education

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.

Peggy R. sent in this great vintage ad for Cessna private planes.  Placed in 1941, it suggests that all families should have private planes after the war:

I spoke with my friend and Cessna expert, Stephen Wilson.  He explained that the G.I. Bill, which reimbursed veterans for educational expenses, applied to flying lessons.  Veterans, then, could be reimbursed for learning to fly and Cessna was trying to encourage all veterans and their families to take to the skies.

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.

PART ONE:

Drinking lowers your GPA. So do smoking, spending time on the computer, and probably other forms of moral dissolution. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 10,000 students in Minnesota.

Inside Higher Ed reported it, as did the Minnesota press with titles like “Bad Habits = Bad Grades.” Chris Uggen reprints graphs of some of the “more dramatic results” (that’s the report’s phrase, not Chris’s). Here’s a graph of the effects of the demon rum.

Pretty impressive . . . if you don’t look too closely. But note: the range of the y-axis is from 3.0 to 3.5.

I’ve blogged before about “gee whiz” graphs , and I guess I’ll keep doing so as long as people keep using them. Here are the same numbers, but the graph below scales them on the traditional GPA scale of 0 to 4.0.

The difference is real – the teetotalers have a B+ average, heaviest drinkers a B. But is it dramatic?

I also would like finer distinctions in the independent variable, but maybe that’s because my glass of wine with dinner each night, six or seven a week, puts me in the top category with the big boozers. I suspect that the big differences are not between the one-drink-a-day students and the teetotalers but between the really heavy drinkers – the ones who have six drinks or more in a sitting, not in a week– and everyone else.

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PART TWO:

Some time ago, the comments on a post here brought up the topic of the “gee whiz graph.” Recently, thanks to a lead from Andrew Gelman, I’ve found another good example in a recent paper.

The authors, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons, have been looking at the influence of initials. Their ideas seem silly at first glance (batters whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out), like those other name studies that claim people named Dennis are more likely to become dentists while those named Lawrence or Laura are more likely to become lawyers

But Nelson and Simmons have the data. Here’s their graph showing that students whose last names begin with C and D get lower grades than do students whose names begin with A and B.

The graph shows an impressive difference, certainly one that warrants Nelson and Simmon’s explanation:

Despite the pervasive desire to achieve high grades, students with the initial C or D, presumably because of a fondness for these letters, were slightly less successful at achieving their conscious academic goals than were students with other initials.

Notice that “slightly.” To find out how slight, you have to take a second look at the numbers on the axis of that gee-whiz graph. The Nelson-Simmons paper doesn’t give the actual means, but from the graph it looks as though he A students’ mean is not quite 3.37. The D students average between 3.34 and 3.35, closer to the latter. But even if the means were, respectively, 3.37 and 3.34, that’s a difference of a whopping 0.03 GPA points.

When you put the numbers on a GPA axis that goes from 0 to 4.0, the differences look like this.

According to Nelson and Simmons, the AB / CD difference was significant (F = 4.55, p < .001). But as I remind students, in the language of statistics, a significant difference is not the same as a meaningful difference.

Breastfeeding is widely believed to carry significant health advantages for infants and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) would like to see all mothers breastfeed their children for at least 12 months, with no supplemental food for the first six.

Breastfeeding, however, is a big job.  Even if a newborn takes to breastfeeding without any problems (some mothers struggle mightily with less-than-cooperative infants), mothers must feed their children around the clock (they now recommend every two hours, 24-hours a day for newborns).  If it takes a half hour to settle the baby down and fill it up, you’ve got an hour and a half before the next feeding time.

Mothers who have the privilege to stay home with their babies — for three, six, or even twelve months — then, are going to find it much easier to follow the AAP guidelines.  For mothers who return to work, those who work in flexible positions that award some degree of autonomy and respect will also be more likely to continue breastfeeding.   In other words, a lawyer with a private office and a work schedule under her own control can stop several times a day and express milk to bring home to her child; in contrast, a woman working the cash register at McDonald’s with a boss hovering over her doesn’t have the same autonomy or privacy and may be forced to give up breastfeeding.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that breastfeeding rates are higher among more educated women and White and Asian women.  Both of these variables tend to correlate with class privilege:

There are some interesting things, however, that don’t correlate with this class thesis.  First Hispanic women are more likely to breastfeed than White women and people with less than a high school education are more likely to breastfeed, especially at six and 12 months, than people with a high school education.

I can think of some reasons why… I’ll let you discuss it in the comments.

Borrowed from Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality Blog.  For more data on rates of breastfeeding, including U.S. state comparisons and changes in rates over time, 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.

A 6-year-old I know brought home a reading assignment from kindergarten. It’s called The New Nest, by Sandra Iversen, with illustrations by Peter Paul Bajer. An innocent tale of Mama Bird and Papa Bird working together to build a nest from 20 twigs, straw and wool. At the end, Mama Bird is sitting on her eggs wearing pearls. Papa Bird is in a white collar and blue tie.

It’s curious to use men’s and women’s accessories (tie, necklace) to identify the gender of the couple, when the species itself provides a reasonable degree of sexual dimorphism.

That’s seems comparable to the dimorphism found in humans.

Using both gendered clothes and bodies is not necessary, but together they are a powerful teaching tool for children, forming a lesson on the concordance of gender and sex differences: matching the different bodies with the appropriately different clothes.

This book is actually featured in a write-up on teaching reading from the journal The Reading Teacher.

I don’t know what the intentions of the article writers were, but there is nothing in there about teaching about sexual dimorphism, or gender norms and practices.

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.

Ms. Marx snapped a picture of an ad for Montessori school in Ontario.  Montessori schools are private schools (grades K-12) with an alternative pedagogy, or educational philosophy.

The slogan for this advertising campaign is: “Every child, every chance, every day.” In Ontario, Ms. Marx reports reports that tuition is $7,000 per year; in Toronto, tuition can be 10,300 for kindergartners and $19,895 for juniors and seniors in high school. So, the ad manages to completely erase the possibility that, while every child might benefit from a fantastic private school education from kindergarten on, not every parent can afford it.

Or, as Ms. Marx puts it:

Maybe it should say “Every child whose parents can afford the tuition, every chance offered to children of the elite, every day in capitalist societies.”

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Ajax was searching for majors on College Board, a website aimed at helping people get into and through college.  She wanted to search for colleges with women’s studies majors and when she typed “women” into the keyword field, the search function returned two majors: women’s studies and fashion design.

This would make perfect sense if the search function returned only women’s studies since it has “women” in the name and all.  But fashion design?  It suggests that somehow fashion design has been marked as a major-for- or about-women, but no other major has.

What about, say, history?  Nope, no women in that.
Psychology?  Well, there is a Psych of Women class.  But, otherwise no.
Economics?  Don’t make me laugh!
Queer Studies? Afro-Am? Wait? Women are gay!? And black!?
Politics?  Oh honey, don’t worry your pretty little head about it!
Literature?  Oh yeah!  We forgot literature!   Let’s slap a “women” tag on that one and call it a day.

UPDATE: Brenden L. went to the website and typed in men. Guess what he got?

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.

College admissions is a competitive business with colleges competing for the smartest, richest, and otherwise most desirable frosh each year.  Administrators have come to realize that “extras” —  e.g., the quality of the gym, the luxuriousness of the living quarters, and the availability of extra-curriculars — now heavily influence the decision making of prospective students.  Among academics and administrators, this is called the “amenities arms race.”  A set of representative images can be found at a slide show about college dorms sent in by Dmitriy T.M. They nicely illustrate the proliferation.

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.