gender

The latest report from the Council on Contemporary Families indicates that men have nearly doubled the number of weekly hours they devote to housework since the 1970s, but that it does not level the playing field…

The Mercury News reports:

“‘What it comes down to is men are doing more,’ said Scott Coltrane, a University of California-Riverside sociologist who co-authored the review released by the Council on Contemporary Families. ‘They were starting at such a low level, however, that they don’t rival what women do.'”

“Still, while the average full-time-employed married man with children has increased his housework contribution by two hours a week since the 1970s, his female counterpart does three hours less housework than she once did. Still, women on average spend 19 hours a week cooking, cleaning, shopping and doing other family work, compared with 10 hours for men. (Both partners, since the ’70s, have increased the amount of time they spend doing child care.)”

A New York Times article on the recent steroid scandals among professional baseball players seeks explanations from sociologists as to the nature of male friendships and the implications for those bonds when trainers testifying against players. Evoking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this depiction of male friendship benefits from a sociological perspective.

“‘These are moments when there’s a clash between two conflicting values connected to masculinity,’ said Michael S. Kimmel, a sociologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of ‘The Gendered Society.’ ‘No. 1, you always do the right thing. And the second is, you never betray your friends.’”

“’There’s a tendency to protect a teammate or the organization, even at the expense of higher moral principles,’ said Faye L. Wachs, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in sports sociology.”

Inside Higher Ed recently published an interview with Kathleen A. Bogle, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University, on her new book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus which explores the ‘hookup culture’ of college life through the study of two East Coast universities. Her in-depth interviews reveal varying effects for men and women and the relationship of this pattern of behavior to issues of alcohol use and sexual assault. Risky sex? No as much as you might think…