“[A]n analysis of traffic can enrich sociological theory.” (Schmidt-Relenberg, 1968: 121)

Almost everywhere we go is a “gendered space.”  Although men and women both go to grocery stores, different days of the week and times of the day are associated with different gender compositions of shoppers.  Most of our jobs are gendered spaces.  In fact, Census data show that roughly 30% of the 66,000,000 women in the U.S. labor force occupy only 10 of the 503 listed occupations on the U.S. Census.  You’d probably be able to guess what some of these jobs are just as easily as you might be able to guess some of the very few Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs.  Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as occupational segregation, and it’s nothing new.  Recently, I did read about a gender segregated space that is new (at least to me): traffic.

When I picture traffic in my head, I think of grumpy men driving to jobs they hate, but this is a horrible stereotype of traffic that’s misleading.  Women actually make up the vast majority of congestion on the roads.  One way of looking at this is to argue that women are causing more congestion on our roads.  But another way to talk about this issue (and the way to talk about this issue that is consistent with actual research – and ought to make us feminists smile) is to say that women endure more congestion on the roads.

Women were actually the first market for household automobiles in the U.S.  Men generally traveled to work by public transportation.  Cars sold to households were marketed to women for daily errands.  This is why, for instance, early automobiles had fancy radiator caps with things like wings, angels and goddesses on them.  These were thought to appeal to women’s more fanciful desires.

Traffic increased a great deal when women moved into the labor force.  But this is not exactly what accounts for the gender gap.  In the 1950s, car trips that were work-related accounted for about 40% of all car use.  Today that number is less than 16%.  The vast majority of car trips are made for various errands: taking children to school, picking up groceries, eating out, going to or from day care, shopping, and more shopping.  And it’s women who are making most of these trips.  It’s a less acknowledged portion of the “second shift” which typically highlights women’s disproportionate contribution to the division of labor inside the household even when they are working outside of the household as well.  Sandra Rosenbloom‘s work on this topic is fantastic (see her chapter summarizing some of her research here).

Traffic research has shown that women are more than two times more likely than men to be taking someone else where they need to go when driving (see Nobis and Lenz’s chapter here and Rosenbloom’s research here).  Men are  more likely to be driving themselves somewhere.  Women are also much more likely to string other errands onto the trips in which they are driving themselves somewhere (like stopping at the grocery store on the drive home, going to day care on the way to work, etc.).  Traffic experts call this “trip chaining,” but the rest of us call it multi-tasking.  What’s more, we also know that women, on average, leave just a bit later than men do for work, and as a result, are much more likely to be making those longer (and more involved) trips right in the middle of peak hours for traffic.

Who knew?  It’s an under-acknowledged gendered space that deserves more attention (at least from sociologists).  Traffic is awful, and if we count up all that extra time and add it to the second shift calculations made by Arlie Hochschild, I think we have a new form of inequality to complain about.

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This post originally appeared at Inequality by (Interior) Design.

About a month ago, I found myself embarrassed to sit as the sole faculty member at a table of new members of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) – that is, aside from Dr. Mary Bernstein, outgoing SWS president, who led the new member orientation. I was excited to attend my first SWS winter meeting (really, first of anything hosted by SWS), but also embarrassed that I was new already half way to tenure and still “new.” No disrespect meant to the graduate students in that room, but I felt as though I was sitting at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving dinner. And, when it came my turn to introduce myself, I felt as though I was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “Hi, my name is Eric Grollman, and this is my first SWS meeting.” “Hi Eric,” my fellow newbies didn’t actually say, but I could hear in my imaginative and anxious mind.

No Support To Attend SWS Meetings

I went through all six years of graduate school, and then two years in my current position, without ever attending an SWS function. Some years I was a dues-paying member, and some years not. I justified the distance from SWS by identifying as more of a health scholar, and secondly a sexualities scholar – that gender was only tangentially related to my research. It took an encouraging email from SWS Executive Officer, Dr. Joey Sprague, to finally get serious about becoming involved in SWS. Recently, my work as an intellectual activist – particularly on my blog, Conditionally Accepted – has focused on protecting fellow intellectual activists from public backlash and professional harm. As many of those who have been attacked are women of color, it was clear that my efforts were in line with SWS’s mission and many of its initiatives. You-should-get-involved became you-should-attend-the-winter-meeting, which became you-should-organize-a-session-on-this-topic. This was quite a break from what feels like eagerly awaiting opportunities for leadership in other academic organizations!

I’ve studied sexuality and gender, as well as their intersections with race, since I officially declared my major in sociology and minor in gender studies in college. And, I’ve been an activist of sorts since kindergarten, focusing heavily on LGBTQ and gender issues beginning in college. Why did it take me so long to get involved with SWS – a feminist sociologist organization?

Elizabeth Salisbury, Drs. Jodi Kelber-Kaye, Ilsa Lottes, Fred Pincus, Michelle Scott, Carole McCann, and Susan McCully, among others. These aren’t names that are known nationwide (not yet, at least), but they are forever a part of my life. These are professors who were fundamental in the raising of my feminist consciousness, and in feeding my budding activist spirit. They introduced me to Black feminist theory (among other theoretical perspectives), feminist and queer critiques of the media, womanist accounts of herstory, and social justice-oriented research methods. Clearly, I still feel nostalgia for those days of self-exploration, advocacy, and community-building.

Graduate school, unfortunately, was a hard right-turn from my undergraduate training. I chose to pursue a PhD in sociology, assuming it would be easier to get into the fields of gender studies, sexuality studies, or even student affairs with that degree than the other way around. I won’t waste my energy on regretting the decision, but I recognize that it was the first of many compromises I would make to advance my career. Dreams of a joint PhD with gender studies were dashed due to “advice” that I would not be employable. I was discouraged from my fallback plan of a graduate minor in gender studies or sexuality studies because, I was told, one can “read a book” to learn everything there is to know about gender. By the time I selected the topic for my qualifying exam, I knew to select the more mainstream area of social psychology rather than the more desirable areas of sexualities, gender, or race/class/gender/sexualities. Still, I was reminded again that my interests in gender, sexualities, and race were not “marketable” when I proposed a dissertation on trans health. I was mostly obedient as a student. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised by my friends’ surprise that I had been offered a tenure-track position in sociology with a focus on gender and health. I entered grad school open to interdisciplinary study on queer, feminist, and anti-racist issues, utilizing qualitative methods, and tying my research to my advocacy; I left a mainstream quantitative medical sociologist who viewed writing blog posts as a “radical” forms of advocacy.

Would it surprise you that I wasn’t encouraged to attend an SWS meeting in graduate school? Those who were actually involved in SWS did so on their own volition. We were otherwise expected and encouraged to attend the mainstream organization – the American Sociological Association – and perhaps the regional sociology conference as a starting point to “nationals.” It wasn’t encouraged, it wasn’t the norm; and, on the limited funds of a graduate student, I had to be pragmatic about which conferences I attended. ASA won out all through grad school and beyond.

Finally Finding My Feminist Sociology Community

So, back to my first SWS winter meeting. It was amazing, of course. I felt like an academic celebrity, having many people – some whom I knew, many whom I did not – express their appreciation for my blog, Conditionally Accepted. Admittedly, with such visibility as an intellectual activist, there is a lingering twinge of the mentality I was forced to adopt in grad school: “what about my research?” I thought privately. Obviously, these colleagues care about my research, as well. But, I found that the meeting, unlike other conferences I’ve attended, was just as much about research as it was about feminism, activism, and building a community. At what other conference would I feel torn between attending a session on feminist public sociology (hosted by the fine folks at Feminist Reflections) and another on campus anti-racist activism? Certainly not the conferences I’ve been attending over the years.

In hindsight, I realize how easy the meeting was emotionally, socially, and professionally. I saw an occasional glance at my nametag, but never followed by averted eyes. I sensed genuine curiosity in meeting others, not the elitist-driven networking to which I’ve grown accustomed at academic conferences. There was even a banquet, featuring a silent auction, a dance party, and delicious food, on the final night of the meeting. Feminist sociologists know how to party after a busy day of talking research and advocacy!

Needless to say, SWS meetings will be one of the regulars on my yearly conference circuit. I am left wondering how different my career and life would be thus far had I attended SWS from the start. Would I have had an easier time finding support for my research and advocacy knowing that I would at least have a network of social justice-minded colleagues in SWS? Would I be in some sort of leadership position within SWS by now? I even saw half a dozen current grad students from my graduate program at the meeting. What do they know that I didn’t?

I can’t speak to paths I did not take, and why others do what they do (or don’t do). I made the decision to focus on becoming involved in mainstream sociology spaces to increase my visibility, widen my professional networks, and enhance my job prospects. SWS did not seem like a feasible opportunity for me because it was not seen as a central in my graduate program. I suffered to a great extent in attempting to navigate the powerful mainstream expectations of my graduate training and my own goals to make a difference in the world. I don’t know that I could have handled being marginal anymore than I already was as a Black queer intellectual activist who studies race, sexualities, and gender.

Find Your Own Feminist Academic Community

What I take from life’s lessons is that one can really benefit from looking just a little bit further to find what one needs. My program devalued research on my communities – Black and LGBTQ. But, had I attended just one SWS conference, I would have found that there exists an academic space where that work is valued without question. My program sought to “beat the activist” out of me; but, in SWS, I would have found regular, open discussions about feminism, activism, and social justice. I know now that if I cannot find support for my goals, my identities, my politics in my immediate context, I am certain I can find support elsewhere. And, if not, there are likely a few others who are willing to join together to build a community that would offer such support. “If you build it, they will come,” or something along those lines. So, no matter how alone we might feel in a specific program, department, university, field, organization, etc., we have to remember that the universe is vast – there is someone or some group out there in which we can find home.

I don’t want to end by beating myself up, though. I’ve done too much of that in trying to make sense of the traumatic experience of grad school. Rather, I want to end by encouraging those who are in supportive networks to reach out to fellow colleagues and students who you know will benefit from access to such networks. I want to encourage those with power, money, and other resources to share them with someone who may not be able to afford attending a conference that might be transformative for them – but their department won’t support or encourage. I encourage faculty to emphasize to their students how amazing SWS is, or at least having other options besides ASA. Departments and universities can also consider setting aside money and resources to help students attend SWS, the Association of Black Sociologists, Humanist Sociologists, Society for the Study of Social Problems, regional sociology meetings, and those outside of sociology (e.g., National Women’s Studies Association). We do not advance our field by reproducing mainstream and traditional work; we do it by taking risks and thinking outside of the box. We do not benefit from young, aspiring feminist sociologists trudging through their careers thinking that their feminist politics are at odds with success in sociology, nor having them drop out of their programs or leave sociology for more supportive fields. We benefit from supporting the creativity and bravery of the next generation of scholars.

So, I hope to see you at the next SWS meeting. I’ll be the one attendee with the big grin on my face – well, at least one of the many.

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Eric Joy Denise is a Black queer feminist sociologist and intellectual activist, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. Their research focuses on the impact of prejudice and discrimination on the health, well-being, and worldviews of oppressed groups, especially those marginalized by multiple systems of oppression (e.g., LGBTQ people of color). They are the founder and editor of the blog, Conditionally Accepted, which is now hosted by Inside Higher Ed.

People are often shockingly wrong about how much time they dedicate to various tasks.  In general, we tend to overestimate how much time it takes to do things we dislike and underestimate how much time we spend on tasks we enjoy.  So, people ritualistically overestimate how much time they spend on laundry, cleaning bathrooms, working out and underestimate how much time they spend watching television, napping, eating, or doing any number of tasks that provide them with joy.

Asking about how people use their time has been a mainstay on surveys dealing with households and family life.  We ask people to assess how much time they spend on all manner of mundane tasks in their lives–everything from shopping, sleeping, watching television, attending to their children, and household labor is divided up into an astonishing number of variables.  The assumption, of course, is that people can provide meaningful information or that their responses are an accurate (or approximately accurate) portrayal of the time they actually spend (see here).  This is why time diary studies came into being–they produce a more accurate picture of how people use their time.  People record their actual time use throughout the day in a diary, marking starting and stopping points of various activities.  And there are a number of different scholars who rely on this method and these data.  But Liana Sayer is among the leading scholars in the field.  When I’ve seen her present, or others present on time use data, the data are almost always visualized in the same way (as stacked column charts).  Personally, I love seeing the data this way.  The changes jump out at me and I feel like I instantly recognize trends and distinctions they discuss. But I have learned in my classroom that students do not always have the same reaction.

I’m interested because I use data visualizations in class a lot.  And in my (admittedly limited) experience, students have an easier time interpreting the story of time use data when it is visualized in some ways over others.

All of the examples here are pretty basic changes in data visualizations.  But, learning these basics are necessary to help students read the more complex data visualizations they may encounter.  Being able to interpret visualizations of temporal data is important; it’s part of what helps social scientists consider, measure, and critique the idea of “feminist change.”  Distinguishing between men’s and women’s time use is only one pocket of this field.  But, it’s the one I’ll focus on here, and on which Liana Sayer is among the foremost experts.  The data I’m visualizing below come from one of Sayer’s most cited articles: “Gender, Time and Inequality: Trends in Women’s and Men’s Paid Work, Unpaid Work, and Free Time” (here – behind a paywall).

It’s fairly common to present time use data with a series of stacked columns (the same way the Census often illustrates shifts in household types).  Below is a visualization of the differences between women’s and men’s minutes per day allocated to paid work, unpaid work, free time, and time dedicated to self care.  It’s all time diary data and we talk about why this is more reliable and a better measure – but also why it is more difficult to collect, etc.  Some students see the story of this graph immediately.  I do too.  Men’s time allocated to paid labor decreased while women’s increased.  And women perform more unpaid work than do men.  Lots of students, however, are stumped.

But when I present the data differently, students often have an easier time seeing the story the chart is produced to illustrate.  The Pew Research Center visualizes a lot of their data using stacked bar graphs.  And maybe it’s because these are more easily recognized by people with less experience with data visualization.  I have found that more of my students are able to read the chart below than the one above (at least for temporal time use data comparisons).

Another way of presenting these data might be to use clustered columns.  I have also found that students are more quick to recognize the trend in these data with the graph below than they are with the initial stacked column chart.

But, I’ve found that students have the easiest time with line charts for temporal time use data.  On the chart below, I deleted the grid lines because The New York Times sometimes displays time trend data this way (see Philip Cohen’s piece on NYT Opinionater, “How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality?” for an example).  Students that struggle to recognize the trend in the clustered column chart, are much faster to see the trend here.

These aren’t an exhaustive set of examples, and all of them are basic visualizations.  For instance, we might use a stacked area chart to show these data (as trends in the racial composition of the U.S. are often depicted), a scatterplot (as data on GDP and fertility rates are often illustrated), a series of pie charts (as men’s and women’s various compositions in different economic sectors are sometimes visualized), or something else entirely. In fact, The New York Times produced a really incredible interactive stream graph visualizing data from The American Time Use Survey that illustrates differences in time use between groups. I sometimes have students explore this graph in my course on the sociology of gender.  But many struggle interpreting it.  This is, I think, in part due to the fact that we often take data visualization literacy for granted.  It’s a skill, and it’s one we should be better at teaching.

I think the point I want to make is that we (or I, at least) need to think more carefully about how we visualize our data and findings to different audiences.  Liana Sayer has an incredible mastery of this (she presents data in all of the ways mentioned in this post and more throughout her work).  One thing that I’m thinking more about as I write and teach about research and findings amenable to data visualization is which visualizations are best suited to which kinds of data (something all scientists are concerned with), but also which visualizations work with which kinds of audiences.  This is new territory to me.

Visualizing feminist change in a single chart is difficult.  And it’s often accompanied by, “Well, this is true, but let me tell you about what these data don’t show…”  But, I’m interested in how we make choices about visualizing feminist research and whether we need to make different kinds of choices when we talk about the findings with different kinds of audiences.

In my introduction to Sociology class, I use trends in baby names to introduce students to sociological research and inquiry. It’s a fun way to show students just how much we can learn from what might feel like idiosyncratic details of our lives. I start by showing students the top 10 boy and girl names from the most recent year of data available (along with their relative frequencies). After this, I show them the most popular names and their relative frequencies from 100 years earlier. There are some names on both lists; but for the most part, the names on the latter list sound “old” to students.

When I ask students to characterize the types of names they see on the older list of names, someone usually says the names sound more “traditional.” I tell them that in 100 years, someone will probably say that about the most recent list of names they’re looking at: these future students will have a different idea of what makes a name “traditional.”

If you’re interested, someone produced these two GIF files that depict the most popular names by state between 1960 and 2012. I like to show one of these while I’m talking with students about what what names can help us learn. I ask students to raise their hand when they see their own name or the name of their best friend. As we get into the 80’s and 90’s, lots of hands start going up. But the GIFs are also interesting because they are a powerful visualization of the spread of cultural norms. Popular names move through a population in a way that appears to be similar to infectious diseases.

This is a fun way to show students that deciding what to name a child might feel like a personal decision, it’s actually a decision that is shaped by social forces. Names and name trends are great examples of what sociology can reveal because, as Stanley Lieberson points out so simply, while taste in most elements of culture is not a requirement, everyone has tastes in names. And, as it turns out, we can learn a lot about a society just by looking at patterns in which names we select for our children (and equally important are the types of names different groups tend to avoid).

SIDENOTE: I like to highlight a great finding by Stanley Lieberson, Susan Dumais, and Shyon Baumann from their article on trends in androgynous names (here). Androgynous names are names that are given to both boys and girls–think Taylor, Cameron, or Casey for current examples. Lieberson, Dumais, and Baumann found that androgynous names follow an incredibly common pattern once they achieve a critical level of popularity: they become girl names and become dramatically less common names for boys–a powerful example of the stigma associated with femininity for boys.

When I first started using the exercise, I was fascinated with the relative frequencies much more than the names on each list. But it’s an amazing shift. More than 1 in 20 girls born in 1914 was named Mary (the most popular name that year – and many other years too if you’re interested). By 2014, just over 1 in 100 girls born were given the most popular name that year, “Emma.” This is part of a larger trend in naming practices–popular names just aren’t as popular as they used to be. Stanley Lieberson refers to this as the “modernization theory” of name trends. The theory suggests that as institutional pressures associated with names decline (e.g., extended family rituals, religious rules), we see the proliferation of more diverse names. But there’s a twist. The phenomenon is also gendered: popular boy names have always been more popular (in aggregate) that popular girl names. Below, I’ve charted the proportion of boys and girls born in the U.S. with top 10 names from 1880-2014. Boys given top ten names in 1880, for instance, accounted for more than 40% of all boys born. And the most popular boy names have always accounted for a larger share of all boys born than the most popular girl names for girls born. It’s not a new fact and I’m not the first to notice it. (Though, as you can see below, the lines have just recently met, and they could conceivably cross paths any year now. And that will be something that has never happened.)

In 1965, Alice Rossi suggested that part of what accounts for the discrepancy is related to gender inequality. As she put it, “Men are the symbolic carriers of the temporal continuity of the family” (here). Lieberson and Eleanor Bell later discovered that girls are more likely to have unique names as well (here). It’s an interesting example of something that many people teach in courses on men and masculinities. While men are, as a group, systematically advantaged, they may be held accountable to a more narrow range of gender performances than are women. And while men’s rights groups might frame this as an illustration of women being the group to benefit from gender inequality, it’s much better understood as what Michael Messner refers to as a “cost of privilege.”

Yet, this appears to be one costs of privilege that has decreased. In 1880, the top 10 boy names accounted for 41.26% of all boys born that year; the top 10 girl names accounted for 22.98%. There was more than an 18% gap. While boys’ popular names are still more popular than girls’ popular names, the gap shrunk to 0.27% by 2014. That’s a monumental shift. And I’m sure the modernization theory of name trends accounts for the lion’s share of the more general shift toward more secular names and a general decrease in name continuity between fathers and sons. But there is more than one way to read this shift. We might also say that this is a really simple illustration of one way that patriarchal family traditions have been chipped away over the past 100 years. Lots of data would support this conclusion.  We might account for it alongside, for instance, data showing the prevalence of women taking men’s surnames after marriage as a percentage of all marriages in a given year or opinions about surname change.  But it’s also an illustration of the ways that this process has meant changes for boys and men as well.

Masculinity has, quite literally, opened up. It’s something that has happened more for some racial and class groups than others. And whether this transformation–this “opening up”–is a sign of gender inequality being successfully challenged or reproduced in new and less easily recognizable ways is the subject of my favorite corner of the field.

The 2016 Oscar nominations were just announced.  This is the second year in a row that all 20 acting nominees are white–prompting the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite.  Matthew Hughey wrote on this issue last year as well.  The announcement got me thinking about inequality in film.  The nominees are selected by just over 7,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences–so they are elected by a panel of peers.  But members of the AMPAS are not automatically voting members.  You have to apply, and your application has to be sponsored by existing member of the branch of the Academy for which you would like to be considered (here).  So, while the Oscars are awarded by a panel of peers, who make up the list of people who qualify as “peers” in the first place is a political matter.  And just like anywhere else, knowing someone who knows someone likely plays a role in gaining access.

Sociologists who study networks are often interested in how social networks provide access to various things people might want to acquire (wealth, status, access, “success” more generally, etc.).  This is why we have a concept for just how networked you are: “social capital.”  And certainly lots of people are complaining about the fact that Hollywood is an old, white, boy’s club and attempting to change this.  Indeed, Genna Davis founded an institute to study gender in the media.  April Reign (an editor at Broadway Black and NU Tribe Magazine) founded the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite after the all-white slate of nominees were announced last year.  And Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote an extensive article last year on the entrenched sexism that keeps women from occupying central roles in Hollywood.  Jessica Piven, one of directors quoted in the article, said:

“I feel that there is something going on underneath all of this which is the idea that women aren’t quite as interesting as men. That men have heroic lives, do heroic things, are these kind of warriors in the world, and that women have a certain set of rooms that they have to operate in.”

This belief system results in a network saturated with men and with precious few opportunities for women–and even fewer for women of color.  And as Effie Brown’s interaction with Matt Damon in “Project Greenlight” brought up, conversations about challenging the lack of diversity in Hollywood (similar to challenging the lack of diversity elsewhere) are often met with the presumption that diversity means compromising on ability, talent and creativity.  Entrenched sexism and inequality is a struggle to challenge in any institution because… well, because it’s entrenched.  So, it’s easy to feel like the most qualified guy who just happens to also be white without fully appreciating the fact that being a white guy might have been a big part of what gave you a foot in the door in the first place.

To think about this empirically, consider the party game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The idea plays on the theory of “six degrees of separation”—part of a sociological puzzle called the “small world problem” asking just how connected everyone in the world is to everyone else.  The theory suggests that we are no more than six connections away from anyone in the world. In the early 1990s, some students at Albright University came up with the idea for the game: pick any actor and see if you can connect that actor with Kevin Bacon through shared movie appearances with other actors as the connections. Take Angela Bassett for example. Angela Bassett was in Sunshine State (2002) with Charlayne Woodard who was in He Said, She Said (1991) with… Kevin Bacon. So, Angela Bassett has a Bacon number of 2.

Later, a group of computer science students at the University of Virginia produced the network of actors to see how “central” Kevin Bacon actually is using IMDB.com (you can play around with the network on their site, www.oracleofbacon.org). And, as it turns out, Kevin Bacon is a central actor—he’s been in films with over 3,000 other actors and more than 99% of all of the almost 2 million actors listed on IMDB.com can be connected with Kevin Bacon in 5 connections or less. But, he’s not the most central actor. He’s actually the 411^th most centrally connected actor (you can see the top 1,000 most “central” actors here). But, Kevin Bacon does share some things in common with the most central actor (Eric Roberts): they’re both white, they’re both men, and they were both born within two years of each other.  Coincidence?

When I encountered the list, I noticed that there weren’t many women. There are only 3 in the top 100 most central actors.  And all three are white.  So, I wrote a script to data mine some basic information on the top 1,000 to see who they are using data from IMDB.com (birth year) as well as NNDB.com (which lists race and gender).*  The list, perhaps unsurprisingly, is dominated by men (81.75%) and by white people (87.8%). Below is the breakdown for proportions of actors among the top 1,000 most central actor by gender and race.It’s a powerful way of saying that Hollywood continues to be a (white) boy’s club. But they’re also an old white boy’s club as well. I also collected data on birth year. And while the 50’s were the best decade to be born in if you want to be among the 1,000 most “central” actors today, the data for the men skews a bit older.** This lends support to the claim that men do not struggle to find roles as much as women do as they age–which may also support the claim that there are more complex roles available to men (as a group) than women.The other things I noticed quickly were that: (1) Hispanic and Asian men among the top 1,000 actors list are extremely likely to be typecast as racial stereotypes, and (2) there are more multiracial women among the top 1,000 actors than either Hispanic or Asian women.

Part of what this tells us is that we like to watch movies about white people and men… white men mostly.  But part of why we like these movies is that these are the movies in which people are investing and that get produced.  As a result of this, there are a critical mass of super-connected white men in Hollywood.  So, it shouldn’t surprise us that white actors dominate the Oscar nominations. They’ve been hoarding social capital in the industry since it began.  #OscarsSoWhite

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* To get the data, I wrote a Python script using the Unofficial IMDb API and the NNDB.com’s API. The results were able to read data for gender for all 1,000 people on the list but only gender, birth year, and race for 959 of the 1,000 people in the dataset. The other 41 had incomplete information on both sites. And I didn’t bother to clean the data up any more.

**Part of becoming a more central actor in the network of all actors has to do with having been a part of a mass of filmed projects with a variety of different actors.  The most central actor – Eric Roberts – has worked on projects with more than 8,000 other actors over the course of his career.  And being alive longer (perhaps obviously) helps.  But, it’s not all older actors.  And you don’t have to be living to be on this list.  But, actors born in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s aren’t as central (as decade-based groups).  So, some of this is also having been in your 20’s, 30’s and 40’s between 1970 and 1990 which was a big period of growth for Hollywood.

Originally posted at Inequality by (Interior) Design

“…it’s a perfect example of how a seemingly inconsequential—or half-destructive act—like writing on the wall can actually promote social change… [simply by] making their gender visible on the wall.” —Jessica Pabón

I love graffiti art.  And I’m not talking about the sexist and racist tags you see in men’s bathroom stalls.  I’m talking about the artwork decorating urban spaces that graffiti artists refer to as “pieces.”  Graffiti is an interesting art form because the artists are–as Richard Lachmann put it–“involved simultaneously in an art world and a deviant subculture” (here: 230).

When walking past a particularly involved piece, I often find myself wondering lots of things.  “Who took the time to paint this?”  “Was it free hand or did the artist have a plan before starting?”  “What does it say?”  Or when I can read the writing, “What does it mean?”  “When did the artist do this?–In the middle of the night?”  “How did they get away with it?”  These are fleeting thoughts, but I’m always struck by the reclamation of public space.  It’s such a powerful, public statement, claiming and labeling social space.  As Jessica Pabón puts it:

Graffiti is a form of writing and writing is fundamentally a form of communicating.  So these writers are reclaiming public space.  They’re asserting their presence.  They’re saying, “I was here!… and here, and here, and here.” (here)

Rather than considering it a deviant act aimed at defacing property, sociologists have found that graffiti artists are drawn by twin processes of appreciating its aesthetic appeal in addition to considering graffiti a practice through which they can make friends and form and solidify communities (here).In Elijah Anderson‘s Code of the Street, he addresses the ways that boys and young men navigate public space and engage in performances of self that garner “respect”–a resource providing status and safety.  While the book is primarily about boys and men, masculinity is not a dominant topic of analysis for Anderson.  Yet, his analysis of “the street” treats it as a masculine space–a space in which masculine identities and reputations are formed, validated, “put on,” challenged, and “on the line.”  Graffiti might be understood as part of Anderson’s code.  Graffiti has a very “masculine” feel to it, and–like Anderson’s work–scholarship on graffiti often implicitly assumes that it’s boys and men writing, drawing, and painting on walls.  Why men are doing this, and what graffiti means is the subject of the majority of research attention.  Less attention is given to analyzing why (or possibly if) girls and women might engage in graffiti too.  Jessica Pabón (above) articulates some of the ways women have been able to accomplish this within the masculinized subcultural arena of graffiti art.

Pabón’s research led her to realize that graffiti culture is increasingly digital.  “Crews” no longer span only neighborhoods, but are increasingly globalized through the use of technology.  Indeed, digital spaces provide women graffiti artists a community that might not have been able to exist previously.  This transformation in graffiti culture has enabled the emergence of all-women graffiti crews.  Some of the women Pabón studied were also a part of graffiti crews composed primarily of men.  Yet, technological changes in this subculture, relied upon by women artists feeling isolated, enabled the emergence of all-women crews.

[G]raffiti culture [is] moving into a more publicly accessible (yet, still counterpublic) domain as it increasingly exists online; the remarkable increase[s in]… female writers’ access to and presence within the culture; [challenging] the discourse of place itself, now slightly removed from the hyperlocal, reconfigured away from “traditional” notions of authenticity rooted in identity and into those rooted in performance and participation. (Pabón here)

All-women crews composed of women around the world challenge and support each other and their art form digitally through the creation of new spaces for visibility, communication, and support.

Interestingly, Pabón found that most of the women graffiti artists she interviewed did not identify as feminists.  Yet Pabón was initially interested in the topic because she understood it as an incredibly feminist act.  And, as she later discovered, it is.  Because graffiti is (arguably) an already-gendered act–by which I mean cultural assumptions lead us to presume graffiti artists are men–women face a unique dilemma: gendering their artwork in ways that “out” them as women.

No matter the words, you’re thinking about this guy [the graffiti artist], not that girl.  So if this girl wants to be recognized, ‘Hey I did that graffiti,’ as a girl who did that, she has to mark it some way in her art. (Pabón, here)

These small gendered “marks” are political; they work to allow women access to this “masculine” subculture and practice in ways that simultaneously (and often subtly) challenge the gender of graffiti art.  Naming their crews the “Stick Up Girlz” and “PMS” is one way they publicly announce their gender.  Some incorporate cultural symbols of femininity in small ways into their pieces, like ribbons, bows and hearts.  Potentially unrecognizable to the casual observer, graffiti artists incorporate elaborate methods of “signing” their artwork, and these are some of the ways that women graffiti artists gender their signatures in ways that might be read as small acts of gender resistance.

How many mass shootings occurred in the United States in 2015? It seems like a relatively simple question; it sounds like just a matter of counting them. Yet, it is challenging to answer for two separate reasons: one is related to how we define mass shootings and the other to reliable sources of data on mass shootings.  And neither of these challenges have easy solutions.

As scholars and teachers, we need to think about the kinds of events we should and should not include when we make claims about mass shootings.  Earlier this year, we posted a gendered analysis of the rise of mass shootings in the U.S. relying the Mass Shootings in America database produced by the Stanford Geospatial Center. That dataset shows an incredible increase in mass shootings in 2015. Through June of 2015, we showed that there were 43 mass shootings in the U.S. The next closest year in terms of number of mass shootings was 2014, which had 16 (see graph below).  That particular dataset relies heavily on mass shootings that achieve a good deal of media attention.  So, it’s possible that the increase is due to an increase in reporting on mass shootings, rather than an increase in the actual number of mass shootings that occurred.  Though, if and which mass shootings are receiving more media attention are certainly valid questions as well.

If you’ve been following the news on mass shootings, you may have noticed that the Washington Post has repeatedly reported that there have been more mass shootings than days in 2015. That claim relies on a different dataset produced by ShootingTracker.com. And both the Stanford Geospatial Center dataset and ShootingTracker.com data differ from the report on mass shootings regularly updated by Mother Jones.* For instance, below are the figures from ShootingTracker.com for the years 2013-2015.

For a detailed day-by-day visualization of the mass shootings collected in the ShootingTracker.com dataset between 2013 and 2015, see below (click each graph to enlarge).

The reason for this discrepancy has to do with definition in addition to data collection.  The dataset produced by the Stanford Geospatial Center is not necessarily exhaustive.  But they also rely on different definitions to decide what qualifies as a “mass shooting” in the first place.

The Stanford Geospatial Center’s Mass Shootings in America database defines mass shootings as shooting incidents that are not identifiably gang- or drug-related with 3 or more shooting victims (not necessarily fatalities) not including the shooter.  The dramatic spike apparent in this dataset in 2015 is likely exaggerated due to online media and increased reporting on mass shootings in recent years.  ShootingTracker.com claims to ensure a more exhaustive sample (if over a shorter period of time).  These data include any incidents in which four or more people are shot and/or killed at the same general time and location.  Thus, some data do not include drug and gang related shootings or cases of domestic violence, while others do.  What is important to note is that neither dataset requires that a certain number of people is actually killed.  And this differs in important ways from how the FBI has counted these events.

Neither ShootingTracker.com nor the Stanford Geospatial Center dataset rely on the definition of mass shootings used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Reporting (SHR) program which tracks the number of mass shooting incidents involving at least four fatalities (not including the shooter). The table below indicates how different types of gun-related homicides are labeled by the FBI.

Often, the media report on events that involve a lot of shooting, but fail to qualify as “mass murders” or “spree killings” by the FBI’s definition.  Some scholarship has suggested that we stick with the objective definition supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  And when we do that, whether mass shootings are on the rise or not becomes less easy to say.  Some scholars suggest that they are not on the rise, while others suggest that they are.  And both of these perspectives, in addition to others, influence the media.

One way of looking at this issue is asking, “Who’s right?”  Which of these various ways of measuring mass shootings, in other words, is the most accurate?  This is, we think, the wrong question to be asking.  What is more likely true is that we’ll gather different kinds of information with different definitions – and that is an important realization, and one that ought to be taken more seriously.  For instance, does the racial and ethnic breakdown of shooters look similar or different with different definitions?  No matter which definition you use, men between the ages of 20 and 40 are almost the entire dataset.  We also know less than we should about the profiles of the victims (those injured and killed).  And we know even less about how those profiles might change as we adopt different definitions of the problem we’re measuring.

There is some recognition of this fact as, in 2013, President Obama signed the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act into law, granting the attorney general authority to study mass killings and attempted mass killings.  The result was the production of an FBI study of “active shooting incidents” between 2000 and 2013 in the U.S.  The study defines active shooting incidents as:

“an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” Implicit in this definition is that the subject’s criminal actions involve the use of firearms. (here: 5)

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, I remained vigilant to my surroundings and viewed feminist consciousness as something natural. I was painfully conscious of racial and socio-economic disparities, and I had a keen eye for the ways in which internal and external social class divisions affected my community, not to mention the daily hassles of gender inequality that surrounded me. I could not fathom as a teenager that people studied this in order to learn it. Upon seeing a course listed, The Sociology of Gender, I thought, “Who needs a textbook to figure this out?” I was living through it on the mean streets of South Central and the neighborhood that bordered this, Compton, California. I volunteered with the Women’s Infant Care (WIC) Program as early as 13 years old as part of a Summer Youth Enrichment Program for low-income inner city youth. And I remained the acutely aware survey-minded sociologist about local community social problems. The dilapidated geriatric neighborhood of Los Angeles – where some people raced through to head toward the 110 Harbor Freeway – was the everyday geographic space that formed my community. I never thought that people would invest time learning how to be a feminist with regards to these issues that women of color face each and every day. I was a natural one, or, in the words of Beyoncé, “I woke up like this.” However, things changed when I entered the Ivory Tower of Academia as an undergraduate.

I started out learning about feminism after reading Patricia Hill Collins’ work and then juxtaposing that to Sandra Harding’s work. I have always been fascinated with how discourses across feminisms worked. It was through this fascination that I developed an understanding that in addition to the production of knowledge, we also need to build relationships and coalitions around shared and different realities we experience as women. It is difficult capturing the particular realities that reproduce economic inequality for women as a unit, and how our binary classifications serve to label and legitimate the disempowerment of women as a group, unless we have discussions about these around the kitchen table. In fact, this is how we initially started building feminist coalitions around our feminist social locations with gender oppression and privilege. I have been reflecting upon sex and gender more and more these days. And I’ve been thinking about ways in which issues that relate to gender also relate to race and class and sexuality.

A well seasoned feminism makes no exceptions. The well seasoned feminist understands that full equality is like a full course well-balanced meal. It is also hearty and filling. It is like fresh baked ziti or gumbo or quiche. Upon reflection of the many different feminisms I have learned about, I always arrive back to the question that led me to these critiques in the first place—questions that interrogate the common core of our “womanism”, “being fully human,” the embracing of that shared part of us that we come to understand through our correspondences at conferences, research/teaching collaborations and informal table talk. To some extent we are like a well-seasoned dish. We have tasted some of the flavor or even have personal knowledge of what it feels like to experience the struggles across a socially unequal landscape and the work we do in our perpetuation and/or reduction of social inequalities.

I am reminded of a cold day in the fall at the University of California Davis while taking Judith Stacey‘s Sociology of Gender course. I was sitting in Olson Hall feeling as if I would never transition through my first semester of undergraduate studies. And in walks another student—a strong brave black woman- who seemed to instantly understand what I was experiencing. She looked at me and said, “You’ll be okay. This is the way first semesters go.” Her voice carried an aura of wisdom about my trepidation with beginning my academic studies at a predominately white college. She was speaking to me; she was speaking to the gendered experience of being a woman in college; she was speaking to the racial experience of being a black woman in college; and she was speaking to the classed experience of being a woman of color from a low income working-class family who was putting a lot of faith in what a college degree from a top-ranked university might provide for her future.

How could I feel comforted by this sense of feminist empowerment that she fostered within me? How was I able to pick up and carry on? I somehow knew that she understood the gendered part of my experience as a woman in an androcentric, masculine thought-based academic setting. Is this not why feminists pressed so hard in the 60s for Women Studies departments? After she said this to me, I regained my academic momentum, and immediately got up, walked to Shields Avenue towards the memorial student union and embraced my new experience. What I later came to realize, however, is that before I even knew about academic feminism or what it meant to take a feminist course from Dr. Judith Stacey, I was embraced by something that was very feminist outside of my neighborhood community in Los Angeles. This realization led me to another discovery: feminism is in many ways very abstract; it is knowing that you are not alone in a world that chooses whether or not to understand your gendered reality.

Taking these lessons and looking back on my life, I see that my life from 13 years old until the present has been rich with musings about all things feminist and the multiple reflections of what a feminist is and could be. This, I found, is what makes me tick. And this is what makes me a stronger feminist. I can appreciate the very struggles that we have across multiple identities. It is a social scientific fact that in some spaces, we as feminists are more privileged over our sisters, and in other spaces, we bear the burden of oppression in relation to our feminist sisters. None of us, however, would deny that there is an eclipsing of worldviews that bring women together under the canopy of shared understandings, narratives and collective biographies. Whether it’s fighting for women’s suffrage and/or trying to get equal pay, our challenges and struggles are collective and require us to fight together. Recognizing that our differences make us stronger is a goal toward which we can work more diligently.  This act of working together is most effective when we collectively share in a social consciousness, collectively identifying as ‘feminists’ toward our common goal of challenging and reducing social inequalities.

My best understandings of this strong feminist force becomes most apparent when I look at feminisms through the lens of multiple reflections—many feminists, many experiences. These experiences frame a set of points that represent feminist coordinates reflecting diverse feminist standpoints. Together, our feminist standpoints challenge us to change present social and economic conditions among ourselves and within the larger society.

I close with a multi layered multifaceted quilt of feminist reflections which synthesizes my early teenage years up to the present day. My initial experiences with a natural feminist social consciousness and later learning it through an academic lens has enabled me to connect the importance of building strong feminist coalitions across our differences. We as feminists represent a collective joined by our diverse life experiences, akin to a resilient quilt that is sewn and stitched together from many different pieces of fabric (life experiences). It is through our collective strength that we make each other better in our work to challenge and reduce social inequalities. I am grateful that we are together as one multifaceted, multi layered quilt in this struggle.

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Gail Wallace is a Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She specializes in Urban|Rural Health Policy, Health Disparities across Race, Class and Gender along with the Health of Minority Populations.

Robin Thicke’s song, “Blurred Lines,” achieved international recognition in 2013. But the lyrics were also heavily criticized as promoting sexual violence by celebrating “blurred lines” around sexual consent. Indeed, the song and video prompted an online photo essay in which women and men are depicted holding up signs with words they heard from their own rapists—some of which were almost direct quotes from Thicke’s song. The song received a great deal of negative and positive press all at the same time. The media attention seemed to prove the media adage that any coverage is good coverage if Thicke’s continued celebrity is any measure.

It’s not a new argument to suggest that many elements of what feminist scholars refer to as “rape culture” are embedded in seemingly pleasurable elements of pop culture, like songs, movies, television shows etc. And Robin Thicke’s song served as an example to many of how we not only tolerate rape culture—but how we celebrate it and render it “sexy.” Recently, Rebecca Traister discussed just how much rape culture even informs what we think of as “good sex” in her piece “The Game is Rigged: Why Consensual Sex Can Still be Bad.” In it, Traister challenges the notion that all consensual sex is good and shows just how messy the debate about what qualifies as “consensual” really is. In many ways, our national discussion around sexual assault and consent is taking up themes raised by feminists in the 1980s about what actually qualifies as consent in a society in which violence against women is considered sexy.

Compared with “Blurred Lines,” Justin Bieber’s newly released hit single, “What Do You Mean?” has been subject to less critique. The notion that women do not actually know what they want and that they are notoriously bad and communicating their desires (sexual and otherwise) is pervasive. In the song, Bieber asks the woman with whom he’s interacting, “What do you mean? / Ohh ohh ohh/ When you nod your head yes / But you wanna say no / What do you mean?” The lack of clear consent isn’t just present in the song; it is what provides the sexual tension. It’s part of what is intended to make the song “sexy.”

Sexualizing women’s sexual indecision is an important part of the way rape culture works. It is one way that conversations about consent often over-simplify a process that is and should be much more complex. The song itself presents Bieber nagging the woman to whom he’s singing to make a decision about their relationship. But there are many elements suggesting that the decision she’s being asked to make is more immediate as well—not only about the larger relationship, but about a sexual interaction in the near future. Throughout the song, the click of a stopwatch can be heard as a beat against which Bieber presses the woman to make a decision while berating her for the mixed signals she has been sending him.

Bieber is presented as the “good guy” throughout the song by attempting to really decipher what the woman actually means. Indeed, this is another element of rape culture: the way in which we are encouraged to see average, everyday guys as “not-rapists,” because rapists are the bad guys who attack women from bushes (at worst) or simply get them drunk at a party (at best).*  The controversy over the ad in Bloomingdale’s recent 2015 holiday catalog urging readers to “spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking” shows that this kind of rape culture is also casually promoted in popular culture as well.  But, the larger discourse that Bieber’s song plays a role in promoting is the notion that women do not know what they mean or want. Bieber plays the role of someone simultaneously pressuring her for sexual advance (“Said we’re running out of time”), helping her work through her feelings (“What do you mean?”), and demanding results (“Better make up your mind”). And, like the Bloomingdale’s advertisement, this is not sexy.

Indeed, the music video (above) takes this a step further. Bieber is shown at the beginning paying John Leguizamo on a street corner and asking him to make sure “she doesn’t get hurt.” We later find out that John was paid to orchestrate a kidnapping of both Justin and the woman whom he meets in a hotel room. Both are taken by men in masks, driven to a warehouse in the trunk of a car, and tied up. Justin is able to free them, but they are still in a room with their kidnappers. They back up to a door that leads outside the building and see that they are one of the top floors. Justin turns to the woman, holds out his hand and asks, “Do you trust me?” She takes his hand and they both jump out of the building. They jump and fall to the ground, landing on a parachute pillow only to discover that the whole thing was a trick. The kidnapping was actually orchestrated ruse to bring her to a party that they entered by leaping from the building away from the men who’d taken them. The men in masks all reveal themselves to be smiling beneath. She smiles at Justin, recognizing that it was all a trick, grabs his face, kisses him and they dance the night away in the underground club.

Even though the song is about feeling like a woman really can’t make up her mind about Justin, their relationship, and sexual intimacy, the woman in the video is not depicted this way at all. She appears sexually interested in Justin from the moment the two meet in the video and not bothered by his questions and demands at all. Though it is worth mentioning that he is terrorizing her in the name of romance, indeed the terror itself is a sign of how much he loves her—also a part of rape culture. This visual display alongside the lyrics works in ways that obscure the content of the lyrics, content that works against much of what we are shown visually.

Part of what makes rape culture so insidious is that violence against women is rendered pleasurable and even desirable. Thicke and Bieber’s songs are catchy, fun, and beg to be danced to. The women in Thicke’s video also appear to be having fun strutting around nude while the men sing. The woman in Bieber’s video is being kidnapped and terrified for sport, sure, but it’s because he wants to show his love for her. She’s shown realizing and appreciating this at the conclusion of the video. Rape culture hides the ways that sexual violence is enacted upon women’s bodies every day. It obscures the ways that men work to minimize women’s control over their own bodies. It conceals the ways that sexual violence stems not just from dangerous, deviant others, but the normal everydayness of heterosexual interactions. And all of this works to make sexualized power arrangements more challenging to identify as problematic, which is precisely what makes confronting rape culture so challenging.

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*See C.J. Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander’s forthcoming work in Gender & Society—“Good Guys Don’t Rape: Gender, Domination, and Mobilizing Rape”—for more on what this discourse looks like and how it works.

10:15 a.m. Ten minutes before my first class of the semester. It was January and Connecticut was buried under several feet of snow. Damn. There was no point trying to run over to one of my friend’s offices to find an accomplice for my exercise. I’d never make it back in time. Who could I grab for this experiment so last minute? As I pulled out my phone to check the time, I mentally smacked myself on my head. Of course!

But I should back up a bit before I go on. Every year in my Introduction to Sociology class, I like to start the first class with an experiment. This is often an exercise that introduces my students to basic sociological concepts, such as norms, cultural values, roles, and legitimate authority (since all of these are very central to what I teach in my course). In the past, my experiments have included asking students to follow me around the building without explanation and then returning to the classroom and resuming the lesson; asking them to jump around the room; asking them to switch their seats in a given pattern (first two rows move to the last two rows, the middle rows switch left and right). But this year, I wanted to do something more. Something that was blatantly wrong. My original plan was to ask a faculty colleague of mine to stand outside the classroom with me and chat past the time that class was supposed to start. But now, just minutes before my class, my friend had told me she couldn’t make it. So here I was, considering my options. And now as the solution dawned on me while I stared at my phone, I muttered, “Who needs humans in the flesh when you have a phone at your disposal.” I went over the plan in my head. “Don’t give in in less than 10 minutes… you have to make it last.” I said to myself as I took a deep breath and walked into class.

From my position behind the podium, I watched the students shuffle in without greeting them. When they were all seated I announced, “This is Introduction to Sociology. Please put all cell phones away.” I then pulled out my own cell phone, walked behind the desk, sat down and started scrolling through my email on my phone. The students sat patiently. A couple of minutes went by and no one said a word. I was getting nervous at this point myself. I giggled as if I had read something funny. Clearly, it was not an emergency that was forcing me to stay on the phone. The students started to shift in their seats a little. I looked up and glanced around the room. They looked at each other. I went back to my phone.

Five minutes passed, although it seemed much longer. Not being one who uses her phone very much, I was really struggling to keep busy with my phone, plus I was nervous. I made a point to look at the clock. 10:32 a.m. Seven minutes had passed since the start of class. I heard a couple of students laugh uncomfortably but no one spoke to each other. I went back to my phone and pretended to scroll through news. “Just a few more minutes,” I thought to myself. “You need to go past the ten minute mark at least.”

At 10:37 a.m., exactly 12 minutes since class was supposed to start, I put my phone away, picked up the syllabus and started class as if nothing unusual had just transpired. After going through my office hours, assignments for the semester, policy on late assignments etc. I looked around and asked, “So, what questions do you have for me?” I encouraged them to deviate from the syllabus, “Ask me anything,” I prodded, “If appropriate, I’ll answer it.” They asked me all kinds of questions . . . but not the one I was waiting for. After a while, I looked around and said, “ Is there ANYTHING else you think you should ask me about?”

The students shook their heads.
At this point my experiment was complete and it was time to let them in on it.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Uncomfortable silence.
“No really, why are you here?”
“To learn”, a student in the front row said after a while.
“Then why didn’t you ask me to stop using my phone and teach?”
The students gave me range of obvious answers, from they don’t know what I would do in return, to they don’t want to question the professor.
“What if I told you, you are also here to un-learn?” I countered.
Uncomfortable laughter.

From here on, we had a lively discussion about the lessons learned and un-learned from this exercise. To briefly summarize:

1) The first lesson of this exercise is to understand that social norms – how we are expected to behave in a given situation—are always working on us whether we know it or not. For my students, it was their socialization in schools, the expectation that they do not question their teachers that encouraged them to not challenge my inappropriate behavior. Students could probably excuse a professor coming in late by a couple of minutes, or taking a couple of minutes to get themselves together. But I had made certain that the experiment lasted longer than ten minutes – an arbitrary choice by me, but one I felt made the experiment long enough to make the situation absurd and unreasonable.

2) This experiment also exposed the power of the “path of least resistance”, (as Allan Johnson discusses in his book, The Forest and the Trees) for my students: nobody else was questioning me, so why should they? It’s much easier to do what everyone else is doing in a given situation. This lesson is one of the most valuable one perhaps, especially as we cover the by-stander effect later on in the semester when discussing hazing in fraternities, or military abuse of prisoners for example.

3) Relatedly, it also revealed the nature of legitimate authority and obedience to authority: my students obeyed my instructions (putting cell phones away) and did not question my behavior, not because they knew who I was as an individual, but because of the authority vested in me by the title of “professor”. In our society, we see professors and teachers as generally moral, intelligent, and ethical. The authority of a professor is further emphasized by the physical structure of the classroom with the professor at the front of the room, and by the “material culture” of a classroom: desk, podium, chalkboard, and smart-board for professors. The students on the other hand, sit in chairs, physically looking up to the professor.

These are all sociological lessons that my students learn on the first day through this experiment. But implicit in this experiment is the hope that they will “un-learn” some of the behavior that they’ve been socialized into, whether it’s being a passive student or a passive by-stander. It is only through learning about and critically analyzing our social world that we are actually able to “un-learn” or challenge the many lessons we’ve been taught.

As a critical, feminist sociologist, that is the most important lesson that I can teach my students—sociology is not a collection of facts and theories, it is a perspective, a way of seeing. And as the writer Arundhati Roy says “once you see, you can’t unsee.” To this I would add: truly seeing, that is, seeing the world through a sociological lens, is the first step towards unlearning. Welcome to Introduction to Sociology.

Works Cited:

Johnson, Allan. 2014. The Forest and the Trees. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Roy, Arundhati. 2001. “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?” In Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

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Afshan Jafar  is in the sociology department at Connecticut College. She studies globalization, gender, and the body.