work

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a report on employment and parental leave for first-time mothers. The mean age at first birth is now 25 years. And while a few decades ago the norm was for women to quit work upon getting pregnant, from 2006 to 2008, 56.1% of women worked full time during their pregnancy, leaving work only as the due date approaches. However, this varies widely by educational level, largely because women with the lowest levels of education are less likely to be working regardless:

The graph on the left below shows how many months before the birth working women left their work; the graph on the left shows how many months after the birth they returned. As we see, over time women have stayed at their paid jobs longer and returned more quickly:

During the 2006-2008 reporting period, for the first time a majority — but a bare one, at 50.8% — of first-time mothers in the labor force used paid leave (maternity leave, sick days, etc.). Not surprisingly, access to paid leave also varied greatly by educational level, and that gap has widened significantly over time:

So nearly half of first-time mothers in the U.S. still do not have paid leave from their jobs.

PBS created an interactive program based on the data that allows you to see the patterns more clearly. You select a race/ethnicity and educational level and get a detailed breakdown of the data. For instance, here’s the info for White non-Hispanic women with a 4-year college degree or higher:

TLC’s new reality program, Big Sexy, features five self-identified plus-size women who work in the fashion industry as models, stylists, and makeup artists. Their mission is to challenge contemporary bodily aesthetics that privilege the thin body and demonstrate that fat can be sexy.

In an interview for the Huffington Post, one of the featured women, Heather, explains, “You can be whatever size you want to be and work in the fashion industry.” However, as we see in this clip of Tiffany’s meeting with her modeling agent, that is not entirely the case. In the exchange, the agent informs Tiffany that a client wants her to lose weight and that “it’s a waste of time and money if the numbers are not right.” At her present size, Tiffany was dangerously close to exceeding the boundaries of plus-size required of models.

In modeling, an inch here or there does matter. In my research of plus-size modeling, I have witnessed other plus-size models, like Tiffany, face pressures from their agents to alter their bodies. These women, in order to work in fashion, must utilize their bodies as capital and embark on a variety of body projects. If their measurements are not in perfect proportion, some stick padding onto their hips, “chicken cutlets” onto their breasts, and squeeze themselves into a pair of Spanx. If a model loses weight, clients tell her to do whatever it takes to gain the weight back, even if that means binging on fat-laden foods that can wreak havoc on any individual’s body. Failure to do so would mean the end of her career.

Beauty is a social construction, but these women are not the ones in charge of its construction. Plus-size models must conform to an image created by fashion’s tastemakers, i.e., agents and designers. Ultimately, they must mold their bodies to fit an image, instead of being empowered in a way that allows them mold the image to fit their bodies. In this sense, they face the same pressures as thin models to be within a fraction of an inch of a shape predetermined by others to be acceptable.

Amanda M. Czerniawski is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University. She specializes in bodies and culture, gender and sexuality, and medical sociology.  Her past research projects involved the development of height and weight tables and the role of plus-size models in constructions of beauty.  Her current research focuses on the contested role of the body in contemporary feminist discourse.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

The Census Bureau posted some information about the economic payoff of a college degree on their blog, Random Samplings. A recent report indicated that educational level had a bigger impact than any other demographic factor on lifetime earnings. More education leads to both higher incomes not just because those with more education receive higher salaries, but also because they are more likely to be in full-time jobs. The x-axis here shows the % of people in full-time, year-round jobs:

Not surprisingly, the gap in earnings widens over time, especially for those with a bachelor’s or higher degree compared to those with less:

The report also estimated lifetime earnings by race/ethnicity for men and women separately. As they point out, except for a couple of cases at the very highest educational levels, men from even the most economically disadvantaged racial/ethnic groups out-earn women from the most economically advantaged ones:

Of course, not all college degrees are equal. Dolores R. sent in a link to an interactive table from the Wall Street Journal that lets you look at earnings and the unemployment rate for various majors. I sorted them by median earnings; here are the ten with the lowest median earnings:

And the ten with the highest:

The highest unemployment rate? Clinical psychology, at 19.5%.

You can also search by area (art, engineering, etc.), though it looks like the categorization may be a little sketchy — for instance, “geology and earth science” and “liberal arts” show up under the arts.

For more on college majors, earnings, and future career opportunities, see the report College Clusters: Forecasting Demand for High School through College Jobs, 2008-2018, from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

George W. Bush did not really say, “The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.”  But that statement does fit with the American tendency to view our country as the land of entrepreneurship (literally “enterprise”).  America is, after all, the land of opportunity, where anyone can become rich.  And the way to get rich is to be an independent, risk-taking entrepreneur and start your own business.  That’s what we do here in the US, and we do it better than most.  At least that’s what we think.

But look at this chart showing the rate of start-ups per working-age population:

The US ranks 23rd.  That doesn’t quite square with all those photo-ops where the president (Obama, Bush, Clinton – they all do it) goes to some small successful company out in the heartland.  What is it about these other countries that makes for more risk-takikng?

James Wimberly has an answer: the safety net.  He makes the point with an analogy – his own photos of kids on a rope-walk – a single rope hung between two platforms in what looks like the Brazilian rain forest.  (It’s really just a replanted hillside, formerly the site of a favela). The kids have safety devices – hard hats, a safety harness, guide-ropes to hold on to.  Without these, only a few of the most f oolhardy would try a Philippe Petit walk.  But the safety devices allow lots of kids to take a risk they would otherwise avoid.

The same logic applies to small business.

How many Americans are locked into jobs they hate by the fear of losing health benefits? No Dane ever has to worry about losing her right to medical care by quitting her job to go it alone

Safety devices cost money, but they pay off.  On the rope-walk, you can see the reward in the expression on the kids’ faces when they reach the other platform.  In the national data, you see it in the those start-ups.

The countries with significantly higher startup rates than the USA are those with stronger, more comprehensive, and more centralised social safety nets, along with correspondingly higher taxation.

See Wimberly’s entire post – with the photos, footnotes, and comments – for a fuller explanation.

I like this post. And it’s the two-year anniversary of Bruce Snowdon’s death. So, here’s my toast to the last sideshow fat man.

He’s so big and so fat it takes four girls to hug him and a box car to lug him.  When he dances you’ll swear he must be full of jelly, cause jam don’t shake that way.  And you know girls!  He is single and lookin’ for a wife, he’ll make some lucky girl a fine husband, why he’s so big and fat, he’ll provide you with a lot of shade in the summertime, keep you nice and warm in the winter time and give you lots of good heavy lovin’ all of the time!

— Carnival Spiel by Ward Hall

On Nov. 9th 2009, Harold Huge, a man billed as the very last sideshow fat man, died.  He weighed 607 pounds or so.

Harold’s real name was Bruce Snowdon.  He had degrees in paleontology, anthropology and chemistry. In 1977, he found himself bored with his work and stumbled across the idea of being a Fat Man:

I had put on a lot of weight between the time I was 20 and 25. I was up to about 450 in those days. I went to the local library, and I was poking through some old circus books and I see this one picture about a sideshow, maybe circa 1905, and I’m looking at this fat man and I’m saying to myself, “He can’t weigh more than 350 pounds.”

Now, I ask myself, how the hell would I go about getting into a sideshow? I’d never even seen a sideshow in my lifetime. In the late ’70s the industry was a very pale ghost of its former self. Instead of thousands, there were maybe dozens left then. So I figured, logically, there’s got to be some sort of trade journal for the carnival industry. It’s Amusement Business. And I’m looking through the AB. Taking a lucky stab, I wrote the editor, Tom Powell. And Tom Powell happens to be a very good friend of Ward Hall. Bingo. I had the job.

In an interview with James Taylor (from which the above quote is also taken), Snowden explained:

I don’t mind being enormously fat… I come from a long line of fat people. My old man tortured himself for 40 years going from 200 to 300 [pounds] and back again. He eventually lost the weight, but he also lost his mind.

Snowdon played Harold Huge for 26 years.  The year of his retirement, in 2003, he played himself in the movie, Big Fish:

So the sociological question I would like to pose is: Why is Snowdon the last fat man?

Marc Hartzman suggests that fat men and woman became less of a curiosity because “waistlines expanded and obesity became less of a laughing matter.  As the years went by, spotting a man who weighed more than quarter of a ton was not that unusual…”  So there’s two  hypotheses: (1) we see fat people everywhere and so it’s no longer a curiosity and (2) obesity has become a very serious matter, not to be played with at sideshows or elsewhere.

Another hypothesis might involve (3) a growing distaste for objectifying and dehumanizing those who are unusual.   As the human rights era evolves, we increasingly embrace difference and promote tolerance.

(4) Perhaps sideshows themselves are simply out-of-fashion, a drab alternative to Avatar in 3D or a Wii.  Or, (5) maybe the internet has made all curiosity easier to quench.  With a click of the button, we can see DD breasts, thalidomide babies, and cats playing the piano… who needs a sideshow?

I can think of reasons to endorse and reject all of these hypotheses.

So, in honor of Snowdon’s 26 years of service and delightful sense of humor (“If there’s a bitchy type of human being, it’s somebody on a diet”), let’s speculate.

Sources: Sideshow World, AOL News, Shocked and Amazed, Randall Levenson photography, and Shapely Prose.

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.

Arlie Hochschild, in her book The Second Shift, discusses a modern tension in American households resulting from a “stalled gender revolution,” i.e., the fact that women and the social construction of femininity have changed and men and masculinity have not caught up with these changes.  These tensions erupt when assigning responsibilities in the second shift of household labor and childcare, which often fall upon wives’ shoulders.  Traditionally, the dominant construction of masculinity does not allow men to participate in housework, such as laundry, since it is threatening to their sense of masculinity.  In fact, as argued by Julie Brines, the economic model of dependency holds for women but not for men.  Men can essentially trade in their salaries for the domestic labor performed by their wife; however, when women out-earn their husbands, they cannot seem to strike a similar bargain.  In this case, since the man is not fulfilling his traditional role as provider, he essentially refuses to further damage his reputation by engaging in “woman’s work” in the home.

Enter Tide:

In this Tide commercial, we see this threatening element of housework, as the “Dad Mom” tries to justify his laundry proficiency by reasserting his masculinity.  At the end, he confirms that he is still a man as he declares that he will “go do pull ups and crunches,” one would assume in order to build up his manly muscles.  Beyond this direct statement of his attempts to embody masculinity, throughout the commercial, we see three themes — normative heterosexuality, competition among men, and the codification of laundry as feminine — used to excuse his role as homemaker.

He first makes the claim that he is at home “being awesome,” and proceeds to explain how.  He stresses his unique (and alluring) mixture of masculinity and nurturing.  By describing himself in this way for the sake of the “Mom Moms,” he alludes to his heterosexuality, a basic element of hegemonic masculinity, in an attempt to establish some sex appeal.

Second, there is a competitive element to his dialogue as he boasts to other dads about his ability to dress a four-year-old and skills at folding a “frilly dress with complete accuracy.”  By making it a competition, he rationalizes his participation in housework. Boom!

Finally, this “dad mom” uses the “brute strength of dad” in combination with the “nurturing abilities of my laundry detergent” to complete this basis household task.  The task of doing laundry and the detergent, itself, is codified as feminine.  This combination is a “smart” one because this is exactly what women need: more men doing the laundry.

Amanda M. Czerniawski is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University. She specializes in bodies and culture, gender and sexuality, and medical sociology.  Her past research projects involved the development of height and weight tables and the role of plus-size models in constructions of beauty.  Her current research focuses on the contested role of the body in contemporary feminist discourse.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

The Pew Charitable Trusts just released an update on the effects of long-term unemployment. One aspect of this economic crisis that sets it apart from others over the past several decades is how long unemployment is lasting. At this point, about a third of the unemployed have been out of a job for a full year or more:

Though the likelihood of being unemployed went down with age, among those who have lost their jobs, long periods of unemployment are more common among older than younger workers:

Read the full mini-report here. Via Talking Points Memo.

Also check out Lisa’s post on the long-term consequences of unemployment.

“Just another example of how children are placed into gender roles,” writes Belinda, who sent in this page from an Australian Kmart catalog:

The girls are, of course, dressed in “pretty” costumes, such as a fairy, a ballerina, or a ladybug. Or they placed in a “domestic” role, such as the cook. The boys however get to be a pirate, a police officer, a doctor or a firefighter. Unsurprisingly, the boys are mainly dressed in costumes that are actually plausible career options, the girls however are placed in the domestic sphere or the realm of fantasy.

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.