Today is Administrative Assistant’s Day! Enjoy our really fabulous post from last year in which we recount Ann Swidler’s observations about “Secretary’s Day” and Social Control.
Abortion is highly politicized in the U.S. (more so than in many other countries) and the fight between those who are in favor of and against available abortion occurs on two fronts. One is familiar to just about everyone: the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legislation Supreme Court decision that established the legality of abortion in 1973.
The second front, though, is less familiar. It involves reducing the ease of access to legal abortion. Efforts to increase barriers to accessing legal abortion include passing laws that require minors to notify their parents of an abortion or get their consent, requiring mandatory counseling for abortion-seekers, instituting waiting periods, and discouraging medical schools from teaching abortion procedures. Some of the issues of diminishing access are non-movement related; others are the direct result of pro-life activism.
I bring this up in order to focus on an additional barrier to access: a reduction in the number of clinics and hospitals that provide abortions. The map below, based on data from the Guttmacher Institute and compiled by ANSIRH, shows how availability varies by state. In the darkest states, up to 20% of women live in a county with no abortion provider; in the lightest states, between 81 and 100% percent do.
Living far from the nearest abortion provider is a problem especially for low-income women. Such women are less likely to have an employer who will give her a day off to travel to the clinic, less likely to get a paid sick day, and less likely to be able to afford to lose even a single day’s wages. She is also less likely to have a car, making it more difficult to get to a distant location, and less likely to have reliable day care for any existing children. If the state requires in-person counseling and has a waiting period, it means that the woman must take two days off, travel to and from the clinic twice, and arrange for child care on multiple days.
Reduction in the availability of abortion does not necessarily reduce the number of abortions. We recently posted global data showing that less liberal abortion laws actually correlate with higher rates of abortion. The data below, also from Guttmacher, show that were abortion laws are less liberal (largely in developing countries), the rate of abortion is 34/1,000 women oer year, compared to 39/1,000 in developed countries (the difference may look significant here, but imagine how trivial it would look if the horizontal axis went all the way to it’s true maximum of 1,000):
Guttmacher explains that the relevant variable isn’t availability of abortion, but the unintended pregnancy rate (which is surprisingly high in the U.S.).
Barriers to accessing abortion, then, don’t lower the abortion rate. They do, however, increase the likelihood that an abortion procedure will occur later in pregnancy and guarantee a greater logistic burden on the pregnant woman.
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.
The Pew Hispanic Center has released a new report on trends in migration from Mexico. For the first time in 40 years, immigration from Mexico has slowed:
This is a notable change, as Mexican immigration has been the single largest immigrant flow to the U.S. form a single country, in overall numbers (though in the late 1800s, German and Irish immigrants made up a larger percent of all immigrants annually than Mexicans make up today). The report attributes this change to a range of factors, from changing economic conditions in Mexico, the recession’s effects on the U.S. economy, border enforcement, and the dangers of border crossings.
Indeed, we may now be seeing more people moving from the U.S. to Mexico than vice versa:
The change is due primarily to a drop in undocumented immigration, which peaked around 2007 and has dropped off significantly since:
There’s a lot more information available on changes in border enforcement and socio-economic changes in Mexico, so check out the full report.
This four-minute video reports research showing that, even if we’re not aware of it, most of us have unconscious biases against short men. (It’s also a great description of Implicit Association Tests.)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRlWvzUznlw[/youtube]
You, too, can take any multitude of implicit association tests. Simply go to Harvard’s Project Implicit.
Borrowed from The Social Complex, a heightism blog. See also guest posts from The Social Complex introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.
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.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve collected a number of awesome examples of kids illustrating socialization into particular types of interaction or performance. We had the toddlers expertly mimicking the cadences of a conversation; we had a 2-year-old rapping; there was the baby worshipper; and finally, the baby preacher, who has the gestures and rhythms of a certain type of preaching down pat.
Thanks to Stephanie V., now we’ve got another example. This 4-year-old has not only figured out how to rap using different cadences and tones, he accompanies himself on a keyboard and drum machine, and has a pretty excellent grasp of song construction. Enjoy!
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDtgyGwvUus[/youtube]
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
@Thom82 tweeted a photograph of a parking space at Ikea. By “family friendly,” I assume they mean people with kids. By coupling the phrase with the image, however, it defines the family as a heterosexual, nuclear one with 2.0 children. People without kids? Not a family. Single people with kids? Not a family. Best friends who support each other? Not a family. Sorry 80% of people in the U.S. who aren’t married with kids, you’re not a family.
But seriously. It’s not a big deal, all things considered. But, when you add it to all the other little reminders, it leaves little doubt as to whose families really count.
Apropo of tax time, see also Turbo Tax Maps Out My Conventional Future, and these humorous take down of the idea of “traditional” marriage.
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 year we posted Anita Sarkeesian’s great discussion of the manic pixie dream girl trope. The manic pixie is a female side character who, through her whimsical approach to life, “helps the male main character find himself, love life again, or overcome some obstacle.” Think Natalie Portman in Garden State.
Anyhow, I came across a skit making fun of the trope by taking the manic pixie to its logical conclusion, titled “Welcome to the State Home for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” Yep, it’s a state-run institution for the charming but totally helpless, perhaps-mentally-challenged not-so-dream girl. I’m putting it up here because it’s quite funny, but I also like how it deconstructs a version of ideal femininity, revealing it to be rather impractical indeed.
Film by Natural Disastronauts. Found via BoingBoing.
Transcript, by Trellany J. Evans, after the jump:
Cross-posted at Work That Matters.
Barbie is running for President of The United States of America… again. She even has a campaign Tumblr. But what is her platform?
Okay, so she’s not taking any strong stands on the GOP’s War on Women’s reproductive rights. But she did come up with a totally awesome nickname for her campaign (“Glam-paign”).
Apparently, however, candidate Barbie will do something no other candidate can: she will bridge the racial divide in America by morphing herself into four different ethnicities!
Yes, I get that this is a toy. And the Miss-America-style platitudes are to be expected from a company that wants to sell to both sides of the political divide. But it’s a shame that girls don’t get a chance to see that women really can change the world.
This week, Malawi swore in Southern Africa’s first female head of state. She wasn’t elected as such, but as Vice President took the position after President Bingu wa Mutharika died in office. (A scenario that could have happened with Sarah Palin, had John McCain won the Presidency.)
Other women currently heading countries are:
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: President of Liberia
- Doris Leuthard, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, Simonetta Sommaruga: Members of the Swiss Federal Council, Switzerland
- Pratibha Patil: President of India
- Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: President of Argentina
- Dalia Grybauskaitė: President of Lithuania
- Laura Chinchilla: President of Costa Rica
- Dilma Rousseff: President of Brazil
- Atifete Jahjaga: President of Kosovo
- Monique Ohsan Bellepeau: Acting President of Mauritius
- Slavica Đukić Dejanović: Acting President of Serbia
- Angela Merkel – Chancellor of Germany
- Julia Gillard – PM of Australia
- Yingluck Shinawatra – PM of Thailand
- Helle Thorning-Schmidt – PM of Denmark
- Portia Simpson-Miller – PM of Jamaica
- Kamla Persad-Bissessar – PM of Trinidad and Tobago
- Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir – PM of Iceland (Appointed)
- Hasina Wazed – PM of Bangladesh
The United States has yet to elect a woman to the position. And while Canada has had two appointed female Vice-Regents, we have yet to elect a woman to the Prime Minister’s Office. (Kim Campbell was nominated for the position directly by her party.)
So perhaps it’s time for Barbie, who has been in every federal election since 1992, to campaign a little harder. Or for North American countries to catch up with the rest of the world and nominate and elect a woman of substance who isn’t seen as just “another Barbie.”
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Tom Megginson is a Creative Director at Acart Communications, a Social Issues Marketing agency based in Ottawa, Canada. Tom writes regularly about creative advertising and marketing ethics for the international social advertising blog, Osocio, as well as on his own, Work That Matters.