gender

The Washington Post reports this morning on findings from sociologist Emilio J. Castilla, of MIT. Castilla’s study, published in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Sociology, examines merit-based pay plans that aim to distribute rewards without racial or gender bias. He concludes that they still favor white men.

The Post reports:

The biases [in pay] were introduced when a supervisor recommended raises or when the human resources department approved them, [Castilla] said. His research, published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, found that minorities and women had starting salaries similar to those of white men. Biases crept in over time, creating a pay gap. Even though merit-based systems create the appearance of meritocracy, he said, they need more transparency and accountability to live up to it.

Read more.

US News and World Report ran a story entitled ‘A Sociologist’s Take on Abortion‘ on Adam Voiland’s ‘On Men’ blog. 

Voiland writes:

Earlier this week, I blogged about a conference on how abortions impact men emotionally. I pointed out that there’s a dearth of dispassionate research exploring whether the controversial procedure affects men’s mental health. That’s very much the case, but I’d like to follow up with perspective, as well as some data, from one of the few academic researchers who has tackled the issue: Arthur Shostak, an emeritus professor of sociology at Drexel University. We weren’t able to connect before that post.

Since the early 1980s, Shostak has been periodically surveying and interviewing what he calls “waiting-room men”—the 600,000 or so guys who sit and wait each year as their partners undergo an abortion, and who help them return home afterward. Though firmly pro-choice, Shostak says he considers every abortion “a tragedy” and cites reducing the need as one of the reasons he studies how the procedure affects men. Thirty years ago, he went through an abortion with his partner; since then, he has surveyed upward of 3,000 waiting-room men about their experiences.

After reading about Shostak’s work, Voiland conducted an interview with him and posted excerpts on his blog. Read it here.

The Washington Post recently posted comments from sociologist Andrew Cherlin on the state of the American family. The online forum was developed to address vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s remarks about her own family.

The Post reports: 

“If the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore — at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday when, while introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: ‘From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That’s how it is with us.'”

View the transcript of the online forum here.

The exchange features topics like homosexual family formation, and Cherlin’s own work, but centers mostly around families currently in the political spotlight. The exchange was in part a response to a piece by Cherlin in the Post in the ‘Outlook’ section this past Sunday. 

Cherlin writes: 

That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the ’50s family. Instead, they focused on being “typical” in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.

Read more.

Recently the headlines have been filled with commentary on Republican VP pick Sarah Palin. Two articles that caught the Crawler’s attention brought in the sociologists to answer current questions about Palin’s future.

Reuters generated an article on Palin’s ability to galvanize the political ‘left.’ For this article they drew upon the expertise of Michael Lindsay.

“Everybody pays attention to the mobilizing affect on the right but equally important is the mobilizing affect that Palin’s nomination makes for the left,” said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston who has written extensively on the U.S. evangelical movement.

“In many ways she is a much more mobilizing figure for both sides than John McCain because he is seen as much more of a moderate middle of the road political figure,” he said.  [Full article]

But will a ‘middle of the road’ image win the Republican ticket the election?

The second article supplemented by sociologist expertise ran in the LA Times and purported to explain the ‘new feminism’ offered by Palin’s candidacy. 

Debbie Walsh, director for the Rutgers Center for the American Woman and Politics, said Palin had already been caught in a bind between her political obligations and her family. That happened when she and her husband, Todd, issued a news release announcing that their daughter Bristol was pregnant.

“It’s terrible, like a Sophie’s choice situation, where you are in this horrible position as a mother,” said Walsh, “to feel that you have to reveal this piece of information about your daughter and not just to a few people in your family but to the national press corps?”

Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist, agreed that the parenting questions came up more readily for Palin because she is a woman.

“I’m all for being a working mom,” Schwartz said. “But I do have a sense from having two children how totally unsuited and uncapable I would be with five.” [Full Article]

Can Palin convince the American voters that she can successfully balance work and family?

This week Newsweek magazine reported on a new book from sociologist Michael Kimmel entitled, ‘Guyland,’ which has been receiving significant media attention since its release. Our fascination with a hard partying lifestyle has at last been systematically studied. 

 Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek writes: 

Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, “Guyland,” the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from “a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life.” In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.

“What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys,” Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it’s more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel’s testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or “thresholders” and “kidults,” as they’ve also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today’s guys to don their fathers’ robes—and commitments. They “see grown-up life as such a loss,” says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they’re running from may be the thing they need.

Read the full story. 

USA Today recently ran a story about the high profile success stories of adult men who grew up in single parent households, supported solely by their mothers. 

USA Today’s Sharon Jayson writes:

Conventional wisdom is that boys who grow up without fathers are at greater risk of problems, from doing poorly in school to substance abuse. So how does that account for the high-profile successes of standouts such as presidential candidate Barack Obama, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and others who were reared by single mothers?

The psychologist consulted for the piece suggested that young men raised by single mothers are not predestined to fail simply because they are raised in a non-traditional household. While not all sons will succeed in the same ways as Phelps and Obama, the risk of growing up with a single mom has more to do with financial strain.

The sociologist on hand delves further into the issue…

Another expert on fatherhood, sociologist Tim Biblarz of the University of Southern California-Los Angeles, says the evidence shows economics plays a significant role in the risk for negative outcomes, such as poorer grades and lower educational attainment, substance abuse or poor social adjustment.

“Those who grow up with single mothers with adequate socioeconomic resources tend to do well. The children of poor single mothers are more at risk,” Biblarz says. “Many of the results that say that kids are at increased risk for negative outcomes have to do with economics.”

Read the full story.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study about children and housework out of the University of Maryland, and the surprising trend that they are doing very little of it. 

WSJ quips: 

Quiz for the day: How much time each day, on average, does a 6- to 12-year-old child spend on household chores?

If you guessed more than a half-hour, you’re wrong. Children are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework — a 12% decline since 1997 and a 25% drop from 1981 levels, says Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, based on a forthcoming study of 1,343 children. In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.

And another sociologist’s findings are considered…

Pitching in at home has become a crucial marriage-preservation skill for young men. Studies show parents still assign more housework to girls than boys. Yet these same young women hope as adults to find men who will help out; 90% of 60 women ages 18 to 32 studied by Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor, said they hoped to share housework and child care with spouses “in a committed, mutually supportive and egalitarian way.” After controlling for other factors, U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, says a study of 506 U.S. couples published in 2006 in the American Journal of Sociology.

And another’s…

Housework has unique value in instilling a habit of serving others. Analyzing data on more than 3,000 adults, Alice Rossi, a proessor emerita of sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, found doing household chores as a child was a major, independent predictor of whether a person chose to do volunteer or other community work as an adult. Thus for parents who value service, housework is an important teaching tool.

Read the full story.

The New York Times health blog, ‘Well,’ reports on a new study out of the University of Toronto which suggests that promotions and increased power at work can lead to an increase in conflict between workers, especially when the new boss is a younger man. The study looks at job authority and personal conflicts at work by using a national survey of more than 1,700 adults in the U.S. 

Tara Parker-Hope reports: 

Lead author Scott Schieman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, said younger men may be more competitive, which leads to more friction with others at work. Conflict may also stem from the fact that other workers view younger supervisors as less deserving of their authority because of their young age, which leads to additional workplace tension. Mr. Schieman speculated that younger women also must deal with concerns about their credibility and authority in the workplace. It may be that women respond with more empathy and concern, however, thus avoiding conflict.

“Overall, the conflict associated with authority is worse for younger workers, but there is something about younger women that attenuates that association,” said Mr. Schieman. “As others have shown, they tend to enact these more cooperative orientations when they attain authority.’’

Read the full story.

Reuters UK reports on new research out of the University of Chicago, which concluded that getting old does not mean an end to sex. Survey data from elderly Americans indicates that more than 60% of the men and nearly 50% of the women have been sexually active in the past year.

Reuters reports:

More than three-quarters of American men aged 75 to 85 and half of women that age are still interested in sex, a survey of the elderly by University of Chicago researchers found.

“It’s not age per se; that when you get to 80 it’s all over with,” said sociologist Edward Laumann, who led the study of 3,000 American men and women aged 57 to 85 who lived at home, not in nursing homes.

“It’s driven by more proximate factors such as if you become obese, or you’re smoking too much, or you contract diabetes. Medications can depress sexual interest. The aging process itself is not a major factor driving these results,” he said in a telephone interview.

Read more.

The Detroit Free Press reports today on a new study out of Michigan State University which suggests that men who have never been married are increasingly just as healthy as their married counterparts. Despite this narrowing gap, this new research suggests that marriage is still beneficial given their findings that widowers report themselves to be in poorer health than those who still had a living spouse — a gap that widened each year. 

MSU author Hui Liu, assistant professor of sociology, said Monday the study shows that policy promoting marriage for health may be outdated, as other forms of long-term commitment become more common. The study also suggests that widows and widowers need strong reinforcement and community support help to keep themselves mentally and physically healthy.

Liu provides an answer as to why, for widowers, the gap between their health and that of married man widened over 30 years…

“People live longer, and the marriage duration increases over time,” she said. It’s more stressful when that long-term companion dies.

Read the full story.