Archive: Sep 2012

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

The New York Times ran these graphics showing the word frequencies of the Republican and Democratic conventions.  I’ve added underlining on the keywords that seem to differentiate the two conventions. (The data on the Democrats runs only through Sept. 4, but it looks like the themes announced early on will be the ones that are repeated.)

The Republican dictionary falls open to the page with Business – ten times as many mentions as in the Democrats’ concordance.  If you go to the interactive Times graphic, you can click on Business and see examples of the contexts for the word.  Many of these excerpts also contain the word Success.

You can put the large-bubble words in each graphic in a sentence that condenses the party’s message about government, though that word – Government – does not appear in either graphic.   For the Republicans, government should lower Taxes so that Business can Succeed, creating Jobs.

For the Democrats, government should protect the rights of Women and ensure that everyone has access to Health and Education.

Perhaps the most telling most interesting word in the Democratic cloud is Together.  The Republican story is one of individual success in business, summed up in their repeated phrase, “I built that.”  The Democrats apparently are emphasizing what people can accomplish together.  These different visions are not new.  They go back at least to the nineteenth century.  (Six years ago, I blogged here about these visions as NFL brands — Cowboys and Steelers — and their parallels in US politics.)

(HT: Neal Caren who has posted his own data about the different balance of emotional expression at the two conventions.)

This week on PostSecret I stumbled across the following confession: 

The idea that certain beliefs about college may not be true reminded me of the concept of pluralistic ignorance.  The phrase refers to a phenomenon in which a large proportion of a population misunderstands reality.

For example, while many college students think that lots of people hook up a lot, 80% of college students hook up less than once a semester, on average.  About 40% of those hook ups involve intercourse, while a strong third just involve getting horizontal and making out.  Students, for what it’s worth, also tend to consistently overestimate how much drugs and alcohol other students are consuming.

So, while “everyone thinks” that “everyone has fun during their freshman year.”  In fact, the person who wrote this confession may be a lot less alone than s/he thinks, even if most people think that everyone does, in fact, have fun.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Earlier this month, Lisa posted about the objectification of female beach volleyball players at the Olympics, discussing the types of photos and poses that are used when reporting on different types of sports, including gendered differences.

Autumn B. sent in another over-the-top example of the objectification of female athletes. The commercial is for RoadID, a company that sells “identification gear.” Autumn saw it while watching the Tour de France; she found this shortened version online, which she says actually features less objectification than the original did.

The main focus of the ad is a slow investigation of various aspects of cyclist Jenny Fletcher’s body. The camera travels slowly up her leg, then shows her full profile before zooming in on her breasts as she zips up her shirt:

Jenny Fletcher has no dialogue. She exists as a body to be broken down into eroticized parts for the consumption of the viewer. As Autumn put it, it’s frustrating that, a fan of the “the male-centric Tour de France,” that “when they do FINALLY feature a female cyclist, it is as a sexual object.”

For other posts on this topic, see Serena Williams’ patriarchal bargain, Sports Illustrated covers, feminizing female athletes, Serena Williams in ESPN magazine, and media portrayals of female athletes.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

As I speculated years ago (here and here), it may be hard for Americans to imagine a world where the law guarantees them at least 20 paid vacation days per year.  But such a world exists.  It’s called Europe.*

Americans are the lucky ones.  As Mitt Romney has warned us “European-style benefits” would   “poison the very spirit of America.”  Niall Ferguson, who weighs in frequently on history and economics, contrasts America’s “Protestant work ethic” with what you find in Europe – an “atheist sloth ethic.”

The graph is a bit misleading. It shows only what the law requires of employers.  Americans do get vacations.  But here in America, how much vacation you get, or whether you get any at all, and whether it’s paid – that all depends on what you can negotiate with your employer.

Since American vacations depend on what the boss will grant, some people get more paid vacation, some get less, and some get none.  So it might be useful to ask which sectors of our economy are beehives of the work ethic and which are sloughs of sloth.  (Ferguson’s employer, for example, Harvard University, probably gives him three months off in the summer, plus a week or two or more in the winter between semesters, plus spring break, and maybe a few other days.  I wonder how he would react if Harvard did away with these sloth-inducing policies.)

The Wall Street Journal recently (here) published a graph of BLS data on access to paid vacations; they break it up by industry near the bottom.

Those people who are cleaning your hotel room and serving your meals while you’re on vacation — only about one in four can get any paid vacation days.  And at the other end, which economic sector is most indulgent of sloth among its workforce?  Wall Street.  Four out of five there get paid vacation.

How much paid vacation do we get?  That depends on sector, but it also depends on length of service.  As the Journal says,

Europeans also get more time off: usually a bare minimum of four weeks off a year. Most Americans have to stay in a job for 20 years to get that much, according to BLS data.

—————————

* The graph is from five years ago, but I doubt things have changed much. The US still has no federal or state laws requiring any paid vacation days.

Most people assume that the various benefits we collectively describe as “welfare” go to people who aren’t working.  The truth is, however, that some people with full-time jobs still find themselves below the poverty line.  The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.  A full-time employee who doesn’t miss a single day of work for a year earns $290 a week; that’s 15,080 a year.  According to how the government measures poverty, that’s enough to support a single adult.  For a single adult with a child, however, it’s officially below the poverty line. It’s $4,000 below the poverty line for a family of three.  When a person has a full-time job, but still lives in poverty, they are what sociologists call the “working poor.”

Some welfare benefits, then, go to people who do work.  The  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, is an example.  Working parents have always comprised a large percentage of people receiving food stamps.  Today the number of working families who rely on food stamps is higher than it’s been in over 20 years (source).  These numbers reflect the impact of the recession generally, but also the extra-burden placed on already struggling families.  The first chart shows the rise of poor families, the second shows the increase in the working poor using food stamps.

This kind of data inspires me to ask if this is what a functional economy looks like.  We have policies — e.g., the federal minimum wage and somewhat laissez faire free market policies — that create a situation in which working full time doesn’t allow a single parent to support even one child.  When we hear criticisms of people who receive benefits, then, we should be careful to remember that their economic crisis is not a straightforwardly personal characteristic, one that can be explained by a poor work ethic or disorderly personality. There are structural reasons that people end up in need.  We have three choices: let them suffer and perhaps die, help them, or change our society.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. Though many think of it mostly as a last long weekend for recreation and shopping before the symbolic end of summer, the federal holiday, officially established in 1894, celebrates the contributions of labor.

Here are some Soc Images posts on a range of issues related to workers, from the history of the labor movement to current workplace conditions to the impacts of the changing economy on workers’ pay:

• What have unions ever done for us?
• Footage of strikes and protests
• “Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?”
• Target’s anti-union video for new employees
• Unemployment and support for unions
• Child labor, 1908-1912
• Mike Rowe defends blue-collar manual labor
• Jon Stewart on class warfare
• César Chávez and the fight for farmworkers’ rights (pictured)
• Hiring non-union workers to staff picket lines
• “A woman’s place is in her union!”
• Historical look at changes in types of work
• The “precariat”: The new working class
• The exploitation of worker productivity
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• Can the minimum wage cover average housing costs?
• First-time mothers and access to paid work leave
• International comparison of workplace leave policies
• Discrimination against the long-term unemployed
• What kinds of jobs are we gaining in the slow recovery?
• Devaluing hospitality workers

Elisabeth R. sent in a commercial that, I admit, I kinda like.   As the ad progresses, a Mustang driven through urban streets gets a new paint job as a diverse group of people project their personalities onto the car.  At the very end a little girl holding the hand of her father, wearing a pink ballerina get-up, spies the car.  The car turns pink and then goes black.  As it drives by her, she’s reflected in the mirror as a bad-ass black angel pictured above.

What I like about the commercial isn’t the fact that they portray the girl as resisting girliness.  Suggesting that girls who are less girly are better than those who aren’t is just another form of sexism, one that demeans femininity.  Likewise, the characters are diverse, but that’s par for the course these days, especially when an item is being marketed as urban and modern.

What I like, instead, is just the fact that the ad has an ounce of creativity, that it ends with a twist.  Advertising is so stereotypical today and relies so strongly on tropes, that I find it exhausting to watch.  So, while the twist wasn’t totally subversive, I was relieved that the marketing team for Mustang did something interesting.  Really, at this point my standards for not-horrible are pretty low.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

About two weeks ago, Chris Hayes said, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”

The case, it turns out, is very deniable.  Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution denied it with data from the 2002 and 2008 General Social Survey (GSS).  He looked at three questions…

• Favor laws against interracial marriage
• Would vote for a Black for president
• Blacks should not be pushy

…and concludes:

It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties.

Hayes then tweeted a retraction.

End of story?

To begin with, the sample sizes Tabarrok uses are small.  In the 2002 GSS, only 87 respondents went on record against interracial marriage, and in 2008, only 80 said they wouldn’t vote for a Black for president.  (All the tables and graphs presented here and in Tabarrok’s post are based on Whites only.)

Only about 5% of the sample takes the racist response to these items.  But I would run the table differently.  Instead of asking what percent of each party is racist, I would ask where do those few racists go.

The differences are small, but the edge goes to the Republicans.

Second, there is a difference between party identification and political ideology.  If you ask not about party but about political views, the differences become sharper.

The GSS has other questions that might stand as a proxy for racism.  For example:

On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?

Again, the differences are small, with White Republicans slightly more likely (50% vs. 45%) to say Blacks’ economic problems are caused by lack of motivation and will power.  And again, the differences are larger when the independent variable is political ideology rather than party identification.

In that same GSS question about the cause of Black economic troubles, another choice is:

Do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination?

The differences for both Party ID and Political views are clear.  White Democrats and liberals are much more likely to see discrimination as a major cause.

But is this racist?  Not necessarily.  It might well be part of a general view of the causes of human behavior, one that emphasizes personal factors (ability, motivation, etc.) and downplays structural forces the individual has little power over (discrimination).   Conservatives might use that same  explanation for unemployment and low income among Whites as well.  But I do not know of any GSS questions about the causes of White economic problems.  (Perhaps these exist, but I am not a GSS expert.)

We do know that racists (those who say they would not vote for a Black president) are more likely to take the conservative position on the “Willpower” explanation (76% vs. 50%) and on the Discrimination explanation (78% vs. 64%) compared with those who say yes, they would vote for a Black president.  But that does not mean that the other conservatives who agree with them and who deny that racial discrimination affects the lives of Black people are also racists. People can come to the same position from different places.  But people can also hide their racism behind seemingly non-racial issues.  In the 1960s ,70s, and 80s, many observers thought that the Republicans were using first school busing and then crime as a proxy for race, as Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously explained.  And some observers today (Tom Edsall, for example) argue that the Republicans are using welfare in the same way this time around.

Other bloggers have written about the questions Hayes raised — Tabarrok has links to three of these.  The most interesting I’ve come across is Will Wilkinson’s (here).  His original views apparently were individual-centered and much in line with Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing as society.”  But that was “when I was a Rand-toting libertarian lad.”

He has now come to see that individuals, with their ideas and attitudes and “non-coercive” behavior, can add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, i.e, society.  But he got to this idea by walking down the left fork of the libertarian road – the road not to serfdom but to sociology.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design.