Originally posted Jan. 26, 2017

Prospective college students consider a wide variety of factors when deciding on a university. While academics and career opportunities are often high on the list, colleges known as top party schools have a special appeal. Everyone loves a good time, but as Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade describes in her new book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, this idea of college as “fun” is a fairly recent trend some troubling consequences.

In a feature with Time Magazine, Dr. Wade explains how American universities changed from predominantly strict, formal institutions to environments known for casual hookups and wild parties. Whereas in colonial America, colleges were highly regulated places, as the student body underwent a shift, so did campus culture. Wade explains,

“They [colonial college students] were generally obedient, but as the eighteenth century came to a close, colleges were increasingly filled with wealthy sons of elite families. These young men weren’t as interested in higher education as they were in a diploma that would ratify their families’ hoarding of wealth and power. Predictably, they had a much lower tolerance for submission.”

This rebellious attitude led to widespread expulsions across many elite universities, as well as the early foundations of Greek life. Fraternities became hubs for parties, alcohol, and casual sex, a legacy that still holds strong on many college campuses across the United States. And while the party scene can be tempting for many, American Hookup highlights how this emphasis on noncommittal and unemotional sex also sets the stage for widespread rape and sexual assault.

“Thanks to the last few hundred years, most colleges now offer a very specific kind of nightlife, controlled in part by the same set of privileged students that brought partying to higher education in the first place, and designed to promote, as much as possible, the ‘big four-year org’ that students both desire and dread.”

Originally posted Sept. 11, 2017

Even in 2017, when more and more women enter historically male-dominated fields, archaic notions of what counts as “men’s work” or “women’s work” continue to persist in many workplace environments. A recent article in The Globe and Mail covers a study that shows how gender stereotypes hurt both men and women at work, and it particularly hurts employees in new fields.

Jobs in new industries are considered to be more gender-neutral than older professions, but gendered perceptions still take hold in these new roles. Using data from a microfinance bank in Central America, Laura Doering and Sarah Thébaud examine how initial interactions with either a man or woman in a gender-ambiguous position shape future perceptions of that role. They find that a client’s initial interaction with a male or female loan manager shaped their perceptions of the entire position as more masculine or feminine. As Doering points out,

“For example, if we first encounter a man in a new or gender-balanced job, we begin to associate the job with masculine stereotypes.”

Clients not only quickly attach gendered perceptions to the position, but are more likely to comply with the demands of the male rather than female managers. However, if the borrower first encounters a woman in the management position, they attribute less authority to the next manager, regardless of gender. As for ways to combat this bias, the authors suggest that one possible solution is an endorsement from a high-status employee among the presence of clients or other colleagues. Doering concludes,

“Such endorsements from high-status individuals can nudge clients and other employees toward more equitable treatment of workers in female-typed roles.”

The recent accusations of many prominent men in media, politics, and the music industry for sexual harassment and assault have many wondering what can be done to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace. According to sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, the answer is simple: hire and promote more women. In an article published by the Harvard Business Review, Dobbin and Kalev review the working conditions that promote sexual misconduct, and emphasize the importance of a top-down approach to enact real change.

Harassment thrives in workplaces with male-dominated management where women are outnumbered among their peers. While the answer to this problem is hiring more women for these roles, the authors explain why this process is not so straightforward:

“…women tend to leave workplaces where sexual harassment is common and goes unaddressed; the fight can feel hopeless in an environment where gender bias runs rampant.”

Therefore it is necessary for organizations to take on the challenge of hiring and retaining women in leadership roles. Many grievance systems and anti-harassment trainings were first implemented in the 1970s, but appear to have been relatively ineffective — women who file complaints often face serious repercussions, including being demoted or facing continued harassment and other types of mistreatment from colleagues.  

Dobbin and Kalev argue that sexual harassment in the workplace should be handled in a way that the survivors of sexual harassment are not punished. They urge CEOs and other company leaders to speak out against sexual harassment and to rethink how they promote and retain female employees.

“[I]t’s critical that leaders start accepting some of the responsibility that the courts have allowed them to brush off for such a long time… After all, culture is shaped by behavior at the top. As long as men dominate in management, it’ll be up to them to make those changes.”

Scandals in college athletics are becoming so commonplace that the NCAA’s decision not to sanction University of North Carolina over academic misconduct barely made the news, while corruption in NCAA basketball has turned into a major FBI investigation. Fans might be justified in viewing the NCAA as a boogeyman in scandal-plagued college sports. After all, the NCAA is the organization that began using the term “student-athlete” as a way to avoid workers compensation claims from the widow of a college football player. Rick Eckstein, however, argues in Salon that the NCAA is simply a sign of larger problems in higher education. In his evocative language,

“If the NCAA is Oz’s projection on the wall, a profit-oriented higher education system is behind the curtain pulling the levers.”

Eckstein ties spending on college athletics, which is known to run huge deficits, to the larger trend of the “corporatization” of higher education. Under this logic, higher education institutions work more like businesses than schools, and college athletics are a way for university administrators to achieve a variety of revenue-driven goals. For instance, sports are a way for colleges to manipulate enrollment statistics, encourage alumni donations, and, most importantly, expand the school’s brand. Eckstein writes,

“If we think about college sports as a marketing venture rather than an educational venture, all of this spending makes perfect sense. Think of players as walking advertisements – each branded with the school’s logo – who appear before millions of viewers on ESPN and ABC.”

Athletics isn’t the only part of higher education that seems to have an unstable foundation. Over half of Republicans now believe that universities have a negative impact on the country. Even the students who attend have less faith in the institution. Eckstein argues that it’s time to view NCAA athletics, with all of its contradictions, as a symptom of a corporatized higher education system that places fights over financial gain over student learning.

Recent social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, have sought to challenge the status quo. While such movements often make the news, less attention is paid to how they achieve success. A recent article in the New York Times by sociologist Kenneth T. Andrews argues that social movements bring about change through exercising different types of power — cultural, disruptive, or organizational.

We are used to seeing cultural or disruptive power from movements in the media, but organizational power is also important. Organizational power is reflected in a movement’s ability to sustain its agenda through ties to other groups. Recent research suggests that after the Tea Party built upon disruptive power gained from initial protests, it established local organizations and supported political candidates that shared its ideas, ultimately transforming the Republican Party. However, as with each mechanism of power, organizational power also has constraints. Andrews explains,

“Staging the occasional protest and raising money are one thing; developing leaders and building constituencies are another. Despite substantial resources and hundreds of organizations, the environmental movement, for example, has not generated the sort of participation sufficient to meet the environmental challenges we face.”

In short, the pathways to power that different social movements utilize are very important to the movement’s success in encouraging change. A movement may have the most success when it combines all three types of power, which helped movements like the Civil Rights Movement. And even if a movement itself is short-lived, the cultural effects may remain long after a movement has fizzled out, and even small-scale changes can still have the cultural power to affect the status quo well into the future.

Over the past few years, Hollywood has come under fire for its continued exclusion of women and racial minorities, both in front of and behind the camera. With controversies surrounding the perpetual whiteness of Oscars nominees to disappointing statistics coming out of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, there is a renewed conversation about the lack of diversity in the media we consume. However, a new report finds that television showrunners and writers are still mostly white, which has important consequences for the ways people of color are represented in the shows we watch.

The report finds that less than 10% of the 234 major series studied were led by minority showrunners, and only 14% of writers for these shows were members of a minority group. The Washington Post talked to Darnell Hunt, author of the report and co-author of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, who explained that this lack of diversity in the writers’ room leads to unequal and inaccurate representations of racial minorities on the screen. Hunt said,

“White men dominate the major positions, and people of color and women have a long way to go to attain any type of equity … We need to change that because television is not just entertainment. Media images do matter, particularly for people who don’t have a lot of face-to-face encounters with people who are not like them. A lot of what they learn about people is what they see in these images.”

Hunt explains that shows led by black showrunners, like FX’s “Atlanta,” and shows with a diverse writing room are more likely to acknowledge racial inequality, whereas predominantly white writers’ rooms more often portray minority characters as one-dimensional “sidekicks.” An especially troubling example from the report concerns depictions of the criminal justice system. The article explains,

“None of the [crime-drama] episodes acknowledged the systemic racial profiling of black Americans, that black people are more likely to be pressured into plea bargaining for crimes they did not commit, or that they routinely face harsher penalties than whites for committing the same crimes … [These] depictions of policing and the court and prison systems, combined with viewers’ existing biases, undermine public support for policies that could help advance racial equity in American society.”

In short, when people of color are left out of the writers room, their stories are left out too.

As of 2015, about half of married couples were dual earners — meaning both partners work for pay — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While having two income earners may be necessary, it also comes with its own stressors and difficulties. In a recent article, BBC spoke with sociologist Phyllis Moen about how dual-working couples make it work. Moen says that the most influential factor in leading a high quality of life is not having kids.

“If they had children, either one or both partners were stressed,” she says. “The things that ameliorate stress from dual-working couples is having a job with considerable flexibility, and not working long hours if possible. Today that is not always possible. So it’s important to make a commitment to both careers, which can be very hard to do.”

Moen cautions that when both partners have careers, one person usually ends up making sacrifices for the other. However, this becomes easier if the sacrifice is temporary. Couples can “leapfrog” so that both careers take priority at different times over the course of the relationship.

“Committing to both careers often means that one person will have to sacrifice for the other … but these sacrifices should be taken in turns with long-term goals in mind. People found that one career might have to come first. And it wasn’t and shouldn’t necessarily be the same career over time. You can leapfrog over time so it will be a different person whose career takes priority.”

Though the balance may be a difficult one to strike, Moen’s work shows power couples can find happiness by promoting each other’s success.

Since the 1990s, rates in homicide, robbery, assault and theft have seen a consistent drop in American cities like New York, Washington, and San Diego. Theories about this great “crime decline” typically focus on larger societal shifts, such as increased access to abortion and reductions in lead poisoning. However, a recent article in The New York Times presents evidence for a different trend: how local non-profit groups played a crucial role in reducing violence in some communities in the U.S.

Using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, sociologist Patrick Sharkey and doctoral students Gerard Torrats-Espinoza and Delaram Takyar traced the formation of community groups and nonprofit organizations in 264 cities over the past 20 years. The research team found that the growing number of organizations is connected to a considerable decline in both the murder rate and in violent crime. The article summarizes Sharkey’s findings,

“Every 10 additional organizations in a city with 100,000 residents, they estimate, led to a 9 percent drop in the murder rate and a 6 percent drop in violent crime.”

What is the connection between nonprofits and crime reduction? Sociologist Robert Sampson explains that effective crime prevention does not necessarily require hot-spot policing, mass incarceration, or tough-on-crime control measures. Community organizations engage in a wide variety of initiatives, from building playgrounds to employing young men, which contributes to the creation of vibrant communities and public spaces, dissuading criminal activity. And while the rise of community organizations is not the sole contributor  in the crime drop, it is a step forward in urban crime prevention that does not rely on intense policing or harsh penalties. As Sharkey notes,

“The model that we’ve relied on to control violence for a long time has broken down … This gives us a model. It gives us another set of actors who can play a larger role.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, women still tend to perform more housework and childcare than men in heterosexual relationships. In an article published by Slate, sociologist Jill Yavorsky notes that progress has been made in equal sharing of household tasks, but a significant gender gap still remains. Yavorsky’s own research sheds light on the influence childrearing has on the division of labor.

“We found that couples evenly shared housework immediately before they had a baby. After the baby was born, a different story emerged. Men reduced their housework by five hours per week (women’s housework remained constant), and women took on 22 hours of child care per week versus men’s 14.”

Yavorsky summarizes research on the division of labor and suggests six major factors contribute to a more equal sharing of household responsibilities after having a child. Some are straightforward: men who believe labor should be divided equally are more likely to equally share responsibilities. Others reflect broader gender dynamics. Men with higher levels of education or who work in female-dominated professions, such as nursing, tend to more equitably share the work. The division of labor is also more equal in households where the woman earns more, works long hours, or is not home at the same time as the man. But despite recent steps in the right direction, significant inequality remains across the board. Yavorsky notes,

“Regardless of the economic arrangements of heterosexual couples, men rarely perform more housework or childcare than their spouses, nor do men typically drop out of the labor market when their wives work long hours, like women often do for their spouses.”

College education is a core part of social mobility in the United States, but it is also increasingly controversial. Amid polarizing views on trust in colleges and universities and a proposed plan to tax graduate students’ tuition waivers, Americans are facing big questions about the role of higher education in our society.

Now, there’s a new twist. In an op-ed column for The New York Times, UC Merced sociologist Charlie Eaton looks at how some private schools are tied up in the Paradise Papers exposé. Eaton writes,

“It’s an increasingly bipartisan view that elite private colleges are islands of wealth. And there’s good reason for that: It’s true … the Paradise Papers revealed that dozens of wealthy college endowments use Caribbean islands as offshore tax havens for their investments.”

Eaton argues that this revelation is in line with a long term trend toward inequality in higher education, where some schools show a broad commitment to educating a wide range of people, while others stockpile their resources to serve a small student body. Elite private schools often enroll a limited number of students, drawing a large proportion from “the 1 percent.”

“The problem with enormous endowment growth is that private institutions have not used the resource boom to provide greater benefits to the public … America’s top public universities, on the other hand, have substantially increased their enrollments since the 1970s despite shrinking state funding. They also tend to enroll low-income students at much higher rates.”

In a time where more people are skeptical of colleges and universities, scandals like this pose a central question for the future of higher education: can private schools provide a leg up, or will they have to find another way to pay out?