If anything positive came from the debacle that surrounded the International Association of Athletics
Federation’s attempts to ‘determine’ South African runner Caster Semenya’s sex, it is that it brought to light the crude methods that were being used to enforce the male/female binary in sports (See David Zirin and Sherry Wolf’s article in the Nation for critical coverage of the initial controversy).

Two years later the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federation, the governing body for track and field, have released a new policy to regulate athletes whose sex development is considered unusual to avoid a repeat of the nightmare that Semenya faced.

In a recent editorial in the The New York Times, Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, provides a critical read of the new policy. Dreger explains that initially the policy seems like an improvement because:

The new policy no longer allows any room for a simplistic “I know it when I see it” approach to who counts as a female athlete.

The new system relies on setting the ‘appropriate’ levels of functional testosterone a female athlete should have. However, as Dregger argues, this policy is fundamentally sexist. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone.

Yet despite the fact that testosterone belongs to women, too, the I.O.C. and the I.A.A.F. are basically saying it is really a manly thing: “You can have functional testosterone, but if you make too much, you’re out of the game because you’re not a real woman.”

Dregger explains that men are free of any equivalent biochemical policing and can take full advantage of any ‘mutation’ that gives him an advantage. In efforts to create ‘the mythical level playing field’ the committee has taken another step in a now rich history of controlling and categorizing women’s bodies. For women athletes who have more functional testosterone than is considered appropriate for a female the only option is to “submit to being made sexually ‘normal’ through hormone treatments” or they cannot compete.

While Dregger is sympathetic to the difficulties that I.O.C. and I.A.A.F. face, she finds little progress in the decision

this newly proposed biological reduction of women to a hormonally disadvantaged class of people — one medically made disadvantaged, if necessary — struck many of us as regressive from the standpoint of women’s rights. Indeed, it reminds me of those itty-bitty shorts that college women’s volleyball players must wear. They each sexualize the bodies of female athletes as a requirement of play. They each insist that a woman never be manly.

Perhaps the biggest take away point from Dregger’s article and the debates surrounding how to define and separate male from female in the sporting arena is that:

There is no perfect solution, one that is reasonably objective, universally applicable and universally satisfying.

According to a recent New York Times article, white children will soon be in the minority in the United States.  In fact, a new report based on Census 2010 data showed that the population of white children fell by 4.3 million (10%) in the last decade, while the population of  Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million (38%).

The Census Bureau had originally forecast that 2023 would be the tipping point for the minority population under the age of 18. But rapid growth among Latinos, Asians and people of more than one race has pushed it earlier, to 2019, according to William Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who wrote the report about the shift, which has far-reaching political and policy implications.

The largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birth rates are much higher than non-Hispanic whites, in large part because the U.S. white population is aging.

As a result, America’s future will include a far more diverse young population, and a largely white older generation. The contrast raises important policy questions. Will the older generation pay for educating a younger generation that looks less like itself? And while the young population is a potential engine of growth for the economy, will it be a burden if it does not have access to adequate education?

As the Supreme Court considers a case regarding discrimination at Wal-Mart, a key issue is sociologist William Bielby’s research.

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

Bielby concluded that two aspects of Wal-Mart’s culture might be behind pay and other disparities.

One was a centralized personnel policy. The other was allowing subjective decisions by managers in the field. Together, he said, those factors allowed stereotypes to infect personnel choices, making “decisions about compensation and promotion vulnerable to gender bias

Now, a main question in the case is whether Bielby should have been allowed to use general research to draw specific conclusions in the preliminary proceedings.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

Click here for the full story from the New York Times.

Last fall, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov was injured in an accident at his part-time job, and he died after two weeks in a coma. Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married, nor was he in a relationship. No woman was pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, his devastated parents believe it’s not too late for them to become the grandparents of his offspring. And because they live in Israel, the world capital of in-vitro fertilization and a country that regularly pushes the envelope on reproductive technologies, they might get their wish.

No, this isn’t science fiction.  It’s reality in Israeli, and  Tablet recently explored an Israeli court’s consideration of whether parents have the right to use their dead son’s frozen sperm to create a grandchild.

It’s not surprising that Israel, a society that is at once rooted in ancient faith and deeply invested in cutting-edge technology, has pioneered futuristic forms of procreation. The biblical emphasis on fruitfulness, when compounded by the legacy of the Holocaust and the demographic issues shaping the Middle East, have made Israeli society and public policy exceptionally pro-natalist. The country is aggressive in pushing the boundaries of reproductive technology.

Some scholars worry about how these boundaries are being pushed, though.

“It used to be, God forbid you were infertile, it was sad and terrible and tragic, but you came to terms with it,” says Susan Martha Kahn, a Harvard anthropologist and author of Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. “Now you can never come to terms with it. There’s no resolution. Some of these women go through round after round, 12, 15 rounds of IVF, and it doesn’t work. That is the eclipse of an entire young life spent trying to get pregnant.

Vardit Ravitsky, a professor in the Bioethics Programs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine, adds:

“Where we are with reproductive technologies is a result of the fact that we have refused to accept infertility as a fact . . . Today, the idea that I have a right to have a genetic child is much more accepted than in the past. To extend that one generation to genetic grandchildren maybe is not that farfetched.”

As the author of the article thoughtfully asks, when should a tragedy be accepted rather than combated with technology? Who gets to decide?  For more questions and discussion, see the full article.

Judging by the popularity of cat and dog videos on the Internet, it seems safe to say that pets have assumed an important role in our society.

However, as Benedict Carey explores in a recent NY Times article, the pet’s position within the family can be a contentious topic.

“The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.”

To understand human pet relationships, Carey turns to the field of sociology. David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, explains that there are three basic categories of belief concerning pets.  “Dominionists” who see pets as a useful, and beloved, but ranked below humans and replaceable. “Humanists,” who cherish their pets and raise them to the same status as a favored child. And, “protectionists,” who base their views on what they think is “best” for the animal.

“These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.”

And, whether you believe Fido should be in the yard or snuggling under the down comforter at night may not simply be a matter of personal preference. Rather, as sociologist Elizabeth Terrien helps us understand, views vary by class, ethnicity and geographic location.

One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside, whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed.

Terrien explains, the cultural and class-based differences in understanding how a pet should be treated can lead to groups judging each other negatively.

In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse” she said.

Carey’s article provides an important reminder that sometimes even the most personal – for instance, family arguments over whether the dog is included in the will – is linked to larger social forces. Also, Carey confirms yet again that class matters, even for dogs and cats.

Sociologist Charles A. Gallagher recently wrote an Op-Ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer that expressed concern about the belief that racial equality has been achieved in the U.S.

With some minor caveats, what has moved to center stage in our national dialogue on race is the idea that the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, with Exhibit A being the election of the first black man as president of the United States. White Americans can point to President Obama as proof of this new racial egalitarianism, cementing the widespread belief that we are indeed a color-blind nation and that white privilege is a prerogative of the past.

And that’s not all.

Consider these figures from polls of white Americans: 71 percent were satisfied with the way society treats blacks (Gallup 2007); 43 percent said that racial discrimination toward blacks is not serious; 55 percent believe that racism is not widespread, but 42 percent believe racism against whites to be widespread (Gallup, 2007, 2008). A 2010 New York Times poll found that close to half, 48 percent of whites, agreed with the statement that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

Gallagher counters the idea that America has become a color-blind nation by explaining that every quality of life indicator (on health, employment, incarceration, longevity, etc.) varies by race, “with racial minorities being on the short end of the stick.”

Yet, with many Americans viewing color-blindness as an accepted social fact, race-conscious policies and actions may be construed as reverse racism against whites.

I have witnessed such pushback, almost exclusively from my white students, when discussing racial inequality in the university classroom. Students challenge any talk about institutional racism with the “What about Obama?” retort, which implies we are beyond race because there is a black man in the White House. This is a fair question from 18-year-old college students, many of whom were raised in almost exclusively white, middle-class suburbs. But we must realize that for many whites of all ages, “What about Obama?” is now the default answer to questions about racial equality in the United States.

Check out the full Op-Ed here.

In an op-ed published in the Raleigh-based paper, the Newsobserver, sociology Ph.D student Amanda Gengler provides insight into what is at stake in the current political struggle in Wisconsin. To do so Gengler draws upon her experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned her master’s degree.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 10 years ago, every month a few dollars of my stipend went to pay dues to the TAA; a unique union that represents and protects graduate employees working in the UW-System. In return, I worked under a contract that ensured full health care benefits and basic dental care (with no out-of-pocket premiums), and tuition remission (without which my education would not have been possible) as well as other fair labor protections.

Now, even after each subsequent renegotiation of the rights for Wisconsin’s graduate employees has resulted in more and more concessions, current Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to remove the TAA’s collective bargaining rights altogether. This would make it impossible to fight for any of these protections, all of which could be immediately revoked.

Graduate students are not alone in seeing this as an attack on the education system.

Under the rallying cry “Hands off our Teachers,” undergraduates have taken to the streets in recent days alongside their graduate student instructors.

Gengler cautions us to not see this as an isolated threat directed at the University system.

Wisconsin’s 3,000 graduate student workers are but one of the many constituencies that will be directly harmed by the state government’s attack on unions and workers’ rights. As Wisconsin’s unions offer up economic concessions in terms of pay and premiums, only to be completely rebuffed by state lawmakers, it is clear that this issue is not about the budget: it is about ending workers’ collective bargaining rights.

The op-ed serves as a call for all workers and unions to pay close attention to what is occurring in Wisconsin. While the situation appears bleak, Gengler leaves us with a statement of resolve:

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have those rights know what they are worth, and the thousands who continue to flood Madison’s streets make it clear that the right to fight is one thing they will not concede.

Many people view aggressive behavior as the behavior of social outcasts.  But, a new study covered by LiveScience (and many other news sources) found that popular adolescents, except for those at the very top of the social ladder, are the ones who are more likely to bully their peers.

It isn’t aggression that makes kids more popular. But becoming more popular makes kids more aggressive, said study author Bob Faris, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis — suggesting that those kids see tormenting others as a way to gain and cement status.

Robert Faris and his co-author Diane Felmlee used data on 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th graders from 19 public schools in North Carolina.  Rather than just looking at the individual traits of bullies, they looked at the social networks in which bullying takes place.

“For the most part, we find that status increases aggression,” Faris told LiveScience….The gradual increase of aggression with popularity continues until you reach the top 2 percent of popular students, Faris said. At that point, aggression suddenly drops off. The top 2 percent are even less aggressive than the kids at the very bottom of the heap, Faris said.

The sociologists also complicated this story by examining gender.

On the whole, kids with many friends of the other gender are 16 percent less aggressive toward their same-gender peers, Faris said. Schools where boys and girls mix and mingle are also less aggressive on the whole. But in schools where mixed-gender friendships are rare, the few kids who do have them tend to be more aggressive, Faris said.

These cross-gender ambassadors (Faris calls them “gender bridges”) are rare, Faris cautioned, so it’s harder to be certain of the results. What may be happening, he said, is that gender bridge kids are proportionately more popular, thanks to their ability to connect the guys to the girls and vice versa.

See LiveScience for the complete story.

In February’s issue of Wired (now available online), Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh helps us understand the life of a prostitute in New York City and how the trade has been transformed by advances in technology.

While Venkatesh’s initial goal was to examine how the gentrification of Times Square and other areas of New York City would impact the sex trade, he quickly found himself documenting the rise of a new type of sex worker.

The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and “wellness” goods. In the process, “dating,” “massage,” “escort,” and “dancing” have replaced hustling and streetwalking. A luxury brand has been born.

The shift has resulted in an increase in both the price of, and level of respect for, prostitutes. Technology has played a large part in this as it allows clients to find companionship without resorting to driving the streets.

The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.

Most exciting about this short piece was the amount of information conveyed in about ½ a page of writing through the use of a wide array of supplemental graphics. A map is used to show the movement of sex workers to trendier, more upscale districts in Manhattan. And a compilation of images, statistics, and well-chosen quotes demonstrate the divide between types of sex work, as well as the infusion of technology into the escort services. For instance, Facebook is quickly becoming a medium for advertising adult-services and a BlackBerry phone has come to symbolize a professional (and disease-free) status.

Ah…to be a college student. Days spent on the college quad, frisbee or text book in hand, and late nights filled with frivolity. It is a time many people look back upon fondly, reminiscing of a simpler time. However, recent studies highlighted by the NY Times and Slate suggest college is not the carefree place it is often made out to be.

Tamar Lewin of the NY Times reports that the emotional health of freshman entering college is at an all time low.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

The statistic is seen as confirmation of what college counselors are encountering on a daily basis.

“More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.” said Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University and president of the American College Counseling Association.

This pressure is in part due to a combination of increased, and internalized, expectations and the devaluing of having ‘just’ a college degree.

While first-year students’ assessments of their emotional health was declining, their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average.
“These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University.

To make matters worse, Lippy Copeland reports in Slate that social networking websites, which have become pervasive on college campuses, only compound the suffering of the unhappy.

Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others’ attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. “They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life.”

The results of both reports are particularly concerning to women. Each study found that women reported higher stress and lower emotional well-being. According to Linda Sax, a professor of education at U.C.L.A. and former director of the freshman study, leisure activity helps us understand the gender gap.

“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,” she said. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.”

Copeland’s article also highlights the significance of leisure time in reporting that women are not only more likely to second guess major life decisions and measure themselves against others success, but they are also more likely to be active on Facebook.

Each article highlights youth confronting a time of increased pressure and uncertainty. While there are few simple answers, Copeland’s article provides a useful reminder when she turns once more to Jordan, now a postdoctoral fellow studying social psychology at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, who suggests

we might do well to consider Facebook profiles as something akin to the airbrushed photos on the covers of women’s magazine. No, you will never have those thighs, because nobody has those thighs. You will never be as consistently happy as your Facebook friends, because nobody is that happy.