inequality

Lil’ Ladies and the Gendering of Legitimacy

Caty Taborda and Anne Kaduk on April 13, 2015

Limbaugh WadeDuring his April 1 on-air radio show, Rush Limbaugh cited a recent SocImages post titled, “Are Economics Majors Anti-Social?” In debating the content of the post, Limbaugh frequently referred to author and editor Lisa Wade as “professorette.” In making up this word, he intentionally gendered the gender-neutral title “professor.” Given the cultural devaluation of femininity, the unnecessary gendering of Wade’s profession signals a discounting of her position and expertise. While Wade is, notably, the author (with Myra Marx-Ferree) of the new book, Gender, women of all professions face challenges to their legitimacy.

Education, prestige, and capital do not exempt women from sexist stereotypes about incompetency. Female researchers and professors are often viewed as less competent than their male colleagues, and male-dominated academic disciplines are perceived to draw more innately brilliant and talented practitioners than female-dominated disciplines.
Even when women occupy high status positions of expertise they are more likely to be interrupted than men. Furthermore, men are more likely to interrupt women even when women occupy a higher professional prestige, suggesting that the gender hierarchy can be more influential to power dynamics than professional status.
Women are also limited in the range of emotions and behaviors they can exhibit in the workplace without being judged negatively. Emotional displays of anger, for example, are interpreted differently if exhibited by men or women, to the likely disadvantage of women. Additionally, displays of dominance by agentic (that is, self-organizing and proactive) female leaders are subject to dominance penalties, backlash, and prejudice.

Curious what our friends in sociolinguistics have to say about gendered titles? Consider listening to Lexicon Valley’s exploration of feminine word endings here.

Rights and Rites: Religion at Work

Jacqui Frost and Evan Stewart on April 7, 2015

Indiana’s recently passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (not to be confused with the 1993 Federal RFRA), faced widespread public controversy and brought a number of high profile boycotts against the state. The law allows private businesses to use the free exercise of religion as a defense in court should they face a lawsuit for discrimination, raising concern about whether businesses are allowed to discriminate against clients on religious grounds. Similar laws are under debate in other states, while in Madison, Wisconsin, officials have signed the first legislation that includes the “non-religious” as a legally protected category. The laws illustrate the importance of religion in shaping social and political issues in American lives.

While religion often works as an inclusive, community-building institution, it also has the potential to reinforce existing social boundaries and inequalities. Cultural and historical contexts shape the ways that religious beliefs are interpreted, and in the American context, religious beliefs are often used to exclude religious and sexual minorities.
Even if these laws are repealed or amended, these social boundaries underlie deeper issues in the workplace. Despite being prohibited by the Employment Non-Discrimination act, audit studies find discrimination against religious minorities and openly gay men in the hiring process.

For more on this issue, check out our post from last year: Religious Freedom and Refusing Service.

Race and the Classroom

Neeraj Rajasekar on March 9, 2015

Race’s role in higher education gets a lot of press. Recent challenges to admissions procedures and classes on race highlight problems with whiteness, raising questions about the state of college diversity.  But what often gets left out of these conversations is the impact of diversity on learning itself and the nuances of how these impacts differ between students.

A diverse student environment can have a positive effect on learning, especially since students from other backgrounds can help each other think about topics differently. In addition, students can learn from the lived experiences of their out-group peers.
While diversity has overall beneficial impacts for the educational process, these outcomes are not created equal. White students are more likely to connect class concepts to abstract theory or class contexts rather than personal experiences, and they are more likely to join in class discussions than are black students.
Students from different backgrounds connect to professors, faculty, and educational spaces differently, affecting their scores and educational success. Notably, this affects the way educators teach and grade. Nonwhite students, particularly under a white teacher, are more likely to feel alienated in the classroom, participate less, and receive lower scores.

Who—and How—Community College Helps

Anne Kaduk and Amy August on February 25, 2015

President Obama’s recently unveiled proposal would make two years of community college freely available to most students who graduate from high school, maintain a 2.5 or greater GPA, and are enrolled at least half time. Others have pointed out that students must also be from families earning $200,000 or less annually to be eligible for the free tuition. Universal access to community college is a popular idea in some circles, but is it really the most effective way to increase equality of opportunities?

How students attend college is changing. Half of students who begin at a four-year college attend at least one other school before graduating (or otherwise leaving school), and over a third take some time off after enrolling initially. Disadvantaged students are more likely to follow interrupted pathways to degree completion, so differences in patterns of college attendance could be influencing social class differences in graduation rates (and thus inequality in opportunities).
While community colleges improve college access and extend post-secondary educational opportunities to underserved groups, they aren’t closing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged groups in terms of program completion. As a result, they don’t necessarily reduce racial and socioeconomic inequities. However, enrolling in a community college modestly increases the probability of completing a bachelor’s degree among disadvantaged students who would not have otherwise attended college (the majority of community college-goers).
More education yields economic benefits in earnings, occupation and employment. It also provides non-economic benefits in areas like marriage, fertility, social participation, and physical and mental health. The returns on a four-year college degree are greatest for marginal students—those whose decision to attend college could be swayed by free access to community college. Completing an associate’s degree or certain certificates that involve at least a year of coursework can also lead to much greater income when compared to just taking some courses.

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.