “Tell me about your middle school experience,” you’d soon get their entire lives in a nutshell. This remains the part of the book that fascinates me the most.

Judith Warner is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Journalism Fellow with the Women Donors Network’s Reflective Democracy Campaign. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, was a contributing columnist for the Times and a special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, and has freelanced for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. 

Arielle Kuperberg, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro, and the editor of the CCF Blog @The Society Pages. Follow her on twitter @ATKuperberg or email her at atkuperb@uncg.edu. 

Deborah J. Cohan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina- Beaufort whose work has appeared in numerous academic and non-academic publications. She is the author of the popular blog “Social Lights” for Psychology Today, is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Here we ask her questions about her new sociologically inspired memoir, Welcome to Wherever We Are. Learn more about her at deborahjcohan.com.

BJR: What made you, a sociologist, decide to write a book about your own life experiences caring for your ailing father?

DJC: I have been actively reading and formally studying memoir in earnest since I was at the end stages of my dissertation in graduate school. I found myself growing impatient with various aspects and profound limitations of academic writing and was looking for a creative outlet. Ever since I was a child, writing was something that felt available and important to me. However, growing up, I was less of a reader because all that was shoved down my throat in school was fiction. And, my dirty secret is that I still don’t read fiction! Once I discovered memoir though, it all made sense. At its best, memoir is essentially a very creative sociology.

The analytical and interpretive properties of both sociology and memoir are quite similar. Sociology is about giving people the tools and the vocabulary to seek multiple truths about individuals, societies and the social forces that constrain and support their very being; sociology offers us the opportunity to then take this information to question, reflect, re-evaluate and put the pieces of our own lives together again, to see how the private “I” fits into the larger public “eye.”

Memoir involves possessing the sociological imagination, connecting biography to history, and understanding how private troubles of one’s personal milieu are indeed public issues related to the social structure. Memoir is about excavating identity and salvaging a sense of self. It is also about the power of finding and using one’s voice.

It is qualitative and ethnographic. The best memoir writers take the particulars of their own lived experience and write their hearts out in a way that connects with others and the larger project of what it means to be human.

Sociological theory, and feminist analysis, which I rely on heavily, helps us to uncover truths no matter how discomforting or disquieting they can be or how deeply one must probe to discover them, and yet this journey toward truth is often enlightening, magical, and transforming. Sociology gives us the opportunity to re-think our place in history, to imagine the future direction of the world, and perhaps to dream about how we might engage in tikkun olam, a Hebrew expression for repairing and healing the world. Memoir has become an extension of all of that for me. The writer Dorothy Allison said: “…Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.”

Long motivated by a continuous thread I have followed since I began college, both my academic writing and my memoir tell stories at the intersections of gender, family, home, identity, race, class, violence, trauma, grief, loss, rage, creativity, social justice, and social change. These tend to be the issues I write about regardless of genre, and I have published a book, academic articles, book chapters, essays, articles for the mass media, and poetry. The breadth and depth of my writing showcases fluency and versatility with genre because of my belief in the promise of sociology and how we must make ourselves relevant in public discourse. I consider myself an interdisciplinary sociologist, a feminist sociologist, and a public sociologist—creating and applying sociological insights for public knowledge and for the public good.

BJR: Are there any sociological lessons that you can share from the story you share in this book?

 DJC: That’s a great question and there are so many!

In sociology, we often say that things are not always as they seem. This is most definitely true. My book sheds light on how abuse is not black or white, and that there is multidimensionality to abusers. In my case, my father was both adoring and abusive; both are my lived realities. Also, in the book you learn that I was raised in an upper middle class Jewish home, and domestic violence is still very much cloaked in silence, secrecy and shame in households like that. The book punctures assumptions around abusers, survivors, marriage, divorce, social class, etc.

Back in college, I got interested in homelessness among children and adults. I wanted to understand the structural conditions that lead some people to a life on the streets. We know there is a connection between homelessness and violence. As time has unfolded, I have found myself compelled by how traumatic experiences of violence leave us homeless, even metaphorically, in our bodies, in our relationships, and just in our very existence. Writing memoir about family violence became a way to come home to myself.

Sociologists are concerned with how relationships come together and break apart. Sociology consistently asks how we form connection and community with one another and how we become alienated from each other. Studying intimacy and violence provides rich ground for examining these dynamics and processes.

Also, in sociology, we aim to understand why people are cruel to each other, especially in a context of intimacy, sexuality, family, and love.  Domestic violence cuts to the core of human experience of intimacy, vulnerability and relations of domination.

Furthermore, many of us have an interest in social justice and social change and operate from the assumption that sociological writing is not just about creating knowledge for knowledge’s sake but that it is also about forging solidarity with suffering human beings. Domestic violence and violence against women offer us the possibility to think about the nexus of relationships between social problems, personal healing and recovery, and social change.  As sociologists, we are trained in asking questions and observing the complexities and nuances of human behavior, and domestic violence cases like what I experienced provide an opportunity for deep, ongoing sociological inquiry.

BJR: Given the connection between the personal and the political, can you help the reader understand if there are any implications for social policy from your experiences as a caregiver?

DJC: I hope that the book compels readers to think about ways that we can talk more honestly about domestic violence, and especially how to have those conversations intergenerationally. When I began caregiving for my father, I was in my thirties and not yet on the tenure track and cobbling together a series of contingent academic jobs back and forth in two states. I spent a lot of money I didn’t have to travel to see him and I remember thinking how fabulous it would be if there were grants for people in my situation, simultaneously doing public service with teaching and also intense caregiving. I felt choked by my living expenses, student loan debt, and caregiving bills. It was clear to me then—and remains so—that we need a much greater, supportive infrastructure in our social institutions to help people navigate this and to buffer against the extreme loneliness that people face in these distressing and grief-filled circumstances. Growing up, I was one of very few only children with older parents. Now that this is an increasingly common demographic, it seems like as a society we will have to better offer support as people reconcile the dilemmas of aging and caregiving from the complicated context of tiny and tender family dynamics.

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families. 

Amy Blackstone is a professor in Sociology and the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I recently interviewed her about her new book, Childfree by Choice: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence (Dutton, 2019). Amy and her husband Lance blog at we’re {not} having a baby!.

BJR: Can you explain why you think that American needs a social movement to support childfree adults? 

AB:  It might seem strange to hear that childfree people need the support of a movement but until we live in a world where childfree people can share their status without receiving patronizing responses (e.g., “Oh, you’ll change your mind one day,” and “That’s selfish!” and “But you’re missing out on the most fundamental part of being a woman!”), where they are not immediately presumed to be less-than or to be miserable and lonely and selfish, I think a movement is needed. Beyond these stereotypes of childfree people, there are also structural, institutional issues that a movement can address. In the United States, we have a tax policy that penalizes poor working non-parents. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which was designed to lift people out of poverty by ensuring that they don’t begin owing income tax until their earnings exceed the poverty level, does not apply equally to parents and non-parents in poverty. Many non-parents begin owing income taxes while still below the poverty line. We also need to change how we think about reproductive health and who is responsible for it. For example, vasectomy is safer, more effective, and less costly than tubal ligation but vasectomy rates are half those of tubal ligation rates in the U.S, and one-fifth the rate of tubal ligation worldwide. Much of this has to do with cultural lore linking men’s fertility to masculinity, and to the belief that birth control is women’s responsibility alone. Finally, many of the childfree women and men I’ve interviewed tell me that they are often overlooked in policy and conversation about work/life balance. Though we all need and deserve balance, we sometimes forget that people without children also create family and have personal lives they need and want to nurture. 

BJR: Does your research suggest that childlessness is different for women and men, and if so, why do you think that is? 

AB: Though my research focuses exclusively on people who have made the choice not to have children, or childfree people, much of the existing research does not distinguish childfree from childless, a term that refers to people who want children but can’t or don’t for any number of reasons. In my own research on childfree people, I did find differences between women’s and men’s experiences. Women felt more pressure to become mothers than men did to become fathers, and they received more negative feedback about their choice than did men. I think that this is because of our strong cultural attachment to, and belief in, the notion of maternal instinct. We assume that women are wired to want kids, though there is no scientific evidence to support this idea. Instead, girls are taught from a very early age that motherhood is their destiny, and that it is the singular most important and fulfilling role they will have. One need only take a stroll down the “girls” aisle of any children’s toy store to see this. Boys are certainly reared to believe they will become fathers one day, but fatherhood is not presumed to be “in their nature” in the way that motherhood is for girls. 

BJR: What are the policy implications of your research on childlessness? 

AB: There are so many! As mentioned, one policy that needs to change is how the Earned Income Tax Credit works. Non-parents should have the same opportunity as parents to lift themselves out of poverty. In my book, I also describe how inheritance laws disadvantage non-parents in some states. Another area that I heard about over and over again in my interviews is work/life balance. Employers and policy makers must understand that the “life” part of that equation does not always mean kids — and this is true for parents and non-parents alike. And we need to think much more creatively about how we age and how we prepare for old age. This isn’t just an issue for non-parents; research shows that most parents do not have adult children who will provide intensive care for them as they age. We also should be educating children to understand that parenthood is a role best fulfilled when it is chosen — and that non-parenthood can be a fulfilling life path as well. Recently, policy makers and others have expressed concern over declining fertility rates among women born in the United States. What these conversations overlook is that our population is actually growing, and we have immigrants to thank for that. Rather that pushing people who don’t want to become parents into doing so, we should be looking for ways to welcome – not turn away – people who wish to immigrate to the U.S. Finally, there are many policy implications having to do with reproductive justice. Who gets to decide when, whether, how, and to how many children we become parents? These are questions that seem to be on everyone’s mind these days, and how and by whom they are answered has very real consequences for everyone, including childfree people.

Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is also a Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Families. 

Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran on 3/6/2018. Punishing Disease was just awarded the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Sexualities Section Distinguished Book Award.

Trevor Hoppe is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and recently published the book Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness.  The book traces the rise and application of criminal laws used to prosecute people living with HIV in the United States, typically for failing to disclose their status to a sexual partner.  I recently interviewed him about his book.

AK: Besides HIV and related behavior that you focus on, have other sexual behaviors and diseases been criminalized in recent United States history, and are these laws disproportionately enforced among certain populations?

TH: The book traces the rise of HIV-specific criminal laws in the 1980s and 1990s, linking that shift towards criminalization to the broader war on crime and particularly the war on drugs. AIDS unfortunately coincided with a massive expansion of the carceral state through Ronald Reagan’s presidency and it was seized upon by evangelical conservatives as a harbinger of moral decline. That made for a unique and deeply punitive response to this epidemic that has no parallel in history or in the years that have followed. During World War II, many states did pass venereal disease statutes, mostly to target prostitutes who were viewed mistakenly as responsible for the spread of syphilis. However, those laws featured misdemeanor penalties and there’s no evidence I could find that that they were widely used.

Recently, states have been moving to expand their felony HIV-specific criminal laws to include other diseases, particularly Hepatitis C. To date, only a handful of states have done so and it’s not clear that they will be widely utilized by prosecutors, as that disease is spread primarily through the sharing of needles, and drug users are not especially likely to call the police to report a needle-sharing partner. By comparison, the sexual transmission aspect of HIV more readily lends itself to a criminal justice response, since the HIV-negative partner can more readily claim victimhood in a criminal courtroom.

AK: You found that lawyers and judges often had very little medical understanding of HIV and how it is transmitted, leading to legal arguments that were inaccurate, but compelling. Did these inaccuracies allow for anyone to appeal their convictions?

TH: As is the case in the criminal justice system more broadly, most defendants charged under these statutes plead guilty. Once you plead guilty, it’s difficult if not impossible to turn back and show cause for an appeal. Defendants take pleas to avoid the much harsher penalties that come with taking your case to trial. My analysis finds, for example, that male defendants at trial received an average prison sentence of 153 months versus an average of 77 months for male defendants who plead out. Further, there is no evidence that any defendant charged under a felony HIV-specific criminal law in the United States has ever been acquitted at trial. The only cases that do not result in conviction are the rare few that are dismissed, usually because the accuser does not show up to testify. In this context, appeals are few and far between and those that have proceeded are almost universally unsuccessful.

That said, there are many cases I encountered that would appear to a casual onlooker to be ripe for appeal—such as the case of a Michigan stripper convicted for giving a lap dance (the prosecutor claimed the prohibited sexual penetration involved the client’s nose). But in her case and countless others, defendants chose to plea.

AK: If someone does not know their HIV status at the time they expose somebody else, can they be prosecuted under these laws, and if not, do these laws then encourage avoiding HIV testing so that individuals can avoid legal issues? What would be a better policy that could more effectively encourage testing and disclosure of HIV to sexual partners?

TH: No. HIV-specific laws require that a person be aware of their HIV-status. Advocates often criticize these laws on the basis that they discourage HIV testing. I don’t think there’s good social science evidence to support that claim. Most people who are not currently living with HIV do not know that these laws exist. There are far stronger arguments for demanding legal reform. For example, these laws are extremely broad and can be used to prosecute harmless behaviors, such as spitting, biting, or in at least once case, even a lap dance. The crime is failing to disclose before any sexual contact, whether or not that contact posed a risk of transmission. To this point, less than 10 percent of cases involve an allegation that defendant transmitted the disease to their partner. This is a dangerous precedent. Should partners suffering from noncommunicable diseases, such as cancer, be required to disclose? No. We can obviously recognize that policy intervention as ludicrous. The only reason we can’t say the same for HIV laws is that our vision is clouded with stigma and, too often, obfuscated by ignorance. It is terrible policy to send people to prison for years or even decades for nothing more than causing a sexual partner to experience irrational and, in most cases, unwarranted psychological duress. The best science we have today says that people living with HIV who are on treatment and have a suppressed viral load cannot—cannot—transmit the disease. It’s time for most Americans to wake up and rethink everything they know about HIV. The disease has changed. The laws, unfortunately, have not.

Trevor Hoppe is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness, published by University of California Press, and co-editor of The War on Sex, published by Duke University Press. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and board member of the Council on Contemporary Families. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg

Stephanie Coontz offers reflections on the Council on Contemporary Families brief, Hiring-related Discrimination: Sexist Beliefs and Expectations Hurt both Women’s and Men’s Career Options, by Jill Yavorsky.

VR: You edited Jill Yavorsky’s brief on hiring-related discrimination, where she reports that both men and women are stereotyped in hiring decisions–and men suffer from this, though women suffer more. How does history play a role in this? 

SC: It wasn’t until 1972 that The Equal Employment Opportunity Act prohibited job discrimination on the basis of sex, and not until 1973 did the Supreme Court definitively rule that newspapers could not sort job ads, as had been done for decades, into “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.” I studied New York Times ads from the 1960s where employers openly stipulated that applicants must be “pretty-looking, cheerful,” “poised, attractive,” “perky,” and even “really beautiful.” No ads for females stressed analytical abilities—only ads for males did. Many employers clearly agreed with the psychiatrist who argued in a 1962 Yale Review article that most young women “are incapable of future long-range intellectual interests” before they had married and raised their children – if then.

The fact that women are now considered equally capable of handling jobs that require education, analysis, and reason is a step forward. But as Yavorsky shows, employers still tend to believe that men are best suited for challenging jobs that require physical or mental prowess. Her findings likely underestimate the full extent of discrimination because many studies find that when jobs are described as requiring stereotypically male attributes, or the majority of workers pictured in the ads are male, women are discouraged from applying in the first place.

VR: What is your view of Yavorsky’s finding that women applying to men’s middle-class jobs experience fewer barriers in getting in the door–but they appear to face significant barriers once they are at work? 

SC: This seems to be especially true in elite professions. As I point out elsewhere, the greatest wage discrimination by gender used to be in working-class and lower middle-class jobs, partly because of men’s greater rates of unionization. But as wage rates and job security in many traditional blue-collar jobs have fallen, we now see the opposite. Many women have established a firm foothold in mid-level middle-class jobs, and their wages have risen significantly. In the most elite professions, however, men’s wages have risen exponentially more, so that the biggest gender wage gaps are now at the top of the occupational ladder rather than at the bottom or middle.

Once women (and minorities) do get hired in traditionally male blue-collar jobs, they tend to be paid similar wages to men, accounting for seniority. But professional jobs where raises, promotions, and incentives rest on more subjective standards allow more free rein to sexist and racist biases.

VR: Men who apply for women-dominated working-class jobs appear to be subject to hiring discrimination, and Yavorsky suggests that as jobs shift to more service sector jobs, this could become a growing problem. Do you agree?

SC: On average, women’s wages still lag behind those of men with comparable education and experience. But more women than men have been upwardly mobile over the past 40 years, because working women have made slow but significant gains from a very low base, while men have lost many of the secure, well-paying blue-collar jobs once open to men without a college education. Between 1979 and 2007, the percentage of workers in middle-skill occupations fell, but for women the vast majority of this shift was due to their moving into higher-skill jobs as they got more experience and education. By contrast, a full half of the shift for men was into lower-skill jobs. Ironically, then, women’s historical disadvantages have incentivized many to seek more education to make a secure living, but men’s historical advantages have slowed their response to the changing job market. Many still believe they can earn a living wage without a college degree, or they assume that all female-dominated jobs will pay less and have less opportunity for advancement. As Yavorsky shows, employers exhibit the same stereotypes in reverse, discriminating against men even in – especially in — the mid-status, middle-class jobs that are expanding much more quickly than other sectors of the economy and that now pay more than many traditionally male-dominated blue-collar jobs. With most families requiring two incomes to get by, gender equality in hiring and promotion ought to be on the agenda of all people who make their living through wages, not just feminists.

Stephanie Coontz is author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Follow her at @StephanieCoontz. Virginia Rutter is co-editor of Families as They Really Are. Follow her at @VirginiaRutter. 

A short interview with Stephanie Coontz by Virginia Rutter on a new CCF study.

VR: You edited the new brief report on cohabitation trends from the Council on Contemporary Families. In it, Arielle Kuperberg reports that premarital cohabitation is more common—occurring before 70 percent of marriages. But what does this new research tell us about Americans’ intimate lives? 

SC: First of all, it adds to our understanding of how quickly the norms and dynamics of personal relationships are changing. Until 1970, couples who cohabited before marriage were 82 percent more likely to divorce than those who married directly. That extra risk is now gone. Similarly, until the 1980s, marriages in which wives had more education than their husbands had a higher risk of divorce than other couples. But since 1990 that extra risk has also disappeared. Despite constant claims to the contrary, it is no longer true that marriages where the wife earns more than her husband are at higher risk of divorce. Finally, couples where the wife did most of the childcare and housework used to report better sex lives than couples with a more egalitarian division of labor. Now the opposite is true.

Within couple relationships there are many signs of growing equality. But that leads to a second contribution of the paper, which illustrates the growing inequality among couples on the basis of higher education, and in turn on their prospects for earning a family wage.

VR: Cohabitation looks like it is useful and valuable to many—as Kuperberg shows in the reversal of that out-of-date link between cohabitation and divorce. (See her awesome Figure 3 for a visual of the reversal!) But some people don’t want to cohabit. What do you think of Kuperberg’s findings about religion, escalating inequality, and access to “direct marrying”?

SC: Despite the widespread social acceptability of premarital cohabitation, a minority of Americans, especially those with strong religious beliefs, continue to disapprove of the practice and prefer to marry directly. Kuperberg highlights the painful dilemmas facing those who hold more traditional values but lack the resources to act on them. While two-thirds of religiously-observant women with a BA or higher did not cohabit before marriage, this was true of only 14 percent of equally observant women who did not attend college — and of just three percent of religiously-observant women without a high school diploma. As Kuperberg suggests, this is almost certainly not because of different values but of different options.

I agree that this gap likely reflects the difficulties that less-educated couples face in meeting the increasingly high economic bar for marriage. And it is especially troubling that the gap used to be just between the least-educated women and everyone else but is now greatest between the most-educated women and everyone else. The same escalating inequality between the most highly-educated Americans and others who work just as hard but are paid drastically less is also seen in rates of non-marriage and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

This divergence is likely to continue, given recent evidence that, as yet, the only group to have recovered fully from the Great Recession is people with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

VR: So what do you make of that? Growing equality within couples, and growing inequality between couples?  

SC: For one thing, it means that much family instability results not from people’s different values or “culture” but from their inability to meet the high interpersonal and economic expectations of marriage that most Americans now embrace. I am thinking of the economically insecure people who move in together rapidly and then don’t move on to marriage, resulting in a lot of churning; the growing numbers of people who are not seen as marriageable by others due to poor job prospects or low wages (low-income men right now have the worst marriage prospects); youths who lack the kind of life opportunities that give them incentives and tools to defer childbearing.

For another thing, when people feel that they are being excluded from the American Dream, they often embrace short-term coping mechanisms or compensating behaviors that make their personal lives and relationships even more difficult. And with higher wage inequality, fewer work-family protections, and a weaker social safety net than other advanced industrial economies, the U.S. imposes exceptionally heavy penalties on people who become single parents or do not complete higher education, leading to lower rates of social mobility – and higher rates of personal problems. As I’ve written elsewhere, the long-standing American myth that individuals succeed purely on their own, on the basis of their personal “grit,” actually undermines people’s ability to establish families that can thrive.