work

According to a story on NPR, Asian Americans are less likely to be unemployed than White, Black, and Hispanic Americans.  But, when they do lose a job, they remain unemployed significantly longer.

Jobless Rates by Race:

Length of Unemployment:

Why might Asians have a more difficult time finding work?  Kent Wong of  UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education explains that their extended length of unemployment can be attributed to a confluence of two realities that make their situation unique.  First,about 70% of Asian Americans are foreign born and these immigrants often live in ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinatowns) that focus on a single industry.  So long as there is work in that industry, Asians can find work.  But, if that industry goes south, their limited network outside of those enclaves becomes a hindrance.  Meanwhile, Asians (unlike Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks) tend to be segregated by language.  Wong explains that, with about a dozen languages spoken widely in the Asian American community, pan-ethnic networks can be difficult to build and maintain.  This leads to extra difficulty finding a new job:

If you have a Vietnamese employee working for a Vietnamese employer in Little Saigon in Orange County, that does not transfer to an ability to get a job in Koreatown in Los Angeles…

Both residential and linguistic segregation, then, contribute to long periods of unemployment for Asian Americans.

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.

Stephen W. sent in a photograph of a public relations notice at a gas station in Kansas City.  The notice, from BP, explains that the owner of the BP gas station is a member of the community:

The notice is clearly an effort to smooth over the negative publicity BP has recieved as a result of the oil spill in the gulf.  On the one hand, it seems obvious that it’s disingenuous for BP to claim that they are “part of the community.”  And, if one wants to boycott BP, one would not want to buy at a BP station.

On the other hand, BP is right.  According to the National Association for Convenience Stores, 80% of the gas in the U.S. is bought at convenience stores and in only 2% of cases are these owned by major oil companies (the remainder is largely sold through superstores like Costco and Sam’s Club).  57% of the time, these stores are owned by a person for whom it is a small business and it is the only convenience store they own.

So it is true that, in almost all cases, attempting to police or punish BP by refusing to buy their gas is also hurting a small business owner who has zero control over BP and its policies.

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.

Please welcome Guest Blogger Ashley Mears.  Mears is a model-turned-sociologist who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.  In her forthcoming book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.  When Osocio‘s Tom Megginson forwarded us a link to a trailer for a new documentary on the topic, Picture Me, we turned immediately to our resident expert.  We’re so pleased that she agreed to share her thoughts.

———————————

Picture Me documents ex-model Sara Ziff’s 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry.  It sets out to expose the grit behind the glamour, chronicling models’ exhausting work and travel schedules, warped body images (include hints of anorexic and bulimic practices), debt to agencies, innocent youth and the attendant vulnerability to sexual predatory clients.  It is a long, wandering complaint of the industry, and in the end, Ziff equates all bodywork with exploitation and dismisses modelling work as cheap thrills—albeit emotionally costly ones.

While critical of the industry, the film glamorizes what it supposedly condemns, most insidiously by portraying Ziff’s meteoric success as normal for a model.  Twice the camera zooms in on the many digits of her paychecks.  As her co-filmmaker/boyfriend Ole Schell wryly notes, “It’s not everyday you see a check for $112,000.”  This is especially the case, they should add, for most working fashion models.  As a winner-take-all market, modelling is extremely unequal; very few women reach this kind of success.  At any given modelling agency, in fact, dozens of women owe significant debt, an issue far more complex—and exploitive—than the moments it gets in Picture Me.  Models accrue debt for start-up costs advanced by their agencies, from plane tickets and visas to pocket money and apartment rent in an agency-owned apartment (to the tune of about $250 per week to stay regardless of how full or vacant its state).  They are charged anywhere from $5 to $50 for bike messengers to deliver their portfolios across town daily.  These costs are not negotiable or traceable; they are deducted automatically from her future earnings.  And they add up; at one New York agency I studied, a model was in the hole up to $18,000 even before stepping foot into her first casting audition.  To recoup their losses, agencies count on the top 5% of their models who bill more than $100,000 annually, people like Ziff who are statistical anomalies in their field.

A model who leaves an agency with a debt is legally bound by contract to repay it, though accountants will tell you that they don’t bother to pursue these debts, since indebted models are an unlikely source from whom to recoup losses.  Instead, agencies write off negative accounts as business expenses.  However, models’ negative accounts will by law transfer to their next agencies should they attempt to work elsewhere, which is unlikely as agencies are hesitant to represent models with existing negative balances from prior agencies.  In other words, once in debt, everywhere in debt.  It is an independent contractor status designed to alleviate the organization’s responsibility for its worker, pushing all market risks onto the freelancer in a work relationship that can resemble indentured servitude.  Thus, Ziff sits at the top of the pile, nonchalantly waving a wad of cash in her hand that masks a precarious career structure in which, for every Sara Ziff, there are thousands of women struggling to make ends meet.

———————————

Another telling omission in the film is men.  Ziff’s accusations of systemic sexual abuse are distressing, and something I heard all too commonly in interviews with models—male models, that is.  I found women were far less likely than men to recount ordeals of sexual advances by clients.  There are a couple of explanations for this discrepancy.  First, it is likely that female models may not report or even recognize as report-worthy sexual advances by men, given the ubiquity of sexual harassment women are likely to face on any job.  Second, the filmmakers seem to have encouraged their subjects to recount their ordeals in confessional-style video diaries, a technique quite different from open-ended interviewing.

Also likely, I think male models do experience more unwanted come-ons than female models.  In an industry over-represented with gay men in decision-making positions, male models report feeling pressure to flirt with men in order to book jobs.  Male models earn considerably less than their female peers, making each job more important to them, and their agents often instruct them to charm important clients.  It’s referred to jokingly in the industry as going “gay for pay,” similar to male porn actors who do gay sex scenes to boost their earnings.  Male models do not as a population identify as gay, but it’s widespread and openly acknowledged that straight men must flirt shamelessly with gay clients to get work.  As one male model told me, “Everyone has to play his cards.”

But it’s not a game to the men I interviewed who told horror stories of such performances turning into threatening situations.  Men reported being “felt up” by stylists while dressing, told to wear revealing clothes, or no clothes at all, and being kissed and hugged by prestigious clients at parties.  One model described how, on a shoot with a male photographer, he was asked to make himself semi-erect.  This is not to downplay women’s encounters with sexual harassment in the industry, but to note that all models are relatively powerless in this market, and given the sex composition of those in power, male models are especially vulnerable.

Picture Me revolves around shocking personal narratives, and as a biting (and I think unfair) NY Times review notes, the filmmakers go straight for the easy critiques at the expense of their social context.  It’s hard to contextualize economics, gender and sexuality, and a complicated career structure in a 75-minute documentary, especially when stomach-turning confessionals and eye-catching runway pictures are so readily available.  And this is what sociologists are for anyway.

For more of Mear’s insights on the modeling industry, see our posts on the contrasting aesthetics of high end and commercial modeling, the ugly other side of the model search, and control and thinness.

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 video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley.  Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here).  Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.

See also our post in which one man explains the “hidden life sentence” he received after a crime 20 years past.

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.

Today is the last day of Oktoberfest in Munich; this has meant a lot of slide shows of people drinking from giant beers steins on the wiesn.  I noticed that the slide show at Boston.com included a disproportionate number of images of young women in (often boob-poppin’) Dirndls.  Men were about as likely to be young as they were to be older, exhibiting interesting character, and more likely to be shown in functional roles.  Women, then, were included primarily as eye candy for a (presumably heterosexual and) male gaze.

Five photos of young girls in Dirndls, two photos of young men in Lederhosen, two photos of older men in Lederhosen, one mixed-sex picture of middle- and older-life characters (the only one that includes a picture of a woman who might be over 25), three photos of men at work, and two photos of women at work (including the only photo of a woman who is not dressed up to be conventionally attractive).

For a slide show without the objectification, see Time.

—————————

UPDATE! Alan Taylor, the editor of the slide show at Boston.com, wrote in with some perspective:

Hi there, just a note from the editor of the blog post in question. First, I’m happy to see the discussion here, believe it or not subjects like this are often in mind when compiling my photo stories.

This seems like fair criticism, and I’m not being defensive. What I will offer is last year’s entry for comparison and contrast: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/oktoberfest_2009.html – not nearly as many “boob-poppin’” dirndls there.

As an editor I am limited by the photos available to me, and their quality. In this case, for example, there may have been a decent photograph of an older woman in a strong functional role, but maybe it was poorly lit or repetitive just not up to par, and was left out. I compile entries three times a week on varied subjects that endup being 30 to 40 photos total, starting with anywhere from 100 to 300 to begin with. The selection process is long, subjective, and can certainly be viewed as flawed from many points of view.

If you think the blog is intentionally objectifying, I invite you to look through my archives: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/ and judge for yourself. I can also be reached by email at ataylor@boston.com

Thanks for the discussion,
-Alan Taylor

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.

This 23-minute documentary, The Colony, explores Chinese immigration to Senegal. The immigrants are drawn to Africa by the promise of lucrative entrepreneurship and they are changing the economic landscape, to the pleasure and displeasure of locals.

At Al Jazeera.

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.

One thing we’ve been interested in, and posted various images about, here at Soc Images is the different ways people experience the current economic crisis. Obviously people will suffer more or less depending on their personal situations — if they had any savings, if they lose their jobs or not, if there are other wage-earners in the household, and so on. While we’re all affected by the recession at least indirectly, for some it’s a much more immediate personal problem than for others. And demographic factors outside our control, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and so on, play a large role in the distribution of the negative impacts (or, for some, the positive ones) of the recession.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a story from the NYT that looks at the particular hardships faced by older workers. I’m interested in the graph on the left below, which shows historic jobless rates for those over age 55:

On the one hand, the unemployment rate for that group (7.3%) is certainly higher than at any point since the mid-’70s. On the other hand, the jobless rate for 55+ -year-old workers is lower than the overall unemployment rate right now, which is still hovering at about 9.6% (Bureau of Labor Statistics). It’s a case of the decontextualized graph: one that isn’t technically misleading, and that presents data in a straightforward manner, but that, without providing comparisons to other groups, makes it hard to know what to think about the data.

That’s not to discount the difficulties experienced by workers over age 55; it’s surely not comforting to know that the unemployment rate for your age group is below the national average if you, yourself, lose your job. And the graph on the right presents another aspect of joblessness: how long it lasts. When workers over 55 lose their jobs, it tends to take them quite a bit longer to find a new one. As the NYT article points out, with the overall higher rates of unemployment for all age groups, that gap becomes increasingly important: “because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.” At the same time, the hits many retirement accounts have taken is pushing more people over age 65 to look for work, while others are forced into early retirement simply because they can’t find jobs.

More on race, age, gender, and the recession here.

Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.”   It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.

First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:

The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine.  Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.

What about for her?

Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels).  The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???)  can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.

Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy.   Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing.  In fact, men do have more leisure time than women.  So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.

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.