While the news often discusses the proportion of the population that is unemployed, sociologists also talk about the working poor (people with full time jobs, but who are paid so little that they remain below the poverty line) and the underemployed (e.g., people who have part-time jobs, but wish they were full-time).

The New York Times recently put together a graphic illustrating the rise of underemployment due to the recession. Overall, the number of people who are working part-time involuntarily has risen.  In the related article, reporter Steven Greenhouse quotes a retail consultant explaining: “Over the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full-time to at least 70 percent part-time across the industry.”  Underemployment has risen in some economic sectors more than others, notably leisure/hospitality and wholesale/retail:

Among other employers, Greenhouse profiles a Fresh & Easy store in San Diego. Employed there are 5 full-time managers and 17 part-time workers.  Shannon Hardin, who has worked there for five years, averages 28 hours a week and earns $10.90 an hour.

Workers like Hardin often get very short shifts (designed to increase the number of employees in the store only during rush times), irregular schedules (making it difficult to arrange childcare), and last minute requests to work.  Being inflexible can get an employee fired.

This is why employers like part-timers; from the company’s perspective, they’re cheap and flexible:

From the employee’s perspective, of course, it means a meager existence, an uncertain future, and a life led at the whims of a company’s bottom line.

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.

…voting rights still excluded certain groups?

Buzzfeed has put together a great collection of U.S. maps showing what last Tuesday’s election would have looked like if women, non-whites, and 18- to 23-year-olds had never been given the vote.

Actual results:

Results with just white men:

Results with only men, all races:

Results with only white people, men and women:

Results excluding people 18- to 23-years-old:

The results are stunning and are a hint of just how consequential the ongoing voter suppression and disenfranchisement can be.

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.

Wanna get clear on the relationship between sex, gender identity, sexual and romantic orientation, sexual behavior, and gender role?  Watch this video by the Vlog Brothers, sent in by Jeffrey B.:

UPDATE: Comments closed.

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.

I’ve posted more than once, and gleefully, about the weird American habit we have of associating dogs with men and cats with women.

Well, Adrienne H. sent in a particularly humorous example: an advertising image from Pajamagram, featuring “hoodie-footies” for the entire family.  They are color-coded — pink for girls, blue for boys — all the way down to the dog and cat.

So, there you have it; I’m not crazy after all.

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 spring I posted a map of the legal status of same-sex marriage in the U.S. Given the results of the election, it’s time to update that map.

Greg Stoll posted an interactive map that lets you look at changes in in statutes regarding same-sex marriage from 1990 to now. On Tuesday, voters in Maine and Maryland approved referendums legalizing same-sex marriage, reaffirmed marriage equality in Washington, and defeated an effort to put a ban on same-sex marriages in the Minnesota constitution. That makes this this first time same-sex marriage was legalized by voters, rather than a legislature or the courts. (NOTE: As a reader pointed out, there’s an error in the map; Maryland should be colored blue now.)

Here’s the current map, with blue states having full marriage equality and red states banning both same-sex marriage as well as civil unions in their constitutions:

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

A while back, David Dismore posted about his archive of suffragist postcards, which appeared in the early 1900s as part of the campaign for women’s right to vote. The postcards got the messages of the movement across in short, clear, and often humorous ways.

Those opposed to women’s suffrage also used postcards to get their message out to the public. The Palczewski Postcard Archive at the University of Northern Iowa, sent to us by Katrin, has a number of great examples that illustrate the frames used to present women’s full political participation as threatening.

For instance, a 12-card series produced by Dunston-Weiler Lithographic Company presented suffrage as upending the gender order by masculinizing women and feminizing men. Suffragists, the postcards tell us, cause women to abandon their household duties and become aggressive and unladylike:

In an effort to win her own rights, then, women make their families suffer — a message complete with visuals that don’t seem out of place among stock images of crying babies and their working mothers today, as Katrin pointed out:

Equality in voting rights is clearly presented as female domination:

Postcards issued by other groups reflect these same themes. The clear message is that giving women the right to vote threatens men, the family, and the entire natural order of things:

The archive has a bunch more examples, categorized by various themes — including Cats and Suffrage, because lolcats are timeless.

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

About a gazillion twitterers and three readers — Andi, Ria, and Jenna B. — have asked us to comment on the new Honda Fit She’s begin marketed in Japan. It’s a car. For ladies. It’s pink.  It reduces wrinkles. The apostrophe in the logo is a little heart. Etc.

My only response to this is: “how very la femme!”  Dodge La Femme that is.

The Dodge La Femme  was sold for two years in the U.S. — 1955 and 1956 — and could be considered a fore mother to the She’s.  We originally posted about it in 2007.

Here is some of the advertising:

Pictures of a restored La Femme from a fan website show that the car was indeed two-tone pink, with pink rosebud patterned upholstery, and a matching umbrella, raincoat, a compact, and coin purse.

One of the reasons that the La Femme didn’t sell was because women were, frankly, offended.  Gender politics are different today, and they’re certainly different in Japan than they are in the U.S., so it’ll be fascinating to see how the She’s is received.

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 Reports from the Economic Front.

The good economic news, which got plenty of attention, is that the U.S. economy added over 170,000 new jobs in October.  The largely unreported negative news is that average real hourly wages in the private sector declined that month, and have been in decline for most of the past year.

It is hard to remember that the economy has been in expansion since June 2009.

Jeffrey Sparshott, in a Wall Street Journal blog post, offered the following chart of the trend in hourly earnings in private industry, with each point showing the change from a year earlier.

Citing a Labor Department report, Sparshott noted that:

…hours worked were flat [in October] for the fourth straight month. Meanwhile, average hourly earnings for all employees on private payrolls fell by 1 cent to $23.58 in October. Over the past 12 months, earnings have risen a scant 1.6%. That’s not enough to keep up with inflation. The consumer price index was up 2% in September from a year earlier.

It’s even worse for blue-collar workers. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees edged down by 1 cent to $19.79, only a 1.1% increase over the past year.

The blog post quoted the HSBC’s chief U.S. economist who said:

This is the smallest increase in wages on record for the data going back to 1964. The persistently high level of unemployment over the past few years is clearly restraining wage gains and suppressing any inflationary pressures that might have possibly emanated from the labor market.

It also quoted the chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan Chase who said:

This pace of labor income growth may be quite acceptable for corporate profits, but it does pose headwinds for consumer spending growth.

Consumer spending did rise last quarter, helping to boost third quarter U.S. GDP, but this was largely because of a decline in the personal savings rate, which fell from 4.0% in the second quarter to 3.7% in the third.

We clearly don’t have a foundation for a sustained economic recovery, certainly not one that brings benefits to the majority of workers.  Instead of talk about austerity we need a real debate about the best way to strength worker bargaining power.

—————————

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of Economics and Director of the Political Economy Program at Lewis and Clark College.  You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.