Several media outlets including The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail have picked up on new sociological research indicating that “women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.”

The original press release notes…

The study, [presented] at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

“This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,” said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study’s primary investigator. “Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power.”

The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail ran the release throughout the week. The Globe & Mail conducted a more detailed interview with McLaughlin…

The harassers “aren’t trying to get into relationships [with their bosses], but they’re just trying to exert control over other employees,” said Heather McLaughlin, a University of Minnesota sociologist and the study’s lead author.

The study involved data from the Youth Development Study, which began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minn., public school district and has continued ever since. More than 500 women responded to the sexual harassment surveys, which were conducted in 2003 and 2004, when the respondents were about 30 years old.

One woman, named Holly, who was the first woman manager at her company, recalled her subordinates joking, “If we had somebody with balls in this position we’d be getting things done.”

Another woman, Marie, who worked as the only female project manager for a contracting company in construction, noted the day an older male subcontractor said to her, “This isn’t the job for a woman.”

After she helped him with some paperwork, Marie said, “I think he just thought I was being a nag and that I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“By objectifying women, it strips them of any power or prestige that they hold in the workplace,” Ms. McLaughlin said.

The article continues…

“It’s the notion that women aren’t welcome, women are less competent, women are not to be trusted with authority, and so on.”

Given that some of the study respondents were responsible for pay raises and advancement opportunities, the findings are somewhat surprising, Ms. McLaughlin said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” she said of the harassment.

So what did guys get out of it?

Ms. McLaughlin said that mostly, men harassed their bosses in order to impress other men at work. She cited a 2002 analysis of “girl watching” by Montana State University professor Beth Quinn.

“She argued that it wasn’t really the women that were the intended audience, but rather other men.”

Ms. McLaughlin said that in the workplace cases, “it’s not that they’re trying to get the women fired or get her to quit her job; it’s about proving your manhood and masculinity to other men.”

Read more.

[Read coverage of the study in the Atlanta Journal Constitution]

[Read additional coverage from UMN News]

The Los Angeles Times ran a story this week, entitled “Macho Men: Too Tough for Healthcare?,” about new research suggesting that men who ‘strongly idealize masculinity’ and are of middle-age are 50% less likely to seek preventative care services from healthcare providers, in comparison to other men.

The LA Times highlighted these findings, presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting:

[The study found that] men with strong masculine beliefs who worked in blue-collar jobs were more likely to report obtaining care than other men — the one exception to the findings. But highly educated macho men were just as unlikely to obtain preventive health care as low-educated macho men. Most research suggests that people with more education have better healthcare habits.

The original press release for the study included some thoughts from the author…

“This research strongly suggests that deep-seated masculinity beliefs are one core cause of men’s poor health, inasmuch as they reduce compliance with recommended preventative health services,” said Kristen W. Springer, the study’s primary investigator. Springer is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, as well as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. “Although previous research points to the health-promoting effects of higher socio-economic status, in the case of the most masculine men—those who most strongly endorse ideals of ‘old school’ masculinity—increases in job status actually have a detrimental effect on preventative healthcare seeking.”

She continues…

“For masculine men in blue-collar occupations, this research suggests that the masculinity threat of seeking health care is less concerning than the masculinity threat of not performing their jobs,” Springer said. “However, as job status increases among men who have strong masculinity beliefs, the likelihood that they will obtain preventative healthcare declines significantly. These findings provide some insight into the persistent gender paradox in health whereby men have a lower life expectancy at birth relative to women, despite having higher socioeconomic resources.”

Read more from the LA Times.

Read more from the press release.

USA Today covered the study as well, read here.

The story was also picked up by the New York Times a few days later, read here.

Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times ran a story about what sociologists now know about how men and women learn to parent. The new findings, presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings suggest that women tend to use their own mothers as parenting role models, while men do not.

The LA Times reports…

Researchers at Ohio State University studied how often parents in the 1990s spanked their children, read to them and showed affection. Their practices were compared to mothers’.

“We were surprised that mothers seem to learn a lot about the parenting role from their own mothers, but fathers don’t follow their mothers as much,” Jonathan Vespa, a co-author of the study, said in a news release. “Although more women were entering the workforce then, they still did the lion’s share of parenting and childcare…. There was good reason to expect that fathers would have learned parenting from their mothers.”

The study did not measure whether men learned parenting from their fathers. So that is certainly possible. “We really need to learn a lot more about how fathers learn to parent,” Vespa said.

The study also reflected some big changes in parenting practices between the generations. The most recent generation of parents reads more to their kids, shows more affection and spanks less. Fathers who were spanked as children appeared especially reluctant to spank their own children.

“If parents really just learned from their own parents, we wouldn’t witness such dramatic generational shifts as were seen in this study,” Vespa said.

Read more from the LA Times.

The story was also picked up by US News & World Report today, which elaborated on the study’s findings, specifically on fathers.

“There was good reason to expect that fathers would have learned parenting from their mothers,” Vespa explained. “These fathers were growing up in the [1970s and 1980s] and received much of their parenting from their mothers. Although more women were entering the workforce then, they still did the lion’s share of parenting and child care,” he added.

“We really need to learn a lot more about how fathers learn to parent,” Vespa said.

As for generational parenting practices, the researchers found significant changes with much more reading and affection shown to children today, and less spanking.

“While parents, particularly women, are learning many parenting practices from their mothers, there [are] also a lot of new practices they are picking up from the broader culture,” Vespa said.

Read more from US News & World Report.

This study was also picked up, a week later, by the New York Times. Read here.

Today United Press International is running a story on new research – presented at this weekend’s American Sociological Association annual meeting -from sociologist Hannah Brueckner of Yale University, which suggests that fewer highly educated black women in the U.S. are marrying and starting families.

UPI reports, with the author’s commentary:

“In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family,” Brueckner said.

The study on family formation and marriage longitudinal trends in the specified demographic found the marriage gap between highly educated black and white women increased dramatically between the 1970s and recent years.

In the 1970s the gap was 9 percent, while that gap rose to 21 percent in 2000-2007. Brueckner said the growing divide may be due to a lack of acceptable partners for highly educated black women.

“They are less likely than black men to marry outside their race, and, compared to whites and black men, they are least likely to marry a college-educated spouse,” she suggested.

Read more.

Science Daily posted a release on new work by Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College to be published in the upcoming issue of Qualitative Sociology about how children today enjoy more freedom from chores and other demands at home, but are more restricted in their activities when they are outside of the house.

Rutherford’s project:

Children have certainly mastered the art of selecting, negotiating and even refusing the chores their parents assign to them. This growth in personal autonomy at home over the last few decades could be the result of shrinking opportunities to participate in activities outside the home, without Mom and Dad looking over their shoulder, according to Dr. Markella Rutherford from Wellesley College in the US. Her analysis of back issues of the popular US magazine, Parents, maps how the portrayal of parental authority and children’s autonomy has changed over the last century…. She analyzed a total of 300 advice columns and relevant editorials from 34 randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine, published between 1929 and 2006, to see how parental authority and children’s autonomy have been portrayed over the last century.

The findings:

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Read more about the study.

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about joblessness in the current recession. The article, entitled “The Price of U.S. Recession is Paid in Jobs,” includes commentary from sociologist Thomas Cottle.

The Times reports:

The pain of joblessness extends well beyond the workers themselves, hitting their families and entire communities as home foreclosures mount, neighborhoods decay and crime rises.

“I see long-term unemployment as a real, treacherous disease. And it kills. It kills,” said Boston University sociologist Thomas Cottle, ticking off side effects from stress and hypertension to depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Even the rate of dental cavities goes up as the unemployed tend to put off routine medical care, said Cottle, author of “Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.”

He worries that the recession is slowly eroding belief in the American ideal that if you work hard enough, you will get ahead. The longer unemployment endures, the more people will feel abandoned and betrayed, he said.

Read more.

The BCC World Service Business Desk ran a story several days ago featuring an interview with Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. The discussion centered on how ordinary people are changed by the current global economic recession. Cherlin’s work suggests that although one might think that hard economic times would take a more severe toll on marriages, leading to more divorce, this is not the case. Instead, Cherlin explains, divorce is on the decline in our current recession, a trend mirroring the last significant rise in unemployment.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW.

Late last week Nature.com’s Nature Reports ran a front-page story about sociologists studying climate change and why our discipline has come to study this unique social problem somewhat slowly.

Nature Reports draws upon the work of several sociologists…

“Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem,” says Steven Brechin, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. “How do you get people to agree in the short term to solutions for a long-term problem?” The answer, like the problem, has to be wide-ranging and global, says Jeffrey Broadbent of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who also studies how societies affect their environments. “Its only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity has never seen before.”

More on Broadbent’s work:

Broadbent is just starting to investigate what factors contribute to this kind of cooperation at the national level. He has recently begun a project, called Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, that aims to find out how information about climate change enters a particular country’s network of interested parties and what happens to it once it’s found its way to organizations and governments.

Broadbent is now one of a band of sociologists that has begun to turn the discipline’s tools towards climate change. In May last year, over 30 sociologists met at the US National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss what sociology is already contributing to climate change research and what questions sociologists need to be answering next. “Purely technological ‘fixes'”, concluded the meeting report, “will not be sufficient to mitigate or successfully adapt to climate change^.”

In the context of our discipline…

Environmental sociology, which has its roots in the 1970s environmental movement, fits most naturally into a climate change research remit. But despite the field’s endurance, environmental sociologists are rather isolated from the discipline’s mainstream, featuring sparsely at the bigger conferences and publishing in different journals.

The American Sociological Review, for example, has published “literally a handful” of papers on environmental studies in the last three decades, says Thomas Dietz, director of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University in East Lansing. According to Dietz, who works at the boundary of environmental science, sociology and human ecology, “Sociology in the US sees environment as not unimportant — but not core.”

That traditional core of sociology has instead been “tied into just looking at people”, says Broadbent, with its focus purely on the interactions going on between people, societies or nations. “What we’ve had very often is the idea that nature is somehow a stable, unchanging background concept,” says Constance Lever-Tracy, a sociologist studying migration at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Lever-Tracy was compelled by these issues to write an article for the journal Current Sociology last year drawing attention to the fact that her clan have had surprisingly little to say about climate change². “Sociology tries to say something about everything, but to my surprise I found almost nothing,” she says.

Read more.

Earlier this week Reuters Health ran a story about a new study suggesting that “people who get married and stay married may enjoy better health than the perpetually single, but losing a spouse could take a significant health toll…”

In the new study, researchers found that middle-aged and older Americans who were currently married tended to give higher ratings to their health than their never-married counterparts. They also reported fewer depression symptoms and limits on their mobility.

On the other hand, divorced or widowed adults fared worse than the never married on certain health measures — including the number of chronic health conditions reported. “Previously married people experience, on average, 20 percent more conditions and 23 percent more limitations,” the researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Remarriage seemed to lessen some of the health effects of divorce or widowhood. However, remarried men and women were still in generally poorer health than those in a lasting marriage.

Sociologist Linda J. Waite of the University of Chicago co-authored the report:

“We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health,” researcher Linda J. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said in a written statement.

“Think of health as money in the bank,” she added. “Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.”

Read more.

The Vancouver Sun ran a story yesterday about a new study by sociologist Laurel Davis-Delano of Springfield College, which suggests that “female athletes are still apologizing for smashing stereotypes while they pursue their sports.”

The Sun reports:

A newly published study that included college basketball, soccer and softball players found nearly three-quarters of them engage in “apologetic behaviours” — stereotypically feminine conduct such as cultivating a girlie appearance, apologizing for being aggressive and hanging out with men to emphasize their heterosexuality — to deflect prejudice.

“If you break a norm, you apologize. If I burp out loud, I know this offended other people, so I apologize,” says Laurel Davis-Delano, a professor of sociology at Springfield College in Massachusetts, explaining why researchers label these behaviours apologetic. “If you are offending people’s sense of gender ideals . . . people don’t necessarily realize they’re apologizing, but you are catering to other people’s sense of what’s proper.”

Most sports are still associated with masculinity in Western cultures, so female athletes are challenging gender expectations by their very participation, she says.

So what makes this different from female athletes looking pretty just because they want to?

Apologetic behaviours are different from female athletes having long hair or wearing makeup simply because they like to, Davis-Delano says, because they’re performed specifically in response to this gender tension.

While 73 per cent of the study participants said they engaged in at least one apologetic behaviour, from criticizing unfeminine athletes to being seen with a boyfriend, no one shied away from aggression or competing hard against male athletes.

On one hand, apologetic behaviours may help female athletes gain acceptance and be rewarded in their sport, Davis-Delano says. But they do little to challenge gender stereotypes, she says, and Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova is a “classic example” of the result: a female athlete of lesser talent who gets attention and endorsements for her ultrafeminine looks.

Read more.