Kelsey C., a master’s student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, sent in this image from Calculated Risk showing the percent of jobs lost in each recession since 1948, relative to the peak of the pre-recession job market. In terms of the percent of jobs lost, the current recession is by far the worst we’ve seen since World War II:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a detailed report on employment (or the lack thereof) as of October 2010 available — including information on length of unemployment, numbers working part-time because they can’t find full-time work, labor force participation broken down by race/ethnicity, sex, and educational attainment, Veteran status, disability status, and more!

Prolific sender-inner Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to a story at Slate showing increases in rates of U.S. adults of diabetes between 2004 and 2008, as well as the distinct regional variations. You can look at maps individually or watch a time-lapse slide show.

Percent of adults diagnosed with diabetes in 2004:

2008:

The change is pretty dramatic for such a short time period. I presume differences in poverty rates, access to health care, and nutritional differences all play a part. Any demographers or public health scholars out there with insights?

The CDCP has the data available for download, and you can play around with different maps (# of adults instead of % and so on).

UPDATE: Reader Arielle says,

Please clarify the type of diabetes this graph is discussing (I assume it’s Type 2). As it stands, you’re perpetuating two myths: one, that all types of diabetes are affected by “poverty rates, access to health care, and nutritional differences” (Type 1 is an autoimmune disease and has nothing to do with lifestyle), and two, that only children are diagnosed with (or have) Type 1 diabetes.

Here’s a problem: neither the CDCP nor the Salon Slate article specify. They say “adult diabetes,” meaning individuals over the age of 18 who are diagnosed with diabetes (so not necessarily adult onset diabetes). I think that would mean either Type 1 or Type 2. But I’d take the data with a little caution since the source doesn’t make that absolutely clear.

UPDATE 2: Chris points out an important element of what might be going on here:

More significantly one of the comments on Slate (not Salon) said that the diagnostic standard for diabetes recently dropped from 140 to 124.  That’s going to add a LOT of people to the second map if the transition occurred between 2004 and 2008.

That would make a lot of sense, because quite honestly, I just couldn’t figure out how the overall numbers had increased so rapidly in just 4 years. This is a great example of the social construction of health and disease: we are constantly defining and redefining what does and doesn’t count as unhealthy, which can dramatically affect statistics on the topic without there necessarily being a large change in the overall state of the population.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (via Family Inequality) reveals that boys report less sex education than girls.

What teenagers report learning from school:

What teenagers report learning from their parents:

Compared to boys, then, girls report more guidance from school and significantly more from their parents. This probably reflects cultural ideas that boys naturally desire sex, have a positive sense of their own sexuality, and that nothing really bad can happen to them; in contrast, the risk that sex poses to girls’ reputations and the possibility of sexual violence and pregnancy often shape how educators and parents manage their emerging sexualities.

Or it might be an artifact of self-reporting.  Thoughts?

See also our popular post on STI, pregnancy, and abortion rates in the U.S. versus select European countries (hint: the U.S. doesn’t come out smelling like roses).

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.

Jose Marichal at Thick Culture put up another great example of what he calls “engaged public space,” or the quiet but political use of public spaces to inform and incite.  Writes Marichal:

This tally of military suicides is outside the studio of Brooklyn artist Sebastian Errasuriz. Its power comes from its simplicity.

See also our post on political (versus historical) roadside markers.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a video where Hans Rosling illustrates changes in wealth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the past 200 years, all in four minutes. Pretty neat!

After Gwen posted her fascinating discussion of the way that people who are reliant on public transportation are inconvenienced or isolated (based on photos sent in by Lynne Shapiro), David F. sent a link to an article in The Columbus Dispatch about the public transportation in downtown Columbus.   Downtown developers, it reports, oppose a plan by the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) to build a transfer station.  The reporter writes:

Downtown developers have complained that COTA passengers waiting for transfers near Broad and High streets, and buses lining the curbs make the area less attractive for retail stores and their customers.

Translation: no one wants to see buses and the people who ride them.

Because, you see, when the buses stop there, those kind of people are there waiting for the bus:

(Image at Google)

One of these developers, Cleve Ricksecker, explains:

Transit-dependent riders who are going through Downtown, for whatever reason, don’t shop… Large numbers of people waiting for a transfer can be intimidating for someone walking down the sidewalk.

Translation: People who buy things want to be protected from knowing about and interacting with people who are too poor to buy things.

Much better to make life more difficult for people who ride the bus.

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 Ms. and Jezebel.

Bug lovers will recall that the female praying mantis cannibalizes the head of her sexual partner upon mating. Wrote Leland Ossian Howard in Science (1886):

Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavoured to escape. In a few minutes the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his front tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur.  Next she gnawed out his left eye… it seems to be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner.

The idea that the female mantis is a femme fatale has resonated in U.S. culture, a culture that loves to recount how human women kill the spirits of their male mates; a culture that, as Twisty Faster puts it, “…will unfairly characterize females as villains whenever possible.”

Well, it turns out that our perfect icon of the man-killer was partly an artifact of bad research design.  Faster, who blogs at I Blame the Patriarchy, reports that the study that established that female mantises decapitate their mates used starving females.  A new study has documented an entirely different mating ritual:

Out of thirty matings, we didn’t record one instance of cannibalism, and instead we saw an elaborate courtship display, with both sexes performing a ritual dance, stroking each other with their antennae before finally mating. It really was a lovely display.

Well, except:

There is one species…. the Mantis religiosa, in which it is necessary that the head be removed for the mating to take effect properly.  [In general, though, s]exual cannibalism occurs most often if the female is hungry. But eating the head does causes the body to ejaculate faster.

One species, okay, but there are over 2,000 species of praying mantis.  (You learn something every day.)  In any case, everyone loves a good bad-woman story and I suppose that one was just too good to pass up.

I have to admit, though, they are still bad motherf—ers.  This mantis boxed my cat into a corner:

Also in projecting human relations onto animals: winners and losers of flatworm sex.

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.

Last month, Lisa posted a video of Devah Pager discussing her research on the effects of race and a criminal background, and the likelihood of being offered a job. Her experiment indicated that White men with a non-violent drug offense on their record were more likely to get a call back for a job interview than African American men with no criminal background at all.

A post at Discover magazine indicates a similar situation for Muslims in France. Researcher Claire Adida looked at the effects of having a name identified as Muslim on job prospects:

Adida did it by focusing on France’s Senegalese community, which includes a mix of both Muslims and Christians…Adida created three imaginary CVs. All were single, 24-year-old women, with two years of higher education and three years of experience in secretarial or accounting jobs. Only their names, and small details about past employers, differed.

The three chosen names were Khadija Diouf (an easily-recognizable Muslim first name, while Diouf is well-known as a common last name in France’s Senegalese community), Marie Diouf (to represent a Christian Senegalese name), and Aurélie Ménard (a common French name with no particular religious associations). To highlight the religious differences, “Khadija” had worked at Secours Islamique, a non-profit, “Marie” had worked for Secours Catholique, another religious non-profit, and “Aurélie” hadn’t worked for any religious-affiliated employers.

The fictional CVs were then sent out to employers who listed secretarial and accounting jobs with a national employment agency in the spring of 2009; the jobs were matched in pairs based on industry characteristics, size of the employing company, and the specific position. Every position was sent a copy of the CV for Aurélie; for each matched pair of jobs, one got Khadija’s CV while one got Marie’s.

The results are striking. Aurélie got the most responses of all three. However, Marie Diouf also got responses from 21% of the employers the CV was sent to. The nearly identical CV, however, when used with the name Khadija Diouf, got responses from only 8% of potential jobs:

The Discover post adds, “Even after Adida included a photo on the applications (the same one, showing a woman who was clearly not North African), she found the same bias.”

Aurélie’s chances of getting a call back were basically identical for each employer in the matched pairs, which would seem to indicate there weren’t glaring differences between the positions themselves that would account for the variation in responses. Adida’s research also helps control for the possibility that employers might be discriminating based on race/ethnicity, immigrant status, concerns about language, or other factors, by focusing on religious-associated names within a particularly recognizable ethnic group.

A recent survey of Senegalese households in France further indicates that religion affects life chances independent of ethnic background. The survey looked at the income of two Senegalese groups, one Muslim, one Christian:

Both groups arrived in France in the 1970s, so neither enjoyed an economic headstart, although the Christians were slightly better educated. The survey’s data revealed that the Muslim households were significantly poorer than their Christian counterparts, even after adjusting for their initial educational advantage. They’re more likely to fall into poorer income groups and they make around 400 Euros less per month, around 15% of the average monthly salary in France.

Here’s the income distribution, clearly showing Muslim households concentrated at lower incomes than Christian households:

Interestingly, the Discover post suggests this might, if anything, underestimate anti-Muslim bias in the job market, because the Senegalese community is relatively assimilated (particularly in terms of language) and not highly identified with Islam. Muslims from ethnic groups more strongly linked to Islam by the general public may face even higher levels of discrimination.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.