education

Philip Cohen posted some interesting data at his blog, Family Inequality, that I think will look at first blush, counterintuitive to many.  The figure below shows the percent of men’s income that women bring home, organized by age bracket and level of education.  The top bar, for example, tell us that, among 45-50 year olds with advanced degrees, women make 68% of what men do.

Two observations:

First, notice that women with more education (the lighter bars in each age bracket) do worse compared to men than women with less education.  That is, the gender inequity is worse in the upper classes than it is in the lower classes.   Why?  Well, people tend to marry other with similar class and education backgrounds.  Accordingly, women with more education may be married to men with higher earning potential than women with less education. Those women are more able to make work-related choices that don’t foreground economics, since their income is less central to the financial health of the couple.  They are also more likely to take substantial amounts of time out of the workforce when they have kids (working class women can’t afford to do so as easily), and we know that doing so makes a real dent in career advancement.  So, perhaps ironically, women who are “richer” educationally may marry economically richer men who then allow them to deprioritize their careers.

Second, notice that the most equal incomes (where women make 85% of men’s salaries) occurs among the youngest and least educated group: 25-34 year old high school drop outs.  Why would younger women do better relative to men than older women?  Some of this may be due to a decrease in gender-based discrimination.  But it also likely has something to do with the devaluation and disappearance of traditionally working-class men’s work.  Most of the narrowing of the gender wage gap, in fact, has to do with the lowering of men’s earning power to meet women’s, not vice versa.  As the industrial base in the U.S. has been collapsing, the number of historically-male blue collar jobs have been shrinking.  Meanwhile, our industrial economy has been replaced by one split between (well compensated) information/technology and (poorly compensated) service jobs.  Those service jobs are going disproportionately to women.  So, while men still dominate (especially the most well-regarded and well-compensated) upper class professions, their dominance in the lower rungs of the economic ladder is waning.

Thanks again to Philip Cohen for the data!

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 bumped up against two pieces of information today regarding caloric intake. I can’t confirm either, but I found both quite interesting. First, State Info features a map showing the average number of calories consumed each day in different countries across the globe. In the U.S., for example, the average is 3,754, in Argentina it is 2,959, in China it is 2,940, and in Congo it is 1,606.  Citizens of some countries, then, eat more than twice as many calories as citizens of others.

The fact that the average in almost every country exceeds the 2,000 calorie goal suggested by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is fascinating in itself.

I was surprised at the average number of calories consumed in the U.S., where I live.  But then I came across the second graphic at GOOD which purports to reveal the number of calories and distribution of food types in the average school lunch and prison meal.  The comparison between the two is interesting enough, but I was struck by just how high the numbers were.  An average of 1,400 calories in your typical school lunch may very well indeed translate into over 3,000 calories a day.

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 weekend I came across an interesting video of Mike Rowe, creator and host of Dirty Jobs. Rowe recently testified before the U.S. Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. He made an impassioned case for the type of difficult but essential jobs he highlights on his show, as well as the vocational and other training programs that prepare workers for them — programs facing tremendous cuts due to state budget crises. While we hear a lot about the need to increase the level of 4-year college degree completion in the U.S., Rowe argues that skilled plumbers and welders are every bit as essential to our economic development, and that such jobs are worthy of respect and public support:

In this 16-minute video Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown does a clear and concise job of outlining eight frightening changes that privatization will bring to higher education. The talk is part of a six-part “Save the University” teach-in at UC Berkeley.

Via John McMahon at Facile Gestures.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times about differences in income between various religious groups in the U.S. This graph shows the percent of households earning more than $75,000 a year (the numbers along the side; and note that, somewhat counterintuitively, the shade of each color gets lighter as the percentage gets higher), as well as the percent of each group with a college degree (along the top). In order from least to most educated, we have Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, the unaffiliated, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, those who identify as secular, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Hindus. Not surprisingly, income is pretty strongly correlated with education:

The data come from a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey (which we’ve posted on before), though the NYT reports that they did smaller surveys in 2010 and 2011 and found similar patterns.

Also see our posts on the demographics of the non-religious and religion, income, and 2008 Presidential voting behavior.

In this 11 minute animated talk, Matthew Taylor argues that scientific study of humans in the tradition of the Enlightenment has taught us, ironically, that Enlightenment values alone cannot be trusted to usher humanity into a better future.

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.

If you are privileged enough to be graduating from college this season, know that your degree translates into a higher degree of privilege now than at any time in the past.  In fact, graduates today will out earn non-graduates by nearly 100%, a number that has doubled in the last 50 years or so.

Chart borrowed from Made in America.

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.

People with a college degree are less likely to be unemployed than people without one (source: Andrew Sullivan):

But a college degree helps blacks less than it  helps whites, especially in this recession (source: Andrew Sullivan):

See also Devah Pager’s stunning data on race, drug convictions, and employment prospects (in text or video).  (Hint: it’s better to be a white felon than a black person with no felony record).

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.