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Katrin sent in a set of signs and advertisements, collected at Buzzfeed, urging young people to refrain from doing methamphetamine, or “meth.”

What I found interesting was how many home made signs in rural areas were included.  It suggests that many people in small towns feel that their children are under attack.  Meanwhile, there’s no big money in drug addiction prevention.  Hence the town-specific, home made signs that contrast so starkly to the generic, glossy, high-production value advertising we are so used to seeing.

Many examples at Buzzfeed.

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.

In light of Romney’s comments regarding those who depend on the government, we thought we’d re-post this great data showing that many people who are using government social programs don’t know they are doing so.  

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Dolores R. sent in a fascinating image posted at boingboing. It comes from a paper by Suzanne Mettler, a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell. Mettler first asked survey participants whether they had ever used a federal U.S. government program. Then later in the survey she specifically asked respondents whether they had ever benefited from or participated in specific federal programs. As it turns out, large number of people who have benefited from various federal programs or policies do not recognize themselves as having done so. This table shows what percent of people who said they had participated in or used these 19 federal programs had earlier in the surveys said they had never used any social program:

Mettler argues that recipients are less likely to recognize themselves as benefiting from programs that are part of what she calls the “submerged state” — programs and policies that provide incentives and motivations for particular behaviors in the private sector, rather than overtly directing behavior. If you receive food stamps, you interact directly with a government agency, are required to periodically meet with a government worker and reapply to re-establish eligibility, and can point to a specific thing that links you to the program (these days usually a debit-type card rather than the old style coupons/stamps).

On the other hand, if you participate in the government’s mortgage interest deduction program, which encourages home ownership by allowing people to deduct the cost of mortgage interest from their taxable income (which you can’t do with rent costs, for instance), it’s less noticeable that you are benefiting from a federal policy. You get a form from your mortgage company that provides the relevant number, and you transfer it over to the correct line when you’re filling out taxes.

Notably, the programs recipients seem least likely to recognize as a government program are among those the middle (and higher) classes are most likely to use, while those more common among the poor are more clearly recognizable to those using them as government programs. Yet allowing you to write off mortgage interest (but not rent), or charitable donations, or the money you put aside for a child’s education, are all forms of government programs, ones that benefit some more than others. But the “submerged” nature of these policies hides the degree to which the middle and upper classes use and benefit from federal programs.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

In 2010, 28% of wives were earning more than their husbands. And wives were 8-times as likely as their husbands to have no earnings.

I still don’t have my copies of The End of Men, by Hanna Rosin, or The Richer Sex, by Liza Mundy. But I’ve read enough of their excerpts to plan out some quick data checks.

Both Rosin and Mundy say women are rapidly becoming primary earners, breadwinners, pants-wearers, etc., in their families. It is absolutely true that the trend is in that direction. Similarly, the Earth is heading toward being devoured by the Sun, but the details are still to be worked out. As Rosin wrote in her Atlantic article:

In feminist circles, these social, political, and economic changes are always cast as a slow, arduous form of catch-up in a continuing struggle for female equality.

Which is right. So, where are we now, really, and what is the pace of change?

For the question of relative income within married-couple families, which is only one part of this picture — and an increasingly selective one — I got some Census data for 1970 to 2010 from IPUMS.

I selected married couples (called “heterogamous” throughout this post) in which the wife was in the age range 25-54, with couple income greater than $0. I added husbands’ and wives’ incomes, and calculated the percentage of the total coming from the wife. The results show and increase from 7% to 28% of couples in which the wife earns more than the husband (defined as 51% or more of the total income):

(Thanks to the NYTimes Magazine for the triumphant wife image)

Please note this is not the percentage of working wives who earn more. That would be higher — Mundy calls it 38% in 2009 — but it wouldn’t describe the state of all women, which is what you need for a global gender trend claim. This is the percentage of all wives who earn more, which is what you need to describe the state of married couples.

But this 51% cutoff is frustratingly arbitrary. No serious study of power and inequality would rest everything on one such point. Earning 51% of the couple’s earnings doesn’t make one “the breadwinner,” and doesn’t determine who “wears the pants.”

Looking at the whole distribution gives much more information. Here it is, at 10-year intervals:

These are the points that jump out at me from this graph:

• Couples in which the wife earns 0% of the income have fallen from 46% to 19%, but they are still 8-times as common as the reverse — couples where the wife earns 100%.
• There have been very big proportionate increases in the frequency of wives earning more — such as a tripling among those who earn 50-59% of the total, and a quadrupling among those in which the wife earns it all.
• But the most common wife-earning-more scenario is the one in which she earns just over half the total. Looking more closely (details in a later post) shows that these are mostly in the middle-income ranges. The poorest and the richest families are most often the ones in which the wife earns 0%.

Maybe it’s just the feminist in me that brings out the stickler in these posts, but I don’t think this shows us to be very far along on the road to female-dominance.

Previous posts in this series…

• #1 Discussed The Richer Sex excerpt in Time (finding that, in fact, the richer sex is still men).
• #2 Discussed that statistical meme about young women earning more than young men (finding it a misleading data manipulation), and showed that the pattern is stable and 20 years old.
• #3 Debunked the common claim that “40% of American women” are “the breadwinners” in their families.
• #4 Debunked the description of stay-at-home dads as the “new normal,” including correcting a few errors from Rosin’s TED Talk.
• #5 Showed how rare the families are that Rosin profiled in her excerpt from The End of Men. 

A new submission from Rucha S. inspires me to bring back our 4-year-old boob products post.  Hers is added last, so enjoy the scroll!

Sent in by Jessica F. and found at Trend de la Creme. Boob hot water bottles:

Boob ice cubes:

A boob/rocket-shaped “stress toy”:

The boob glasses don’t even make sense:

Taylor S. sent us this picture of “boob stress relievers” sold at a flea market:

Pitseleh S. found these boob clogs at boinkology.  You can also get these clogs with piercings or tattoos.

In comments to another post, Tim pointed us to this ad:

Many, many more after the jump.

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[Note: The last item on this page might be NSFW in some workplaces; it’s behind a jump, but if you came to the post directly, be careful about scrolling down past the raincoats.]

Seven readers — Aneesa D., mouskatel, Brandi B., Lisa B., Jared B., Tom Megginson (of Work that Matters), and sociologist Michael Kimmel — all let us know about the attention Bic’s “for Her” pens have been getting, so I thought it was a good day for another round-up of the many items we have decided must be differentiated into versions for men and women. We’ve featured pens like this before; Bic’s are designed just for us ladies and our special pen needs, which apparently include the colors pink and purple and “easy glide” and “smoothness”:

The pens are for sale on Amazon in the UK, and they’ve inspired a lot of push-back over the gendering, with people writing reviews mocking the product and its packaging. Buzzfeed featured a number of the reviews, which highlight the way that internet marketing certainly helps companies, but also opens up more avenues for the public to complain about or ridicule products in a very direct, immediate way that can quickly attract others to do the same — a much faster form of complaint than the days when you had to write a letter to a company’s headquarters:

But don’t worry, guys! There are products just for you, too! J.V. is happy to report that there’s now a hair dryer for men, called the Man Groomer. After all these years of wishing you had some way to quickly dry your hair the way women can, a solution is at hand:

And Sean discovered that Planters is helpfully now selling cans of mixed nuts that are specifically chosen to support men’s health. Obviously women may eat almonds, peanuts, and pistachios separately, but when combined, these form a magical Man Food that addresses men’s unique needs for protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber:

UPDATE: Reader Kat says,

The Men’s Health on the can of nuts is because they are a product the editors of the magazine Men’s Health felt were a healthy option…The can of nuts aren’t gender specific they are just boasting their “award” of being well liked by the editors of this particular magazine. No different than when any other product has the label “recognized by *fill in the blank* magazine.”

In other gendered products news, Jessie L. noticed these face masks for sale in Taiwan. They are different sizes, but instead of simply presenting them as Medium and Large, for whoever might need those sizes, those size differences are clearly connected to expectations about gender. They’re differentiated by color, by the person shown wearing each one, and the pink package even has a heart-shaped hole that lets you feel the mask.

Similarly, Joonas L. saw his-and-hers versions of disposable raincoats for sale in Helsinki, Finland, and couldn’t see anything different about them except the color and the use of language (miesten = men’s, naisten=women’s) to explicitly gender them:

Finally, Megan C. pointed out an example of gendered personal lubricant. The exact same product it “Tush Eze” when it’s pink and features a woman, but “Anal Eze” in the blue bottle featuring a man. I’m putting it after the jump, just in case it’s not safe for some workplaces:

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Somehow the accidental mis-translation of the Princess/Barbie character is just right…

Buzzfeed and CookdandBombd, via Work that Matters.

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 Family Inequality.

It is great to acknowledge and celebrate the increase in father involvement in parenting. But it is not helpful to exaggerate the trend and link it to the myth-making about looming female dominance. Yesterday’s feature in the Sunday New York Times does just that, and reminds me that I meant to offer a quick debunking of Hanna Rosin’s TED talk.

The story is headlined “Just Wait Till Your Mother Gets Home.” The picture shows a group of dads with their kids, as if representing what one calls “the new normal.” Careful inspection of the caption reveals it is a “daddy and me” music class, so we should not be surprised to see a lot of dads with their kids.

The article also makes use of a New Yorker cover, which captures a certain gestalt — it’s a funny exaggeration — but should not be confused with an empirical description of the gender distribution of parents and playgrounds:

Naturally, the story is in the Style section, so close reading of the empirical support is perhaps a fool’s errand. However, I could not help noticing that the only two statistics in the story were either misleading or simply inaccurate. In the category of misleading, was this:

In the last decade, though, the number of men who have left the work force entirely to raise children has more than doubled, to 176,000, according to recent United States census data. Expanding that to include men who maintain freelance or part-time jobs but serve as the primary caretaker of children under 15 while their wife works, the number is around 626,000, according to calculations the census bureau compiled for this article.

The Census Bureau has for years employed a very rigid definition of stay-at-home dads, which only counts those who are out of the labor force for an entire year for reasons of “taking care of home and family.” This may seem an overly strict definition and an undercount, but if you simply counted any man with no job but with children as a stay-at-home dad, you risk counting any father who lost a job as stay-at-home. (A former student of mine, Beth Latshaw, now at Appalachian State University, has explored this issue and published her results here in the journal Fathering.)

In any event, those look like big numbers, but one should always be wary of raw numbers in the news. In fact, when you look at the trend as published by the Census Bureau, you see that the proportion of married couple families in which the father meets the stay-at-home criteria has doubled: from 0.4% in 2000 to 0.8% today. The larger estimate which includes fathers working part-time comes out to 2.8% of married couple families with children under 15. The father who used the phrase “the new normal” in the story was presumably not speaking statistically.

(Source: My calculations from Census Bureau numbers [.xls file]. Includes only married-couple families with children under age 15.)

That’s the misleading number. The inaccurate number is here:

About 40 percent of women now make more than their husbands, the bureau’s statistics show, and that may be only the beginning of a seismic power shift, if new books like “The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, And Family,” by Liza Mundy, and “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women,” by Hanna Rosin, are to be believed.

I guess in these troubled times for the newspaper business it might be acceptable to report X and Y statistic “if so-and-so is to be believed.” But it is a shame to do so when the public is paying the salary of people who have already debunked the numbers in question. Just the other day, I wrote about that very statistic: “Really? No. I don’t know why this keeps going around.” Using freely available tables (see the post), I calculated that a reasonable estimate of the higher-earning-wife share is 21%. In fact, on this point Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin and are not to be believed.

(Source: My graph from Census Bureau numbers.)

TED: Misinformation Frequently Spread

There is a TED talk featuring Hanna Rosin from the end of 2010, and I finally got around to watching it. Without doing a formal calculation, I would say that “most” of the statistics she uses in this talk are either wrong or misinterpreted to exaggerate the looming approach of female dominance. For example, she says that the majority of “managers” are now women, but the image on the slide which flashes by briefly refers to “managers and professionals.” Professionals includes nurses and elementary school teachers. Among managers themselves, women do represent a growing share (although not a majority, and the growth has slowed considerably), but they remain heavily segregated as I have shown here.

Rosin further reports that “young women” are earning more than “young men.” This statistic, which has been going around for a few years now, in fact refers to single, child-free women under age 30 and living in metropolitan areas. That is an interesting statistic, but used in this way is simply a distortion. (See this post for a more thorough discussion, with links.)

Rosin also claims that “70% of fertility clinic patients” prefer to have a female birth. In her own article in the Atlantic, Rosin reports a similar number for one (expensive, rare) method of sex selection only (with no source offered) — but of course the vast majority of fertility clinic patients are not using sex selection techniques. In fact, in her own article she writes, “Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls.”

Finally, I don’t think I need to offer statistics to address such claims as women are “taking control of everything”and “starting to dominate” among “doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants.” These are just made up. Congress is 17% female.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

In the wake of the shootings in a Colorado theater last week, Sean D. sent in a BBC video clip commenting on media coverage of mass murders.  It criticizes the typical response, which usually involves intense coverage dissecting every piece of the story, focusing closely on the killer and his motivations.  This can go on for days.

The narrator argues that this is exploitative — the media is using gruesome events to drive ratings (often for days at a time) — and it feeds into the public’s tendency towards voyeurism.  He also includes an interview with a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who specializes in such cases; he says that this type of coverage is the exact opposite of what the media should do… if it is interested in saving lives.  The attention, especially to the criminal himself, encourages other “anti-heros” to contemplate and execute mass murders themselves.

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.