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Recently, Elizabeth Warren — Harvard Law professor and Massachusetts Senate candidate — was filmed discussing arguments that efforts to raise taxes on extremely high income earners is “class warfare,” an increasingly common refrain. She responds to this line of argument by questioning the individualist narrative of wealth — that is, that people who are rich did it all on their own, and thus owe nothing to society. As she points out, taxpayer-funded infrastructure and services — from highways to law enforcement to widely-available education — are essential elements of such financial success stories. But current discourse about wealth and taxes obscures the social nature of wealth creation, portraying taxation as unfair taking rather than a fair return on the public’s investment:

Transcript after the jump.

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The following chart featured at The Economist illustrates that women in Europe expect to earn significantly less than men after graduating from university. (Of course, women’s expectations are represented in pink, and men’s in blue.) According to the study, European women attending the most prestigious universities expect to earn an average of 21 per cent less than their male counterparts.

Given that women actually do earn an average of 17.5 per cent less than men in the European Union, this difference in salary expectations might not seem shocking. What’s interesting, though, is the accompanying text that attempts to explain these disparities:

Women and men seem to differ in workplace and career aspirations, which may explain why salary expectations differ.  Men generally placed more importance on being a leader or manager than women (34% of men versus 22% of women), and want jobs with high levels of responsibility (25% v 17%). Women, however want to work for a company with high corporate social responsibility and ethical standards; men are more interested in prestige (31% v 24%).

By neglecting to address how our social environment can contribute to reported differences in career aspirations, statements like these risk reinforcing gender stereotypes and naturalizing salary inequalities. Can we really assume that gendered salary disparities are due to women’s innately lower inclination to pursue high-paying career paths?

Research says: no, we can’t. As Cordelia Fine writes in her book Delusions of Gender, countless studies have demonstrated that social factors such as prevalent beliefs about gender differences and male-dominated work environments influence women’s responses to questions about their abilities and aspirations. For example, women exposed to media articles claiming that successful careers in entrepreneurship require typically “masculine” qualities were less likely to report an interest in becoming entrepreneurs. Women who knew that the test they were taking was measuring gender differences were more likely to report being highly empathic. Women were less interested in attending an engineers’ conference when it was advertised as male-dominated rather than gender-balanced.

Our perceptions of our abilities, identities, and sense of belonging are influenced by our social environment. If, as this graph shows, women attending the most prestigious universities in Europe aspire to different career paths than men, this fact can’t be taken for granted; addressing this inequality requires an analysis of its own.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for sending in this graph!

Reference: Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Hayley Price has a background in sociology, international development studies, and education. She recently completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

A  picture – or a graph without data – is like anecdotal evidence.  It can be very persuasive, but unless it’s based on systematic evidence, it’s just misleading.  Case in point:

The FBI is teaching its counter-terrorism agents that Islam is an inherently violent religion.  So are the followers of Islam.  Not just the extremists and radicals, but the mainstream.

There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology… The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.

Wired got hold of the training materials.  The Times has more coverage, including a section of the report that describes Muhammad as “a cult leader for a small inner circle.” (How small? Twelve perhaps?)  He also “employed torture to extract information.”*

An FBI PowerPoint slide has a “graph” to support its assertions.

The graph, really just a drawing, claims to show that followers of the Torah and the Bible have gotten progressively less violent since 1400 BC, while followers of the Koran flatline starting around 620 AD and remain just as violent as ever.

Unfortunately, the creators of the chart do not say how they operationalized “violent” and “non-violent.”  But since the title of the presentation is “Militancy Considerations,” it might have something to do with military, para-military, and quasi-military violence.  When it comes to quantities of death, destruction, and injury, these overwhelm other types of violence.

I must confess that my knowledge of history is sadly wanting, and I was educated before liberals imposed all this global, multicultural nonsense on schools, so I know nothing about wars that might have happened among Muslims during the period in question.  What I was taught was that the really big wars, the important wars, the wars that killed the most people, were mostly affairs among followers of the Bible.  Some of these were so big that they were called “World Wars” even though followers of the Qur’an had very low levels of participation.  Some of these wars lasted quite a long time – thirty years, a hundred years.  I was also taught that the in the important violence that did involve Muslims – i.e., the Crusades** – it was the followers of the Bible who were doing most of the killing.

Perhaps those with a more knowledge of Muslim militant violence can provide the data.

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* To be fair, the FBI seems to have been innocent of any of the torture that took place during the Bush years.  That was all done by the military and the CIA – and by the non-Christian governments to which the Bush administration outsourced the work.

** Followers of the Bible crusading to “take back our city” from a Muslim-led regime may have familiar overtones.

Lately we’ve seen a number of instances in which men are portrayed as babies.  We saw it in a Jack in the Box commercial featuring men being pushed around in a stroller, in the recent advertising for the movie Life as We Know It, and now Australian Ikea has opened Manland, a “day care” for men, a place where women can drop off their husbands while they shop. Thanks to Andri, a brand new student of mine, and readers YetAnotherGirl, Laura E., and LM for sending it in.

The idea that men are like babies is pretty damn obnoxious and should be offensive on the face of it (see especially the Jack in the Box commercial). But this is more insidiously problematic even than that.  It tells women that they can’t expect men to be grown ups.  And if men can’t be grown ups, they we certainly can’t expect them to do their share of the dishes or the hard work of raising families or, for that matter, be a true and equal emotional partner.

We see a similar pattern of insulting men in a way that undermines women  in the new “mediocre man” genre.  As I’ve written elsewhere, the mediocre man (think Judd Apatow movies and Hard Lemonade commercials):

…is a self-deprecating character who undermines idealized masculinity by being likeable despite being decidedly non-ideal…  The viewers are meant to identify with the mediocre men, who revel in each others’ company, happy to be dudes free from the clutches of the women in their lives, even if they aren’t sleeping with supermodels.  The mediocre man may be kind of a loser, indeed, but he can thank God he’s a man.

In both the man-as-child and the mediocre man tropes, then, the portrayals manage to simultaneously mock guys and support patriarchy. Pretty amazing.

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 U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) just released a new report on projected growth in global energy consumption. In case you were wondering, it’s going to continue to climb, by an estimated 53% by 2035. And the majority of that energy use will occur in countries outside the highly industrialized nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; map of member states):

That said, while non-OECD countries will consume the majority of energy, the OECD nations will continue to lead the world in carbon emissions per person, still more than twice that of non-OECD nations by 2035, according to projections:

While renewable energy sources will increase as a proportion of all electricity production, fossil fuels, especially coal and natural gas, will continue to be the most important sources:

If you are fascinated by the ins and outs of global energy use — how much different nations use, what different types of energy source are used for (electricity, transportation, etc.), and how carbon intensive different economies are — check out the full report, as it’s chock full of data. There are also customizable tables that allow you to select topics of interest and see trends in different nations over time. But I warn you: if, say, global climate change worries you, this isn’t exactly a soothing read.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Sometimes marketing is so absurd that I am tied into knots trying to understand how an advertisement could possibly have been made and set loose into the world.  Like this ad for Zappos, sent in by Cheryl S., that claims it sells jeans in “fits for every body type”:

Are they actually mocking us?  Do they really think we are so stupid as to not find the text and visuals in this ad laughably mis-matched?  Are they trying to offend all people outside of this “range” of body types so that they don’t wear their clothes?  I just… I don’t know.

UPDATE! Business Insider featured the ad above and included another example:

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.

As of today, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, the U.S. policy that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military only as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret, is officially over. In honor of this milestone, here’s the official letter from top Army commanders to soldiers announcing the end of the policy:

Via Joe. My. God.

NPR posted interviews with two men who worked hard for repeal, and it’s worth a read.

In a previous post I discussed data showing the growing income inequality in the U.S.: the middle class is shrinking, the poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer. It turns out that corporations understand what is happening and they are responding.  In brief, they are letting go of the middle class as a market and restructuring their offerings to appeal to the top and bottom of the income distribution.

Below the jump (warning, it automatically starts playing with sound) is an enlightening five minute discussion of this new business strategy on Daily Ticker video:

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