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Because Americans in general like to think we’re an equal society, we’re also quick to discount the importance of race, gender, appearance, class, upbringing, and other essential forms of social capital that can open doors for people who have it — and close them on those who don’t. The self-made myth allows us to deflect our attention from these critical factors, undermining our determination to level the playing field for those who don’t start life with a pocket fat with advantages.
— The Self-Made Myth: Debunking Conservatives’ Favorite — And Most Dangerous — Fiction (via sociolab)
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The taken-for-granted contemporary Western attitude towards homosexuality, with its deposit in the mores and in the law, is based on the assumption that sexual roles are given by nature, that one set of sexual patterns is normal and healthy and desirable, another set abnormal, diseased and execrable. Again, sociological understanding will have to place a question mark behind this assumption. Sexual roles are constructed within the same general precariousness that marks the entire social fabric. Cross-cultural comparisons of sexual conduct bring home to us powerfully the near-infinite flexibility that men are capable of in organizing their lives in this area.
— Invitation to Sociology by Peter L. Berger (via sociolab)
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To comprehend the whole we must first understand ourselves. The root of understanding lies in oneself, and without the understanding of oneself, there is no comprehension of the world; for the world is oneself. The other - the friend, the relation, the enemy, the neighbor, near or far - is yourself. Self-knowledge is the beginning of right thinking, and in the process of self-knowledge, the infinite is discovered.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti (via nirvikalpa)
(via sociolab)
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The Social Life of Things
(Source: sociolab)
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I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.
(via Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is)
(via sociolab)
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“The one-line summary of her article reads: “In studies from the U.S. to Sweden, pay discrimination can’t explain the disparity. Women earn less because they work fewer hours” implies that the work hours difference between women and men is the root cause of the gap.
The data indicate clearly that women work, on average, fewer hours than men and that a primary reason they do so is because they cut back hours to have and raise children. But the contention that the work hours disparity between women and men is the only driving force behind the pay gap – and that discrimination has little to do with it – is a tough sell to those of us familiar with the research.
Sociologists have shown that net of work hours, a sex pay gap exists. What is more, the gap is largest when we compare mothers to childless women and men with and without children and women and men in occupations dominated by women. In short, a large body of evidence suggests a sex pay gap exists because women’s work is less rewarded than men’s, even when they may be working in the same or very similar jobs (e.g., as full-time lawyers in private practice see, Dinovitzer, Reichman, and Sterling (2009) “The Differential Valuation of Women’s Work: A New Look at the Gender Gap in Lawyers’ Incomes.” Social Forces).”
— Sex pay gap more than an hours gap (via globalsociology)
(via sociolab)
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One way is that men athletes are glorified and women athletes ignored in the mass media. Messner and his colleagues found that in 1989, in TV sports news in the United States, men’s sports got 92 percent of the coverage and women’s sports 5 percent, with the rest mixed or gender-neutral. In 1990, in four of the top-selling newspapers in the United States, stories on men’s sports outnumbered those on women’s sports 23 to 1. Messner and his colleagues also found an implicit hierarchy in naming, with women athletes most likely to be called by first names, followed by Black men athletes, and only white men athletes routinely referred to by their last names. Similarly, women’s collegiate sports teams are named or marked in ways that symbolically feminize and trivialize them – the men’s team is called Tigers, the women’s Kittens
— Judith Lorber, “Believing is Seeing” (via wretchedoftheearth)
(via sociolab)
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A new study from Social Studies of Science… reveals that when men chair committees that select scientific awards recipients, males win the awards more than 95% of the time. This new study also reports that while in the past two decades women have begun to win more awards for their scientific achievements, compared to men, they win more service and teaching awards and fewer prestigious scholarly awards than would be expected based on their representation in the nomination pool.
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“Women’s scientific achievements often overlooked and undervalued”
this just in, the sky is blue and scientists are fucking misogynist and always have been!
(via bad-dominicana)
but guys, science is immune to politics, everyone know that.
(via dionthesocialist)
(via sociologyofgender)
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Despite the historical evidence that Black women have always played a major role as teachers, critical thinkers, and cultural theorists in Black life, particularly in segregated Black communities, there is very little written about Black female intellectuals. When most Black folks think about “great minds” they most often conjure up male images.
— bell hooks in “Black Women Intellectuals” (via daniellemertina)
(via sociolab)
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The Society Pages Reading List
Essential links to new and classic social science research, The Reading List is a resource to inform your reading of the news, research in the field, and showing off at fancy cocktail parties (or on Twitter).
(Source: sociolab)
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We picture competition as a matter of one business interest outdoing another. But the fiercest competition may be the quiet continuing one between market and private life. As a setter of standards of the ideal experience, it often wins, whether we buy the service or not. The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy. […] Even more than what we wish for, the market alters how we wish. Wallet in hand, we focus in the market on the thing we buy. In the realm of services, this is an experience — the perfect wedding, the delicious ‘traditional’ meal, the well-raised child, even the well-gestated baby.
— Prof. Arlie Russell Hochchild, “The outsourced life” (via rethinkcapitalism)
(Source: The New York Times, via sociolab)
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“We don’t hire homies to bake bread. we bake bread to hire homies.”
Homeboy Industries, the passion project of an L.A. priest, has brought life reboots to hundreds of former criminals, including onetime gang members and the fallen CEO of mega-construction company KB Home.