culture

This post was created in collaboration with the Minnesota Journalism Center.

The landscape of journalism is changing every day. The Pew Research Center reported that newspaper newsroom employees declined by 45% between 2008 and 2017, and Nieman Lab argues that newsrooms are in the midst of a “do-or-die moment.” As traditional newsrooms lose hundreds of reporters and editors annually, content creators including WikiLeaks and Deadspin are coming alongside legacy media outlets including CNN, the BBC, and The New York Times to provide information to the public. All of these players publish content online in a journalistic fashion, raising the question of what journalism is as a profession.

In the midst of a shrinking workforce, scholars are starting to pay attention to “interlopers” and “intralopers:” Interlopers are actors or institutions who may consider the work they do to be part of news media, though they do not always define themselves as journalists; web analytics companies are one current example. Intralopers are similar to interlopers, but instead work from within news organizations as specialists in digital and social media and often produce emerging technology meant to complement journalists’ work. Both play increasingly key roles in journalistic spaces.

• Avery E. Holton and Valerie Belair-Gagnon. 2018. “Strangers to the Game? Interlopers, Intralopers, and Shifting News Production.” Media and Communication 6(4): 70–78.
• Scott A. Eldridge, II. 2018. Online Journalism from the Periphery: Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field. London: Routledge.

Machines and software packages are beginning to play a more central role in news gathering, news selection, news writing, news editing, and news distribution in newsrooms worldwide. Drones are one example of machines occupying space traditionally held by journalistic actors. 2016 was a turning point for the institutionalization of drones in newsrooms in the United States, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) amended aviation regulations to allow for widespread experimentation with drones in American journalism. Since that date, journalists from outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced compelling stories, photos and videos but have also go through a comprehensive federal certification process (Columbia Journalism Review recently wrote about this phenomenon).

• Shangyuan Wu, Edson C. Tandoc Jr., and Charles T. Salmon. 2018. “Journalism Reconfigured.” Journalism Studies: 1–18.
• Astrid Gynnild. 2014. “The Robot Eye Witness.” Digital Journalism 2(3): 334–343.

Analytics and metrics also play a key role in newsrooms nationwide. However, journalists have varying opinions of how influential their role is in their daily routines, with some arguing that analytics challenge journalists’ authority to decide which stories are newsworthy.

• Valerie Belair-Gagnon and Avery E. Holton. 2018. “Boundary Work, Interloper Media, And Analytics In Newsrooms.” Digital Journalism 6(4): 492–508.
• Edson C. Tandoc Jr. 2014. “Journalism is Twerking? How Web Analytics is Changing the Process of Gatekeeping.” New Media & Society 16(4): 559–575.
• Rodrigo Zamith. 2018. “Quantified Audiences in News Production.” Digital Journalism 6(4): 418–435.

Beyond analytics and metrics, journalists and technologists often collaborate with each other on a regular basis to create open-source software programs. One example is “hackathons” — events where coders and journalists come together to find solutions to journalistic problems in the interest of creating a brighter future for news outlets worldwide.

• Jan Lauren Boyles. 2017. “Laboratories for News? Experimenting with Journalism Hackathons.” Journalism: 1–17.

• Seth C. Lewis and Nikki Usher. 2014. “Code, Collaboration, And The Future Of Journalism.” Digital Journalism 2(3): 383–393.

Brexit negotiations have stalled on what to do about the Irish border. Some want to implement a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to control the flow of migrants into the United Kingdom. Others fear that a hard border will reignite violence that plagued the region in recent memory. Sociologists explain why peace is so fragile in this region by uncovering the structural, religious, and political roots of the conflict.

The conflict in Northern Ireland is religious, but that does not mean it is about doctrine. Religion does not just describe what individuals believe regarding the supernatural. It is a meaningful social identity that shapes how people experience and perceive the world. This is more true in Northern Ireland than in other parts of Europe. Protestants and Catholics not only worship in different churches, they also tend to live in different communities, send their children to different schools, and drink in different pubs. Through participating in these rituals, people in Northern Ireland construct strong identification with one or the other religious group, even if they do not personally believe in God at all.

• Claire Mitchell. 2005. “Behind the Ethnic Marker: Religion and Social Identification in Northern Ireland.” Sociology of Religion 66(1): 3-21.

Religion does not just signify group membership in Northern Ireland. It also signifies access to power and resources. Protestants there have been legally and socially privileged for centuries. This inequality set the stage for inter-group conflict. Because they constructed their social identity in opposition to Catholics, Protestants tended to see Catholic social ascent as a sign of their own descent. When Catholics mobilized for civil rights in the 1960s, the British-backed Protestants responded harshly. Violent repression strengthened the sense of group identification among Catholics. This collective victimhood identity was used to mobilize some Catholics to join violent resistance groups. A wave of bloodshed lasted for 30 years.

• John D. Brewer and Gareth I. Higgins. 1998. Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600-1998. St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
• Gary Easthope. 1976. “Religious War in Northern Ireland.” Sociology 10(3): 427-450.
• Robert W. White. 1989. “From Peaceful Protest to Guerrilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” American Journal of Sociology 94(6): 1277-1302.

Conflict in Northern Ireland is more muted today. Globalization and trade liberalization have reduced the significance of the Irish border. The Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998 charted a path forward for peaceful power sharing in the territory. However, sectarianism did not end with the stroke of a pen. In the years following the agreement, residential segregation in Northern Ireland has increased, and periodic violence still occurs. The government has done little to dismantle structural sources of inequality, such as integrating schools. Instead, lawmakers place the blame of lasting inequality on bad individual actors. As a result, the Good Friday Agreement has not ushered in the era of religious and political cooperation that many hoped for.

• James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd. 1999. “Contested Borders: Globalization and Ethno-national Conflict in Ireland.” Regional Studies 33(7): 681-696.
• Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston. 2007. “From Good Friday to Good Relations: Sectarianism, Racism, and the Northern Ireland State.” Race and Class 48(4): 1-23.

The situation in Northern Ireland has parallels to social conflicts elsewhere, including racial inequality in the United States and South Africa. Social identities, such as religion and race, give meaning and texture to people’s lives. However, when one group’s success is defined by another group’s failure, harmful competition and conflict can tear at the fabric of society. Peace depends not only on individuals seeking and offering forgiveness, but on structural changes and daily rituals that construct an appreciation for differences in society.

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly designated April 2nd as World Autism Awareness Day. This community-wide event promotes the recognition and raises awareness about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The celebration brings individuals with autism and grassroots organizations together to connect and to promote appreciation for people with autism. Despite increasing awareness, the causes of ASD remain a puzzle. While scientific approaches consider it to be a developmental disorder associated with genetic or environmental factors, recent studies in social science illustrate how cultures themselves vary in their perception of both autism and other neurological differences.

The prevalence of autism has grown in past decades in North America.  Explanations of this trend point out to an increase in the prevalence of ASD, a broadening spectrum of autism diagnoses, and declining stigma that promotes recognition and acceptance of the condition. Sociologists have also suggested that this may be because parents, psychologists, and therapists have created alliances, using their expertise to develop a new system of institutions for approaching autism.

• Gil Eyal. 2013. “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic.” American Journal of Sociology 118(4): 863-907.

• Annemarie Jutel. 2009. “Sociology of Diagnosis: a Preliminary Review.” Sociology of Health & Illness 31(2): 278-299.

Regarding the causes of ASD per se, early scientific theories indicated that the condition was associated with genetic alterations, but social science studies have emphasized the role of environmental factors. Further, cultural factors across the world can also shape how people understand autism in the first place.

• Douglas W. Maynard and Jason Turowetz. 2019. “Doing Abstraction: Autism, Diagnosis, and Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 37(1): 89-116.

• Marissa D. King, and Peter S. Bearman. 2011. “Socioeconomic Status and the Increased Prevalence of Autism in California.” American Sociological Review 76(2): 320-346.

Both the description and diagnosis of the ASD depend on historical factors and vary across nations. In Korea, children with autism and their families experience profound stigma, especially the mother — who is considered to be responsible for her child’s condition. Since in Korea parents gain social respect based on the behavior of their children, having a child with autism constitutes a signal of defective parenting. On the other hand, in Nicaragua, there is an emergent culture around autism that encourages teachers and communities to create a supportive environment. However, both cultures still see autistic children as suffering with a disability. Both stances contrast with new ideas about neurodiversity that strive to create a new place for autism in larger socio-cultural contexts.

• Hyun Uk Kim. 2012. “Autism Across cultures: Rethinking Autism.” Disability & Society 27(4): 535-545.

• Jennifer C. Sarrett. 2015. “’Maybe at Birth There was an Injury’: Drivers and Implications of Caretaker Explanatory Models of Autistic Characteristics in Kerala, India.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(1): 62-74.

Somali immigrants call autism the “Western disease” because there is no word for autism in the Somali language and because many believe it does not exist in Somalia. Somali parents accuse the Western diet and medical environment in North America for the condition of their children. Their testimonies have not only opened possibilities to explore new scientific hypotheses regarding the environmental causes of autism, but also to reveal the power dynamics and struggles involved in validating different perspectives and narratives about the condition.  

• Claire Laurier Decoteau. 2017. “The “Western Disease”: Autism and Somali Parents’ Embodied Health Movements.” Social Science & Medicine 177: 169-176.

• Steve Silberman. 2015. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. Penguin.

Contemporary educational programs in the United States are now more aware of the importance of highlighting the strengths rather than the deficits of students with autism. They also recognize that accommodation and acceptance of autism is as important as finding its genetic and neurological causes.

It may be April Fools Day, but the sociology of humor is no joke! Social science research demonstrates that humor reflects societal conditions and can be important for social cohesion. For example, “inside jokes” — shared references between members of a group — promote social cohesion and ensure the group continues to exist by reminding members of the group’s shared history and their social ties to each other.

• Gary Alan Fine and Michaela DeSoucey. 2005. “Joking Cultures: Humor Themes as Social Regulation in Group Life.” Humor.

Women tend to use cohesion-building humor — treating the audience as a cohesive unit — and women rarely make jokes when men are present. Men, on the other hand, tend to use differentiating humor — calling out specific members of their audience and building hierarchies. In other words, using differentiating humor challenges the sense that “we’re all in this together” and instead point out distinctions between group members. Thus, humor can be viewed as a wedge or glue depending on who is using it.

• Dawn T. Robinson and Lynn Smith-Lovin. 2001. “Getting a Laugh: Gender, Status, and Humor in Task Discussions.” Social Forces 80(1): 123-158.

Humor can also reveal cultural tensions in particular times and places. For instance, in Malawi “AIDS humor” reflects the huge shadow cast by the disease over everyday life. For instance, many jokes play on the multiple meanings of “to give” — relationships are often a place of expected exchange, but have also become a key location for the spread of HIV. One cartoon includes the picture of a man kneeling beside a woman saying, “well, you asked me for a romantic present — I’ve just given you AIDs, girl.” While many outsiders would not view these jokes as funny, AIDS is sometimes funny to those in Malawi because it touches the lives of those reading and listening to the jokes.

• Iddo Tavory. 2014. “The Situations of Culture: Humor and the Limits of Measurability.” Theoretical Sociology 43(3-4): 275-289.

The next time you tell a joke, consider how you’re responding to a particular social context or situation and whether your humor is pointing out distinctions or bringing people together.

We’re hearing more and more about the dangers of brain injuries, especially in sports. While the physical nature of these injuries often take the forefront, brain injury survivors must also deal with the emotional and social repercussions of their injuries. To mark Brain Injury Awareness month, we delve into social science research on how recovery from a brain injury involves changes to identity, social relationships, and everyday routines.

Post-injury, brain injury survivors must learn to adapt to the changes their injury caused — this could mean relearning how to walk or eat, learning to rely on others for help, and taking more breaks during the day. With these changes to daily life, many survivors believe their identities change too — and they must construct or reconstruct a new version of themselves. And while they retain aspects of their old selves, many survivors view their new identities as separate pieces. For example, brain injury survivors may distinguish between their new “brain injured self,” an “old self,” and a self that does “meaningful” activities, like parenting, helping others, paid work, art, or gardening. The process of healing and therefore the process of constructing a new self is not linear — like riding a rollercoaster, survivors get better for a while and then backtrack, then getter better, and so on. Consequently, a large part of accepting a new self also involves accepting an unpredictable future.

• Laura Lorenz. 2010. “Discovery a New Identity after Brain Injury.” Sociology of Health & Illness 32(6): 862-869.
• Jonathan Harvey. 2017. A Sociological Approach to Acquired Brain Injury and Identity. Routledge.

• Diane J. Chamberlain. 2006. “The Experience of Surviving Traumatic Brain Injury.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 54(4): 407-417.

The FBI recently announced charges in a wide-spread college admission scandal involving fake test scores and fabricated athletic resumes. In the wake of the scandal, sociologists are weighing in and reminding us that college admissions is as much about legitimating privilege as improving life prospects. Sociologists have long been skeptical of the term meritocracy, which was in fact first coined as satire by Michael Young. The research below shows how constructed measures of merit in college admissions play a key part in reproducing inequality.

Mitchell Stevens spent a year in the admissions department at a selective liberal arts school. His book describes “the aristocracy of merit” — especially how the review process rewards the activities and presentation styles most common for privileged students. And while admissions officers are mostly the ones judging merit, the book also highlights how staff from other departments, such as coaches or fundraising officers, can advocate for a student’s admission. Shamus Khan’s ethnographic work similarly notes how elite prep schools set up their students to be competitive in elite college admission through skills, activities, and awards. Prep school staff even occasionally call admissions offices of Ivy League schools for students.

• Mitchell L. Stevens. 2009. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Shamus Rahman Khan. 2012. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Other work on college admissions highlights that the idea of “merit” has always been socially constructed because those with race and class privilege can set the rules. For instance, colleges instituted  “holistic admission” in the early twentieth century because contemporary elites worried that their children would be shut out of attending their alma mater because of high-achieving Jewish students. They rewrote admissions criteria to devalue standardized test scores in favor of a review process that gave students credit for the experiences, skills, and habits that students from the upper-class were more likely to have.

• Jerome Karabel. 2006. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
• Joseph A. Soares. 2007. The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

So, if upper-class kids already have advantages, why is there a college cheating scandal? Jessica Calarco points out in NPR that the students affected by this scandal would likely do well no matter what school they attended, but parents are anxious about rising inequality, a bifurcating labor market, and afraid that children will have a harder time than their parents did. From teaching children how to advocate for themselves in school to paying thousands of dollars for out-of-school activities, middle and upper-class parents do whatever they can to help their children get ahead. American higher education is a decentralized marketplace that runs on prestige, which makes credentials from a big-name school potentially even more important in today’s changing labor market — both for students looking for social mobility and those looking to legitimate their privilege.

• Tressie McMillan Cottom. 2018. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of for-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. New York: The New Press.
• Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang. 2017. “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940.” Science 356(6336): 398–406.
• John R. Thelin. 2011. A History of American Higher Education. 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Jessica McCrory Calarco. 2018. Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School. New York: Oxford University Press.

As Anthony Jack told CNN, the admission scandal flips the usual script — usually when we are discussing merit in college admissions it is around insinuations that minority students don’t deserve to get in. For more on race-based affirmative action, check out other TSP work below!

Affirmative Action, College Admissions, and the Debunked “Mismatch” Hypothesis

The Supreme Court’s Impacts on Race and Admissions in America

Merit and the Admissions Debates at Harvard University and Stuyvesant High School

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! As you top one off down at the pub, here’s a round on the house about how the Irish became white in the United States.    

Irish presence in America greatly expanded following increased emigration in the mid-to-late 19th century. The journey from Ireland was arduous and dangerous, but their welcome on arrival was worse. Various political and social organizations espoused prejudiced, bigoted views towards Irish immigrants their families; frequent metaphors included comparing the Irish to animals or vermin. Scholars have described how Irish groups in America resisted hatred and discrimination and took steps to combat discrimination both in the job market and everyday culture. As the sources below describe, the Irish actively overcame and struggled against oppression, and civil society organizations and community engagement helped the Irish to eventually be seen as part of the racial category “White” in America.

• David R. Roediger. 1999. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso Books.
• Noel Ignatiev. 1995. How the Irish Became White. Routledge.
• M. Alison Kibler. 2015. Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles Over Race and Representation. University of North Carolina Press.

This story of becoming white applies not only to the Irish, but also to Italians, Poles, and virtually any other European group once framed as outsiders by America’s paradigm of “whiteness” in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over time, these groups’ cultural identities didn’t disappear; instead they became symbolic and strategic expressions of identity that no longer bore these oppressive stigmas.

• Mary Waters. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press.
• Richard Alba. 1990. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. Yale University Press.
• Jason Torkelson and Douglas Hartmann. 2010. “White Ethnicity in Twenty-first-century America: Findings from a New National Survey.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33(8): 1310-1331.

Following work by civil organizations and resulting changes in dominant cultural practices, the racial paradigm has expanded to incorporate some groups into the label of white, but not all. Non-European groups’ stories contrasted greatly with that of the Irish, spawning inequalities that still exist today.

• Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Manges Douglas. 2015. “A Call for the Racialization of Immigration Studies: On the Transition of Ethnic Immigrants to Racialized Immigrants.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(1): 166–80.
• Leo Chavez. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition. Stanford University Press.
• Vilna Bashi Trietler. 2013. The Ethnic Project: Turning Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions. Stanford University Press.

As you finish your drink, ponder how several immigrant groups have been historically labeled as racially black, Hispanic, or Asian, instead of white. How would life be different for Irish-Americans if that had been their story?

Last week, HBO released the documentary, Leaving Neverland, which chronicles two young men’s accounts of sexual abuse by pop superstar Michael Jackson in the late 1980s and early 90s. The documentary provides harrowing details of abuse and grooming, although Jackson maintained his innocence throughout his life. Yet, beyond Jackson’s guilt or innocence, HBO’s airing of Leaving Neverland forces us to engage in larger discussions about an often-neglected group of sexual assault survivors — adolescent boys. Sociological research is examining how masculinity and heterosexuality shape boys’ experiences of sexual victimization.

Threat to masculinity often shapes how male youth interpret experiences of sexual coercion. Many boys view sexual victimization by another man as individual weakness and vulnerability. Forensic interviews with adolescent male survivors reveal how boys attempted to fight off their male perpetrators and/or avoid physical stimulation to show their unwillingness. Boys can be hesitant to disclose abuse by older men because they do not want others to think they are gay. Sexual abuse by women is often viewed as less harmful (e.g. saying it was “weird but fine” and “she wanted it”), suggesting that despite women’s use of sexual coercion and manipulation, these interactions posed less of a threat to boys’ masculinity.

• Aliraza Javaid. 2017. “The Unknown Victims: Hegemonic Masculinity, Masculinities, and Male Sexual Victimisation.” Sociological Research Online 22(1): 1-20.
• Heather Hlavka. 2017. “Speaking of Stigma and the Silence of Shame Young Men and Sexual Victimization.” Men and Masculinities 20(4): 482-505.

Parents of boys who were sexually assaulted by other men also reinforce cultural messages that link same-sex sexual victimization to homosexuality. Many parents believed the trauma of sexual assault by another man would turn their son gay. In his interviews with 62 parents of Black and Puerto Rican male victims, Shawn McGuffey found that parents engage in “gender recovery work” after the abuse to reaffirm heteronormative gender roles. As such, they encouraged their sons to participate in heterosexual relationships, objectify women, and engage in sports. Fathers in particular expected that immersing their sons in traditionally masculine activities would strengthen their heterosexual identities after the trauma of same-sex assault.

• Shawn C. McGuffey. 2005. “Engendering Trauma: Race, Class, and Gender Reaffirmation after Child Sexual Abuse.” Gender & Society 19(5): 621-643.

Criminal justice institutions further reinforce gendered rape myths regarding male sexual assault victims. Court observations reveal how attorneys dismantle boys’ credibility by pointing to the lack of emotional trauma on the witness stand and physical evidence on their bodies. In the case of one 12-year-old boy, defense attorneys dismissed the victim’s claims of assault by two older men because the boy did not show enough emotion and failed to display the penetrative injury expected from a same-sex sexual assault. One defense attorney suggested a young Latino victim fabricated the use of sexual force by his sister’s boyfriend because he was ashamed to admit that he “consented” to homosexual sex.

• Amber Joy Powell, Heather Hlavka, and Sameena Mulla. 2017. “Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials.” Gender & Society 31(4): 457-480.

As we continue to grapple with the implications of #MeToo for boys, sociology allows us to challenge how masculinity and heteronormativity silence young male sexual assault survivors. Dismantling these systems of power brings us one step closer to effective prevention and response to boys’ sexual victimization.

Tattoos can be important symbols in the underworld, but the exact meaning of these images are often a well-kept secret. Even the teardrop tattoo, considered the most popular emblem of prison culture, has contested meanings. While some consider that the tear underneath the eye symbolizes the death of a loved one, others believe that it serves as a tally of the carriers’ crimes. Beyond the actual meaning of their shapes and contours, prison tattoos serve several social functions in prison life.

Studies usually describe how prisons can strip prisoners of different parts of their ‘identity kit’. At intake to prisons, people are fingerprinted, photographed, and assigned an identification number. Penal institutions also routinely strip prisoners of their possessions, clothes, and cultural signifiers in a forced process of personal defacement. To neutralize this process, prisoners gradually acquire a ‘prison identity’. Tattoos enable prisoners to consolidate their self-perception, embrace a new identity, and announce their commitment to ‘convict’ status.

• Erving Goffman.1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Random House.
• Michael P. Phelan and Scott A. Hunt. 1998. “Prison Gang Members’ Tattoos as Identity Work: The Visual Communication of Moral Careers.” Symbolic Interaction 21(3): 277-298.
• Robert Koehler. 2000. “The Organizational Structure and Function of La Nuestra Familia within Colorado State Correctional Facilities.” Deviant Behavior 21(2): 155–179.

Prison scholars argue that prison subcultures endow status and prestige among peers, and strengthen prisoners’ sentiments of loyalty to the prison world. According to David Skarbek, formal and informal norms are effective in securing prison order. However, when a community becomes larger or more diverse, inmates often start organizing around prison gangs. These groups are forms of brotherhood or comradeship that provide information, safety, and a deeper sense of belonging. Tattoos provide gangs with a coded language that serve as an informal mechanism of communication, but also as a way of differentiation against outsiders. Through the visual display of a tattoo, prisoners convey their status, rank, accomplishments, and their allegiance to a specific organization.

• David Skarbek. 2012. “Prison Gangs, Norms, and Organizations.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 82(1): 96-109.
• Josh Page and Phillip Goodman. 2018. “Creative Disruption: Edward Bunker, Carceral Habitus, and the Criminological Value of Fiction.” Theoretical Criminology.

On January 31, The New York Times responded to a letter from Kimberly Probolus, an American Studies PhD candidate, with a commitment to publish gender parity in their letters to the editor (on a weekly basis) in 2019. This policy comes in the wake of many efforts to change the overwhelming overrepresentation of men in the position of “expert” in the media, from the Op-Ed project to womenalsoknowstuff.com to #citeblackwomen.

The classic sociology article “Doing Gender,” explains that we repeatedly accomplish gender through consistent, patterned interactions. According to the popular press and imagination — such as Rebecca Solnit’s essay, Men Explain Things to Me — one of these patterns includes men stepping into the role of expert. Within the social sciences, there is research on how gender as a performance can explain gender disparities in knowledge-producing spaces.

Women are less likely to volunteer expertise in a variety of spaces, and researchers often explain this finding as a result of self-esteem or confidence. In 2008, for example, only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. Two reasons cited for this gender disparity were a lack of confidence in their expertise and a discomfort with editing (which involves conflict). Likewise, studies of classroom participation have consistently found that men are more likely than women to talk in class — an unsurprising finding considering that classroom participation studies show that students with higher confidence are more likely to participate. Within academia, research shows that men are much more likely to cite themselves as experts within their own work.

• Julia B. Bear and Benjamin Collier. 2016. “Where Are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia.” Sex Roles 74(5–6): 254–65.
• Kelly A. Rocca. 2010. “Student Participation in the College Classroom: An Extended Multidisciplinary Literature Review.” Communication Education 59(2): 185–213.
• Molly M. King, Carl T. Bergstrom, Shelley J. Correll, Jennifer Jacquet, and Jevin D. West. 2017. “Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time” Socius 3: 1-22.

This behavior may continue because both men and women are sanctioned for behavior that falls outside of gender performances. In the research on salary negotiation, researchers found that women can face a backlash when they ask for raises because self-promotion goes against female gender norms. Men, on the other hand, may be sanctioned for being too self-effacing.

• Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever, Michelle Gelfand, and Deborah Small. 2003. “Nice Girls Don’t Ask.” Harvard Business Review October: 2–5.
• Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan, and Laurie A. Rudman. 2010. “When Men Break the Gender Rules: Status Incongruity and Backlash against Modest Men.” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 11(2): 140–51.

Knowledge exchange on the Internet may make the sanctions for women in expert roles more plentiful. As is demonstrated by the experiences of female journalists, video game enthusiasts, and women in general online, being active on the Internet carries intense risk of exposure to trolling, harassment, abuse, and misogyny. The social science research on online misogyny is recent and plentiful.

• Mairead Eastin Moloney and Tony P. Love. 2018. “Assessing Online Misogyny: Perspectives from Sociology and Feminist Media Studies.” Sociology Compass 12(5).
• Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell. 2018. “Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: A Literature Review of Empirical Research.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse 19(2): 195-208.

Social media can also be a place to amplify the expertise of women or to respond to particularly egregious examples of mansplaining. And institutions like higher education and the media can continue to intervene to disrupt the social expectation that an expert is always a man. Check out the “Overlooked” obituary project for previously underappreciated scientists and thinkers, including the great sociologist Ida B. Wells.

For more on gendered confidence in specific areas, such as STEM, see our TROT on Gendering Intelligence.