inequality

Many more men are incarcerated than women, but from 1980 to 2014, the number of women in state and federal prisons rose from just over 13,000 to more than 106,000, making women the fastest growing prison population in the U.S. This drastic increase is due in part to the War on Drugs and the shift to a “tough-on-crime” logic in the 1970s and ‘80s. For women, the mass incarceration era doesn’t just exert tougher penalties; it also carries over an earlier, paternalistic way of disciplining women.

Before mass incarceration, women’s prisons operated under rehabilitative models. These viewed women’s criminal behavior as a result of their vulnerability or dependency, rather than dangerousness. Inmates were sometimes called “girls” and referred to the warden as “daddy.” Later tough-on-crime policies increased security, abolished mandatory counseling, and emphasized order and control in women’s prisons. Still, some contemporary prisons maintain a paternalistic attitude by offering women “treatment” that focuses exclusively their perceived inability to make good choices in the face of challenges from men, drugs, or a history of abuse.For women, the mass incarceration era doesn’t just exert tougher penalties; it also carries over an earlier, paternalistic way of disciplining women.

In other words, incarcerated women are hit with a double bind. Strict sentencing policies ignore social context and drastically increase the number of women in prison, while the paternalism of the past shapes how the criminal justice system interprets and judges their behavior and prospects for rehabilitation.

• Jill McCorkel. 2013. Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment. New York: New York University Press.
• Candace Kruttschnitt and Rosemary Gartner. 2005. Marking Time in the Golden State: Women’s Imprisonment in California. New York: Cambridge University Press.

A recent working paper from Harvard found that hosts of the room/house renting service Airbnb discriminate against renters with Black-sounding names. The study revealed that “requests from guests with distinctly African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names.”

Unfortunately, racial discrimination based on names is nothing new.

• Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” The American Economic Review 94(4): 991-1013.

Racialized housing discrimination also has a long history. Once overt, such as in the outright denial of mortgages, housing discrimination has shifted toward micro-aggressions that are harder to spot, such as the private decision not to offer an Airbnb to people of color.

• Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd. 2008. “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34: 181–209.
• Vincent J. Roscigno, Diana L. Karafin, and Griff Tester. 2009.“The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination,” Social Problems 56(1): 49-69.
• Douglas S. Massey. 2015. “ The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Sociological Forum 30(1): 571-588.

Let’s do this, Twitterers! RT if you want to see me fight @MechofJusticeWZ per his request #MasculinitySoFragile pic.twitter.com/uBihFlcA3P

— Pia Glenn (@PiaGlenn) September 23, 2015

In September 2015, the hashtag #masculinitysofragile first swept across the greater twitter community—even gaining its own twitter account. Tweeters use the hashtag to point out how masculinity and expectations for men to be “manly” are not only unattainable, but also harmful to both men and women. Some posts called out the gendered marketing of men’s products like man-sized soap bars, and others the need to qualify affection between two men with “no homo” and the way boys are taught to reserve, rather than express, emotions.

So, is #masculinitysofragile? Luckily for all of us, there’s research on that!

Scholars define masculinity as more than just an individual trait. It involves social practices that privilege men over women and some men over other men. Traits associated with the “ideal” man—what scholars refer to as “hegemonic masculinity”—include sexual aggression, violent behavior, and lack of outward emotion, as well as whiteness, middle-class status, and heterosexual desire for women. Men actively work to maintain a spot in the dominant gender group. Sometimes this involves demonstrating masculinity through behaviors like fighting discrediting women at work.

• Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe. 2009. “Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts,” Annual Review of Sociology 35(1):277–95
• R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19(6):829–59.
• Kyle Green. 2015. “Tales from the Mat Narrating Men and Meaning Making in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Masculinity faces crises when the dominant status of manhood is threatened. For instance, during periods when women’s rights and freedoms expand—like during the three waves of American feminism—men felt their advantages as the more powerful group were threatened. Men also police other men by calling out their lack of toughness using homophobic language. In this case, one man is deemed feminine or weak, while the other’s straightness and dominance is affirmed. Finally, parents may participate in constructing their sons’ masculinity by limiting access to feminine toys and clothing. Men with privilege—those who are white, straight, and/or middle- or upper-class—can afford to be more flexible with their masculinity.

• Michael Kimmel. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press
• C.J. Pascoe. 2005. “‘Dude, You’re a Fag’: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse,” Sexualities 8(3):329–46.
• Tristan Bridges. 2014. “A Very ‘Gay’ Straight? Hybrid Masculinities, Sexual Aesthetics, and the Changing Relationship between Masculinity and Homophobia,” Gender & Society 28(1):58–82.

In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” details the historical development of the carceral state, its consequences on current and formerly imprisoned black Americans, and the unique challenges families face during their absences and returns. Coates cites and interviews several prominent sociologists for their insight into the carceral state’s repercussions for black Americans specifically. We rounded up some of their best work on the topic.

The 1970s saw increasing unemployment and concentrated poverty. Legislators developed “tough on crime” policies that resulted in the start of a massive increase in the number of incarcerated individuals in jails and prisons. Increases in incarceration, however, do not appear to have had a significant effect on decreasing crime rates.

• Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson. 1995. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.” In Shaun L. Gabbidon and Helen Taylor Greene (eds.), Race, Crime, and Justice: A Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 177-190.
• Bruce Western and Christopher Muller. 2013. “Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 647(1):166-189.
• Bruce Western. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage.

Mass imprisonment has a wide range of collateral consequences. Those who serve time face health risks, familial struggles, and barriers to employment before and after they are released.

• Christopher Wildeman and Christopher Muller. 2012. “Mass Imprisonment and Inequality in Health and Family Life,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8:11-30.
• Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Devah Pager. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108(5):937-975.
• Devah Pager. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Chicago Public Media’s This American Life recently aired “The Problem We All Live With”—an extended episode with New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on how racial segregation lives on into 21st century classrooms.

School segregation has been on the rise since the 1980s, leading, in part, to a wide achievement gap between Black and White students. Policymakers often focus on the moral achievement of Brown v. Board of Education, but racial separation persists.

• Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and The Harvard Project on School Desegregation. 1996. Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: New Press.

Minority students are much more likely to drop out of school, to be tracked into “low-ability” groups or vocational programs, and to face other barriers to achieving higher education. Ability matters for achievement, but so does the social structure of schools.

• Grace Kao and Jennifer S. Thompson. 2003. “Racial and Ethnic Stratification in Education Achievement and Attainment.” Annual Review of Sociology. 29:417-442

We usually think school segregation really happens at the neighborhood level, but neighborhood segregation has declined since 1990. Instead, we see increasing macro-segregation—patterns where minority groups are concentrated in certain urban and suburban areas. Therefore, entire schools or districts are more likely to see homogenous groups of students.

• Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino. 2015. “Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs.” American Sociological Review 80(4):843–73.

For more on inequality in schools, check out the TSP White Paper “Students Squeezed by an Hourglass Economy” by Robert Crosnoe.

The Emmanuel AME shootings in Charleston, South Carolina have reignited public discussion of both terrorism and hate crimes. While the media often focuses on foreign religious extremism as a motivation for domestic attacks, data show more radicalization has taken place on the political far-right (independent of religion or race) than among Muslims in the United States. Since 9/11, only 25 recorded attacks have been committed by Muslim extremists, while 65 attacks were driven by right-wing extremists at home. So what’s the difference between terror and a hate crime? Is there a difference? Sociological research shows how public discourse and community differences can change the story.

Words like “terrorism” and “hate crime” change across social contexts. In the U.S., acts of violence perpetrated by minority populations are more likely to be defined as acts of terrorism, whereas “home-grown” offenders are likely to be dismissed as crazy, deranged, or evil—“bad apples” rather than people motivated by hate or politics. For hate-crimes, the pattern is reversed. Hate crimes that involve majority perpetrators, particularly in interracial incidents, are linked to higher seriousness ratings. In both cases, the social position of both perpetrator and victim changes how we interpret the violence.

• Austin T. Turk. 2004. “The Sociology of Terrorism.” Annual Review of Sociology 30:271-286.
• Phillip Jenkins. 2003. “Images of Terror: What We Can and Can’t Know about Terrorism.” Transaction Publishers.
• Christopher J. Lyons. 2008. “Individual Perceptions and the Social Construction of Hate Crimes: A Factorial Survey.” The Social Science Journal 45(1):107-131

American anti-black hate crimes are most prevalent in communities with a high concentration of white residents that are undergoing black in-migration. This suggests that majority members may try to “defend turf” from the perceived threat of “outsiders”. Compliance with hate crime law is less likely in high-percentage black communities, particularly in the southern U.S. Within these black communities, past lynchings (between 1882-1930) are associated with lower compliance with hate crime law in the present and a lower likelihood of prosecution of hate crime cases.

• Christopher J. Lyons. 2008. “Defending Turf: Racial Demographics and Hate Crime against Blacks and Whites.” Social Forces 87(1):357-385.
• Ryan D. King. 2007. “The Context of Minority Group Threat: Race, Institutions, and Complying with Hate Crime Law.” Law and Society Review 41(1): 189-224.
• Ryan D. King, Steven F. Messner, and Robert D. Baller. 2009. Contemporary Hate Crimes, Law Enforcement, and the Legacy of Racial Violence. American Sociological Review 74: 291-315.

For more on this issue, check out our other TROT! post, “How Hate Crimes Count.”

With the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, states must legally recognize same-sex marriage nationwide. The fight for equality isn’t over, however, as many states do not have explicit protections for same-sex couples against practices like hiring discrimination. The Texas Attorney General also ruled that individual county clerks can refuse to offer marriage licenses to same sex couples on the grounds of their religious beliefs, even if the clerks’ office must ultimately grant the license. This is the challenge with nationwide legislation: laws on the books often differs from the law in action. History shows inequality can thrive in low level bureaucracy, sometimes in spite of national policy.

Policy changes take time to wind through organizations, especially those with large bureaucratic structures like the U.S. government. Autonomous managers in the middle construct their own reasons for adopting policies, often distancing themselves from big changes at the top of the chain. An institutional culture affects the implementation of a policy as much as the policy itself.

• Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton. 1998. “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions.” American Journal of Sociology 104(2): 441-476
• Bruce G. Carruthers. 1994. “When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organization Theory, and the Political Sociology of the State.” Sociological Theory 12(1): 19-44

We can see these institutional boundaries in broader patterns of hiring discrimination against LGBT citizens that appear in experimental studies, even when employers don’t intend to discriminate. The history of federal regulation in immigration, the military, and welfare policies shows that the U.S. slowly built a bureaucratic system interested in measuring and controlling sexuality long before public battles over LGBT rights came on the scene.

• Margot Canaday. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton University Press
• András Tilcsik. 2011. “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States.”American Journal of Sociology 117(2):586–626.

Similar bureaucratic patterns happen around race. When the Supreme Court repealed laws against interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, for example, mixed-race couples still faced clerks who were often unwilling to grant them licenses. While the GI Bill was a sweeping national effort in which many U.S. citizens got better housing and education, veterans of color often had trouble registering for those benefits in uncooperative local offices.

• Peggy Pascoe. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford University Press
• Ira Katznelson. 2006. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Co.

With Hillary Clinton’s official announcement of her presidential candidacy—and now Carly Fiorina’s GOP candidacy—we have seen the immediate and constant sexism that will undoubtedly plague the campaign coverage until election day. Time Magazine, for example, ran a piece focusing on Clinton’s presumed post-menopausal estrogen levels as an asset to her presidential leadership skills (we have yet to spot an article on the testosterone levels of Jeb Bush or Bernie Sanders).

Media outlets often pay a disproportionately higher rate of attention to female candidate’s wardrobe, appearance, and age than to that of male candidates, treating women as novelties rather than serious contenders. The focus on appearance objectifies and sexualizes, delegitimizing their authority.

• Caroline Heldman and Lisa Wade. 2011. “Sexualizing Sarah Palin: The Social and Political Context of the Sexual Objectification of Female Candidates.” Sex Roles 65: 156-164.
• Caroline Heldman, Susan J. Carroll, and Stephanie Olson. 2005. “She Brought Only a Skirt: Print Media Coverage of Elizabeth Dole’s Bid For the Republican Nomination.” Political Communication 22: 315-335.

People evaluate “appropriate” roles for women in public office based on gender stereotypes about policy and issue competency more than on personality traits. Public opinion survey respondents indicate that they find female candidates more capable of handling “feminine” topics like education and healthcare, while male candidates are more qualified to deal with “masculine” issues like terrorism and the economy.

• Kathleen Dolan. 2010. “The Impact of Gender Stereotyped Evaluation on Support for Women Candidates.” Political Behavior 32(1): 69-88.

Contrary to expectations, neither higher numbers of educated women nor the type of political system translates to more women in national office. In fact, female congressional candidates win at similar rates to men in general elections. Instead, ideologies about women’s roles and positions in societies influence women’s abilities to enter politics as candidates and survive the primary process.

• Jennifer L. Lawless and Kathryn Pearson. 2008. “The Primary Reason for Women’s Underrepresentation? Reevaluating the Conventional Wisdom.” The Journal of Politics 70(1):67-82
• Sheri Kunovich and Pamela Paxton. 2005. “Pathways to Power: The Role of Political Parties in Women’s National Political Representation.” American Journal of Sociology 111(2): 505-552.

For more on this topic, check out Scholars Strategy Network and Sociological Images

As senioritis infects graduating classes across the U.S., one group of students is denied the thrill of the “senior slide”: those enrolled in Advanced Placement courses. These students look forward to a grueling gauntlet of 3-hour exams on topics ranging from Computer Science to Studio Art to Chinese Language and Culture. The tests are rigorous, cumulative assessments of each student’s mastery of an entire year’s worth of class content, and they have extremely high stakes. College Board, the organization that creates and scores the exams (as well as the SAT), claims high AP scores help students “stand out in the admissions process.” While these tests only seem to target elite, high achieving students, they also impact educational processes school-wide.

AP classes are a source of inequality in educational attainment. Minority and low-income students are more likely to attend schools offering fewer AP courses. Even when courses are available, these students are also more likely to be underrepresented in them relative to their more affluent and white peers.

• Grace Kao and Jennifer S. Thompson. 2003. “Racial and Ethnic Stratification in Educational Achievement and Attainment.” Annual Review of Sociology 29:417-442.
• Daniel G. Solorzano and Armida Ornelas. 2004. “A Critical Race analysis of Latina/o and African American Advanced Placement Enrollment in Public High Schools.” The High School Journal, 87(3): 15-26.

Policies aiming to increase AP courses at underprivileged schools may be one way to narrow the gap, since parent/student demand and school officials’ response in more affluent districts are likely driving the difference. The proportion of upper-middle class students at a school is an excellent predictor of both the number of AP courses offered and the number of students who enroll.

• Joshua Klugman. 2013. The Advanced Placement Arms Race and the Reproduction of Educational Inequality. Teachers College Record, 115(5):1-34.
• Thurston Domina and Joshua Saldana. 2012. Does Raising the Bar Level the Playing Field? Mathematics curricular intensification and inequality in American high schools, 1982–2004. American Educational Research Journal, 49(4): 685-708.

AP tests weren’t always used in college admissions. They were originally designed to allow high-achieving students to place out of introductory courses and into more advanced college work. Only in recent years have they become an important indicator for college admissions boards.

• Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices. 2004. The Role of Advanced Placement and Honors Courses in College Admissions. Expanding opportunity in higher education: Leveraging promise, 75-113.

AP testing culture affects all students, no matter where they’re tracked. In most cases, tests change curricula by narrowing content to tested subjects, fragmenting content area knowledge into test-related pieces, and increasing teacher-centered instruction. However, certain types of high-stakes tests can encourage curricular content expansion, integration of knowledge, and cooperative learning.

• Wayne Au. 2007. “High-stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A qualitative metasynthesis.” Educational Researcher (36)5:258-267.

Workers of the World, Unite!

Since the late 1800s May Day—the first of May and a traditional European spring celebration—has been recognized as International Workers Day. It’s a time to celebrate working people and the possibilities for international solidarity. On May Day 2015, the state of workers looks rather grim: expanding inequality, increasing fiscal austerity, and degrading working conditions. Amid these negative trends, though, there are glimmers of hope as global workers organize and mobilize to assert their rights, curtail corporate power, and create a more equitable world.

To mark May Day, we are exploring issues of inequality, labor, and social movements in a three-part series.

Part I: The U.S. & Inequality

Deregulation, privatization, and declining unionization have exacerbated the gulf between rich and poor in the past 50 years. Researchers have documented how much of the increase in wage inequality is due to the weakening of policies and institutions that have historically protected and empowered workers—unions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and labor law—in addition to structural changes in the economy and labor market.

• ChangHwan Kim and Arthur Sakamoto. 2010. “Assessing the Consequences of Declining Unionization and Public-Sector Employment: A Density-Function Decomposition of Rising Inequality From 1983 to 2005.” Work and Occupations 37(2):119–61.
• Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld. 2011. “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality.” American Sociological Review 76(4):513–37.
• Winfried Koeniger, Marco Leonardi, and Luca Nunzjata. 2007. “Labor Market Institutions And Wage Inequality.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 60(3):340–56.

Read May Day Part II: Global Labor. There’s Research on That!

Read May Day Part III: Social & Political Movements. There’s Research on That!