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Happy Graduation, Seniors! Congratulations! What’s next?  Below is some sociologically-inspired, out-of-the-box advice on work, love, family, friendship, and the meaning of life.  For new grads from the two of us!

1. Don’t Worry About Making Your Dreams Come True

College graduates are often told: “follow your passion,” do “what you love,” what you were “meant to do,” or “make your dreams come true.”  Two-thirds think they’re going find a job that allows them to change the world, half within five years.  Yikes.

This sets young people up to fail. The truth is that the vast majority of us will not be employed in a job that is both our lifelong passion and a world-changer; that’s just not the way our global economy is. So it’s ok to set your sights just a tad below occupational ecstasy.  Just find a job that you like.  Use that job to help you have a full life with lots of good things and pleasure and helping others and stuff.  A great life is pretty good, even if it’s not perfect.

2. Make Friends

Americans put a lot of emphasis on finding Mr. or Ms. Right and getting married. We think this will bring us happiness.  In fact, however, both psychological well-being and health are more strongly related to friendship.  If you have good friends, you’ll be less likely to get the common cold, less likely to die from cancer, recover better from the loss of a spouse, and keep your mental acuity as you age.  You’ll also feel more capable of facing life’s challenges, be less likely to feed depressed or commit suicide, and be happier in old age.  Having happy friends increases your chance of being happy as much as an extra $145,500 a year does.  So, make friends!

3. Don’t Worry  about Being Single

Single people, especially women, are stigmatized in our society: we’re all familiar with the image of a sad, lonely woman eating ice cream with her cats in her pajamas on Saturday night. But about 45% of U.S. adults aren’t married and around 1 in 7 lives alone.

This might be you.  Research shows that young people’s expectations about their marital status (e.g., the desire to be married by 30 and have kids by 32) have little or no relationship to what actually happens to people.  So, go with the flow.

And, if you’re single, you’re in good company.  Single people spend more time with friends, volunteer more, and are more involved in their communities than married people. Never-married and divorced women are happier, on average, than married women. So, don’t buy into the myth of the miserable singleton.

4. Don’t Take Your Ideas about Gender and Marriage Too Seriously

If you do get married, be both principled and flexible.  Relationship satisfaction, financial security, and happy kids are more strongly related to the ability to adapt in the face of life’s challenges than any particular way of organizing families.  The most functional families are ones that can bend.  So partnering with someone who thinks that one partner should support their families and the other should take responsibility for the house and children is a recipe for disaster.  So is being equally rigid about non-traditional divisions of labor.  It’s okay to have ideas about how to organize your family – and, for the love of god, please talk about both your ideals and fallback positions on this – but your best bet for happiness is to be flexible.

5. Think Hard About Whether to Buy a House

Our current image of the American Dream revolves around homeownership, and buying a home is often taken for granted as a stage on the path to full-fledge adulthood. But the ideal of universal home ownership was born in the 1950s.  It’s a rather new idea.

With such a short history, it’s funny that people often insist that buying a house is a fool-proof investment and the best way to secure retirement.  In fact, buying a house may not be the best choice for you. The mortgage may be less than rent, but there are also taxes, insurance, and the increasingly common Home Owners Association (HOA) fees. You may someday sell the house for more than you bought it but, if you paid interest on a mortgage, you also paid far more than the sale price.  You have freedom from a landlord, but may discover your HOA is just as controlling, or worse.  And then there’s the headache: renting relieves you from the stress of being responsible for repairs. It also offers a freedom of movement that you might cherish.

So, think carefully about whether buying or renting is a better fit for your finances, lifestyle, and future goals. This New York Times rent vs. buy calculator is a good start.

6. Think Even Harder about Having Kids

One father had this to say about children: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” In fact, having children correlates with both an increased sense of purpose in life and a long-lasting decrease in individual and marital happiness.  Having kids means spending a lot of your short life and limited income on one source of joy. It’s not a bad decision. But it’s also not the only good decision you can make. We want to think we can “have it all” but, in fact, it’s a zero sum game. You have only so much time and money and there are lots of ways to find satisfaction, pleasure, and meaning in this life.  Consider all your options.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.  Gwen Sharp is a professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally posted in 2013 and cross-posted at The Huffington Post and PolicyMic (with gifs!).

In case you were wondering, race is still important in the U.S., including in American sports. Deadspin put out a neat tool just in time for NFL draft weekend, allowing readers to see for themselves just how often different words are used to describe white and black athletes in draft scouting reports.  It turns out, for example, that a black prospect’s report is more likely to mention his “motor,” while the typical white player is more likely to be called a “worker.” “Freakish” shows up five times in black reports, and never in a white player’s. Black players are also more likely to be called “coachable.”

I downloaded the data to find out just what the “blackest” and “whitest’ words were. I then drew out the 50 words most likely associated with black and white athletes, respectively. The words are all vaguely football-ish, but upon reflection distinctive patterns emerge.

Some words leap out immediately. Reports on black athletes are far more likely to include the word “mother.” Conversely, white athletes’ reports mention “brothers” more often.  Black players’ reports more often include “driving”; reports on white athletes mention “drive.”

I was quite surprised just how pervasive the old tropes of the smart white leader athletes, and the talent and physical black athletes remain. The word “accuracy” is more than twelve times more likely to be associated with a white player than his black counterpart. Likewise, the words “understands,”(3.9 times) “intelligence” (3.0 times), and the sneaky “intangibles” (3.9 times) are all far more likely to be associated with white athletes.

Conversely, reports on black athletes are more likely to include “leaping” (6.3 times), “upright” (10.4 times), and “violent” (5.1 times). They comparatively rarely include words associated with quarterbacking, intelligence, or leadership.

What the numbers can’t tell us is how much of the difference can be ascribed to the scouts themselves allowing biases to creep in, and how much reflects ways in which athletes have been shaped to this point (i.e., coached to be violent,  encouraged to become leaders, etc). This is obviously an important question, but either way it is clear that race remains a hugely important filter affecting life chances, even in something as supposedly meritocratic as professional and near-professional sports.

A longer version of this post, with more details on methods, can be found at Politics All the Way Down.  Photo credit: Ron Almog, via wikimedia commons.

Stewart Prest is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  You can follow him at his blog, Politics All the Way Down, and on Twitter.  Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

On average, U.S. workers with jobs put in more hours per year  than workers in most OECD countries. In 2012, only Greece, Hungary, Israel, Korea, and Turkey recorded a longer work year per employed person.

A long work year is nothing to celebrate. The following chart, from the same Economist article, shows there is a strong negative correlation between yearly hours worked and hourly productivity.

More importantly, the greater the number of hours worked per year, the greater the likelihood of premature death and poor quality of life.  This reality is highlighted in the following two charts taken from an article by Angus Chen titled “8 Charts to Show Your Boss to Prove That You Can Do More By Working Less.”

In sum, we need to pay far more attention to the organization and distribution of work, not to mention its remuneration and purpose, than we currently do.

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.

Countries with a lot of ethnic diversity generally show weaker economic growth than homogeneous countries.  A new study, however, discovered a variable that strongly reverses the trend: women leaders.

Management professor Susan Perkins and her colleagues compared the economic growth rate of 139 countries over 55 years.  They found that diverse countries did significantly better when a woman was at the helm.  The more diverse the country, the stronger the effect.

Perkins and her co-authors cautiously attempt to explain their data (here), but think that it may have something to do with leadership style.  Female leaders have been shown to be more collaborative and non-authoritarian than men. Co-author Nicholas Pearce speculates:

In countries with a lot of internal conflict, oftentimes people are looking for signals that the person in charge is going to be collaborative and not dictatorial or self-interested. Women’s gender role is symbolic of collaboration, that they’re going to empower marginalized voices.

Because of gender stereotypes, then, women may seem more trustworthy. Meanwhile, real differences in leadership style may affirm those expectations and be more effective in practice.

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.

Flashback Friday.

Behold, one of my favorite things on SocImages.  This pair of Italian commercials are for a do-it-yourself fabric dye.  First, commercial #1 (no Italian needed):

Message: “Coloured is better” or black men are physically and sexually superior to white men.

BUT WAIT!  Wait till you see the twist in commercial #2!

When the man tries to use the dye to transform his wife, it becomes clear that the dye only works one way.  Clearly, it is designed for women to produce the (heteronormative, racialized) object of desire that they supposedly want.  Message: Coloreria is “What women want” or the laundry room is for ladies.

Originally posted April 2008, thanks to  Elizabeth A. and Feministing.  Also in women-are-responsible-for-cooking-and-cleaning: women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, liberation through quick meals, and my husband’s an ass.

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.

Economic policies often rest on assumptions about human motivation.  Here’s Rep. Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin):

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.

Fox News has been hitting the theme of “Entitlement Nation” lately. This Conservative case against things like Food Stamps, Medicare, welfare, unemployment benefits, etc rests on some easily understood principles of motivation and economics.

1.    Giving money or things to a person creates dependency and saps the desire to work. That’s bad for the person and bad for the country.
2.    A person working for money is good for the person and the country.
3.    We want to encourage work.
4.    We do not want to encourage dependency.
5.    Taxing something discourages it.

Now that you’ve mastered these, here’s the test question:

1. According to Conservatives, which should be taxed more heavily:

a.    money a person earns by working.
b.    money a person receives without working, for example because someone else died and left it in their will.

If you said “b,” you’d better go back to Conservative class. A good Conservative believes that the money a person gets without working for it should not be taxed at all.

Not all such money, of course.  Lottery tickets are bought disproportionately by lower-income people.  If a person gets income by winning the PowerBall or some other lottery, the Federal government taxes the money as income. Conservatives do not object.  But if a person gets income by winning the rich-parent lottery, Conservatives think he or she should not pay any taxes.

What Conservatives are saying to you is this: working for your money is not as good as instead of inheriting it. This message seems to contradict the principles listed above. But, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out, Conservatives apply those principles of economics and motivational psychology only to the poor, not to wealthy individuals or corporations.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog and the Huffington Post.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

There are now more people working as private security guards than high school teachers.

Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev offer the following graph, highlighting the number of “protective service workers”* employed per 10,000 workers and the degree of income inequality in the year 2000 for 16 countries.  The United States is tops on both counts.

Two things stand out from this graph beyond U.S. “leadership.”  The first is the relationship between the share of protective service workers  — or “guard labor” — and inequality.  As Bowles and Jayadev comment:

In America, growing inequality has been accompanied by a boom in gated communities and armies of doormen controlling access to upscale apartment buildings. We did not count the doormen, or those producing the gates, locks and security equipment. One could quibble about the numbers; we have elsewhere adopted a broader definition, including prisoners, work supervisors with disciplinary functions, and others.

But however one totes up guard labor in the United States, there is a lot of it, and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States with high levels of income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice as many security workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal states like Idaho and New Hampshire.

When we look across advanced industrialized countries, we see the same pattern: the more inequality, the more guard labor. As the graph shows, the United States leads in both.

The second is the rapid rise in the U.S. share of guard labor and inequality from 1979 to 2000.

One can only wonder in what ways and for whom this large and growing dependence on guard labor represents a rational use of social resources.

* For those who like definitions: The category protective service workers includes those employed as Private Security Guards, Supervisors of Correctional Officers, Supervisors of Police and Detectives, Supervisors of all other Protective Service Workers, Bailiffs, Correctional Officers and Jailers, Detectives and Criminal Investigators, Fish and Game Wardens, Parking Enforcement Workers, Police and Patrol Officers, Transit and Railroad Police, Private Detectives and Investigators, Gaming Surveillance Officers, and Transportation Security Screeners.  A broader measure of guard labor might include members of the armed forces, civilian employees of the military, and those that produce weapons to those employed as protective service workers.  That total was 5.2 million workers in 2011.

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.

Amelia Earhart, aviator. Wilma Rudolph, athlete. Sally Ride, astronaut. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, activist. Josephine Baker, performer. Virginia Woolf, novelist. Rosie the Riveter, archetype. Alice Paul, suffragist. Frida Kahlo, artist. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.

What do these women have in common? They are the 10 iconic women featured this year by womenshistorymonth.gov, the official website of Women’s History Month in the United States. A rotating banner across the top of the page shows a photo of each woman, her name, and a one word description, presumably the reason she is worthy of celebration.

Unfortunately, the women singled out for recognition at the site appear to be considered notable mainly because they excelled at what are generally thought to be “masculine” pursuits. This is androcentric, meaning that it values masculinity over femininity. Traits that have been traditionally conceptualized as masculine (such as being a leader and good at sports and math) are now seen as valuable for girls to develop, while boys are often still discouraged from do things traditionally conceptualized as feminine (such as nurturing, cooking, and cleaning).

I am all for questioning the idea that certain jobs are “men’s jobs,” but we also need to challenge the idea that only women can do “women’s jobs.” If we do not, the belief that women should do “women’s work” and, more importantly, that women’s work is not worth celebrating, is left unquestioned.

Women’s History Month tends to follow this trend. None of the women we typically recognize at this time of year, for example, are noted for being good cooks, care givers, or educators of children, nor are they lauded for their nurturing of others, emotional openness, kindness, or compassion — all traditionally “feminine” traits. Caring for others and teaching youth are wonderful things that everyone should be encouraged to do. Our history books should be filled with people of all genders who were exceptional in these areas. But, these traditionally feminine pursuits are not what earns one accolades during Women’s History Month, or any other time. As a consequence, people are not taught to value such jobs or the people who do them. This one-sided celebration is unlikely to solve the very problem that Women’s History Month is ostensibly designed to combat: gender inequality.

“To all the women who quietly made history” (source):

Laurel Westbrook is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on gendered violence, social movements, and the inner workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system.