Twenty years ago, Christine Williams wrote “The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the ‘Female’ Professions,” examining how gender inequality operates in traditionally sex segregated, predominantly female occupations such as nursing, teaching, librarianship, and social work. She found that men in these occupations were often “fast-tracked” to higher administrative and management positions, and she called this process the “glass escalator.” Williams’s study provided an important complement to analyses of the “glass ceiling”—the invisible threshold in the organizational hierarchy above which women would rarely be promoted.

In the most recent issue of Gender & Society, Williams returns to her earlier work to see what’s changed. She finds that the glass escalator remains for men in female-dominated professions, although it operates differently based on identity and on the current economic climate.

Williams concedes that the glass escalator operates most clearly in relation to white men in stable middle-class jobs. Further, the glass escalator only operates in organizations with stable employment, job hierarchies, and career ladders—all aspects of work that have changed drastically over the past decade. She argues, “We need new metaphors to understand the persistence of male privilege in the flexible, project-based, and flatter neoliberal organization.”

Let’s get down to business: unemployment has been linked to increases in debt, poverty, homelessness, crime, depression, and family breakdown. According to a recent article by Montez and Zajacova, unemployment is also partially responsible for the growing difference in mortality rates of low-educated white women compared to their more highly educated peers.

Between 1997 and 2001, low-educated women 45-86 years old were 1.37 times more likely to die than high-educated women. Compared to mortality data from 2002 to 2006, the gap between groups widened by 21%. To find out why, the authors use complex statistical modeling to investigate the influence of socio-psychological, economic, and health factors on the increasing difference in mortality rates. Along with smoking, unemployment is identified as the factor most strongly linked to this change. The authors speculate that the Internet and the “digital divide” may be playing a larger role in the unemployment of low-educated women, and that the information taught in schools may be becoming more relevant to health.

Having identified unemployment as one of the causes of the growing education gap in mortality, Montez and Zajacova call for social-protection policies geared toward helping low-educated women remain in the workforce. They believe that work-family policies allowing more flexible hours and protected leave will contribute to stemming the divergence.  Their hope is that giving women the opportunity to punch the clock will—in the long-run—give them more time to unwind.

The ability to create your own avatar in video and online games has become increasingly popular, particularly with the increase in online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). With the advent of avatars, players are able to pick and choose how they want their gaming character to look, act, and even feel. As expected, players often attempt to replicate themselves in their avatar. But what happens when your characteristics are not available?

Setting out to determine how race is represented in video game characters, David Dietrich found that only 10 of the 65 games he analyzed allowed for a non-white avatar. Dietrich looked at non-white skin color, hair style/color, and facial features, finding that a majority of these games—including World of Warcraft, which boasts over 10 million players as of 2012 and dominates the online gaming world—to be reinforcing “normative whiteness” by assuming that the default color of their players is white.

The consequence, Dietrich argues, is that these all-white worlds force non-white players to “become white” in order to play while implicitly signaling to the non-white player that they do not belong. While the exclusion of non-white avatar options is likely unintentional on the part of the game’s creator, the simple fact that this was overlooked is evidence enough of the “unquestioned standards of whiteness” in American society. What these games are telling us is that you can be a fairy, a dwarf, or the Primordial Thunder King, but you can only be white.

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Considered undesirable by many Americans, “brown collar” jobs are those occupations with an overrepresentation of newly arrived Latino immigrants. With low pay and low status, employment in areas such as construction, hospitality, and textile production has been thought to offer few opportunities to earn better wages and learn English (which can, in turn, lead to higher wages).

Describing these workplaces as “linguistic niches” due to the prevalence of Spanish-speakers, Ted Mouw and Sergio Chavez’s complex and novel data analysis showed that brown collar occupations are not necessarily dead end jobs. Analyzing survey and government data—even bringing in a longitudinal element that’s been missing in other research—the authors found that the niches actually enabled some newly arrived immigrants to learn English while getting a foothold in the U.S. labor market.

Mouw and Chavez found that, although immigrant workers initially “sort” into brown collar jobs upon arrival to the U.S., these jobs are not detrimental to wage growth if they are used as a transition to the mainstream labor market—a feat 20% of workers are able to achieve. It’ll be interesting to find out the secret to their success.

College attendance, access to loans, and higher education are all gendered experiences influenced by inequalities—and so is the significant debt that often accompanies college. In a recent article, Rachel E. Dwyer, Randy Hodson, and Laura McCloud (Gender & Society, February 2013) explore how debt influences dropout rates and how men and women make decisions about each differently.

The authors find that men are less likely to take out student loans and that men drop out of college at lower levels of debt than women. The authors explain these findings by examining the effects of gendered occupational segregation and the gender pay gap. Because women and men face different labor market opportunities, their assessments of whether a college degree is worth the debt also differ.

When it comes to jobs that do not require a college degree, women and men are segregated into different types of work and men make significantly more money than women. For example, female dropouts tend to work in service and clerical jobs, while male dropouts work in higher-paid manufacturing, construction, and transportation positions. The consequences of dropping out of college, then, are greater for women, while it’s a more viable option for men to drop out before acquiring excessive debt.

With a college degree, men and women work more similar jobs and have more similar incomes. Still, even if they stay in college and graduate, women are less able to pay back student loans and get ahead because of the wage gap.

In nearly half of all U.S. states, it is a felony for HIV-positive people to have sex without disclosing their status to their partners. In some places, this law, meant to promote public health, has become a tool of social control. Those who have—or are suspected of having—HIV or AIDS are essentially kept under surveillance and can be criminally sanctioned for various violations.

Trevor Hoppe (Social Problems, February 2013) interviewed 25 health officials responsible for managing “health threat” cases in Michigan, where the laws are particularly strenuous. When new HIV-positive individuals are identified, officials do extensive contact tracing. While surveillance technologies are officially about disease prevention, they are also used to aid law enforcement and to regulate the client’s sexual practices. If an individual is labeled a “health threat,” they may be forced to undergo testing, counseling, treatment, or be quarantined. HIV-positive individuals may not be allowed to have any unprotected sex, even if they have disclosed their status to their partner (and if they test positive for a secondary STI, that is taken as evidence of unprotected sex). The law also treats all types of sex as equally risky, criminalizing even those sexual acts that carry no risk of transmission.

The criminal punishment for non-disclosure also provides impetus for local rumor mills, often setting in motion a “witch hunt.” Community members can call in confidential third party reports accusing individuals they suspect are HIV positive of not disclosing. These accusations often come against already-stigmatized individuals and may be false reports, but they set investigations in motion.

The additional stigma and social costs attached to an HIV diagnosis in states with such legislation may now be reducing people’s willingness to be tested for STIs at all, thus rendering a public health effort bad for public health.

A lot of 2008 election analysis focused on prejudice and race—would white Americans vote for a black president? In his recent Public Opinion Quarterly piece, Seth Goldman turns this question around to ask how the massive reach of the Obama campaign affected racial prejudice. He shows that, in just six months, the “Obama Effect” reduced racial prejudice at a rate five times faster than the average drop in racism over the entire previous twenty years. Because the same people were polled at various times during the Obama campaign, Goldman was able to measure individual- rather than group-level changes.

Unexpectedly, this effect was strongest among McCain supporters, especially those who watched political television shows. The effect was even stronger in states where the Obama campaign aired an influx of television advertisements. Watching TV didn’t change Republicans’ political views or swing their vote. Instead, seeing Obama challenged their expectations of black Americans by offering a positive image and countering stereotypes. Television is where media acts as a point of “virtual” contact between racial groups—and as Goldman argues, it can reduce prejudice as effectively as a face-to-face encounter.

On July 7, 2005, four British Muslim young men from the Leeds area detonated bombs on the London transportation system killing over fifty people. In the wake of these 7/7 bombings, politicians and academics worried that incidents of racism and Islamophobia against British South Asians perceived as Muslim would dramatically increase. Demonstrating a commonsense yet novel methodology, Yasmin Hussain and Paul Bagguley (Racial and Ethnic Studies, January 2013) interviewed forty British Pakistani Muslims to gauge post-7/7 racist or Islamophobic incidents, rather than replicate social science research that measures white, non-Muslim respondents’ changes in attitudes toward Muslims.

Among the findings, Hussain and Bagguley report that instead of outright violent incidents, most manifestations of racism and Islamophobia were much more subtle and patterned, experienced as “funny looks” from (mainly white) non-Muslim strangers. Drawing from the slang British connotation of “funny” as peculiar or slightly hostile, these looks were aimed particularly at young South Asians who were recognizably Muslim, wearing more traditional forms of dress. Women with headscarves disproportionately experienced funny looks, although respondents of all genders drew these looks if they were carrying a bag or backpack in public.

Responding with increased self-policing, many young Muslims said they’d become more intentional about when and where they travelled in order to insulate themselves from hostility and potential violence. Some even stopped wearing traditional dress. Other respondents disregarded these issues as an act of resistance and assertion of their identity as British Muslims. Hussain and Bagguley’s study reminds us that racism and prejudice is often not experienced directly through verbal or physical attacks but rather manifested in racial micro-aggressions that are difficult to quantify.

The hunt for “pink Viagra”—a medical solution to women’s so-called sexual dysfunction, identified as an official disorder in 1999—has so far proven fruitless. Sociologists Cristalle Pronier and Elizabeth Monk-Turner suggest in the Journal of Gender Studies that we stop looking. Instead, we need to consider the relational aspects of sex that many women require for satisfaction.

After surveying more than 300 female students, staff, and faculty in university community, Pronier and Monk-Turner found that social factors such as feeling intimacy, sexual agency, emotional closeness, and low levels of stress were key to women’s self-reported sexual satisfaction. Contrary to the pharmaceutical mantra “a pill for every ill,” these researchers believe female friskiness (or at least arousal) has fairly little to do with rerouting blood flow.

The zoo: a chance to leave the over-regulated world of concrete and bureaucracy behind and reinvigorate the spirit through witnessing exotic animals in their natural splendor. However, as David Grazian reminds us in The Sociological Quarterly, it takes a lot of planning to produce the “natural”.

Drawing on three years and over 500 hours of volunteering at two metropolitan zoos, Grazian provides detailed insights into the tensions that are negotiated on a daily basis by the “nature makers” charged with designing displays that fit how visitors imagine jungles, grasslands, and other untamed settings. This involves creating landscapes that imitate the fauna from far-away lands, while simultaneously enclosing the animals and separating them from human visitors… all without making the zoo look too much like a prison. Audiences must also be convinced that the animals’ activities are unaltered by captivity even as the taboo—sex, killing, and defecating—is censored. Because, hey, even being a wild animal is no excuse for poor manners.

So next time you are strolling your local big cat house, take some time to think about the constant planning and negotiation necessary to create an experience that is wild but not too wild, dangerous but not too dangerous, cute but not too cute, educational but not too educational, civilized but not too civilized, and most important of all, “natural”.