work

K. sent in a trailer for a new comedy called Outsourced.  In it, a white call center manager is sent to India to  manage a company full of Indian workers who take orders for gag items (including jingle jugs).  I think the it is both troubling and promising at the same time.  My thoughts after the trailer:

On the one hand, a lot of prior experience and several aspects of this trailer make me worry that this show is going to capitalize on negative stereotypes of Indians, especially ones that suggest that they are goofy and nerdy and are hilariously unfamiliar (e.g., “stupid” names and “scary” food)… with a handful of stereotypes about Americans thrown in for good measure.  The show threatens to reaffirm a binary where the U.S. and India are completely different in every way.

On the other hand, I am encouraged by the fact that the show includes a wide range of Indian characters.  In some cases, our stereotypes are upset by traits that Americans are conditioned not to expect in Indians (such as the guy who likes to dance); in other cases, characteristics are clearly attributed to individuals instead of “Indians” (such as the girl who is afraid to talk).  Further, it becomes clear in the trailer that the employees in the manager’s office are misfits because they’re misfits, not because they’re Indian.  The competitor call center employees are not misfits at all.  They are clearly super-effective and excellently-trained (though, perhaps, also Westernized).  The ridiculousness of the main ensemble cast, then, isn’t attributed to their Indianness per se.

So, yes, I fear that this is going to be a show that makes (white) Americans laugh by suggesting that Indians are dorky and weird.  At the same time, I see promise in a show that actually casts Indians as individuals instead of representatives of their nation/race.

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.

Data from The Institute for College Access and Success shows that the number of students who graduate with at least $40,000 in student loans increased nine-fold between 1996 and 2008.

Sally Raskoff at Everyday Sociologyoffers some explanations for the data:  (1)  College has been getting more expensive; among other reasons, states cut education budgets.  (2)  For-profit colleges have also become a larger proportion of all colleges and students in these colleges are more likely to take out loans.   (3)  Given a bad economy, students are less likely to have jobs while in school.  Other explanations?  Stories?

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 full-time worker making nine dollars an hour cannot raise a family above the poverty line.  A paper by Sheldon Danziger and David Ratner demonstrates that fewer women survive on less than $9 an hour today than (its adjusted equivalent) in 1979.  The same cannot be said for men: The authors write:

…changes in the labor market over the past thirty-five years, such as labor-saving technological changes, increased globalization, declining unionization, and the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, have made it more difficult for young adults to attain the economic stability and self-sufficiency that are important markers of the transition to adulthood.

This is just more evidence of the shrinking of the middle class; solid working class jobs that will allow you to buy a modest home are disappearing. Hat tip to Family Inequality and Karl Bakeman’s blog.

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.

Sixty-two percent of Americans think that the country should reduce spending in order to cut the deficit.  What do they think we should cut?  Nothing really.

Well, nothing except foreign aid.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones reminds us that foreign aid is about one percent of the U.S. budget.

…there were only four [other] areas that even a quarter of the population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.

The Economist, via BoingBoing.

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.

Why does the iconic New York City paper cup look so… Greek?

The designer of the cup, Leslie Buck, arrived in the U.S. after fleeing the Nazis during World War II.  He joined a new company called “Sherri Cup” in the ’60s.  He designed the cup, with no art training, with a Grecian theme and in the colors of the Greek flag, to appeal to… Greeks.  It turns out that a large portion of the city’s diners at that time were owned by Greeks.  It was an instant hit.

So, we have immigration, ethnic occupational segregation, and Buck’s ingenuity to thank for decades of cozy, New Yorky feelings inspired by that little cup.

Buck died this April.  You can read his obituary, and the whole story of the cup, at the New York Times.

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.

Existing data suggests that, for college students graduating during an economic recession, wage depression will follow them throughout their life.  The figure below shows that, for every one percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate, a college grad’s wages will drop by about six percent.  Five years later, their wages will still lag by five percent.   Fifteen years later they’ve recovered their losses to about three percent, but they’re still behind where they would have been.  And remember, this data is for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate.

Data borrowed from the Office of Management and Budget, via Matthew Yglesias.

For more happy graduation news, 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.

You might have heard that the U.S. added 290,000 jobs in April.  At the same time, the unemployment rate rose!  Bwhat!?

The unemployment rate doesn’t measure how many people are unemployed.  It sounds like it should, being that it includes the words “unemployment” and “rate” and all, but it doesn’t.  Instead, the unemployment rate measures how many people are looking for jobs.  When things are really bad, some people get discouraged and give up, or go to school instead, or stay home to take care of their kids and save day care money.

So the number of jobs and the unemployment rate are not directly correlated.  Ezra Klein posted this visual:

It shows unemployment rising as job growth remains negative, leveling off as (perhaps) people drop out of active job seeking, and than actually going up again there at the end in response to two months of solid job growth.

So it turns out that, in this case, a rise in the unemployment rate is good news.  It means some people are hopeful again.

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.

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.