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Existing data suggests that, for college students graduating during an economic recession, wage depression will follow them throughout their life.  The figure below shows that, for every one percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate, a college grad’s wages will drop by about six percent.  Five years later, their wages will still lag by five percent.   Fifteen years later they’ve recovered their losses to about three percent, but they’re still behind where they would have been.  And remember, this data is for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate.

Data borrowed from the Office of Management and Budget, via Matthew Yglesias.

For more happy graduation news, see here.

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.

Tom Schaller recently posted over at FiveThirtyEight about a new Hyundai commercial. The commercial suggests that you need to get a safe car because of all the young drivers on the road:

Here’s another:

Schaller argues that, while the commercials may be entertaining enough, he can’t help but wonder how people would react to similar commercials mocking the other age group over-represented in accidents — the elderly, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:

Is Hyundai wrong to say that teens, particularly those who just got their licenses, are more dangerous drivers than other age groups? No. But though people might joke about elderly drivers, I agree with Schaller — I can’t imagine a company putting out ads with a similar mocking tone and not immediately getting a ton of negative feedback ending in pulling the commercials and apologizing.

And this likely has a lot to do with the fact that older Americans are organized and represented by groups like the AARP and are thus able to wield political pressure and protest negative portrayals in a way that teens aren’t. This doesn’t mean that older people don’t get mocked (especially in TV shows and movies), but that a company is likely to be much more afraid of insulting them than insulting 16-year-olds.

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

This 4-minute 20-second video, by Colorlines, uses true stories to illustrate the impact of a 1996 law that authorizes the (sometimes retroactive) deportation of non-citizens convicted of any crime, including misdemeanors and traffic violations.  In 2008, the video reports, the U.S. government deported almost 360,000 people on these grounds.

Via Racewire.

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.

Yael S. sent along a 10-minute educational video by FilmFixation. In it, she asks viewers to consider the conditions in which historical photographs came to be.  “Why was it created,” she asks, “by whom, and for what purpose?”  It starts off a bit slow, but picks up with voiceover.  Please be alerted that there are images of racialized violence:

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.

Penny R. and p.j. sent in a link to the American Able project. A description from the artist’s website:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women… Women with disabilities go unrepresented…in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable’…

Too often, the pervasive influence of imagery in mass media goes unexamined, consumed en masse by the public. However, this imagery has real, oppressive effects on people who are continuously ‘othered’ by society. The model, Jes Sachse, and I intend to reveal these stories by placing her in a position where women with disabilities are typically excluded.

The goal is admirable. Individuals with disabilities are routinely ignored in pop culture, and if depicted, they are often either mocked or are devoid of sexuality (notable examples being the documentary Murderball and the depiction of a character in a wheelchair on the TV show Friday Night Lights, though both focus solely on men with disabilities who generally have relationships with women who do not).

That said, it brings up the eternal question regarding artistic endeavors, particularly those aimed at undermining prejudices: does it work? The idea here is to show a woman with disabilities in sexualized contexts and use humor to counter popular conceptions of those with disabilities as asexual (and parody American Apparel in the process). As with any use of parody/irony/etc., it poses a dilemma. Will viewers get it? Will they grasp the intent and look at the images through that lens? Will it lead some people to question why they might find these photos shocking, why a woman with a disability shown in sexual situations would be surprising, or the reason for any discomfort they might feel when looking at them?

Or will people respond by ridiculing Jes, or even feeling disgusted? Will they look further into those feelings and why they might have them? Will it change anything?

And how do you decide if it’s worth it? If half of viewers engage in some introspection and examining of their own prejudices, and half don’t, is that a sufficient trade-off? If 90% of people ridiculed the images and it reinforced their belief that bodies of those with disabilities are undesirable, but 10% would think about how women with disabilities are de-sexualized, or that American Apparel presents a very narrow range of body types as “normal,” everyday women, would you feel that you had accomplished something significant? Is it the artist’s responsibility to care?

Similar questions have been posed about photos of individuals from Appalachia: do they humanize people often depicted as backward “hillbillies,” or do they actually reinforce perceptions that everyone living in the area is poor and rural?

How do you negotiate the use of art to make social statements (whether questioning prejudices, pointing out inequalities, or humanizing stigmatized groups), considering that once you put something out in the public domain, you have little control over how people interpret it and whether they take from it the opposite message you intended, perhaps even ridiculing your subjects as a result of your project?

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

Mexican Independence Day May 5th commemorates the Battle of Pueblo in which Mexico defeated the French…  how better to celebrate than to animate offensive stereotypes and make fun of Spanish!

Maya sent us a link to publicity for a clothing swap schedule for May 5th called “Swappo de Mayo,” of course:

And Maddy B. sent us a screen shot from buycostumes.com.  This image was featured on the front page in mid-April:

See also our post featuring “celebrations” of Martin Luther King Day.

(Thanks to Ramona, Jess, Ryan, Kristen, CS, and Jorge for the correction on the significance of the date!)

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UPDATE: Several Readers who corrected my mistake have stated that it was offensive.  I’m really sorry.

Gwen and I have a policy of owning our mistakes.  I don’t know everything, even things that I really should know.  One of the best things about this blog, for me as an author, is that I learn all the time.  I don’t resent being corrected, I am grateful.

I apologize that my ignorance was offensive. My hope is that, by leaving the post up, with my ignorance laid bare, I am modeling the kind of humility that allows people to learn new ideas and accept correction from others.

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.

Snehata K. sent in two commercials for Miller Lite that reproduce ideas of masculinity while encouraging men to do something usually seen as feminine: care about calories. In the commercials we see that it’s ok to drink beer with fewer calories than the regular, as long as you do it in a manly way:

What’s a feminine way of drinking light beer? Prioritizing calorie content over the taste. If you’re a guy, you can care about health/diet and thus want a lower-calorie beer, but only if you show you still care about beer the way men are supposed to: you appreciate the taste and won’t sacrifice it for anything.

Guys who forget that are embarrassingly girly. And being feminized is clearly stigmatizing, worthy of ridicule. Even women are disgusted by feminized men. So not only will men who fail to adequately perform masculinity be ridiculed by men, they’ll lose any chance with hot chicks, too. As they do so often, men are receiving a clear message: be sure you’re masculine in every way, all the time, or you risk losing any claim you have to a respected version of manhood.

Of course, if you really want to be manly, you need to stop caring about silly things like your health altogether and drink Miller High Life.

Cross-posted at Ms. magazine.

Full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn.  One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex.  Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations.  How severe is job segregation by sex?  A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more.  (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.)  Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time.  The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.”  Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time.  It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s.  It has changed little since then.

The lines above and below the white line show that sex segregation correlates with education level.  People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs.  This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

Via Family Inequality.

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.