inequality

The Second Sex and Second-Class Citizenship

Anne Kaduk on January 14, 2015

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in Young v. United Parcel Service. The outcome will affect many American women’s ability to financially support their families and even have children.

Pregnancy discrimination, while widely illegal, happens when some employers illegally terminate their female workers. They are not explicitly fired for being pregnant, but instead branded “bad workers” by managers. The organizations then use run-of-the-mill meritocratic policies to fire the women.

Reginald A. Byron and Vincent J. Roscigno. 2014. “Relational Power, Legitimation, and Pregnancy Discrimination,” Gender & Society 28(3):435–62.

Pregnancy is a particularly vulnerable time for women; it holds health, legal, and employment risks. A systematic examination of arrests of and forced interventions in the lives of pregnant women in the U.S. shows a variety of concerns about their health, dignity, and autonomy.

Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin. 2013. “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005: Implications for Women’s Legal Status and Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

A variety of laws and their sometimes-selective enforcement affect women’s ability to be healthy and valued members of society.

Jeanne Flavin. 2009. Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America. New York: NYU Press.

Beyond pregnancy discrimination, mothers are paid less than childless women. A portion of this motherhood wage penalty is due to discrimination.

Stephen Benard and Shelley J. Correll. 2010. “Normative Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalty,” Gender & Society 24(5):616–46.

Harassment Online and On the Street

Evan Stewart on November 5, 2014

A new survey from the Pew forum sheds light on widespread online harassment. Young adults in the study reported experiencing more bullying overall, and women were more likely to have been stalked or sexually harassed. These are serious crimes, but routine harassment also isn’t harmless. A new viral video and recent piece from The Daily Show capture women’s everyday experiences with street harassment and catcalling in public. These accounts bring bullying back to light, and social science research shows how and why harassment emerges. 

Bullying isn’t just meaningless cruelty; it is one way groups enforce social norms (especially around gender and race). Challenging harassment often means criticizing society’s deeply held beliefs.
Bullying and harassment are also advanced through social organization. Bullying can emerge when an organization is in chaos and can’t moderate unequal relationships around race and gender, and our legal protection of free speech often makes anti-harassment efforts hard to enforce.

Foraging in the Urban Jungle: Food Security and Homelessness

Matt Gunther on October 28, 2014

According to a new report making headlines this week, 21 American cities have passed laws designed to stop residents from sharing food with homeless people since 2013. The finding, which comes from the National Coalition for the Homeless, highlights an increasingly popular belief that hunger motivates troubled individuals to make lifestyle changes. Food aid, in this view, keeps the homeless complacent. In an interview with NPR, one consultant argued that “Street feeding is one of the worst things to do… it’s very unproductive, very enabling, and it keeps people out of recovery programs.” Many city officials quoted in the report have extended this line of thinking to community soup kitchens and food pantries as well. They see those offerings as well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided attempts to help. One, a police captain from Cincinnati, remarked “If you want the bears to go away, don’t feed the bears.” Research shows this isn’t the case, and these attitudes may actually harm people experiencing homelessness.

Social scientists have amassed a great deal of knowledge about the connection between homelessness and hunger. Over and over, they’ve shown that people with stable food access tend to fare better in other aspects of life.
More importantly, these people aren’t animals and homelessness is no mere matter of individual laziness or poor choice. A number of well known structural factors cause and sustain homelessness, including social stigma, poor access to affordable housing, limited employment opportunities, mental health factors, and physical disabilities.

For more on homelessness, check out TROT posts on last year’s polar vortex and this year’s VMAs.

Gender Pay Gaps: The Silicon Ceiling?

Anne Kaduk on October 24, 2014

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been harshly criticized for his remarks that women should trust in the system to give them the right raises as they go along, rather than asking for raises they feel they deserve.  While he later “clarified” his statement on Twitter saying that he meant to say that the tech industry must close the gender pay gap so asking for a raise is not needed, research shows why sociologists are skeptical of his arguments.

The gender pay gap is well documented, and it exists even when controlling for a variety of factors related to wages, such as occupation, work hours, and educational attainment.
Occupations with lots of female employees also tend to be paid less favorably than those requiring similar skills but largely done by men.
Mothers tend to be particularly disadvantaged in terms of salary compared to childless women or to men.
Women can also face penalties for asking for a raise, even if they deserve it, if they don’t frame their request in a way that still conforms to gender norms.

For more on women in the workforce, check out these previous TROT posts and briefs from SSN.

Falling Poverty Rates Leave Us Hungry For More

Jacqui Frost on September 29, 2014

For the first time since 2006, the Census finds a .5 percentage drop in the poverty rate, with children and Hispanics seeing the biggest declines. Before taking these encouraging statistics at face value, it is important to put them into context. Briefs produced by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Equality and the Center for American Progress outline important factors that often get ignored when focusing on the poverty rate alone, including the consistent struggle for young adults and minorities to find work and the ever-increasing working poor that often get left out of the poverty conversation entirely.

The high poverty rate among young adults is cause for concern. Experiencing poverty in early adulthood has been found to hinder future earnings, especially within minority populations. Young people may stay hungry if our definition of poverty doesn’t grow up with them.
While the poverty rate may have dropped slightly, this is largely due to the increase in the working poor. Millions of families are trapped in the middle, earning just enough to be considered above the poverty line but making far from enough to be considered economically secure. Poverty among working adults is linked to a broader decline in labor unions.
Most of the discussion around the poverty rate centers on what David Cotter calls “person poverty” as opposed to “place poverty.” In his analysis of Census data, Cotter finds that, regardless of any individual characteristic, households in rural America are more likely to experience poverty than their metropolitan counterparts.

Our partner Scholars Strategy Network has tons of great briefs on this issue, including this one on the need for a more comprehensive measure of poverty.

Think Fast: Policing, Race, and Implicit Bias

Richie Lenne on September 26, 2014

Recent shootings in Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina keep us asking how racial bias affects the use of deadly force by the police. How and why does differential treatment by race continue to persist in law enforcement? Part of the answer has to do with the culture and history of policing (see our pervious post Reflecting on Ferguson). Another part involves what psychologists call “implicit biases.” Implicit biases are the unconscious ways in which people treat others differently. Studies of implicit bias have consistently shown that people tend to prefer white to African-American, young to old, and heterosexual to gay. Many social scientists conclude these implicit biases reflect societal biases, because continuous exposure to these assumptions in media and daily interactions leads to biased cognitive associations like “white-innocent” or “black-criminal.”

Implicit biases are most clearly exposed when people are forced to make quick decisions, like when an officer is deciding to shoot or holster their weapon.
Psychologists study the shoot/don’t shoot scenario with video game simulations that require civilians and police to make decisions about a person removing an object (either a weapon or non-weapon) from their pocket. Generally, police make better decisions than civilians, but a racial bias still persists.
Social scientists have several suggestions on how to reduce biases in law enforcement, including increasing the diversity of police forces and management, removing stereotypic images from the workplace, and requiring training to develop counter-stereotypic cognition.

If you are interested in learning about your own implicit biases you can take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at Project Implicit.

Fast Food Strikes Bring Everyone to the Table

Erik Kojola on September 23, 2014
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons

Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black Friday strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.
This revitalized labor movement is also mobilizing women, people of color and immigrants who were largely left out of the traditional craft and industrial unions.
Broader decline of unionization and decrease in the minimum wage has contributed to rising income inequality, and so attempts to organize low-wage workers could help all U.S. workers and reduce this inequality. Union membership provides a wage boost for workers, especially women, people of color and those with less education.

For more on the inclusive power of unions, check out this Girl w/Pen! post.

Net Neutrality: Corporate Versus Common

Matt Gunther on September 15, 2014

In the latest push against an FCC proposal that would create fee-based “fast lanes” on the Internet, a coalition of tech companies purposely slowed download speeds on their websites. The idea – to demonstrate to users how the new rules might slow traffic on non-paying sites – generated quite a stir: as of September 10th, the FCC received a record-breaking 1.4 million public comments on the proposal.

The coalition of protesting firms includes a roster of sites that rely heavily on user uploads: Mozilla, Etsy, PornHub, Kickstarter, Vimeo, and Reddit all voluntarily slowed traffic. Netflix also joined, displaying a message explaining to users “If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still be waiting.” Tech giants Google and Twitter added their opposition as well. Protest organizers are asking the FCC to reclassify the Internet as a “Common Carrier” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, thereby granting the government special regulatory powers designed to protect the web as a kind of public commons.

For most of us, the idea of a “commons” calls to mind a kind of protected natural resource, like the public lands that ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote about in his classic article, “Tragedy of the Commons.” The protesters, though, are asking the FCC to create a “commons” from a service that was built in-part by Internet service providers who now want to charge for speed. So, where might the government stake its claim on a proprietary public service? David Harvey and other social scientists have shown how and why capitalist societies engage in this kind of “commoning.”
The incredible outpouring of individual action in this protest owes a great deal to the organizing efforts of a number of large corporations, each with its own ideological and financial interests in the final ruling. What do you call a campaign that uses grassroots tactics, but takes cues from big business? “Astroturfing”, says Sociologist Edward Walker – and it’s more common than you might think.

Homelessness at the VMAs

Jacqui Frost on September 4, 2014

Miley Cyrus’ VMA activities recently hit the news again – but this time it wasn’t for twerking. Instead, Miley took the spotlight off herself and put it on the issue of homeless youth. Passing her award acceptance on to 22-year-old Jesse Helt, a formerly homeless youth, Miley brought attention to severe social inequality across the U.S. The move raised over $200,000 for Los Angeles homeless youth. However, sociologists show that increasing media awareness of a stigmatized group can have both positive and negative consequences.

Regardless of Miley’s intentions, her effort to give voice to the homeless population is a step in the right direction. Sociologists show that increased awareness of and contact with stigmatized populations can help decrease that stigma.
The media also plays a large role in which issues get deemed “social problems”—problems we feel responsible for helping to fix. Positive media attention given to homelessness at the VMAs, while fleeting, may have some positive impact on social perceptions of homelessness.
However, raising awareness of what many see as a deserving segment of the homeless population—white, healthy, homeless youth—may also detract from what many sociologists call the “undeserving poor.” This equally important group of minority populations and welfare recipients will have a much harder time finding its way into an awards show.

Reflecting on Ferguson

Evan Stewart on August 26, 2014

In the wake of protests responding to the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sociologists began building a large body of resources to explain how these events fit into a broader pattern of racial bias in the United States’ criminal justice system. Sociologists for Justice has both a public statement on the matter and a syllabus on source material related to racialized policing. Sociology Toolbox has recent data on racial disparities and militarized police departments in Ferguson and nationwide. In addition to the conversation about racial injustice, Ferguson also calls into question our assumptions about how to maintain public safety.

Policing in communities of color presents a paradox. The state offers very little attention for social services, but also embeds itself in residents’ everyday lives through strong policing practices.
While there isn’t much research on the effectiveness of policing tactics, we do know that a militaristic approach which maximizes coercion does little to make a community feel safer. In fact, this approach may actually increase future crime and conflict as community members start to resist coercion.
In addition to racial bias in policing, there is also a gendered dimension to military tactics. Precincts develop a sense of male solidarity through military scorn of feminine traits, and even manufacturers of nonlethal police weapons appeal to these masculine sensibilities to sell their products.