Last Thursday, the Senate voted to pass the Employment Non-discrimination Act. ENDA would make it illegal for the workplace to discriminate on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, nationality, religion, age and disability is already illegal. If passed by the House of Representatives, this will be a major civil rights act, as twenty-nine states do not have any laws protecting LGBT individuals in the workplace.

Kathleen Hull’s chapter in the Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research addresses how gay and lesbian workers experience discrimination, and how public attitudes clash over anti-discrimination laws.

• Kathy Hull. 2005. “Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: Dimensions of Difference.” in Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities, edited by Robert L. Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Organizational context such as sex composition and workplace culture affects the likelihood for sexual discrimination.

• Stainback, K., Ratliff, T. N., & Roscigno, V. J. 2011. “The Context of Workplace Sex Discrimination: Sex Composition, Workplace Culture and Relative Power.” Social Forces, 89(4), 1165-1188.

Gay employees were most likely to report discrimination in primarily heterosexual workplaces and organizations which lacked supportive policies and protective legislation.

• Ragins, Belle Rose, and John M. Cornwell. 2001. “Pink Triangles: Antecedents and Consequences of Perceived Workplace Discrimination against Gay and Lesbian Employees.” Journal of Applied Psychology 86(6), 1244-261.

Shopping while black is not a crime, but what happens when a store assumes the customer is always white?

ColorofChange.org has created a petition urging the NYPD to conduct a full investigation into over 50 arrests of young people, predominantly of color, outside of major department stores like Barney’s and Macy’s. Why hasn’t the “shop and frisk” trend gone out of style?  Theories on race and racism, as well as the application of such ideas through social experiments, may offer some useful insights.

To study the gap between actions and rhetoric, audit studies reveal patterns of discrimination in the working world which shape employment opportunities for many low-wage workers of color.

• Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005.  “Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do.” American Sociological Review. 70: 355-80.

• Pager, Devah, Bruce Western, Bart Bonikowski.  2009.  “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment.”  American Sociological Review.  79: 777-99.

Some theorists view racial attitudes through a conflict perspective that suggests racism and prejudice is rooted in different social positions between groups.

• Bobo, Lawrence. 1999.  “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations.”  Journal of Social Issues.  55(3): 445-72.

A recent CNN article reports that relationships between EU officials and the US have been “severely shaken” on account of information leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA monitored the personal cell phones of 35 world leaders, possibly including Germany’s Angela Merkel. The statement made by Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco raises the important question: Are we collecting information because we need it or just because we can?

While privacy and publicity are often portrayed as a tradeoff, the editors at Cyborgology demonstrate that in many cases, one is a necessary condition for the other.

• Jurgenson, N., and Rey, P.J.  2013. The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity.  In Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives. Lovink, G. and Ratsch, M. (eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 62-75.

Although we typically think privacy is “freedom from” government intrusion, some scholars say society makes it a “freedom to” choose whether or not to disclose personal information. From this perspective,  both social and technological solutions are needed to solve privacy issues.

• Boyd, D. and Marwick, A. September 22, 2011.  Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies.  A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society.

Leading scholars show how many government practices are invented and learned to manage their populations.

• The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1991. Burchell, G., Gordon, C.,&  Miller, P. (Eds.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The US federal minimum wage has been a hot topic in 2013, starting with President Obama’s proposal in February to increase the federal minimum wage to $9/hour. Then, over the summer, McDonald’s was the source for national ridicule after releasing a financial planning document for its workforce that suggested employees would need to work two full-time entry level jobs in order to pay for basic monthly expenses. Most recently, thousands of fast food workers from across the nation went on strike to increase the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. Is living on a minimum wage income really that tough? And if it is, why is it so difficult to simply increase it?

In most cases, living off a minimum wage income is simply not feasible, especially for single parents.

• Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, 1997. Making ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York:Russell Sage Foundation.

Much of the reluctance to increase the minimum wage stems from the fear that higher wages would force companies to raise prices and hire fewer employees. However, these anxieties are largely unfounded.

• Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Kreuger, 1992. “The effect of minimum wage on the fast food industry”

Sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for protesting the exclusion of girls from school in Pakistan, recently met with Queen Elizabeth II and other international leaders to promote girls’ education. Her advocacy reminds us that gender inequality in education is not limited to developing countries, but one that affects women worldwide.

In industrialized countries, female students have gained in some aspects of schooling, but the gender divide limits women’s educational opportunities as well as their roles in the home, the workforce, politics, and religion.

• Buchmann, C., DiPrete, T., & McDaniel, A. (2008). Gender Inequalities in Education. Annual Review of Sociology. 34: 319-337.
• Fuchs Epstein, C. (2007). Great Divides: The Cultural, Cognitive, and Social Bases of the Global Subordination of Women. American Sociological Review. 72(1): 1-22.

Last week atheist bloggers expressed their frustration when Oprah Winfrey suggested that distance-swimmer Diana Nyad’s atheism wasn’t really atheism. Op-eds from authors in the secular community reminded us that atheists appreciate lots of wonder in the world, and warned about stereotypical views of non-religious people. A few pieces of sociological work can also help explain the weight of her words.

Americans already hold negative opinions about self-identifying atheists, and many say atheists “don’t agree with their vision of American society.”

• Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. 2006. “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” American Sociological Review 71(2):211–34.
• Ryan T. Cragun, Barry Kosmin, Ariela Keysar, Joseph H. Hammer, and Michael Nielsen. 2012. “On the Receiving End: Discrimination toward the Non-Religious in the United States.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 27(1): 105-127.

Oprah’s fame makes her a “moral entrepreneur”— someone with the power to define who the insiders and outsiders are in society. This makes her opinions more likely to influence viewers’ misunderstandings about atheism.

• Howard Becker. 1973. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was recently sentenced to 28 years in prison after being convicted of two dozen federal charges including racketeering, extortion, and the filing of false tax returns. Judge Nancy G. Edmunds recently told CNN that although she wasn’t holding Kilpatrick responsible for Detroit’s bankruptcy, “a long prison sentence is necessary to insulate the public from his behavior.” Whether conviction alone is enough to restore public trust and put an end to white collar crime is still an open question.

Who commits white-collar crime and why? Classical criminology shows how the answers have changed over time.

• Sutherland, E.H. (1940). White Collar Criminality. American Sociological Review. 5(1):1-12.

Current work suggests that political and economic corruption often happens through collaboration, and that we shouldn’t treat the two as separate issues.

• Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer , 2006. State-corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government. Rutgers University Press

It’s Columbus Day! In 1492 he sailed the ocean blue and—well—historians, sociologists, and even web comic artists have been reminding us for a while now that he didn’t really “discover” America, so much as find the native peoples who were already living there. So, how does the narrative of Columbus day (or any other story in our history textbooks) keep coming up the same way year after year?

Columbus’ voyage isn’t the only historical story we tend to get wrong in the classroom.

In a recent report from Al Jazeera America on his first major interview, Pope Francis raises concerns that the Catholic Church needs to change its political priorities if it doesn’t want to “fall like a house of cards.” He argues that the church is focusing too heavily on “narrow” issues like gay marriage and abortion when it should be fostering a more inclusive message. Is this a new and necessary direction for Catholic politics in the United States, or just a flash in the pan?

Pope Francis may be right about church collapse. Many Americans choose not to affiliate with religion for political reasons.

• Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations,” 2002.
  

It also isn’t just political. Narrow theological views on issues like gender and sexuality have an effect on who comes to Mass every week.

• Andrew M. Greeley and Mary G. Durkin,  Angry Catholic Women: A Sociological Investigation, a Theological Reflection, 1984.
  

This isn’t the first shift, though, new leaders and changes in society have a long history of altering the church’s politics.

• Gene Burns, The Frontiers of Catholicism: The Politics of Ideology in a Liberal World, 1994.

Plenty of organization for change can emerge from the church’s membership as well. Not all the discontented leave!

• Tricia C. Bruce, Faithful Revolution: How Voice of the Faithful is Changing the Church, 2011.