marriage/family

Last week, on the heels of Obama’s announcement that he supports gay marriage, NPR interviewed the President of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, about trends in American support for the issue.  Kohut explained that American opinion has changed dramatically, and unusually, in a very short time.  In 1996, for example, 27% of people supported gay marriage (65% opposed).  This “really didn’t change very much” for a while.  In 2004, when Republicans mobilized the issue to get conservatives to the polls, 60% still opposed it.  But today, in the space of less than a decade, we have more people supporting gay marriage than opposing it.  Some polls show the majority of Americans believe that we should have the right to marry someone of the same sex.

This trend is driven, in part, by young people replacing the old, but focusing on this overshadows the fact that essentially all Americans — of every stripe — show higher support for gay marriage than they did a decade ago.  Both men and women and people of all races, political affiliations, religions, and ages are showing increased support for gay marriage.  This is a real, remarkable, and rare shift in opinion:

Opinion by age:
Opinion by religion:
Opinion by political party:
Opinion by political orientation:
Opinion by race:
Opinion by gender:
Via Montclair SocioBlog.

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.

Sociologists have observed that employment in the U.S. is largely structured around an assumption that the worker has no family responsibilities.  The ideas that an employee should be able to work during non-school hours, stay late when needed, take off time for their own illness but never anyone else’s, for example, all presume that the workers have either no children or someone else taking care of children for them.

Most jobs, then, are not designed to be compatible with family responsibilities.  Since most people doing primary child care are women, this hurts mothers disproportionately.  Mothers have a more difficult time being the “perfect employee” and also face discrimination from employers.  This translates into some telling numbers.  Women make about 69% of what men make (not controlling for type of occupation), but most of this disadvantage is related to parental status, not sex. Women without children make 90% of what men make, while mothers make 66%.  Ann Crittenden’s book, The Price of Motherhood, lays out these numbers starkly.

These issues are at the heart of this well-crafted Ampersand cartoon by B. Deutsch, which prompted this post in anticipation of Mother’s Day in the U.S.

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.

Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.

Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:

In this three-minute clip, sociologist Shelley Correll discusses her research on the “motherhood penalty.”  The phrase refers to the finding that being a mom specifically, not just being female or being a parent, leads to lower income. Scholars have begun to realize just how significant this is. As Correll explains, the pay gap between women with and without children is larger than that between women and men:

For more, see the full text of Correll’s paper titled “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty.”

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.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a really great interactive graphic posted by the Guardian that summarizes the degree to which a number of rights and benefits are available to gays and lesbians in the U.S., by state. Each state is represented as a segment radiating out from the center of the circle; each colored ring represents a particular right, benefit, or protection:

• Light blue = whether state has a law addressing discrimination or bullying in the school system
• Purple = state-level hate-crime laws
• Pink = protection against housing discrimination
• Green = protection against employment discrimination
• Blue = right to adopt (lighter shade indicates individuals are allowed; darker shade means gay and lesbian couples are allowed to jointly adopt)
• Yellow = right to visit partner in the hospital
• Red = marriage

The different shades indicate differences in the scope of coverage (say, full marriage rights vs. domestic partnership — and it has been updated to reflect yesterday’s passage of the bill outlawing same-sex marriage in North Carolina — or whether a law bans discrimination based on sexual orientation but not gender identity); the Guardian website explains each issue. Their post also allows you to hover over a state and get a more detailed summary. Here’s the info for Nevada, for instance:

The graphic also lets you scale states by population if you want to get a better sense of the proportion of the U.S. population living in areas that do or do not provide these protections.

@Thom82 tweeted a photograph of a parking space at Ikea.  By “family friendly,” I assume they mean people with kids.  By coupling the phrase with the image, however, it defines the family as a heterosexual, nuclear one with 2.0 children.  People without kids? Not a family. Single people with kids? Not a family. Best friends who support each other? Not a family.  Sorry 80% of people in the U.S. who aren’t married with kids, you’re not a family.

But seriously. It’s not a big deal, all things considered. But, when you add it to all the other little reminders, it leaves little doubt as to whose families really count.

Apropo of tax time, see also Turbo Tax Maps Out My Conventional Future, and these humorous take down of the idea of “traditional” marriage.

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 little over a month ago I posted a map of the legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S. It was soon made obsolete by the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state of Washington. In addition, several readers pointed out that the map hid important differences within categories.

Ned Flaherty, Project Manager of Marriage Equality USA, sent in a link to an updated and more comprehensive map at their site. Green states have fully legalized same-sex marriage; yellow states recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions; and pink states do not allow either. The lettered codes provide more information on exactly what the status is in each state:

Click on the map or go to their website to look at the much larger version; they also have a round-up of pending or possible legislation and court cases in various states.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The Carsey Institute’s Kristin Smith has written a brief on the plight of home care workers — the home health aides and personal care aides that play a growing role in our patchwork network of care work.

The news now is that these workers are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act — which offers the protection of minimum wage and overtime pay — but the U.S. Labor Department has proposed to bring them under its aegis.

According to the Department of Labor:

Many of these workers are the primary breadwinners for their families. Of the roughly 2 million workers who will be affected by this rule, more than 92 percent are women, nearly 50 percent are minorities, and nearly 40 percent rely on public benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home health care aides earn about $21,000 a year and many lack health insurance.

Smith’s analysis uses 2011 federal data. She shows that home care workers are more likely to work overtime, and more likely to work part time, than direct care workers in hospitals and nursing homes:

And they are more likely to be working part time for involuntary reasons:

Finally, their median wages — and the wages of those in the bottom quartile of the occupation — are lower than those of hospital and nursing home workers:

As Nancy Folbre as explained, the economics are bad here. Besides the bad hours, bad pay, bad working conditions, lack of unions and lack of state protections, there are some structural problems. Paid home health care is competing with unpaid family care. That means the decision about whether to pay for professional care weighs against the value of a (usually female) family member’s unpaid work. That drives down the cost of home health care — which means more than a million women get lower wages, and women’s work is devalued. And so on. Breaking that cycle requires either a wage increase (sadly, that includes bringing them under the minimum wage law) or government subsidies.*

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*One attempt to beat these economic odds and support long-term care, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS Act), was supposed to be a premium-based long-term care support program, and it was passed as part of Obamacare. However, with the rule that it be self-funding, and solvent, while paying a cash benefit for life to eligible beneficiaries, theadministration said it couldn’t be done after all. Actually paying for care isn’t cheap.

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.