Re-posted from Education Week

The #MeToo movement has brought to the forefront what has been a long-standing concern for women across various communities: sexual harassment and, more broadly, gender inequality.

It’s critical that we implement sanctions against perpetrators of sexual harassment and that we increase men’s awareness of what is and is not acceptable. But this movement also highlights the need for thinking more seriously about how we teach children and teens about these issues.

Sexual harassment is not merely something that young people will need to contend with sometime in their distant future when they are adults in the workforce. Rather, it is something many of them, especially girls, are experiencing right now and right in their schools. Like it or not, schools are formally and informally communicating lessons to their students about expectations for men’s and women’s sexual conduct. Thus, we should look to education as a significant avenue to tackle sexual harassment and gender inequality.

In particular, we need to rethink what is typically referred to as “sex education.” First, we need to change the very word we use for it from “sex” education to “sexuality” education. This education must address not just “the birds and the bees,” but sexual harassment, including the ways in which it sometimes affects different groups of women and girls.

The conventional wisdom about sexuality education in schools is that there are two choices: an abstinence-only curriculum or a comprehensive curriculum that includes both abstinence and other topics, such as options for preventing pregnancy and protecting individuals from contracting sexually transmitted diseases.

While research has largely established that the latter approach is more effective than abstinence-only education in delaying sexual activity and reducing adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, comprehensive sexuality education would be even more effective if it were even more comprehensive.

One way to do this is to expand sexuality education curricula to incorporate lessons about sexual harassment and gender inequality. A 2011 nationally representative survey commissioned by the American Association of University Women found that nearly half of middle and high school students surveyed reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment during the 2010-2011 academic year. Girls were more likely than boys to be sexually harassed, but the problem was widespread across genders: 56 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys reported experiencing sexual harassment. This included in-person sexual harassment, such as unwelcome touching or sexual jokes, as well electronic sexual harassment, such as unsolicited pictures or videos.

I have encountered this high rate of sexual harassment in my own research as well. When interviewing Latina girls in Chicago on their sexual experiences, I heard repeated stories of boys groping them in the hallway or making sexual comments about their bodies in school.

Teachers and other school employees need better training in how to identify and stop sexual harassment. In her 2007 book Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, sociologist C. J. Pascoe found that teachers frequently witness the harassment yet fail to do anything about it, or they may minimize the seriousness of the incident.

It is also important that school employees become aware of how unconscious racial biases may influence their perceptions of such incidents. Research shows that black and Latinx students face more disciplinary action and are assumed to be more adult-like and less innocent, and thus in less need of protection. Researchers, including Monique Morris and Jody Miller, have documented how school personnel routinely label black girls as “loud,” or “unladylike” when they are perceived to fail to conform to white, middle-class expectations of femininity.

Such research demonstrates how racial and gender stereotypes of girls of color can inform some school personnel’s understanding of their harassment. It can even lead educators to punish these girls’ attempts to protect themselves or to assume they provoked their own sexual harassment.

The prevalence of sexual harassment in schools also suggests that sexuality education should be made more comprehensive in terms of when it is taught. Instead of treating it as a discrete topic limited to health class, it should be incorporated into other aspects of school.

In rethinking sexuality education to address the issue of sexual harassment, for instance, schools need to think about dress-code policies. By focusing almost exclusively on girls’ attire, school officials often reinforce the sexual double standard that permits boys more freedom than girls, thereby reinforcing gender inequality. Instead, schools should concentrate on training school personnel and students on identifying, preventing, and addressing sexual harassment.

These lessons can also be incorporated into classroom discussion, where students could learn and dialogue about relevant topics in an age-appropriate manner. For instance, students can explore Title IX through history class assignments. Students’ familiarity with the federal law—which prohibits sex discrimination in educational activities and programs by institutions that receive federal funds—can empower them to demand gender equity in their schools, as well as in the larger society. Gender equity can also be examined in the social studies classroom, where teachers can facilitate student discussions of gender stereotypes in the media, for example. These types of classroom activities can also assist students in developing media-literacy skills, such as understanding how our engagement with media relates to social interactions.

Young people are already facing sexual harassment in their lives, including their schools. Why not help them take it on now in a more structured context? It’s time to start these conversations earlier, help youths recognize harassment, call it out, and demand that something be done about it. Maybe this can help us move in a more concerted effort to stop making sexual harassment and gender inequality a “normal” aspect of our culture. It’s gone on too long. It’s about time we figure it out.

Lorena Garcia is an associate professor of sociology and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a sociologist who studies the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race and the author of Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (New York University Press, 2012).

On April 24, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services rang the death knell on work authorization for spouses of high-skilled immigrant workers. Under the direction of the White House, the USCIS conducted an audit of the H-1B guest worker program, specifically to see if it complies with the President’s Buy American, Hire American executive order. In a report submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the director of the USCIS proposed sweeping changes to the program, including removing regulations that would allow the spouses of H-1B workers to obtain work permits.

Despite being an established program for almost thirty years, the H-1B program has become a target for the current administration. The H-1B visa program first came into existence after the passage of the 1990 Immigration Act.  As the tech boom of the 1990s and rising fears about “Y2K” created a demand for technically-trained labor, U.S. companies began to seek workers from around the world.  The H-1B is given to workers in “specialized and complex” jobs. Typically issued for three to six years, the visa allows employers to hire foreign workers.

While the visa has always been classified as a “temporary nonimmigrant visa,” employers can sponsor the visa holders for permanent residency. The program also created the H-4 family reunification visa, which go overwhelmingly to the women spouses of workers. Children under the age of 21 years are also eligible for the H-4 visa.

The H-4 visa has real benefits for foreign workers, as it allows hundreds of thousands of family members to migrate to the U.S. along with the primary visa holder. Employers have supported the H-1B and H-4 visa, arguing that companies can bring the “best and brightest” to work in the U.S., particularly if they can also bring their families along. However, the visa also comes with restrictions: H-4 visa holders can’t work legally, apply for a social security number, or qualify for many federal education programs.

In my ethnographic study of H-1B and H-4 visa holders, I document the long-lasting negative impacts of these work restrictions on women’s careers, emotional health, and economic well-being. Many spouses of H-1B workers are also well educated and have advanced degrees, but after moving to the U.S., they become housewives. Their dependency creates other problems as well. In cases of domestic violence, H-4 visa holders have difficult leaving their partners without putting their own visas at risk.

There has been some relief for H-4 spouses who were already in the process of applying for their green cards. In 2015, the Obama administration issued an executive order that allowed H-4 visa holders employment authorization. But that authorization is contingent on the good standing of the primary H-1B visa holder. In other words, if their partner loses the H-1B, the spouse also loses her work authorization.

Even with this risk, the ability to work has provided welcome respite for tens of thousands of dependent spouses.  After spending years stuck at home, the chance to join the workforce is important both psychologically and economically vital. As my study and recent reports have shown, many families delay making major life choices or even having children until both partners are able to work. Having two incomes also offsets the high cost of living in regions where H-1B workers are concentrated. In addition, women’s participation in the workforce can translate into greater gender equity at home.

However, with this most recent report by the USCIS, we not only see a mandate to severely curtail the number of H-1B visas granted, but also to eliminate rights for their family members. As my research has shown, when immigrant women are given opportunities to become economically productive, they are more likely to stay in the U.S., and receive numerous other benefits. Ending the ability of immigrant spouses to work will undoubtedly reduce the amount of highly skilled workers willing to move to and stay in the U.S.

Amy Bhatt is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Contact her at abhatt@umbc.edu.

Marriage in Black: The Pursuit of Married Life among American-Born and Immigrant Blacks (Routledge, 2018) by Katrina Bell McDonald and Caitlin Cross-Barnet examines contemporary Black marriages in the United States. Based upon in-depth interviews with 60 couples, they examine the historical and continuing impact of racial inequalities in the United States on Black marriages, distinct features of Black marriages, and the diversity among Black marriages. Their interviewees included African American couples, immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and White American couples. I enjoyed reading the book and recently had the opportunity to interview the authors.

AK: What are some of the ways that you found racial inequalities in the United States impact Black marriages in contemporary society?

KBM and CC-B: There are so many angles to consider in response to this question. If we consider the legacy of African American life from the slave era onward, there have been enormous efforts by the state to exert social control over Black relationships. Under slavery, legal marriage was prohibited, but after emancipation, Black couples were pressured or forced to formalize their unions. The context of heterosexual marriage in the United States has historically been situated in White patriarchy, but the privilege accorded White men to support that model of marriage was never extended to Black men. Thus, you see a long history of paid employment among Black wives; married White women didn’t meet married Black women’s employment rates until the 1990s. Systemic racism is a constant for Black couples—structural barriers mean that couples have to negotiate discrimination in housing, employment, the criminal justice system, and everyday interactions with institutions ranging from government offices to the grocery store. That stress spills over into relationships and can create instability that is beyond a couple’s control. But then there also is an increasing proportion of the American Black population that is made up of immigrants. The context of marriage is different in Caribbean and African countries, but their cultural practices and meanings of marriage (in those countries as well as in the United States) don’t always conform to conventions in the United States. And then there is the question of assimilation. Institutionalized racism has historically prevented the assimilation of American-born Blacks into the full privileges of White American middle-class life, so for Black immigrants, what does assimilation mean?

AK: What other distinctive features did you find among Black marriages?

KBM and CC-B: Part of what we found is that there aren’t necessarily any universal features of Black marriage. Intersectional identities make it difficult to define “Black marriage” because individuals have many more components to their identities than race. Black families do have to confront particularly entrenched institutionalized racism, and that means there are certain problems Black couples are more likely to face or just fear—poverty, housing discrimination, incarceration. But when it comes to couples’ ideals or behavior, there are wide variations in marital ideals and practices by social class and immigration status in addition to variation by individuals, creating much more diversity among Black couples than we saw between Black couples and White couples (our sample included 14 White couples). Our sample was small—61 couples all living in the same geographic area—so there could be clearer patterns that would emerge in a larger group, but that would probably be true of any categorization of people, such as by social class or geographic location. That being said, we did find a few patterns that we thought were worthy of further investigation (see next question).

AK: One thing that struck me about your book was the diversity you found among the Black couples you interviewed. What were some differences you found among Black married couples?

KBM and CC-B: Sociologists have speculated that Black married couples are more egalitarian than couples of other ethnic backgrounds, particularly Whites, and because we were looking at Black couples from such diverse backgrounds, we were excited about investigating that idea more deeply. We did find that, regardless of their marital ideals, American-born Black couples were more likely than Whites or immigrant Blacks to share tasks and power fairly equally and that black husbands generally weren’t threatened by Black wives’ income earning power. Conservative religious values of headship and submission expressed by some American-born Black couples actually translated into more role sharing in daily life because the men were more involved with their families. No couple ever used the word “egalitarian,” but some couples professing to share everything “fifty/fifty,” still left the wife with most of the responsibility for housework and childcare even though she worked.

But the American-born Blacks were distinct from the Caribbean and African immigrants, who had radically different approaches to ideas of egalitarianism. African immigrants usually said they wanted to “adjust” or “adapt” to more egalitarian practices, which they saw as distinctly American and necessary to life in America. They generally weren’t fully egalitarian, but they were certainly not replicating the practices they had grown up with in their home countries, where they commonly compared their fathers to “dictators.” Caribbean immigrants, particularly men, were the opposite, wanting to maintain patriarchal power they would have had on the Islands. Caribbeans–and also whites—who were more conservative or traditional attached those values to economic power for men and felt strongly that men should be providers and that mothers shouldn’t work outside the home. For American-born Blacks, working wives and mothers were a norm regardless of the couples’ marital ideals.

Sometimes quantitative work can lead people to believe that an aggregate difference between two groups indicates that there is homogeneity within each group. When it comes to “Black marriage,” that perspective has often led people to view Black couples as deficient because marriage rates are lower than those among white couples, and poverty and divorce rates are higher.  But there are lots of Black couples who marry and work things out, and within the group of those who do, there are many approaches to being in a marriage.

Katrina Bell McDonald is Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of Africana Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. Caitlin Cross-Barnet is a federal researcher and an Associate at the Hopkins Population Center. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg.

A brief report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by David Cotter, Professor of Sociology at Union College

The General Social Survey[i] has been asking a set of four questions about gender ideology since the mid 1970s. These cover the relative suitability of women and men for politics, whether or not families should have a breadwinner/homemaker division of responsibilities, and whether mothers’ employment is harmful to children. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the answers to each of these trended in an egalitarian direction. Then from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s this support for gender equality stalled, even reversed. Since the early 2000s, however, all have returned to an egalitarian direction – and in every case are now above their mid-1990s peak. (See Figure 1.)

The Gender Ideology Index  my colleagues Joan Hermsen, Reeve Vanneman and I use is comprised of these four questions, which have been asked most consistently in the General Social Survey since the 1970s. For each egalitarian answer a respondent gets one “point,” so that someone who answered all four questions in an egalitarian way would get four points, and someone who answered all four in a traditionalist way would get a score of zero. The index now allows us to trace almost forty years of change. As with the items that make it up, it charts a pattern of rapid change from the 1970s up to the mid-1990s, a stall, and then a resumption of the trend toward egalitarianism. See Figure 2.

Gender Ideology by Gender
Gender differences in the Gender Ideology Index are, for the most part, relatively unremarkable. For nearly all of the series men are slightly (but significantly) less egalitarian than women. This remains true.  However, it is notable that the gap has now narrowed from what was nearly its widest point in 2012 to its smallest point in 2016. In addition, most of the change in the last few years is attributable to men’s “catching up” with women’s egalitarian attitudes. See Figure 3.

Gender Ideology and Generation: More Evolution than Revolution
Further analysis reveals that much of the change happens between generations – something that is particularly true in the post-stall period where individual generations show little secular trend. The fact that the Greatest Generation is fading from the survey and being replaced by Millennials after 2000, and especially since 2012, seems to be what is driving the movement toward egalitarianism. But those large differences between generations are less pronounced among the more recent cohorts: The difference between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers in 1977 was nearly as large as the whole change from 1977 to 2016, but the differences between Baby Boomers, GenXers, and Millennials barely as large as the overall change from 2012 to 2016. See Figure 4.

[i] The General Social Survey is a nationally representative survey of the U.S. population conducted regularly (annually or biennially) since 1972.  It is among the best sources for ongoing social science data on Americans’ attitudes about gender and a number of other issues. Yearly sample sizes in this analysis range from 904 in 2004 to 1,984 in 2006 (https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/).

A brief report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Dan Carlson, Assistant Professor, Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.

The stories inspired by the #MeToo movement reveal that despite decades of struggle for gender equality at work, patriarchy, misogyny, and the sexual objectification of women run deep. And yet the fact that some harassers, abusers, and predators are being held accountable indicates that proponents of gender equality continue to make progress.

But what’s happening on the home front? Has the gender revolution there stalled or is progress being made? Today, married men do roughly four hours of housework per week, up from two hours in 1965 but roughly the same as in 1995 (Bianchi et al. 2012). Married women perform much less housework today than in 1965 (14.2 hours vs. 30.4), but the amount hasn’t changed much since the mid-90s (14.2 hours vs. 15.8). Among youth, egalitarian attitudes about male authority at home and separate gender spheres increased from the 1960s through the mid-90s, but have reversed since, becoming more conventional.

Does this mean the gender revolution stalled? Not necessarily. Since the mid-90s, women have obtained a larger share of college degrees than men and increasingly earn as much or more than their partners, especially in the middle, working, and lower classes (Glynn 2012). Men have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend in direct care of children since 1965, with more than half of these gains occurring since the 90s (Bianchi et al. 2012) and twice as many men today are stay-at-home dads than 20 years ago, with four times as many saying they are doing it to care for their family (Pew Research Center 2014). Additionally, even though the attitudes of youth have become more conventional, results from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) indicate that after a lull in the mid-90s, U.S. adults’ valuation of gender egalitarianism has continued to increase since the mid-2000s (Shu and Meagher 2018).

In new research to be published later this month in Socius, my colleagues Amanda Miller, Sharon Sassler, and I find a significant increase in the proportion of low- to moderate-income parents sharing routine housework tasks between 1992 and 2006. In the 1990s, couples were most likely to share shopping (28%) and dishwashing (16%) and least likely to share laundry (9%) and house cleaning (12%). By 2006, the proportion of couples sharing house cleaning had nearly doubled, to 22 percent, and the proportion sharing the laundry had risen to 21 percent, an increase of 129 percent. The proportion who shared cooking rose from 13 percent to 21 percent while the proportion sharing dishwashing increased from 16 to 29 percent. The increase in shared shopping was less dramatic – from 28 to 30 percent—but it remains the most frequently shared task, now closely followed by dishwashing. And the percent of couples where men did the majority of cooking, cleaning, laundry, and dishes roughly doubled from 1992 to 2006.

The gender revolution can be measured not only by the way we arrange our lives, but also by the consequences of those arrangements. And that too appears to have changed. In earlier decades, couples who shared housework equally reported lower levels of marital and sexual satisfaction, and less frequent sex, than couples who adhered to a more “conventional” division of labor. But for married and cohabiting couples since the early 1990s, the reverse is true.  Although less than one-third of the couples we studied shared housework equally, these were the couples who, in contrast to couples in earlier decades, reported the highest marital and sexual satisfaction. In fact, this is the only group among which the frequency of sexual intercourse has increased since the early 90s. In our new study, we confirmed that egalitarian sharing of tasks has become more important for relationship quality. In 1992, the division of tasks mattered little for couples’ well-being. By 2006, couples who equally shared tasks demonstrated clear advantages over couples where one partner shouldered the load.

As it turns out, though, all housework isn’t created equal. Our new study reveals that some tasks are more closely associated with relationship quality than others.

For contemporary men, sharing shopping with their partner seems to be a turn on. Men who shared the shopping for their household not only reported greater sexual and relationship satisfaction than men who did the majority of this work, but also greater satisfaction than men whose partner did the majority of shopping. For cleaning and laundry, men reported lower relationship and sexual satisfaction and more discord when they did the majority of these tasks, but they were just as satisfied when these tasks were shared as when their partner did them.

For women, the shared task that mattered most for their satisfaction with their relationship was dishwashing. As of 2006, women who found themselves doing the lion’s share of dishwashing reported significantly more relationship discord, lower relationship satisfaction, and less sexual satisfaction than women who split the dishes with their partner. Sharing responsibility for dishwashing was the single biggest source of satisfaction for women among all the household tasks, and lack of sharing of this task the single biggest source of discontent.

One overarching pattern that emerged from our data is that the more common it is to share a task, the more damaging to relationship quality it is for just one partner to shoulder responsibility for it. This is why shopping and dish-washing appear to matter so much for relationship quality. It seems individuals and couples take stock of their arrangements in comparison to those around them, and those assessments of relative advantage or disadvantage come to shape their feelings about their arrangements and their relationships overall. This suggests that as the sharing of other tasks becomes more common, the benefits of sharing — and the costs of not sharing — increase. Such a pattern sounds less like a movement undergoing a stall and more like one that is continuing to build.

Jessica McCrory Calarco is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington and recently published the book Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford Press). Based on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork following a group of students from 3^rd to 7^th grade, she explores class differences in the ways in which students interact with teachers. She found that, coached by their parents, middle class students are more likely to ask teachers for assistance, accommodation, and attention, while working class students acted with more restraint. I was recently able to interview about her book.

AK: What were some differences by social class that you found in students’ interactions with teachers?

JMC: The middle-class and working-class students were similar in many ways. They liked their teachers and they were excited about learning new things. Where they differed, though, was in the extent to which they tried to negotiate for individual (and often unfair) advantages in school.

At the schools where I observed, teachers got a steady stream of questions and requests. The vast majority of those questions and requests came from middle-class students. And many of those requests went beyond what was fair or required. Middle-class students asked for extensions on assignments. They asked teachers to check their work on tests. They monopolized class time with their stories. They even tried to talk their way out of punishment when they got in trouble for forgetting homework or running in the hallways or being disrespectful to their peers.

Middle-class students were also incredibly pushy in making those requests. They rarely sat patiently with their hands raised, especially if that meant waiting more than a few seconds for a response. Instead, they called out, got up from their seats, and even interrupted teachers to ask questions. They also kept asking, even when well-meaning teachers tried to deny those requests. They refused to take “no” for an answer, and they were willing to waste class time (and sometimes call in their parents for reinforcement) to get the support they desired.

Teachers rarely got questions or requests from working-class students. They didn’t feel entitled to teachers’ assistance, accommodations, or intention. And they tried hard to manage on their own. Of course, working-class students did sometimes ask for assistance or accommodations or attention. But the support they requested was typically fair or required. They asked for help when they were struggling to understand concepts. They raised their hands when teachers asked for volunteers to share.

Working-class students were also more patient and more polite in making requests. They would often spend three or five or even eight minutes with their hands raised, even while teachers responded to other students who got up or called out, instead. In the process, working-class students sometimes fell off-task or even gave up, leaving assignments incomplete and questions unanswered on tests. Furthermore, when teachers denied their requests, working-class students rarely pushed back. They just accepted the “no” and moved on.

AK: What role did parents play in teaching children to interact with teachers in specific ways?

JMC: Middle-class and working-class parents all cared deeply about their children, and both groups wanted their children to succeed. But they differed in the lessons they taught children about interacting with teachers and securing advantages in school.

Middle-class parents coached their kids to treat their teachers as resources. When their children were confused or struggling in school, middle-class parents encouraged them to turn to their teachers for support. One middle-class mother recalled what she tells her kids: “It’s okay to ask questions. Your teacher is there to help you. That’s her job.” Middle-class parents also taught their children to keep asking until teachers met their needs.

Working-class parents instead coached their children to treat teachers with respect. As one working-class father recalled: “I just want my kids to be respectful and responsible. My kids are good for the teachers.” Working-class parents recognized that teachers had a lot on their plates. They also worried that teachers might get frustrated with students who asked questions. So they taught their children to deal with problems on their own and to avoid making requests.

AK: Did these differences lead to unequal outcomes for children, and what can be done to reduce these inequalities?

JMC:  Middle-class students’ negotiations with teachers gave them a number of unfair advantages in school. They persuaded teachers to help them correct their work on tests. To grant them extensions on assignments. To exempt them from punishment when they got in trouble. To give them extra time to share their thoughts and ideas. In sum, the bulk of teachers’ support went to the students who needed it the least.

That said, those advantages weren’t automatic. Middle-class students were only successful in negotiating advantages because teachers said “yes” to their requests.

Of course, teachers were well-meaning. They did not intend to privilege middle-class students over their working-class peers. But they still said “yes” to middle-class students’ requests. And they did so, in part, because they worried about the consequences of saying “no.” In particular, they worried about the possibility of pushback from middle-class students and middle-class parents.

Teachers worried because middle-class parents and children could make their lives miserable. They could waste class time with constant emails and back-and-forth negotiations. They could undermine teachers’ authority by complaining to the principal or “blacklisting” teachers they saw as “unresponsive.” They could jeopardize the school by withdrawing critical financial and political support.

Essentially, then, middle-class students’ negotiated advantage was the product of privilege. And that means we can’t level the playing field by teaching working-class students to act more like their middle-class peers. It wouldn’t work. And it isn’t fair—we shouldn’t penalize working-class students for trying to be respectful and responsible.

Instead, we need to level the playing field by preventing middle-class students and parents from using their privilege to negotiate advantages. For teachers, that means thinking carefully before granting requests from middle-class students and parents. For schools, that means protecting teachers from pushback when they say “no.”

Of course, those changes aren’t easy to make. Middle-class families have a history of hoarding opportunities, and they’re unlikely to give up their privilege without a fight.

In the short term, then, we also need to make schools and classrooms more welcoming places for working-class families. We need teachers to recognize silent signs of struggle. And we need teachers to reach out and offer support, even when students don’t ask for it themselves.

Jessica McCrory Calarco is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She is the author of Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School. Follow her on Twitter  @JessicaCalarco. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg

If you couldn’t come to CCF’s 19th conference, Conceiving American Families in the 21st Century: Reproductive Policies, Practices, and Technologies, you don’t know what you were missing. So I’m here to tell you. Held on March 2nd in our new single-day format, it was a great success and the theme could not have been more timely. Individual rights, freedoms and immunities are being fiercely debated globally and locally, and if, how and to whom babies are born are part of that debate. Throughout the day, issues of positive and negative rights related to reproduction were a recurring theme in lively presentations and discussions.

The theme of individual rights influenced the conference even before it began this year. Traditionally, we convene at our organizational home, which has been UT Austin since 2015. However, Texas has recently implemented a campus carry law, which gives individuals the right to carry licensed concealed handguns in public university conference rooms. Some states have since denied travel funding to presenters invited to speak at these institutions. Considering safety and funding concerns, our diligent co-chairs, Adina Nack and Josh Coleman, changed locations to the DoubleTree hotel nearby, where firearms are prohibited.

Our flexible co-chairs continued to work around hurdles shortly before the conference began. Illness prevented keynoter, Mary Mason, from coming at the last minute so her Babies of Technology co-author and son, Tom Eckman, took the podium alone. We heard startling stats on the $100 billion worldwide assisted reproduction market, and examples of how the rights of the child can get lost in the for-profit designer baby marketplace. We learned about new technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing techniques that can snip defective disease causing genes and keep them from being passed on to offspring. When or if this technology is ready for prime time, who will have the right to decide what genetic defects will be permanently removed from family lineage? What will be the unintended consequences of permanently altered DNA?

Our second keynoter, Carole Jaffe, gave us stunning examples of coercive reproductive policies, and how denial of access to adequate family planning services disproportionately affect poor, black, and brown women. She noted that maternal mortality is three times higher for black women than white women, and fifty-five percent of births today are to mothers receiving Medicaid. These women are trapped in a system with insufficient birth control choices, lack of access to termination of unwanted pregnancies, and inadequate healthcare after birth. In her talk, Amanda Stevenson also pointed out the coercive state policies that result in disproportionate distribution of IUDs and implants to Medicaid recipients in Texas.

Lisa Ikemoto and Sharmila Rudrappa eloquently illustrated how laws banning commercial surrogacy, which are intended to protect working-class women’s rights to fair compensation and treatment, can backfire. In some countries, women end up even more vulnerable as they move across borders to places where state immunity decreases their control over compensation and care. We learned how regulation rather than outright banning can protect women’s rights and give women more control over their surrogacy.

Teresa Morris raised questions about who is protected and who is vulnerable during prenatal care and delivery. For example, although 99.8% of the problems detected via continuous fetal monitoring are false positives and expose the mother to additional radiation, continuous monitoring persists to lower malpractice risk. Since the C-section is the “gold standard of care” in malpractice court cases, a dramatic rise in U.S. C-sections may also be attributed to provider liability concerns that trump maternal health considerations.

I could go on. All our presenters brought something new, enlightening, counter-intuitive, or clarifying to the table.

A hallmark of all CCF conferences is the generous time devoted to Q & A. Negative and positive reproductive rights dominated these lively discussions as well. Some hot topics were: How will legal and ethical codes regulate the eugenics of commercial surrogacy, when cryobanks broker higher prices for “fair complexion” “Ivy League”, and “celebrity look-alike”? How are babies being treated like commodities rather than a public good? What complex immunities and injustices will the new Conscience and Religious Freedom rule usher in? For example, under this rule, what happens to frozen embryos when the private hospital that stored them is taken over by a Catholic hospital?

As you know, CCF’s mission is to disseminate robust family research and best practice findings from diverse disciplines to a broad audience. This year we expanded our reach by including two non-academic speakers who founded community organizations that educate the public about family issues. Mo Cortez is an intersexed, trans, Latino man who co-founded the Houston Intersexed Society for this purpose. His personal stories about reproductive injustices and denied rights in the intersexed and transsexual communities hit home viscerally. Marsha Jones, co-founder and executive director of the Afiya Center, shared stories of black women who are not supported for fertility control, pregnancy termination, healthy pregnancy or healthy baby. Both speakers contributed such rich additions to the human rights and justice conversation that we will hopefully be adding more community educators to our rosters in the future.

Several features that make CCF conferences special were brought back by popular demand. Flash Sessions, which allow budding researchers to present their work in five minute summaries, were thought-provoking and left us wanting more. We were also left wanting more at our fabulous Media Workshop. Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research and Public Education, gave us cutting edge tools for producing op-eds that stand out. Board member Philip Cohen, who founded the SocArXiv.org open archive for social sciences, and the popular FamilyInequality blog, brought us up to speed on social media and blogging do’s and don’ts. Board member and UMass economics professor, Lee Badgett, shared her insights from her latest book, The Public Professor.

The CCF Media Award went to noted ProPublica and NPR reporter, Nina Martin, for her outstanding reporting on abortion, pregnancy, and maternal health. Two 2017 pieces, Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth, (NPR audio here) and The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth are brilliant examples of her recent work.

Hat tips to all who made the 2018 CCF conference possible – our phenomenal organizers Josh Coleman and Adina Nack, CCF Executive Director Jennifer Glass, her above-and-beyond grad assistant Rachel Donnelly, and all of our UT co-sponsors. And special thanks to Pam Smock, for her generous donation that allowed CCF to fund an early career student scholar travel award. This year’s award went to Elizabeth Nalepa, of Case Western Reserve with honorable mention to Maurice Anywie, of Bowling Green State.

This report is a conference tasting menu. For more on this year’s content, go to this link. If you missed this year, another theme is already in the works for 2020. Manage your FOMO (fear of missing out), stay tuned and hope to see you next time!

Hooray! Arielle Kuperberg is now to be the editor of CCF @ The Society Pages! Arielle has already populated many spaces in my life—mainly thanks to the interesting work she has done on cohabitation, hooking up, and most recently college debt.  She’s been sharing her good research at The Society Pages and via mainstream media and sharpening (and debunking where necessary) some issues people hold dear. I asked Arielle a few questions about her thoughts about forward-facing scholarship as she begins this new role.

VR: You are a busy person, as a scholar, teacher, program director, and parent. In that context, can you tell us about your commitment to public sociology?

AK: I have long had an interest in the types of messages presented in the media, and the degree to which they are inaccurate. I was a media studies major in college before I switched to sociology, and one of my first publications examined media rhetoric surrounding stay-at-home mothers, and how this rhetoric did not match up with reality. After I went to grad school and began to publish more articles, I started becoming frustrated when I would see inaccurate or misleading things in the media that I knew my research could speak to, or contradicted. I was also frustrated that after all the effort of publishing articles on topics I felt were very important, very few people would read my research unless they happened to be doing research on the same topic. I had published articles on  topics like the effectiveness of different policies in addressing poverty and gender/race-based pay inequality, and the role of poor labor market conditions in lowering marriage rates for the less educated, but what good did that work do if nobody ever heard of it?

When I was about to publish an article showing cohabitation does not cause divorce I felt this research was important enough that I should make a more concrete effort to get the word out, and that I was at a point in my career where I was ready to get more involved in public sociology. I got in touch with a mentor who recommended I get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families. CCF helped me put together a research brief about that project, and later another one about my research on college hookups, and both of those pieces were picked up by major outlets. I started writing some blog posts for the CCF blog and other blogs, and eventually started recruiting my friends into CCF and interviewing them for this blog, since they too have important research findings that more people should know about. Which is probably how I ended up in this position as the new editor.

I used to think of publication as the last stage in the “research pipeline” but I now think of public sociology as that last stage. For research to make an impact, other people need to hear about it. Academic research on the family has a lot to say about modern mythologies surrounding the family – but if nobody hears about it, it’s not going to be very useful. Pierre Bourdieu has been quoted as saying “My goal is to contribute to preventing people from being able to utter all kinds of nonsense about the social world” and I think that pretty well sums up my philosophy.

And yes I am extremely busy with all my different roles, but one of the reasons I went into academia is I enjoy the busyness and all the different roles you get to play – I’m never bored! I am also extremely lucky to have a partner who is a stay-at-home dad, and who supports my career by doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to childcare and housework.

VR: Your active support of others’ work really stands out to me. What is your approach to mentoring, collaboration, and supporting colleagues and earlier career scholars?

AK: I am only in the position I am because of the generous mentoring of other people. My first two publications were coauthored with my undergraduate mentor Pamela Stone, who taught me everything from how to read a research article and format a table, to how to respond to reviewers when you get a “revise and resubmit.” She also introduced me to several leading scholars in the field when we went to conferences. Since then I have had several very important mentors who have helped me refine my research skills, wrote letters for me to get into grad school and later to get jobs, guided me through grad school, introduced me to their professional connections, gave me advice when I was facing important career decisions, and helped keep me going when I was facing various professional crises. I feel an obligation to pass that help forward to my students and junior colleagues, so that other people can have the same opportunities I had.

But it’s more than an obligation. I find mentoring to be one of the most rewarding aspects of being an academic. I’ve spent many years of my life developing some very specific skills in research, and some more general “succeeding in academia” skills, many of them learned the hard way. What use is all that knowledge if I keep it to myself? Plus there is a special kind of pleasure you get from seeing someone you mentored going off and doing well for themselves in life.

VR: What are your favorite ways of consuming social media?

AK: I have long been a fan of blogs. Back in 2001 when I was an undergraduate (and for several years afterwards), I started and ran a LiveJournal “community” (group blog) for sociologists, which was one of the earliest sociology blogs as far as I can tell. I think there is just something to be said about the short essay format that allows you to go more in depth than a tweet, but is still digestible in 10 minutes of reading while I’m drinking my morning coffee. One type of blog I particularly enjoy is the more personal memoir type of blogs, and I follow several non-academic blogs, although not as many as I used to.

Apart from that, I love facebook. I have made a few major moves in my life, and facebook lets me keep in touch with friends from the various places I’ve lived, and the academics I meet at various conferences. I also coordinate with two of my long-distance collaborators over facebook chat. I got a twitter account last year but have not used it as much as I could. I like the way it makes it easier to keep up with current events, and since most of the people I follow are academics and writers I have a very interesting feed, but I spend much more time on facebook. I also have participated in many message boards over the years, and right now my favorite one is reddit.

Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg. Virginia Rutter is Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University. Follow her on twitter at @VirginiaRutter.

50 years ago a student was expelled from Barnard College for living with her boyfriend. In March 1968 an article published in The New York Times discussed a young unmarried couple that was living together but not married, sparking a national scandal and debate about morality. It was quickly discovered that the woman in question was Linda LeClair, who was later expelled from Barnard College over the matter; this incident was later dubbed “The LeClair Affair.”

In the years after The LeClair Affair, premarital cohabitation became trendy, and by the early 1970s every women’s magazine had published articles about celebrities living with unmarried partners. Rates of cohabitation skyrocketed; in the late 1960s less than 7% of first marriages among young women aged 18-35 began in premarital cohabitation. By the early 1980s over 40% of first marriages in this group were among couples that lived together beforehand, and rates rose to nearly 70% in the early 2010s*.

In the 1980s concern grew over this increase and debate raged over whether cohabitation was the reason for a recent increase in divorce. Some said it was the type of people who cohabited that had a higher divorce rate because of their lower levels of financial preparedness, lesser religiosity, and higher likelihood of having divorced parents, while others argued it was the act of living together itself that caused couples to later divorce. More recently, research (including mine) has found cohabitation is not associated with a higher risk of divorce once factors like the ages at which they form their unions are taken into account, and that this is true even if couples have a child prior to marriage.

But even though it doesn’t cause divorce, there is still a problem with premarital cohabitation: as cohabitation went from new trend to the new normal, it has also increasingly been undertaken by those who don’t have the financial means to marry directly. Gaps in education between premarital cohabitors and couples that marry directly have been growing steadily since the 1970s. In 2010-2015, nearly 50% of young women marrying their first husband without living together first had a college degree; this rate was only 34% among women marrying after living together first*.

This growing gap positions cohabitation as a new facet of family inequality. Young adults want to pay down debt and become financially stable before entering marriage; this is an increasingly elusive goal, especially for those who do not complete a degree, so they enter cohabitation instead of marriage while waiting for more financial stability. Those with less education also are more likely to rush into cohabitation to make ends meet, some before they are ready, or with a less-than-ideal partner that a longer courtship would have revealed.

Today’s Linda LeClair wouldn’t be living with her boyfriend because it is trendy, but because she is up to her eyeballs in student loan debt, driving an Uber to survive, and struggling to establish herself in a career that could bring some stability and health insurance. After decades of disinvestment in public higher education by state governments, a minimum wage that has not kept pace with inflation, and an increasing number of young adults working in the “gig economy” that offers no stability and few benefits, it’s no wonder that young adults today have the highest rates of premarital cohabitation in U.S. history – and also have the lowest rates of marriage and childbearing. More affordable public higher education and more stable job opportunities that pay a living wage for young adults at all levels of education would allow more to shape their relationships according to their desires, instead of out of financial necessity.

*Numbers based on author’s analysis of the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households (N=3594) and multiple waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (1995, 2002, 2006-2010, 2011-2015, N=9420), examining women who married between age 18 and 35.  

Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg

Virginia Rutter was the founding editor of the Council on Contemporary Families Blog—CCF @ The Society Pages — which was launched in 2014. CCF@TSP is a venue for reporting on new research, policy reports, and current events. A particularly valuable feature of the blog has been the inclusion of undergraduate students, who have had the chance to engage with the substance of family sociology and the opportunity to address broader audiences. Virginia steps down in April, and I will be taking over. Here are some questions I had for Virginia before she leaves us:

AK:  What were some of your favorite blog posts that you edited in your tenure as editor of the Council on Contemporary Families blog?

VR: I’m still delighted with the title for Braxton Jones’s October 2016 post, As American as Divorce, which was a round-up of interviews done about research and commentary on divorce. But, Secular Listening at a Brainstorming and Prayer Meeting on 11/9/16 by Sarah Diefendorf, about the reaction by Evangelicals to the election of President Trump, was a wonderful, generous, quick turnaround piece of writing dealing with just a shocking, shocking day. I felt like Sarah had gone off to do the best kind of meditation for a sociologist to do on WTF had just happened the day before: She studied it. Respectfully, thoughtfully, effectively. And she told us a bit of what she heard, and so told us also about her own process in that strange time. The post went up two weeks after that 2016 election day. At that time it was hard to talk about the election, about people, about factions, and yet so hard not to do so. She did it, and it was a great post.

AK:  What is your advice for a blog writer who wants to write a successful blog post? What are some common missteps?

VR: The great thing about blogging is whenever you’ve said something you want to put out into the world, that’s success. But at CCF@TSP a few things work well: Make it short. Make one point. Don’t be cutesy or corny or cliché. You aren’t writing a scholarly paper, but you do have to support or substantiate what you have to say.

So, to make it short: Edit yourself, just take the time to streamline it sentence by sentence. To make one point, try reading your post backwards, paragraph by paragraph. You might see that you have more points than you need. You can always keep the multiple directions—there’s really no limit on space!—but make that decision consciously. Remember, that stray point could be the start of a separate post.

A few other rules: Try to make your title short, too. Provide the editor with open source artwork to go with your post, and embed good links to key references. Here or anywhere, know the website you are writing for; read other people’s posts there. That will teach you what to do and what not to do better than anything else.

AK:  What are you looking forward to doing with all your free time now that you will no longer be managing this blog?

VR: Yes, like other professors at underfunded state universities fighting for our contract, I am mostly, but for the occasional blogging, a lady of leisure. Just kidding. I have a project right now that focuses on connecting students from underrepresented groups to people just like them in professions they want to pursue. And at this very moment, I am completing a report about a family diversity and change teach-in we held last fall at Framingham State. It involved a digital photography installation, SHOWING (workxfamily), and about six weeks of campus events including about 65 classes that incorporated the exhibition into their subjects—from physics to English to (of course) sociology.

Virginia Rutter is Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University. Follow her on twitter at @virginiarutter. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg.