education

The number of Americans under correctional control has more than tripled since the 1980s, up to 1 in 31 U.S. citizens.  And the U.S. incarcerates six times more of its citizens than many European countries.  As you might imagine, this is very expensive.  Between 1987 and 2007, the amount spent on corrections increased by 127%.  To put this in perspective, the amount spent on higher education has only increased 21%.

The Pew Center illustrates the disparity:

States varied in the ratio of corrections to college spending.  The dark green bars (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) are for states that spend as much or more on higher education than corrections corrections as on higher education The rest spend less.  Minnesota has the most extreme ratio; it spent 17 cents on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections. Vermont has the most extreme ratio, Minnesota the least:

[Sorry for the initial confusion with the graph.]

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.

Philip Cohen, at Family Inequality, posted an interesting graph displaying 30-44-year-old women’s share of their household’s income by level of education:

The graph shows that, on average, women with higher levels of education have incomes closer to that of their husbands than women with lower levels of education.  Cohen writes:

It captures nicely both how women’s earning power within married couples has increased, and how that shift has been much greater for women with higher education.

In other words, the figure suggests that efforts to close the wage gap between men and women have been much more successful at the top of the economic ladder than the bottom.

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 Jezebel.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (via Family Inequality) reveals that boys report less sex education than girls.

What teenagers report learning from school:

What teenagers report learning from their parents:

Compared to boys, then, girls report more guidance from school and significantly more from their parents. This probably reflects cultural ideas that boys naturally desire sex, have a positive sense of their own sexuality, and that nothing really bad can happen to them; in contrast, the risk that sex poses to girls’ reputations and the possibility of sexual violence and pregnancy often shape how educators and parents manage their emerging sexualities.

Or it might be an artifact of self-reporting.  Thoughts?

See also our popular post on STI, pregnancy, and abortion rates in the U.S. versus select European countries (hint: the U.S. doesn’t come out smelling like roses).

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 Centers for Disease Control report that pregnancy rates for U.S. girls age 15-19 vary quite significantly by state: from 66/1,000 in Mississippi to 20/1,000 in New Hampshire (dark and light green represent states with teen pregnancy rates lower than the U.S. average; dark and light purple represent states in which it is higher):

The map shows that, on average, southern states tend to have higher teen pregnancy rates than others.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that the disparity can be explained, in part, by the fact that Blacks and Latinos tend to have higher rates of teen pregnancy than other racial groups such that states with higher proportions of Blacks and Latinos would have higher rates.  However, rates among different racial/ethnic populations also vary quite tremendously by state.  Among white teenagers the teen pregnancy rate ranged from 4/1,000 (in the District of Columbia) to 55/1,000 (in Mississippi), among Black teenagers, it ranged from 17/1,000 (in Hawaii) to 95/1,000 (in Wisconsin), and among Latinas it ranged from 31/1,000 (in Maine) to 188/1,000 (in Alabama).

Race, then, doesn’t predict differences in rates of teen pregnancy all by itself.  In fact, White teenagers are more likely to get pregnant in some states than Black and Latina teenagers in others.  There must be something region- or state-specific driving teen pregnancy rates.

The CDC doesn’t mention sex education, but Mike Lillis at The Hill compared teen pregnancy rates to a sex education policy report by the Guttmacher Institute.  He writes:

All five states with the highest teen birth rates have adopted policies requiring that abstinence be stressed when taught as part of sex education, HIV education or both, the group found. Only one of the five states (New Mexico) mandates that sex education be a part of students’ curriculum.

Of the four states with the lowest teen birth rates, none requires that abstinence be stressed to students, according to Guttmacher.

For your perusal, the CDC data, by state and race (# of pregnancies/1,000 girls 15-19):

Hat tip to Annie Shields at Ms. magazine.

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. and Jeff H. sent in a link to Mapping the Measure of America, a website by the Social Science Research Council that provides an amazing amount of information about various measures of economic/human development in the U.S. Here’s a map showing median personal (not household) earnings in 2009:

The District of Columbia has the highest, at $40,342; the lowest is Arkansas, at $23,470 (if you go to their website, you can scroll over the bars on the left and it will list each state and its median income, or you can hover over a state).

You can break the data down by race and sex as well. Here’s median personal income for Native American women, specifically (apparently there is only sufficient data to report for a few states):

Native American women’s highest median income, in Washington ($22,181), is  lower than the overall median income in Arkansas, which is the lowest in the U.S. as we saw above.

Here is the percent of children under age 6 who live below the poverty line (for all races):

Life expectancy at birth differs by nearly 7 years between the lowest — 74.81 years in Mississippi — to the highest — 81.48 years in Hawaii:

It’s significantly lower for African American men, however, with a life expectancy of only 66.22 years in D.C. (again, several states had insufficient data):

The site has more information than I could ever fully discuss here (including crime rates, various health indicators, all types of educational attainment measures, commuting time, political participation, sex of elected officials, environmental pollutants, and on and on), and it’s fairly addictive searching different topics, looking data up by zip code to get an overview of a particular area, and so on. Have fun!

The World Economic Forum recently released its Global Gender Gap Report for 2010, authored by Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University), Laura Tyson (UC Berkeley), and Saadia Zahidi (World Economic Forum).  The report ranks countries according to concrete measures of gender inequality.  They write:

The Global Gender Gap Index… is a framework for capturing the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress. The Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education – and healthbased criteria, and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across regions and income groups, and over time.

You can read about their methods, in depth, in the Report.

Here are the rankings:

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 this 11-minute video, Dalton Conley interviews Victor Rios about the youth control complex.  He argues the that punishing arm of the state (the prison system) and the nurturing arm of the state (the education system) work together to criminalize, stigmatize, and punish young inner city boys and men.

Rios’ ideas apply very well to the treatment of Latarian Milton, the 7-year-old boy who was charged with grand theft auto for taking his grandmother’s car for a joy ride.

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.

Adrienne at Native Appropriations reports that this year Harvard University fraternity Sigma Chi threw a Columbus Day “bros and hos” party titled “Conquistabros and Navajos.” Get it?

Perhaps it’s too much to expect student in the Ivy League to be sensitive, but Harvard students are supposed to be smart, right?  Not so much.  Adrienne points out their bizarre illogic: how exactly does it make sense to have a party that mingles Navajos (from the American Southwest) with pilgrims (who lived in the American Northeast) and Conquistadors (who arrived after, not with Columbus) and cowboys (who, as we know them, would come hundreds of years later)?

And while we’re at it, why not expect them to be sensitive.  Adrienne reminds us, again, patiently…

1. Glorifying and making light of the atrocities committed by the “explorers” of the Americas is just as bad as glorifying the Nazis and the Holocaust, and not something to be taken lightly.

2. The theme is using a generic stereotype of an Indigenous person (in this case “Navajo”) to represent thousands of tribes and communities throughout the Americas, each with their own unique culture and history. The Indigenous groups who encountered the conquistadors are not remotely the same as Navajos in the southwest, and by lumping them together, the party contributes to continued stereotyping of Native peoples as one monolithic group — consisting of hollywood stereotypes of war paint, feathers, and buckskin.

3. Encouraging party goers to “dress up” as American Indians and Indigenous Peoples puts Native people in the category of a fantasy character — something that no longer exists, or never did. Columbus, Conquistadors, and Pilgrims are all situated in the past, but Native peoples are still here, are still alive, and still Native (and yes, cowboys are still alive, but they are not systematically oppressed and facing continued colonialism). It is also condoning dressing up in racial drag, and I would bet Sigma Chi might get in a little trouble if they hosted a blackface party.

But no one would do that, would they?

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.