Introduction to Sociology C273 (Unit 4, Modules 12-14)

changing demographic of race and ethnicity

According to the United States Census Bureau, White Americans made up just over 75 percent of the U.S. population in 2010, making them the clear-cut majority group in the nation as a whole and in every region of the country. Of the primary racial categories, the Census Bureau recognizes: White Black or African American: the second-largest group in the U.S., African Americans made up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population in 2010. Asian: Asian Americans made up 4.8 percent of the U.S. population in 2010. It is the fastest-growing segment of the American population, having increased 43 percent between 2000 and 2010. As a group, Asian Americans boast a substantially higher proportion of college graduates than White Americans and a slightly higher median income. American Indian and Native Alaskan: Native Americans, including Alaska Natives, made up 1.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2010; this figure includes those who identify as Native American in combination with some other group. Native Americans are defined as a racial group by the Census Bureau, but they are very culturally diverse. This group includes 554 different tribal groups, each with its own traditions and customs. Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders: the smallest racial minority recognized by the Census Bureau, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders accounted for just 0.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2010. People of mixed-race heritage denoted as "two or more races": 2.4 percent of the population chose to identify as mixed race in the 2010 census bureau, a percentage that grew by one third from the 2000 census. While all of these groups are minorities in the numerical sense, they are also minorities in the sociological sense—that is, they are subordinate to the dominant or majority group and have little political and social clout. Today, Native Americans occupy the lowest rungs on the nation's socioeconomic ladder. The median income for Native American families is only two-thirds of the national average, and the proportion of Native Americans who earn college degrees is less than half the national average. Unemployment among Native Americans is more than double the national rate, and rates of alcoholism and suicide among Native Americans are much higher than among White Americans. The smallest racial minority recognized by the Census Bureau, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, accounted for just 0.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2010. The other major categories are substantially larger than that. Interestingly, the Census Bureau does not recognize Hispanic or Latinx as a race because people of Hispanic or Latinx descent can be of any race. Latinxs are an ethnic group, defined by their shared Spanish-speaking culture. This group includes members who identify themselves as White, Black, Asian, Native American, and mixed or other race. Slightly more than half of all Latinxs classify their race as White. This ethnicity accounted for 16.3 percent of the population. The U.S. Census Bureau's method of asking about race and ethnicity is controversial. Many Latinx readily choose "Hispanic or Latino" for their ethnicity, but when faced with racial categories offered by the Bureau, choose "some other race," which was the third largest racial group on the census results from 2000 to 2010. To bypass this confusion, the Obama administration suggested changing the census to include "Hispanic or Latino" as both an ethnic and racial category. Another proposal was to include Middle Eastern or North African as a distinct racial category. Both proposals would likely have decreased the number of people identifying as "White," a result that, given the history of race in the United States, could be politically potent

the gender wage gap

One of these ways is the gender wage gap*, which is the difference between what women make on average and what men make on average over their lifetimes. Currently, the gender wage gap favors men, who are both more likely to be hired for higher-paying positions and also get paid more than women within the same profession. Currently, women earn 82.5 cents to every dollar that men earn, and the number is even lower for Black women (68.6 cents) and Latinx women (61.2 cents) when compared to what White men earn. The chart below shows some of the research that has confirmed this phenomenon exists. The wage gap: currently women earn 82.5 cents to every dollar that men earn. Let's look at the five professions from the above chart. The secretaries and teachers were occupations largely held by women, while the college professors, chief executives, and police officers were occupations largely held by men. In 1985, Paula England co-authored an influential essay that argued for the existence of "comparable worth discrimination." Comparable worth discrimination occurs when gender-segregated occupations result in discriminatory pay between different occupations that require the same basic education and skills. For example, in 2012, furniture movers (a primarily male profession) earned on average $11.01 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while childcare workers (a primarily female profession) earned on average $9.38. These figures are a snapshot of the gender stratification of income. Although neither profession requires a high school diploma, the occupation dominated by women earns $1.50 less than that occupied primarily by men. Hegewisch and Ellis found that even in female-dominated professions, female workers earned less than their male counterparts. In the chart below, the column on the left of each profession represents how much female workers make in comparison to the male workers. Source: Institute for Women's Policy Research and the American Association of University Professors. This chart compares the wages of female and male wages in the aforementioned five professions. Female secretaries earn 84.5 percent of their male counterparts. Female elementary/middle school teachers earn 87.2 percent of their male counterparts. Female college professors earn 83 percent of their male counterparts. Female chief executives earn 70 percent of their male counterparts. Female police officers earn 71.2 percent of their male counterparts. Source: Institute for Women's Policy Research. Hegewisch and Ellis found many other professions that showed a similar pattern—regardless of whether a job was commonly held by women or by men, female workers earned less than their male counterparts. Sociologists have identified two phenomena that reflect this inequality: the glass ceiling and the glass escalator. The glass ceiling* is what hinders female workers in male-dominated industries and professions: it is a point of status near the top of a given organization beyond which women do not get promoted. The very top-level positions are thus almost always held by men. The glass ceiling is damaging to an organization's growth because it discourages female workers, who may not feel that their time and efforts are worth continuing with the organization and because it prevents the organization from being run by a more qualified employee. Meanwhile, male workers in female-dominated professions and industries may experience the glass escalator*, which actually propels them through the promotion ladder at a faster rate than their female counterparts. When the men are promoted more quickly, it is frustrating and discouraging for women who work as hard as men and are denied their just rewards

social inequality

Society does not treat people equally. Social stratification* is the division of society into a hierarchy of social groups who have unequal access to and control over rewards, education, money, and other "goods" that are valued socially. We learn that individuals "achieve" success through hard work. This leads us to ignore the power of social networks and social institutions like education and mass media that affect how likely people in certain social groups are to be successful. Success is not based solely on workers' achievements. Aspects of ourselves over which we have no control, such as age, race, ethnicity, and gender, also play a major role in our ability to achieve success. For example, in the U.S. a gender wage gap exists where women are paid 82.5 cents, on average, to every dollar men make. Sociologists are interested not only in understanding social stratification, but also in how these systems maintain themselves. Often people are discriminated against because of characteristics they have no control over, such as race or gender. For instance, a 2003 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research researched the effects of discrimination on the basis of race. Researchers responded to real job ads in Boston and Chicago by sending out fictional resumes. The resumes were headed by names that would be culturally recognized as either White or African-American, such as Emily Walsh or Lakisha Washington. The researchers sent applications to a wide variety of jobs from cashier work to sales management. Researchers found that "job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback." This rate of response corresponded with an additional eight years of job experience. This level of discrimination occurred across all industry categories covered by the research. But social stratification can replicate itself in more subtle ways as well. In Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, for example, Annette Laureau found that middle class parents parented their children quite differently from working class parents. Middle class parents actively cultivated their children, designing projects and activities for them. Working class parents, on the other hand, did not think of their children as "projects," instead allowing them to grow up naturally, watching TV or playing together. Poor and working class parents gave their children more independence in their schooling. Laureau studies how these different parenting styles lead to unequal academic achievements, which in turn lead to higher paying jobs for the children of middle class parents than for those of working class parents. Like many who study social stratification, Laureau is interested in the mechanism of how social class replicates itself across generations. Stratification along lines of age, class, gender, race, ethnicity, and ability is a central structure in modern society, affecting how we view and treat others and the ease or difficulty with which we achieve our own goals.

homophobia

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

institutional racism

racism that is imbedded into institution; policies, laws, and practices that disproportionately favor or disadvantage one rave over another

3 main systems of stratification globally

slavery, caste systems, and class systems.

hostile work environment harassment

when co workers and or supervisor engage in unwelcome sexually charged behavior, making the workplace atmosphere intimidating, hostile, or offensive

proletariat

workers that must sell their labor to those who own the means of production in order to earn money to survive

Caste System

A caste system* is a fairly rigid, explicit system of stratification that a person is born into. Caste systems have little or no social mobility*, which is a person's ability to transition either up or down across the boundaries of a social hierarchy. India is the most common example of a culture with a caste system, and historically this has determined what resources each caste* can access, whom they can marry (only people within their own caste), what jobs they can perform, and even whom they can physically touch. Many of these restrictions were previously both social and legal. Recently, the Indian government has passed legislation which guarantees certain rights to some castes, widens their access to resources and seats of influence in government, and protects them from violence and discrimination. There have been reports that recent generations have become more lax about castes, blurring the boundaries between these societal levels in recent decades.

Class System

A class system* is a system of stratification that offers the opportunity for social mobility, and is based on wealth and economic standing. Though a person may be born into a certain class, he or she can transcend the boundaries of this class. There are no legal restrictions on marriage, career, or socialization based on one's class. The United States is an example of a society that has a class system. Because class divisions are defined primarily by economic status, many people believe that one's class is a function of their work ethic and determination. While it is true that rising up in the socioeconomic hierarchy takes hard work and determination, there are a few key characteristics of class systems that make mobility a bit more complicated. Opportunity is not equally available in each class. It takes wealth to make wealth. Class is also stratified by race, geography, religion, gender, and culture. In essence, social stratification in a class society is a complicated system, dependent on many interrelated factors.

Education

A little over 80 percent of working-age adults in poverty had at most a high school diploma. In the overall population, close to 59 percent of working-age adults have a high school diploma or le

Absolute Poverty

Absolute poverty* is likely what comes to mind for most people when they hear the word "poverty": people starving, homeless, living in filth, shivering in the cold or exposed to brutal heat. These desperate images are, unfortunately, highly accurate, not only in the United States but also in developing countries* (also called periphery countries*) throughout the world. People who live in absolute poverty do not have reliable access to resources to meet their basic needs*, such as food, clean water, protective clothing, and sturdy shelter. People who live in absolute poverty are not simply unemployed temporarily. Often, they are born into very bleak circumstances and do not have much hope or opportunity to improve their lot in life. Thus, sociologists view absolute poverty as not just a state of economic standing, but also a state of mind. That is not to suggest that all people who live in absolute poverty are hopeless or depressed, but that their goals in life are typically more short-term: it is difficult to plan for financial success when you are constantly worried about where your next meal is coming from. Many Americans may assume that absolute poverty is only found in developing countries (the "starving children in Africa" trope), but there are plenty of pockets in developed countries* (core countries*) as well.

stratification of nations

According to Wallerstein's world systems analysis*, core countries dominate the periphery, just as those who own the means of production in capitalism dominate the workers who sell their labor. A company might employ hundreds of managers in the United States to supervise thousands of lower-earning programmers in India (a semiperiphery country). Meanwhile, the same company might have computer factories in rural China in which the workers are paid even less. Even the factory workers probably have a higher standard of living than subsistence farmers in Peru (a periphery nation). Multinational corporations*, corporations based in one country that also operate in other countries, are a key component of how the global economy stratifies countries. The imaginary corporation of the previous paragraph benefits from the lower cost of paying Indian (rather than American) programmers and the even lower cost of manufacturing in rural China to funnel profits to its shareholders. Furthermore, the American managers can change the location of programming centers and factories when labor costs rise. In this way, world systems analysts argue, the core countries dominate and exploit the periphery countries. They pay their foreign workers less than they would American workers. They buy land and construction materials more cheaply. They may also take advantage of looser environmental regulations to produce goods in a less costly (and more environmentally destructive) way. Modernization theory* differs from world systems analysis. Modernization theory argues that industrialization will gradually improve the lives of people in developing countries. As the technology improves and spreads, people will gain many of the benefits found in core nations. Modernization theorists point out that even low-paid factory workers are often better off than subsistence farmers. The factory workers have benefited from the capital and technological know-how of core nations.

what is intersectionality

Another school of thought, called intersectionality*, holds that class, race, and gender are all intertwined and interact to create different levels of disadvantage in society. This theory asserts that members of a particular minority group are also affected by their status. For example, while women in American society all face certain prejudices, the disadvantages facing a White, middle-class woman are uniquely different from those facing a Black, lower-class woman. Patricia Hill Collins introduced the phrase "matrix of oppression" to describe the way in which different types of prejudices and oppression interact to create different levels of disadvantage

The Gini Coefficient

Another way to measure the status of well-being in a country is to look at the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient*, also known as a Gini index, is a measure of how well-distributed income is across the population of a country. A measure of 0 indicates that all people receive the same income, and a measure of 1 (or 100%) indicates that one person has all the wealth while others receive nothing. The Gini coefficient is often reported in its percentile form as a number from 0 to 100. The Gini coefficient is an imperfect statistic for the following reasons: It can be skewed by population demographics, such as a large number of retirees or children. It can be challenging to receive accurate, up-to-date data. A smaller population's Gini index can be disproportionately skewed by a few individuals' earnings. Despite the obvious problems associated with boiling an entire country's income distribution down to a single number, the Gini coefficient is still a widely used statistic (often in conjunction with many other measures) to look at wealth distribution and inequality around the world.

family life

As important to Western society as the workplace is the home, where gender roles have a strong presence. Traditionally, women are expected to be in charge of home and families, where their feminine* traits of caretaking and nurturing come into play. Nowadays, as more women are educated and in the workforce, it is becoming more common for men to contribute to housework and childrearing.

employment

As mentioned, students educated in schools that serve predominantly minority populations are less likely to go on to college or be well-prepared for the labor market. However, that's not the only reason fewer minorities receive well-paying jobs. The labor market can be racist. A 2004 study showed that employers are significantly more likely to call back applicants whose resumes display White-sounding names than Black- or Latinx-sounding names.

Poverty

As we've seen, there is a distinct "underclass" of people who live in poverty*. But just what is poverty? It turns out to be a more complicated definition than it seems, since exact financial numbers are changing all the time as the economy itself fluctuates, and different political viewpoints have different ideas about who "qualifies" as poor. In broad terms, however, sociologists identify two types of poverty: absolute poverty and relative poverty. Click on the tabs below to learn more about each category.

education

Because neighborhoods are racially segregated, schools are also largely racially segregated. Further, because schools depend on property taxes, there is a higher probability that these schools will receive lower funding than schools serving White neighborhoods. A report released by the Department of Education showed the following: Predominantly Black and Latinx schools have significantly lower graduation rates, are less likely to offer gifted and talented programs or AP courses, and have lower participation in classes such as Algebra and Chemistry. The teachers employed by these schools are often inexperienced and, as a result, less effective in instructing the class. The facilities and resources are also lacking. Often the buildings are portable or dilapidated, and there is inadequate light or space. These schools lack facilities like auditoriums or sports fields. Students have inadequate access to materials like books and computers. Ultimately, the quality of education for minority groups is substandard. With poor education and low graduation rates, many minority groups have a harder time gaining acceptance to college or employment.

factors influencing stratification

Both globally and in the United States, race and gender are significantly stratified into certain socioeconomic brackets. Geography plays a role as well, especially globally. It seems that a person's ability to climb to the top tier of society, whether through the acquisition of resources, motivation, or pure dumb luck, is not an equal struggle around the world.

the conflict perspective and homelessness

Conflict theorists point out that homelessness (as we know it) began with the migration of workers from farms to cities, that is with the rise of capitalism itself which broke up families as the primary economic unit and sent newly isolated workers into the cities. In the 1850s, lodging rooms in urban police stations were the equivalent of homeless shelters. Capitalism pits the interest of employers against that of their workers and a living wage is not in employers' interest. The class conflict continues today in what some call the "criminalization" of homelessness in cities and towns across America. According to a report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (2014), 34 percent of cities have a city-wide ban on "camping" (usually to include simply sleeping) in public, while 53 percent of cities make it illegal to sit or lie down in some public places. Finally, 43 percent of cities prohibit sleeping in vehicles. Homeless advocates point out that activities like sitting or sleeping are necessary for survival. This war on the homeless is emblematic of a class conflict where those with more resources are able to impose restrictions on the most basic human rights of those with fewer resources. Finally, conflict theorists focus on the role big pharmaceutical companies had on the problem of homelessness (as well as the rise addiction rates and deaths more generally), pointing to the companies' aggressive wooing of doctors. Doctors are regularly given free dinners and trips and paid generous speaking fees by the companies marketing prescription drugs, including opioids. According to a 2019 study, increased marketing dollars in a certain county led to increased overdose mortality one year later. The increased addiction to opioids led to greater homelessness. Companies' profit motive fueled the problem of homelessness.

workplace outcomes

Discrimination based on gender that leads to different workplace outcomes such as hiring, firing, or promotion. Example: Janell is not promoted even though her sales are stronger than those of male peers who have been promoted.

education

Educational resources are unequally distributed across social class. School funding comes largely from local property taxes, resulting in a system where the schools most in need of resources tend to get the least. Moreover, poverty itself detracts from children's ability to learn, which results in lower rates of completing high school and entering college.

ethnicity by circumstance

Ethnic groups are not defined simply by a common heritage; they are formed by historical and social circumstances. For example, Jews are a group defined only by a shared religious-cultural heritage but one which has, nonetheless, often been seen as a race. During the Holocaust, the Nazis sought to exterminate "the Jewish race" in the name of "racial purity," and similarly persecuted other ethnic groups, such as the Roma (a group that is also known as gypsies) on racial grounds.

lesson 32 intro

Everyone recognizes that some people in society enjoy greater wealth and privilege than others. Inequality is a controversial topic because people disagree about its causes. Those who believe that privileged people by and large earn their privilege through hard work and intelligence generally have no qualms about social inequality. On the other hand, those who believe that the privileged are simply lucky, or worse, that they take resources away from others, believe inequality is one of the greatest problems society faces. This lesson will present information about stratification around the world.

what is explicit bias

Explicit bias* exists in the conscious mind. It is a bias toward or against a particular group that a person knows he or she harbors. Explicit racism involves prejudice against a racial or ethnic group. Hate crimes involve explicit bias since the victims are chosen for their race or ethnicity. For example, since 9/11, the war on terrorism, and other terrorist attacks, fear surrounds the Islamic religion within the United States. A series of opinion polls performed by the American Arab Institute shows that favorable attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims in the United States have steadily declined from 43 percent in 2010 to 27 percent in 2014. Responding to an opinion poll requires a conscious response; hence, this poll shows explicit bias towards a certain group of people.

nonheterosexuality

For many years heterosexuality* was the only legitimate sexuality, and even as new sexualities are becoming more accepted, heterosexuality is still the dominant cultural norm. Heteronormativity* is promoting heterosexuality or just assuming that people are heterosexual. Because culture operates as a whole (holism*), heteronormativity is all around us—in the advertisements we see, in the forms we fill out, in our daily conversations. Consider, for example, the common tradition of father-daughter dances at school. Even though the participants are not a romantic couple, the tradition still reinforces the idea that a "couple" will consist of a male and female. Mother-daughter dances are far less common, even though a single parent is more likely to be a woman, because we are, consciously or not, operating within heteronormativity. Certain communities in America consider nonheterosexuality to be unacceptable, while others celebrate the diversity of sexual orientation. Still others, including much of mainstream society, nominally accept nonheterosexuality, but may misunderstand or dismiss LGBTQIA* people. Those who label nonheterosexuality as unacceptable use forms of sanctions*, such as ostracization and bullying, to isolate and punish those who do not conform to heterosexual norms. Members of the LGBTQIA community who wish to gain greater acceptance and understanding of their sexual orientations use multiple forums to promote their choices and educate others.

intro

For many years, Affirmative Action has been one of the most controversial programs, but few people know what it really involves. Like race itself, the issue provokes strong feelings, but little understanding. Learning more about Affirmative Action is a good introduction to the complexities of race and ethnicity. Affirmative Action as we know it today emerged out of presidential executive orders that Federal contractors do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. This means people hired by the government to build bridges or plow snow or do any other work could not discriminate against anyone because of his or her race. Those orders, however, didn't seem to be doing enough to create equality of opportunity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy went a step further and issued an executive order that required Federal government contractors to take "affirmative action" to ensure minorities and women would be employed by government contractors. Then as now, this employment affirmative action does not require that a certain number of women or minorities be employed. But it does require that Federal contractors put a plan in place to ensure that underrepresented groups are informed of employment opportunities, evaluated fairly in the application process, and promoted properly once they are hired. To this end, companies are asked to conduct studies to track race throughout the hiring process, from the number of qualified minority applicants living in the area to the number of current employees who are minorities. These numbers show whether minority workers show up in the same numbers in the company as they do in the pool of qualified applicants. Does Affirmative Action in employment work? Studies have shown a modest improvement in the hiring of minorities and women. More importantly, why should it work? Affirmative Action attempts to reverse gender and racial stratification*. Stratification works by separating people into groups with unequal income, status, and life opportunities. The programmatic, data-driven way affirmative action is pursued is meant to counter the inequality that occurs around race. It's a kind of social engineering. Stratification occurs without premeditation as people interact with each other (whom they choose to introduce themselves to at a party or how they evaluate someone else). People easily break into in-groups* and out-groups*, identifying with each other on the basis of the salience principle*. Consider how people learn about job openings. Often, they hear about a job through friends. The higher up someone is in a company, the more likely he is to be a White male. This manager looking to hire sends the job ad to people he knows. He might post it on his Facebook page or send it to neighbors or colleagues. Social networks are highly segregated; one recent study concluded that 91% of a White person's friends will be White, while 83% of a Black person's friends will be Black. So when the manager spreads the word to people he knows, they are likely to be almost entirely White. And this is just the beginning of the application process. At every stage of the process, those hiring are likely to prefer candidates who resemble them. Affirmative action policies try to break this closed network by encouraging people to "affirmatively" reach out to find minority applicants. A company with an affirmative action policy might send a job ad to a college that has a higher percentage of Black students in the hopes of attracting more Black applicants to the position. Because the company is tracking the numbers of candidates of different races for every stage of the application process, the managers now have an incentive to have more Black, Asian, and Native American applicants. The company will compare how many of each racial category of applicants applied for the position to how many qualified workers in each category are living in the area the company is situated. For example, if 35 percent of engineers living in the area are Black, but only 12 percent of the applicants for a particular engineering job are Black, the company is prompted to look at how and where the job was advertised. With only 12 percent Black applicants, the company management might reach out to organizations or individuals it would otherwise not have considered. Affirmative action is interesting in the way it attempts to artificially monitor and correct unselfconscious ways of hiring that lead to inequality. The misperception that the Federal Affirmative Action program and affirmative action programs more generally force companies to hire women or minorities is no more accurate than the misperception that White managers are consciously thinking, "Black workers are not as qualified. I do not want to hire a Black worker." (Some managers, of course, may be thinking this, but plenty of preferential treatment for Whites occurs with even the most benign intentions on the part of the decision makers.) Racial stratification occurs through systems of human interactions: race becoming an important and salient social category through a history of racial injustice, the tendency to prefer one's in-group* to an out-group*, and the socialization that occurs in social institutions such as law enforcement and education. In the pages that follow, you will learn more about the systems that create "race" as a category and stratify people according to this category—the systems affirmative action are meant to counter.

functionalism and homelessness

Functionalists identify homelessness as a dysfunction of our society's ability to care for its members. Two systems simultaneously failed. On one hand, the closing of treatment facilities for the mentally ill, while motivated by a desire for their welfare, left more families struggling to care for loved-ones with challenging mental illnesses. On the other hand, cuts in funding for affordable housing and less affordable housing stock on the market placed greater burdens on low-income individuals and families. The mentally ill homeless fall at the intersection of these two failing systems.

minority integration in the US

From its inception, the United States has seen an almost constant conflict between the White majority and a wide array of racial and ethnic minorities. Because of this history, certain types of integrations (assimilation, pluralism, etc.) have been difficult. In each case, conflicts have arisen from economic motives but have been fueled by racism and ethnocentrism to become emotional and often violent long-term confrontations. The conflict between Whites and Native Americans, which essentially began as a White conquest of land, resulted in the near extinction of many tribes and the forced expulsion of others from their homelands. Slavery, an economic device designed to support the South's plantation economy, resulted in centuries of violent repression of African Americans, followed by the brutal, legally enforced racial segregation of the Jim Crow era. At different points in American history, various immigrant groups, whether from Europe, Asia, or South America and the Caribbean, have been victims of prejudice and discrimination because native-born Whites saw them as rivals for scarce jobs and other economic benefits. Many of these groups, most especially White ethnic groups of European heritage, have generally been able to overcome prejudice and assimilate successfully into mainstream American society. Others, particularly those with darker skin color, such as African Americans, some Latinx, and Native Americans, have faced a much tougher time. Many White Americans view the continued struggle that these minority groups face as their own fault. This perspective holds that any group can get ahead in America if only it works hard enough and pulls itself up by its bootstraps; failure to get ahead, to blend into American society, is therefore evidence of an unwillingness to work, an inability to play by the rules, or some other inherent failing. The success of Asian Americans, "the model minority," is seen as proof that assimilation can be achieved by non-Whites as well. This perspective is flawed in many respects. First, it ignores the conditions under which immigrants arrived. The forced migration of African Americans and the cumulative legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, which left families ripped apart and economically disadvantaged, is very different from the extended network of family support enjoyed by many Asian and European immigrants. But most significantly, the assimilation perspective ignores the reality of continued racism. Skin color is, after all, a highly salient characteristic, one that forms the basis for much stereotyping and ensuing prejudice. While it was relatively easy for many European immigrants to assimilate because they already looked like members of the White majority, it is much harder for African Americans, Latinx, or Native Americans to do so. Despite all that, the circumstances of non-White minorities in the United States have improved from what they were fifty years ago. Overt, individual discrimination has been outlawed, access to education has increased, and the path to the middle class has opened for at least some. Real barriers remain: racism, both individual and institutional, as well as deepening economic anxiety in the face of ongoing globalization, continue to plague the minorities that remain stratified in lower socio-economic strata. Overcoming these barriers will require much more work and progress.

lesson 34 intro

Historically, the American Dream has been romanticized. In the late 1800s and early 1900s immigrants flocked to the United States, "the land of opportunity," where they heard that the streets were paved with gold. The American Dream still endures, the idea that anyone can achieve great success if they work hard enough, regardless of who they are or where they come from. The reality is that our chances of achieving the American Dream are intricately tied to wealth and income inequality. This lesson will give more information about the causes and consequences of social class inequality in the United States.

the biology of race

Historically there has been some debate as to whether race is a biological category, a socio-cultural one, or both. Racial categorization goes back for centuries. Early notions of race were based on perceived biological differences between groups. These categorizations revolved around inherited physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. Obviously, a person's physical features (their phenotype) have a biological component. Genes are passed from one generation to the next, and the phenotype* is the physical expression of those genes. In many areas, certain phenotypes cluster. There is an environmental factor to this; for example, people that live in sunnier, hotter places often produce more melanin (the skin pigment that turns skin darker). There is also a genetic component. If many people in a particular area have the recessive genes for blue eyes, there is a greater probability that the children in this population will be born with blue eyes. The very well-traveled French physician and anthropologist, François Bernier, noticed this. In 1683 he published the first system of racial classification: an essay titled A new division of the earth. Bernier (1683) opened the door for other classification systems. It wasn't long until theorists attempted to apply Darwin's newly published theories of evolution to the classification of humans. The 1890s gave rise to scientific racism*, which sought to use science to prove biological differences among races. Some scientists focused on physical differences by measuring the cranial size and brain weight of cadavers, while others developed intelligence tests and gave them to varying populations. Many of these (not very scientific) practices concluded that White races were the most highly evolved and intellectually superior. This attitude fueled eugenics*, the desire to improve humanity by encouraging genetically "superior" people to have children and genetically "inferior" people to not have children. Eugenics likewise promoted "pure" races and sought to eradicate the "impure" ones. From there, we've seen some horrific moments in global history, such as Hitler's racial cleansing in Nazi Germany. More recent scientific research has looked below the skin, at our genomes. The research has shown that aside from physical characteristics, there isn't much difference in our genetic makeup. There's as much variation within a population as between populations. In 1972, Richard Lewontin, a geneticist with degrees in statistics and zoology, published an influential paper in which he argued that only 6.3 percent of the variation in genes among people could be attributed to race. If we were truly to group ourselves by how similar we are at a genetic level, he argued, we would see people from Africa grouped with people from Norway and Sweden. Lewontin concluded that race was essentially a biologically meaningless category. Other geneticists critiqued Lewontin's methodology; most notably A. W. F. Edwards. Edwards did not dispute the 6.3 percent when considering genetic variation between individuals, but he pointed out that by considering clusters of genes at different locations, (typically those genes associated with physical characteristics), individuals could be located within a geographic location with almost complete accuracy. Edwards argued that looking at individual genetic differences missed this clustering effect, which made race a real biological category. Jonathan Marks weighed in on the debate on Lewontin's side, arguing that just because people can reliably be assigned to a group does not mean that the group itself is biologically significant. He returned to Lewontin's initial analysis that of the 0.1 percent genetic variation among humans, 85 percent occurs between individuals within the same population. Furthermore, Edwards' groups were determined by geographic area, rather than by "race," per se. Close to 300 years passed between the publication of Bernier's essay and Lewontin's paper. By that time, the concept of race had become well-established in the minds and hearts of most of the world. Today the debate continues over whether race exists at all on the biological level; however, there is broad agreement that any biological differences—if they do exist—are too insignificant to justify the separation of humans into distinct biological categories. We all belong to the same species and subspecies, Homo sapiens, within which there is relatively little genetic variation among any of the major racial categories. The Fluidity of Race Conceptualized

Homelessness in the US

Homelessness has existed for hundreds of years in the United States, but our modern version of homelessness began in the 1970s and 80s. After World War II, as wealthier families migrated to the suburbs of large cities, the business district and inner city areas began to house poorer families and individuals. The inner city provided single rooms for rent by the week, an option not available in the suburbs dominated by single-family homes. Transportation needs were few in cities, which provided buses, trains, and the ability to walk to a variety of businesses and services. In the mid-twentieth century, homeless people were largely white males, increasingly older as the century progressed. These "homeless" men were often housed, at least temporarily, in single room occupancy hotels. The 1980s ushered a new era of homelessness. Fueled by a desire to give mentally ill people greater freedom, mental institutions closed while social services were cut, leaving fewer treatment options for families supporting members whose mental illness prevented them from living on their own. The number of mentally ill people on the streets increased and is now the single largest category of homeless people. Meanwhile, poor people face more housing instability. Since the 1980s, wages have stagnated while rents in the inner city have increased. The number of affordable housing units has decreased. Another trend exacerbating the rate of homelessness in inner cities is gentrification, the process of increasing land value that crowds out the housing that previously catered to poorer individuals and families. The confluence of factors affecting homelessness leads to very different homeless populations. According to a study in the 1990s, 80 percent of those using shelters in New York City and Philadelphia had a single brief stay in a homeless shelter. 10 percent had repeated, but brief, stays in homeless shelters and 10 percent were regular residents in homeless shelters. This last category, called the chronic homeless population, uses a disproportionate amount of resources dedicated to combatting homelessness.

the LGBTQIA civil rights movement

Homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSMV), the key handbook used by psychiatrists, until near the end of the twentieth century, so the LGBTQIA movement is in relatively early stages of pushing for equal treatment of those who identify outside of Western gender norms and heterosexuality. One of the significant moments for the movement occurred on June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village of New York City, when a popular gay bar called Stonewall Inn was raided by police, sparking week-long riots and protests against the law that banned homosexual sex. These riots, collectively referred to as "Stonewall," resulted in the culmination of a more tightly bonded LGBTQIA community and two political organizations, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, which have since made significant strides toward LGBTQIA civil rights. Today, Gay Pride marches and parades occur in numerous major U.S. cities in June to honor the anniversary of Stonewall. One of the issues that the LGBTQIA civil rights movement has fought for was the right for same-sex couples to marry. It has been a long-fought struggle surrounded by controversy, particularly regarding whether it should be a Federal decision or state decision. Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. For 11 years, pro- and anti- same-sex marriage forces battled the issue state by state. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court made its historic decision to allow same-sex couples to get married anywhere in the United States.

gender norms and sexual orientation

In "Masculinity as Homophobia," Kimmel argues that being homosexual is linked to being female. In fact, he argues that the "threat" of being labeled gay, especially for boys and young men, is really not about sexual orientation at all. Instead, being called "gay" is about being perceived as not manly enough, and, according to Kimmel, the most likely people to make the accusation are a boy's male peers. Men police what it means to be "man" enough. In America, lesbians are stereotyped as masculine and gay men are stereotyped as feminine. Some of these stereotypes of gay men are the inability or unwillingness to fight (like men), being more interested in art, fashion, and their own physical appearance, as well as being more sensitive and emotional—all feminine traits. Lesbians, on the other hand, are stereotyped as good at sports, pursuing sex, aggressive, indifferent to their appearances, and having other traits associated with masculinity. Some people conform to some of the stereotypes associated with their sexual orientation, such as heterosexual men behaving in a masculine way; others do not. In general, it is impossible to tell whether someone is homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual from the way he or she acts. Stereotyped behaviors and mannerisms associated with a homosexual orientation, effeminate men or masculine women, are as culturally constructed as the behaviors and mannerisms associated with heterosexual masculinity or femininity.

gender and perception interruption

In a famous study done in 1975, Zimmerman and West discovered that in a dyadic* conversation, 96 percent of the interruptions in the conversation were caused by men, while only 4 percent were caused by women. Further research, however, called those results into question, so later researchers James Orcutt and Diane Mennella devised an experiment to test peoples' judgments of interruptions. The researchers wrote out a conversation between two college students, A and B, about their weekend plans, in which speaker B interrupts speaker A four times. Speaker A, however, speaks about 65 percent of the time. The researchers then made 16 different taped versions. The experiment had four different variable conditions: Interruption during the conversation and no interruption. The version without any interruption served as a control* against which to test how people's judgments were influenced by interruption. Rapport v. discord. In half of the versions, the dyad was generally agreeing, while in half there was some conflict. Person A read by a woman and person B read by a man; Person A read by a man and person B read by a woman 256 students each listened to one of the 16 versions of the tape. After listening to the tape, students were asked questions about what they had heard. The experiment yielded a number of interesting results, but the strongest was what sociologists call the "visible woman" effect. When a woman was playing person A and therefore talking more, people correctly perceived it, but when a woman was playing person B and therefore interrupting a man, but talking less, people consistently and significantly overestimated her talkativeness. What the results show is that cultural stereotypes are self-reinforcing: once people believe women talk more than men, they perpetually hear women talking more than men, even when the women aren't.

the feminist approach

In addition to these three traditional perspectives, modern academic conversations about gender include the feminist* approach. Although there are multiple schools of thought within feminism, in general it is most closely aligned with the conflict approach in that it recognizes many differences between the sexes as inequalities. Feminism, however, takes it one step further by seeking to end the oppression and subjugation of women and other non-male genders. The more radical branches of feminism identify patriarchal society as the source for most of the inequalities because of the ways that patriarchy favors and rewards the work of men while devaluing and limiting the work of women. The feminist movement pushes for certain tangible inequalities to be fixed through legislature and business policy, such as eliminating the gender wage gap* and promoting more women beyond the glass ceiling*. Feminism also focuses on raising awareness of the less tangible inequalities, such as the social discouragement of women to pursue professions in STEM fields* and male-dominated culture that allows for sexual harassment* to take place.

ascribed and achieved status

In an effort to understand how people achieve different strata, twentieth-century anthropologist Ralph Linton identified a difference between ascribed and achieved status. Linton first defined status* as a position given by a social group or structure, such as "boyfriend,""project manager," or "harpist." Everyone occupies multiple statuses, and most statuses confer some rights and privileges. A "neighbor," for example, might be greeted warmly by others in the community, while a stranger would not be. The "neighbor" might even have a key to others' homes. To help clarify the question of inequality, sociologists borrow Linton's distinction between ascribed status and achieved status. Ascribed status* is a status given to individuals on the basis of qualities that they did not earn and cannot change. For example, an Indian baby might be born into a certain caste. Achieved status*, on the other hand, is just what its name suggests: status or privilege that someone has achieved though personal qualities or hard work. "Daughter" is an ascribed status, while "college student" is an achieved status. This distinction matters because many ascribed statuses, such as race and gender, can have a profound impact on the strata someone comes to occupy. As the information presented later will demonstrate, even the distinction between ascribed and achieved status can be tricky. Can someone be sure he was given (or denied) a job for his achieved statuses or might the employers have been influenced by certain ascribed statuses, such as his gender or able-bodiedness? Are certain achieved statuses easier to obtain because of ascribed ones?

Stratification

In primary school science classes, most children learn about different types of clouds. Each type of cloud has different characteristics and occupies different parts of the stratosphere. Some hover close to earth, while others float in the middle of the atmosphere. A select few drift far above the earth where the air is very thin. Clouds are stratified, meaning that they are classified by their height above the earth. Oddly enough, the same thing happens to people in societies, though for different reasons. Social stratification* is the categorization and ranking of groups of people to form a hierarchy. Stratification can be observed in most societies. Groups become stratified in the social hierarchy based on their accumulation of wealth (money and assets), access to and control over resources (marketable, sellable things), and ability to wield power (status and influence). Historically, societies were not significantly stratified. Nomadic groups of hunters and gatherers had relatively few resources to accumulate. There is evidence that any accumulated wealth was shared. As humans transitioned to agrarian societies, occasionally food could be stockpiled and stored. This was the beginning of accumulated wealth. Soon, ownership of accumulated wealth expanded to include other resources, land, and eventually money. Societies, like those led by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, became hierarchical, and societal structure resembled the pyramids they built. Nowadays, the hierarchy of the many developed countries resembles a teardrop, with a select few ultra rich at the top, a larger percentage of middle class that holds a moderate amount of wealth, and a smaller percentage of poor. (The shape represents the number of people in each class, not the extent of their resources.) Industrialization has also caused stratification across the globe, with some nations holding more of the wealth and income than others. Globally, 1 percent of the population holds approximately 50 percent of the wealth.

bullying and discrimination

In the United States, LGBTQIA youth are very often the target of bullying in schools because they violate gender and sexuality norms. The majority of schools do not have effective policies in place to protect LGBTQIA children and teens from abuse, and teachers and staff alike have been found to look away or even join in on the bullying. This kind of intolerance, which is known as homophobia*, during an already emotionally tumultuous period of a person's life—puberty—often causes LGBTQIA teens to develop mental health disorders like depression and even drives some to suicide. The CDC has reported that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. Furthermore, one study conducted from 2001 to 2009 in seven states found that 12 to 28 percent of LGB students were threatened or outright injured with a weapon on school property. Homophobia follows LGBTQIA people from the bullying at schools to discrimination in the workplace. According to the Williams Institute, 42 percent of LGB employees reported having experienced employment discrimination at some point in their lives (Sears, Mallory, & Meyer, 2011). Employment discrimination ranges from losing a job because of their sexual orientation to being harassed at work. While private employers may introduce policies to protect LGBTQIA employees from discrimination and harassment, there has yet to be legislation that would make this a requirement of all employers. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with 15 or more employees, but Congress has not passed it since its introduction in 1994. However, in 2015, the definition of discrimination by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was reinterpreted to include sexual orientation. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against their employees on the basis of "sex, race, color, national origin, and religion," and the EEOC ruled that sexual orientation counted as part of sex discrimination. The EEOC followed the logic that discriminating against a female employee who is homosexual, for instance, would be discriminating against the fact that she is a woman in a relationship with another woman. If the employee were a man, then there would be no problem—ergo, it is the employee's sex that is being discriminated against. It is still unclear how this will affect employer policies and other legislation like ENDA that continues to wait for approval.

age

In the United States, children under 18 years old have the highest rate of poverty across all age groups. While children in this age group constitute about a quarter of the population, they make up almost one third of all people living in poverty. The risk of poverty among children is significantly higher among racial and ethnic minorities.

gender

In the United States, women are disproportionately likely to experience poverty. Women are 51 percent of the population but 55.9 percent of the poor. Women, on average, earn less than men; unmarried mothers tend to be the parent responsible for the raising of children; and women live longer than men. Therefore, the experience of poverty among women is particularly felt by single mothers and older persons.

define the mindset

In this way, racial prejudice defined the laws, and the laws legitimized racial prejudice. The laws "justified" unequal treatment and a sense of White superiority. This feedback loop helped to further drive a wedge between the groups sociologically, creating a mindset that existed even after the removal of the laws. As a consequence, a narrative of White superiority has been woven into the history of United States so profoundly that we are still battling that narrative today. At various times, throughout the history of the United States, laws and policies have made distinctions among people of European, African, and Native American descent, and later among Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and other immigrant populations.

conflict approach

Inequality between the sexes exists, traditionally favoring men as the dominant sex because they are rewarded for their roles more than women are (with money, status, authority, etc.).

global stratification trends

Inequality is increasing both in the United States and throughout the world. In 2006, two percent of the world's adults owned over half of the world's wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owned about one percent of world wealth. Nor were those wealthy individuals evenly distributed throughout the world. Close to 90 percent of the world's wealth is located in Europe, North America, and the core Asian nations Further, the middle class is facing growing economic pressure, largely due to the effect that technological advances are having on the availability of jobs. In advanced countries, the number of mid-level skilled jobs is shrinking; in contrast, the number of highly-skilled or low-skilled jobs is increasing (Dabla-Norris, Kochhar, Ricka, Suphaphiphat, & Tsounta, 2015) The same technologies make global trade much easier, faster, and more efficient. In this way, wealth flows around the world much more freely, allowing companies to outsource jobs or entire projects to cheaper labor markets. While this influx of labor demand can be helpful for emerging markets, it shifts low-skilled jobs away from workers in the advanced economies. This may be a factor affecting another global trend: the changing location of poverty. While poverty has declined worldwide, the rate of poverty in advanced economies has increased. Public policy can mitigate the effects of poverty by providing services and opportunities to disadvantaged populations. Policies regarding education, healthcare, and social programs that target the poor can help reduce the wealth gap. Though governments have historically alleviated inequality through publicly funded programs, changes in tax policies have restricted the revenue available for social welfare programs and grants. A number of countries' tax policies have actually reduced tax rates of the top financial strata. Inequality matters not only from social justice perspective, but also from the perspective of economic development. An IMF report found that when income increases for the top 20 percent of a country relative to the rest of the country, the country's GDP actually decreases, while if the bottom 20 percent of a country increases its share of the total income, GDP rises. One potential result of rising inequality is political instability, which has several ramifications for a country. In extreme cases, it can lead to violence and the degradation of the conditions within the country. In lesser cases, political instability can put a strain on the economy and trade relations. Overall, attending to the wellbeing of lower rungs of the population by managing the level of wealth inequality is to the benefit of all, and should be a consideration when implementing new policies.

how to measure well being

Is money everything? Some groups wishing to obtain a more detailed picture of quality of life measure factors such as work-life balance, social connections, housing conditions, and personal security, to name just a few. Nevertheless, social scientists generally agree that economic measures are a good rough indicator of the quality of life citizens enjoy within a country. Income is another interesting way to qualify global distribution of wealth; however, this (like most other measures) is an incomplete way to classify an individual, or a country's, wellbeing. Income does not account for the cost-of-living and the distribution of debt. Regardless, it's a good way to determine how much money is available to be earned, as a measure of how easily people can overcome debt or live comfortably. Click here to investigate an interactive graph, developed by Pew Research Center, that shows the median income by country.

global stratification

Just as American society is stratified by wealth, power, and prestige, so too are the interconnected world economies. Globally, wealth and power can become concentrated in certain countries. Global wealth distribution identifies how wealth is distributed among the countries of the world... ...and within those countries, how wealth is distributed among the people. Wealth in the United States is distributed among the tiers of society very differently than in India or Thailand, for example. Conflict theorist Immanuel Wallerstein divided the world into three broad categories of nations: periphery nations, semiperiphery nations, and core nations. These three categories are also sometimes called (in respective order) low-income, middle-income, and high-income. Periphery countries* are the poorest, concentrated in Africa, Central America, and central Asia; semi-periphery countries* have some infrastructure and resources, while core countries* have relatively low poverty rates and enjoy a fully industrialized economy. Development and income go hand-in-hand; the more modern a country—characterized by more paved roads, water sanitation plants, and houses with electricity and running water—the greater its wealth. It takes wealth to build and sustain infrastructure (such as highways and bridges), and the infrastructure leads to greater wealth and well-being; for example, companies are better able to transport goods.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx believed that a capitalist* society stratifies groups unequally due to the structure of work itself. According to Marx (1939/1973), when a society is built on capitalism, that capitalist ideology infiltrates all aspects of society. Institutions such as the law, schooling, and the family tend to promote capitalist ideals. The institutions that socialize people into a capitalist society are governed by the elite; therefore, the people who benefit most from capitalism use these institutions to perpetuate their own class status as well as capitalism itself. Marx called this top tier the "capitalist class," or bourgeoisie*. This class, he argued, owns the means of production, which is the system of producing goods and services. They do this because they own "capital," an accumulation of money that they don't need to spend. With this capital, they buy factories and machines to produce goods. They hire workers. The capitalist class pays the people who work for them less money than they make from selling the goods, and in this way, they accumulate more capital to invest. Money breeds money while the capitalist himself does not need to work. For Marx, because of this system, it is inevitable that the rich will grow richer. In contrast, the "working class," or proletariat*, are those people who sell their skills and labor. Laborers do not own what they produce; instead what they make is sold so that the capitalist can earn a profit. (If no profit is earned, the company collapses and the workers must find new jobs.) Marx believed their position in the social system lead to workers' alienation*, their estrangement from themselves and their society because of unnatural working conditions. The theory is complex, with multiple layers. A worker is alienated from the things she produces; although she has made, or helped to make, a product, her employer owns it and sells it to others. Furthermore, manufacturing or service work often dehumanizes the worker, making someone's job just a long day of repetitive actions, such as putting one small component into part of a manufactured item hundreds of times each day, so the worker no longer enjoys her human potential for creative, self-directed activity. Instead, she is like another machine in the factory, not like a human being at all. She is alienated from her own humanity. Finally, because she can only sell her labor, a worker also loses a sense of herself as a self-determined person, as a full member of society. Marx believed that workers would become increasingly dissatisfied with capitalism's structure of inequality, and would ultimately rise up and overthrow the system entirely. The conflict perspective, based on Marx's ideas, is grounded in a structural inequality between laborers and corporate magnates that gives them conflicting, mutually incompatible interests in society.

stigmatization and stereotyping

Like other socially disadvantaged groups, LGBTQIA people are underrepresented in entertainment and mass media. Most TV shows, films, advertisements, and other examples of media tend to avoid portraying nonheterosexual characters—except when that's the point. So a lawyer, garbage collector, neighbor, parent, or child in a film or TV show will not be incidentally LGBTQIA. They will be heterosexual or they will play "a gay man" or "lesbian" because their sexual orientation is important to the plot or to the humor of the story. This lack of a casual representation of LGBTQIA characters serves to further highlight their nonheterosexuality as the key aspect of their identity, what makes them who they are. This also creates a vicious cycle. If every time a lesbian shows up in a TV show, the audience expects her sexual orientation to be significant to the plot, script writers will be less likely to introduce such characters casually. When nonheterosexual characters are represented, they often conform to the stereotypes associated with their sexual identities.

alienation

Marx's concept that the working conditions of capitalism leads people to be estranged from themselves as human beings and from a society that does not allow full experession of their humanity

functionalists and conflict approaches

Modern day theories of stratification look at inequality from two opposing perspectives. Functionalists believe that social stratification evolved because society needed it. Stratification, they argue, motivates people to work harder. The positions of highest importance (such as positions of political office or business ownership) are the most difficult to achieve, and therefore have the greatest reward attached. Functionalists believe that stratification, like everything else in society, evolves naturally to fit the needs of the society. The conflict perspective, obviously, disagrees. From this perspective, each group in society fights for its own interests. Much of the time, each group's interests are in direct opposition to the interests of another group. Some win, and some lose; however, those in a higher social strata are better equipped to win. From this perspective, inequality is the unfair result of the fact that some groups have advantages when fighting for the same resources. While conflict theorists recognize the tensions that exist across strata, it is noteworthy that conflict theorists argue these tensions are what ultimately lead to social change.

who are the poor

More women than men are poor in the United States. In the U.S., there are four percent more women than men between the ages of 18 and 64 living in poverty, and an even greater difference of about five percent for women over the age of 65. The poverty rate for women age 65 and older was 11.6 percent while the poverty rate for men age 65 years and older was 6.8 percent. There are some theories that explain this significant difference—known as the feminization of poverty*—which include the fact that women, on average, earn less than their male counterparts (sometimes even for the same job); that unmarried women tend to be the ones solely or mostly responsible for raising their children; and that women live longer than men, and are therefore more likely to live alone when they are older. The gender disparity in poverty also affects families. For example, in 2013, 5.8 percent of families headed by a married couple lived in poverty, compared to 15.9 percent of families headed by a single male householder and a staggering 30.6 percent of families headed by a single female household. As one can imagine, it is more difficult for single parents to provide for their families since they often only have one income as opposed to two, but even considering the impact of a single income, the gender disparity is striking. Only 10.5 percent of children in poverty live in families with two or more wage earners, while 57.5 percent of children in poverty live in families who only have one wage-earner. One possible factor for the greater gender disparity of household poverty is the "motherhood" penalty, the fact that the wages of mothers tend to be significantly lower than those of fathers. Analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Michelle Budig found that the average unmarried woman earns 96 cents on the average unmarried man's dollar. Wives and mothers among married couples earned 76 cents to the married father's dollar, while single mothers earned 83.1 cents to a single father's dollar. In addition, Budig noted that single mothers are less likely to be employed full-time relative to single fathers. Racial minorities are more likely to be poor relative to Whites. Recent census surveys have found that the racial groups with the highest national poverty rates are African Americans, American Indians/Alaska natives, and those of Hispanic origin. About 13 percent of the U.S. population was living below the poverty line in 2016. The graph below shows that White and Asian groups had poverty rates below the national average, while native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders and those who identify as two or more races had rates above the national average.

module 14 intro

Neighborhoods are an important determinant of stratification*. Redlining has contributed to racial stratification from the 1930s to the 1960s. Redlining refers to the practice of marking "hazardous" neighborhoods—neighborhoods that often contained minority residents—in a red outline to warn lenders of the "higher risk" of lending to these communities. Since the risk was partially evaluated using race, the practice of redlining ensured that minority applicants for mortgages were denied the opportunity of owning a home or given mortgages at a higher cost than White applicants. The Federal Housing Administration (later the Veterans Administration) financed more than $120 billion of new home construction. Of that, less than 2 percent went to non-White individuals and households. The effects of inequality persist across time. Because minorities were denied mortgages, they were less able to build family wealth over the years. The effects of redlining can be seen today. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2013 Whites had thirteen times the wealth of Blacks and ten times the wealth of Hispanic people. A recent study examines the current conditions in neighborhoods identified by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation as "hazardous" eighty years ago. 74 percent of the neighborhoods identified as hazardous remain low-to-moderate income today. The effects of inequality also snowball. Neighborhoods that were once redlined and are now low income, segregated by race and income, are more likely to have poorer educational outcomes since schools are largely funded through property taxes. These same neighborhoods are more likely to be located in a "food desert," an area in which nutritious food is unavailable. An inability to eat nutritious food leads to poorer health outcomes making it more challenging to work. The cycle of poverty continues. This module will discuss some of the social causes and consequences of stratification, which unequally distributes resources across groups.

Weber

One can summarize Max Weber's response to Marx's theory of stratification as, "yes, and..." Certainly, economic factors play a large role in determining a group's societal standing, but Weber argued it is not just money. There are other factors in play. For example, have you ever seen a very rich celebrity, such as a political figure or entertainer, endure a fall from grace over some highly publicized snafu? (It happens constantly.) The criticism they attract can make it harder for them to gain the respect of people who would otherwise be supporters. Reputation matters. Weber knew this. He developed a multidimensional approach to stratification, in which he identified the following three factors as integral contributors to a person's level in society: Class ‐ wealth as described by Marx. This includes money, possessions, and access to resources. Status ‐ prestige, reputation, social standing. Party ‐ Weber thought of this as one's political standing, but today we consider this to be "power", or one's ability to influence others.

housing

People who live in poverty face unaffordable and substandard housing. Not only do people in poverty have a greater risk of living in neighborhoods and housing with environmental hazards but also in neighborhoods where residents feel unsafe. Even more concerning is that poverty is often linked to homelessness.

health

People who live in poverty have lower life expectancies, greater risk for chronic illnesses, higher infant mortality rates, less access to and ability to pay for health care and medications. People living in poverty are more likely to work at jobs that are more dangerous and have greater health hazards than higher paying jobs. Also, people with higher levels of income and wealth are less likely to smoke and more likely to exercise, maintain a healthy body weight, and eat nutritious meals.

discrimmination

Prejudice is closely linked to discrimination*, the unequal treatment of certain groups in society based on prejudiced stereotypes. People may discriminate against many different groups, such as members of a gender, an age group, a religion, or a particular sexual orientation. Racial-ethnic discrimination is discrimination based on race or ethnicity. While prejudice is an attitude, discrimination is a behavior, an overt action that has a negative impact on a person or group. Discrimination can be formal, such as the denial of a job or a promotion to a member of a minority group, and it can also be informal, such as the refusal to socialize with minority-group members. While discrimination is the unequal treatment of a particular social group, unequal social outcomes may provide statistical evidence that discrimination has taken place.

two basic types of unlawful sexual harrassment

Quid pro quo is Latin for "this for that." Quid pro quo harassment* describes a situation in which a person in authority, usually a supervisor, demands sexual favors of a subordinate as a condition of getting or keeping a job benefit. Hostile work environment harassment* describes a situation in which coworkers and/or a supervisor engage in unwelcome sexually-charged behavior making the workplace atmosphere intimidating, hostile, or offensive.

Relative Poverty

Relative poverty* is the type of poverty that is far more nebulous and open to interpretation, but it is essentially defined by the amount of wealth that exists around it. In other words, those who live in relative poverty own much less and have fewer advantages than those who live comfortably around them. People who live in relative poverty in America, therefore, may still own certain things that they need to survive in a society, like a car or a computer with an internet connection that might be considered "luxury" items in other societies. However, even with these possessions, these people still struggle to provide for themselves and their families, and they may be shackled with debt or live in decrepit, cramped housing. It is important to recognize that the definition of relative poverty changes depending on several factors. The strength of the economy determines how much wealth may be available to the general population, even if only a small percentage of it reaches the lowest strata. The advancement of technology defines what amenities may be considered normal. While a refrigerator might have been very expensive in the past, today it is considered a necessity in American society, and ergo, it is reasonable for poor people to have them and still be considered poor. Finally, an area's level of urbanization* can work to alleviate or induce poverty by either making resources available to a large quantity of people, or by trapping them in areas with little access to resources. Thus, the image of relative poverty in the United States today is much different than it was twenty or even ten years ago. The poverty line*, the income below which people are considered poor in the United States, is calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Bureau calculates the cost of a minimum food diet and multiples it by three to establish a threshold. The threshold is adjusted to account for family size and inflation and then used as a standard against which the family income is measured. If a family makes more than the threshold, they are not considered poor. If the family makes less, then everyone in the family is considered poor. While the poverty threshold is adjusted for inflation, regional differences are not taken into account. This can be a significant factor in a family's ability to obtain basic necessities since the cost of living varies significantly in different regions of the country. In 2019, the poverty threshold for a family of 3 was $21,300. The poverty line fluctuates every year, meaning that the percentage of people who live below it changes as time goes on. In the U.S., there was a spike in poverty during and after the Great Recession. More recently, since 2013, the number of people in poverty has been falling. See the graphs below to get an idea of how much poverty has fallen and risen in the past 50 years

functionalist approach

Sexual division of labor, in which men are instrumental and women are expressive, is important to ensure the stability of the family unit and, consequently, the stability of society as a whole.

feminist approach

Similar to the conflict perspective, but with more of a politically activist viewpoint that seeks equal treatment of, and opportunity for, all the genders. Feminism also considers the intersection* of other social factors that contribute to gender inequality, like race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability.

Slavery

Slavery* is the ownership of another human being. Though slavery is illegal in every country, underground human trafficking is a widespread, ongoing global issue. The United Nations released a global report on human trafficking in 2014, in which it showed that human trafficking occurs in every part of the world. The two greatest reasons for human trafficking are sexual exploitation and free human labor. In this extreme form of social stratification, victims are stripped of their most basic human rights. The United Nation's report is clear, well-presented, and easy to understand. Read more about global human slavery and trafficking.

sociological answers to gender

Sociological approaches to sex and gender have changed dramatically in the past century. As more women are educated and entering the workforce, we as a society have started to have culturally-significant conversations about sex and gender. Below you will read about some of the more traditional sociological ideas about sex and gender as well as more recent ones. Although these approaches cover the major arguments and conversations around gender, it is still a hotly debated topic among sociologists and laypeople alike. Some would prefer to stick to simpler, traditional definitions of sex and gender, while others more radically challenge the need for any definitions or labels whatsoever.

stratification in the US

Sociologist measure poverty in two ways: absolute poverty*, or the inability to meet basic needs, such as water, food, and housing, and relative poverty*, poverty in relation to those around someone. For example, if you do not have an iPhone or iPod while your friends and neighbors do, you may feel poor. Most poor people in the U.S. experience relative poverty; that is, they feel poor compared to other Americans, but they do not lack basic resources to the same degree as those in less industrialized and less wealthy nations. While some people may experience relative poverty and be unable to afford the goods and services the people around them take for granted, most people in America claim to be in the "middle class"—maybe because they want to be seen as "average" and not "above" or "below" other members of society. How is wealth distributed in the United States? And for that matter, how is "wealth" calculated? According to Domhoff, most economists calculate wealth by totaling what the person owns, including money saved and valuable marketable assets like real estate or stocks, but not including physical possessions that depreciate in value like televisions or cars. From this, subtract any debts, such as college loans still being paid, mortgages, or credit card debt. Wealth is different than income, and this is an important distinction. One's income is all the money coming into one's home. This may be from wages or salary, from interest earned on investments, from royalties, or from social security or other government aid programs. A person's income is not necessarily indicative of their wealth. Income inequality has increased significantly in the United States over the last few decades. Roughly from the 1940s to the 1970s, there was low inequality as the middle class enjoyed relatively high wages. Wealth increased significantly in the United States in these decades, and gains were shared by everyone. Starting in the 1970s, however, economic growth slowed and income inequality grew significantly. The United States now has higher income inequality than other developed nations. However, despite the growing income inequality, wealth is still more highly concentrated. The wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from just under 30 percent of the total wealth in the nation in 1989, to 39 percent in 2016, while the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent fell from just over 33 percent of the total wealth in the nation to less than 23 percent over the same period. So the very rich, the top 1 percent, are getting richer. The income disparity and wealth disparity are fairly telling of the fact that there is a significantly unequal distribution of financial resources throughout the United States. Further, there is evidence that this gap is increasing, meaning the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer

explanations

Sociologists attribute the gender gap in higher education to a number of different factors—and men's declining rate may be caused by different factors than women's rising rate. Some educational commentators have suggested changing the school environment to be more conducive to boys' later biological development and greater need for physical exercise. Sociologists generally reject arguments based on biological determinism. Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann argue that boys do better when there are girls in the classroom, when the school promotes and rewards academic achievement, and when parents explain how academic achievement is related to later professional success.

understanding social stratification

Stratification One fundamental insight sociology has had into society is the recognition that human beings are clumped, or stratified, into different groups that are not socially equal. Stratification is the categorization and ranking of groups of people to form a social hierarchy. All human societies are stratified, though in different ways and some to a greater degree than others. India's caste system, for example, has historically stratified the population into rigid social groups that affect marriage opportunities, jobs, and social structure. In the United States, a class system determines access to wealth and resources, but the population can move up or down in the hierarchy. Marx was one of the most critical theorists of how capitalist societies depend on inequality. Those who own capital pay other people to work for them. The capitalists then sell the goods those workers make for more money than they are paying the workers. Capitalism, he believed, divides people into classes to benefit the rich. Functionalists, on the other hand, think stratification encourages people to work hard, and rewards those who work harder than others. It also rewards those who, by their talents or innovations, improve the lives of others. While the United States' class system is not rigid, (meaning that people can move up or down into other social classes), often people stay within their own social class. Of those born in the lower income brackets, only 30 percent move to middle or upper income; 70 percent are born poor and die poor. Certain groups of people, such as darker-skinned people, single parents, and females are disproportionately represented in the lower classes. The same is true of those born in the upper-class; most will pass along their social advantages to their children, enabling them to stay in the class in which they were born. There are many factors at play to keep a person within his or her social strata. In this module, you will learn how wealth and privilege, as well as poverty and disadvantage, self-perpetuate across the generations. Stratification happens not only within a society but across nations as well. Nations that are developed control a greater proportion of wealth, resources, and power than those that are less developed. Much of the world's wealth is concentrated in a few geographic areas. Stratification is an area of interest for sociologists. How can societies make sure that everyone gets a fair shot at having a good life? How can core, developed nations help raise the standard of living in those nations that lack their resources? These are central questions that will continue to confront us as we try to understand the forms and forces of stratification.

consequences of class inequality

The American Dream is built on the concept of social mobility*, which is a person's ability to move up or down in the social hierarchy of a society. While it is true that social mobility is possible in American society—more possible than it was in many traditional societies—it is a myth that each class of people has an equal opportunity to better his or her situation. In reality, people become entrenched (to a degree) in their social classes. Of those sons born to the lowest ten percent of male earners, about 40 percent grew up to have incomes in the lowest 20 percent of incomes, while less than 10 percent made it to the top 20 percent income bracket. Stratification also tends to concentrate certain groups, such as minorities and women, at particular levels within society. How does income and wealth inequality affect the lives of individuals? Sociologists address this complex question and have identified the consequences of inequality, including health and nutrition, housing, and education. See the table below for more information.

ethnicity by settlement

The United States, which has historically been a destination for immigrants from around the world, has many ethnic groups. Around the turn of the century, immigrants poured into the United States, excited about the prospect of job opportunities and higher wages. Upon arrival—unsurprisingly—many chose to settle in the areas populated by fellow countrymen, in pockets called ethnic enclaves*. These are areas that have high concentrations of a particular ethnicity, prevailing cultural norms, and in some cases, distinct economic systems. Examples include historic Chinatown in San Francisco or Little Italy in New York City. Ethnic enclaves provided a common language, a shared sense of cultural and national identity, resources, and familiarity. That many of these countrymen shared similar physical characteristics did not go unnoticed. Ethnic enclaves are not a historical concept; these still exist around the United States and in many corners of the world. New ethnic enclaves are created all the time. There is something comforting about being among "your people."

gender and the workplace

The gender differences that children learn about at home and in schools not only affect their formation of self but also their adult careers and how they make a living. Although there have been conscious efforts in the last 50 years to promote gender equality in all professions, there are still many industries that remain gender segregated. Such occupations that are dominated by men include truck driver, construction worker, carpenter, mechanic, electrician, police officer, software developer, and chief executive, while occupations that are dominated by women include secretary/receptionist, teacher, nurse, bookkeeper/accountant, housekeeper/maid, and social workers. These occupations reflect many of society's expectations of the gender binary: the male-dominated jobs seem to require physical labor, object-oriented problem solving, and authority and power, whereas the female-dominated jobs seem to require caretaking, support, domesticity, and compassion. Secretaries and elementary/middle school teachers are examples of female-dominated professions, while college teachers, chief executives, and police and sheriff's patrol officers are examples of male-dominated professions.Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Close examinations of which industries and jobs favor one gender over another shows sociologists what characteristics our society values in each gender. As previously discussed, society continues to uphold leadership, authority, and provision as ideals of masculinity*. The fact that most executives and higher-ranked positions are held by men is believed to be a manifestation of these traditional masculine roles. The same could be said about the number of men in law enforcement. Women, meanwhile, occupy more submissive positions, like secretarial and retail positions, which are considered more feminine* because they support others or offer care. This phenomenon is known as gender typing*, and it can be detrimental if the benefits and pay of a position are affected by this bias. It is interesting to note that women dominate early childhood education while men dominate later, more culturally prestigious, college education. Presumably, each gender has an equal desire to teach, but women are more likely to be associated with small children. It is telling that in our society higher education, the profession dominated by men, requires more training, earns a higher salary, and has significantly greater cultural prestige. For most of these jobs, such as chief executive, biological sex plays no role in predicting an employee's skill. Therefore, in these jobs, there is no reason to discriminate against an individual on the basis of their sex. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 defined discrimination as unequal treatment based on race, national origin, age, religion, or sex. Despite the equality of sexes that both law and biology establish, however, gender inequality persists in certain tangible ways.

symbolic interactionist approach

The social construction of gender is perpetuated in everyday interactions that reinforce traditional masculine and feminine traits.

symbolic interaction and homelessness

The symbolic interactionist perspective focuses on the stigma* associated with homelessness. Homeless is a master status*, dwarfing the other aspects of someone's identity and changing how people in society perceive the individual. We perpetuate this master status by discussing "the homeless" as a separate category of people, despite the fact that many individuals and families are without shelter for only a brief period of time. The perception of homelessness is that those experiencing it are responsible for their condition. The stigma of homelessness is evident in how people without homes are treated. Homeless people are moved from public parks where they sleep on the assumption that they can find a better place to sleep. They might have to take drug tests or answer intrusive questions in order to gain access to a shelter. The Boise Rescue Mission, to take one example, requires anyone who has stayed in its shelter for 30 consecutive days to either leave or join a discipleship program based on Christianity. This requirement sends the message that homeless people have stayed too long at the shelter and need to improve themselves in order to find a home of their own. Symbolic interactionists study both how people who are experiencing homelessness and how those who aren't think about the problem. They conduct studies to determine how much people blame those experiencing homelessness and the self-concept* of those grappling with the problem.

the classes

The upper class is about 1 percent of the U.S. population and controls the majority of the nation's wealth. Most of these people inherit their wealth (e.g., land, homes, stocks and bonds). They have annual incomes in the millions of dollars. People in the upper-middle class (14 percent of the U.S.) consist of professionals with high levels of education, such as CEO's, doctors, and lawyers. Unlike most of the upper class, members of the upper-middle class work to earn a living, and their household income is about $150,000 annually. Middle class (30 percent of U.S.) people hold 2-year or 4-year college degrees, have more supervision at work, and typically make $70,000 as their household annual income. Working class (30 percent) people have blue-collar jobs and perform service work for example as store clerks. Household income is $40,000 a year and most members only have a high school diploma. Working poor members (13 percent of the U.S.) live just above or below the poverty line. Their annual household income is about $25,000. They hold unskilled jobs, seasonal migrant jobs in agriculture, lower-paid factory jobs, and minimum-wage service-sector jobs. The underclass (12 percent of the U.S.) includes unemployed individuals or part-time workers who often have low education levels. Household income is $15,000 or less each year.

missing housing

There is a national shortage of housing, driving up the cost of housing for everyone. In 2018, over 30 percent of all households in the United States were "cost burdened," meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. However, the burden is not evenly distributed: nearly half of all renters were "cost burdened" and 24 percent of renters spent over half their income on housing. The general increase in housing costs significantly impacts low-income people. In 2018, the National Low Income Housing Coalition measured the number of rental housing units available to those who are at or below the poverty line and those who earn 30 percent of their area median income to account for very expensive areas where even those living above the official poverty line might be unable to afford housing. Nationally, only 37 affordable and available housing units exist for every 100 extremely low income renter household. In the 50 largest metropolitan areas, available and affordable housing units range from a high of only 51 in Pittsburgh, PA to a low of 13 in Orlando FL. When housing is unavailable, more people become homeless.

Myths of poverty

There is a pervading myth that individuals who are poor can work their way out of poverty if they simply work hard enough; however, the reality is far more complicated than that, and individual responsibility is only one of many factors affecting poverty. People who are children, elderly, or disabled are far more likely to be living below the poverty line than able-bodied working-age adults. In 2016, of the 40.6 million Americans living in poverty, only 56.1 percent were working-age adults. That means that only a little more than half of poor people are people we would normally expect to be working. In 2014, of the adults age 18 to 64 who were living below the poverty line, 40.8 percent were working, 18.9 percent were disabled, 10 percent were in school, and close to 6 percent were unemployed and looking for work (Stevens, 2018). These categories account for 75 percent of the working-age poor. Another myth is that a subset of the population relies on government benefits rather than working. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2017, of those adults receiving Medicaid benefits, 44 percent were working full-time, another 19 percent were working part-time, and 12 percent were not working because they were caring for others. Therefore, fully 75 percent of Medicaid recipients were working or caring for others. It is important to note that Kaiser removed from their analysis people receiving benefits under Medicare (which mainly provides benefits to those over 65) and those receiving Supplemental Security Income, which supports disabled adults and children. Some sociologists recognize that capitalist businesses contribute to poverty levels by offering low wages and hiring a small pool of employees, which allows businesses to profit more. Businesses also prefer having what Marx and Engels called a "reserve army of labor," meaning that as long as there existed a large number of poor people to hire, they can use that as leverage over their current employees. If you don't behave and comply, you can be easily replaced by someone else who needs a job. This "reserve army" could also be called upon once a business expands. Capitalism also encourages competition between classes, since those who gain success wish to be on top and keep others on the bottom. This bias, along with the belief that hard work alone can lift people out of poverty, means that voters and policymakers sometimes turn against government aid programs, which are viewed as unfair advantages that encourage laziness and entitlement.

wealth and inequality transcript

Transcript There's a chart I saw recently that I can't get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States. This is what they said they thought it was: Dividing the country into five rough groups of the top, bottom, and middle three 20 percent groups, they asked people how they thought the wealth in this country was divided. Then he asked them what they thought was the ideal distribution, and 92 percent, that's at least nine out of 10 of them, said it should be more like this. In other words, more equitable than they think it is. Now, that fact is telling, admittedly, the notion that most Americans know that the system is already skewed unfairly. But what's most interesting to me is the reality compared to our perception. The ideal is as far removed from our perception of reality, as the actual distribution is from what we think exists in this country. So ignore the ideal for a moment. Here's what we think it is again. And here is the actual distribution. Shockingly skewed, not only do the bottom, 20 percent, and the next 20 percent, the bottom 40 percent of Americans, barely have any of the wealth. I mean, it's hard to even see them on the chart. But the top 1% has more of the country's wealth than 9 out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20 percent should have. Mind blowing. But let's look at it another way because I find this chart kind of difficult to wrap my head around. Instead, let's reduce the 311 million Americans to just a representative 100 people. Make it simple. Here they are: teachers, coaches, firefighters, construction workers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, some investment bankers, a CEO, maybe a celebrity or two. Now let's line them up according to their wealth. Poorest people on the left, wealthiest on the right, just a steady row of folks based on their net worth. We'll color code them like we did before based on which 20 percent quintile they fall into. Now let's reduce the total wealth of the United States, which was roughly $54 trillion in 2009, to this symbolic pile of cash, and let's distribute it among our 100 America. Well, here's socialism, all the wealth of the country distributed. We all know that won't work. We need to encourage people to work, and work hard, to achieve that good old American dream and keep our country moving forward. So, here's that ideal that we asked everyone about. Something like this curve. This isn't too bad. We've got some incentive, as the wealthiest folks are now about 10 to 20 times better off than the poorest Americans. But, hey, even the poor folks aren't actually poor, since the poverty line has stayed almost entirely off the chart. We have a super healthy middle class with a smooth transition into wealth. And yes, Republicans and Democrats alike chose this curve. 9 out of 10 people, 92 percent, said this was a nice ideal distribution of America's wealth. But let's move on. This is what people think America's wealth distribution actually looks like. Not as equitable clearly. But for me, even this still looks pretty great. Yes, the poorest 20 to 30 percent are starting to suffer quite a lot compared to the ideal. And the middle class is certainly struggling more than they were, while the rich and wealthy are making roughly 100 times that of the poorest Americans, and about 10 times that of the still healthy middle class. Sadly, this isn't even close to the reality. Here is the actual distribution of wealth in America. The poorest Americans don't even register. They're down to pocket change. And the middle class is barely distinguishable from the poor. In fact, even the rich between the top 10 and 20 percentile are worse off. Only the top 10 percent are better off. How much better off? So much better off that the top 2 to 5 percent are actually off the chart, at this scale. And the top 1%, this guy? Well his stack of money stretches 10 times higher than we can show. Here's his stack of cash re-stacked all by itself. This is the top 1% we've been hearing so much about. So much green in his pocket that I have to give him a whole new column of his own, because he won't fit on my chart. 1% of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth. The bottom 80 percent, eight out of every 10 people, or 80 out of these hundred, only has 7 percent between them. And this has only gotten worse in the last 20 and 30 years. While the richest 1 percent take home almost a quarter of the national income today, in 1976 they took home only 9%, meaning their share of income has nearly tripled in the last 30 years. The top 1 percent owns half the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The bottom 50 percent of Americans own only half a percent of these investments, which means they aren't investing. They're just scraping by. I'm sure many of these wealthy people have worked very hard for their money. But do you really believe that the CEO is working 380 times harder than his average employee? Not his lowest paid employee, not the janitor, but the average earner in his company. The average worker needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO makes in one hour. We certainly don't have to go all the way to socialism to find something that is fair for hardworking Americans. We don't even have to achieve what most of us consider might be ideal. All we need to do is wake up and realize that the reality in this country is not at all what we think it is.

the motherhood penalty

Transcript Carrie Saldo: There is new research on how mothers in the workforce are penalized for having children. Joya Mishra of the UMass School of Public Policy and Sociology outlined that research in a paper titled "Motherhood Penalty: the Wage Gap Between Women with Kids and Those Without." I spoke with her about that research, how the United States fares compared to other countries on this issue—not well—and whether new laws might help reverse this disparity. Joya Misra: The United States is really exceptional in its lack of support for families with children. So we do have a few things. We have the earned income tax credit, that families, that families with children receive. But there are many other policies that other countries have, so like family allowances, payments to families with children, universal childcare. So the same thing that we have for K through 12, in terms of public schooling, is available in most countries, for children below six or below five. Saldo: And even before that, paid leave, right, for new parents? Misra: And even before that. So paid leave started getting adopted in the very early years of the 20th century. So around 1904, 1908, a lot of countries put paid leaves in place. By now, pretty much every country except for, for really poor countries and the U.S. have a paid parental leave. Saldo: So most, so just to recap what you just said, most industrialized countries, except for the United States, have some form of paid leave for their parents? Misra: Well, that's the thing. What's interesting about it is, it's not just that most industrialized countries, but most countries have maternity leave. So poor, rich, all over the world, everybody sort of supports the idea of maternity leave. The U.S. is very exceptional. And we do have FMLA, which provides... Saldo: Family Medical Leave Act, right? Misra: Family Medical Leave Act, which allows parents to take off some time around the birth of a child. But, because it's unpaid, many families can't afford to take the leave. Saldo: Right, so what that leave does is protect your job, essentially, so that it's there when you decided to come back, if I understand it correctly, right? Misra: Exactly, exactly. Saldo: So, in your research, which you coauthored with some other folks, you use this phrase "the motherhood penalty." Where does that phrase come from? Misra: The motherhood penalty—it's been used by different researchers probably since the late 90's. So I think either Michelle Budig and Paula England or Jane Waldfogel actually coined the term. And it's been used to show that there's this consistent penalty that mothers appear to, to pay in the, in the labor market, that they are paid less than childless women who have all of their other same characteristics. Saldo: And some of those characteristics include what, education? And so give us some of the specifics Misra: Education and job experience, you know, what kinds of jobs they're in. Saldo: So really on paper, they would be comparable. If if the employer didn't know that they had a child, they'd looked kind of the same, right? Misra: Exactly, exactly. And there are even like a really, really interesting audit study and experimental study that Shelley Correll did, where she sends resumes to employers, and on some of the resumes, they say that the person is involved in a community organization and on some they say, a parent-guardian organization in a school. And then she looks to see which ones get callbacks and what is the recommended salary. And it's so interesting, because the men who look on paper like they're fathers are more likely to be called back and are more likely to get higher wages offered to them, and the ones that look like they're mothers on paper are less likely to get called back and are offered lower wages. So even there, like, you know, they're just looking at the paper—there's no other difference that they could possibly be observing—motherhood seems to carry a penalty. Saldo: So in your recent paper, you looked at three periods of time. So, this is, we're not even talking about oh, 40 years ago this was the case. You looked at 1986 to 1985, 1996 to 2004, and 2006 to 2014. Overarching, and we'll talk about specifics in a minute, but overarching, what did you find? Misra: Well, what we hoped to find, what we would have liked to find, is that because over that same time period, women have really increased their experience, so they've been spending more time in the labor force, and they've increased their education. So women are very highly educated these days in the U.S. Saldo: So to your earlier point, they look better on paper. Misra: They look better on paper today than they did maybe in the mid-80's. And so what we would hope to find was that motherhood penalty had reduced over this time period, and we could say, you know, "we've really made progress on this. Employers are treating women sort of equally, whether they have, whether they're parents or not." Saldo: But what you actually found was... Misra: What we found was that the penalty has remained pretty much stable over that time period. So it really hasn't changed over time, and... Saldo: More than 30 years, there hasn't been a significant amount of change here. Misra: Despite the fact that we know, that we've seen enormous change in women's labor force participation, their education, their experience, like all of the things that should be affecting wages. Saldo: Something that you said in the report, I want to quote. It says, the report says, "There remain stubborn differences in pay between childless women and mothers." And more specifically, you found that women who have one child versus women who don't have a child, there's a difference there. What's the pay gap among that group? Misra: Well, it depends a little bit on the time period, but we could sort of say that there's about a 13% pay difference. Saldo: So someone with a one child, a woman with one child is going to make 13% less than someone who is comparably educated but just does not have a child. Misra: Exactly. Saldo: Do you know why that is? Misra: Well, the research can't tell us really that much about why that is. We definitely tried to like suss out, we use different statistical techniques to try to suss out whether there was something going on, like, for example, mothers with one child are just less motivated. The data doesn't seem to suggest that. It really does seem like there's a penalty there. Saldo: And so in continuing with the research, when you looked at mothers who have maybe two or more children, difference there, right, when compared to a woman who's childless and working? What's that difference? Misra: So that becomes more like a 17% difference. So it definitely increases the more children that people have. And that's, like, just rock-solid stable over this entire time period from the 80s through the teens. Saldo: So they're being penalized more if they have more children, or... Misra: Yes, for the most part, you're penalized more, the more children you have. And the way we modeled it was to think about, okay, well, there are mothers with one child, mothers with two children, mothers with three or more children. Another way people model it sometimes is to do it just as number of children. And what they usually find is there's somewhere between a four and seven percent effect for each child. Saldo: Wow. And so I know that you've a lot of, you've looked at this research over a period of years too, and you've also compared it, as we said, to other countries. In terms of pay, what do we know about that, the United States versus other countries? Misra: Well, the wonderful thing about this is that there actually seems to be a solution to the problem. So in countries that have adopted policies that really support working parents, really all working parents, including parental leaves for fathers and mothers, including childcare availability that's subsidized by the government, so it becomes sort of like the educational system, in those countries, we really have seen the motherhood penalty drop off. There's a great study that's based on data in Norway that shows that over the same time period that we were looking for the U.S. the motherhood penalty disappeared. So it was there at the beginning, but it really disappeared. And it's, you know, certainly mothers have really focused on making sure that they have the skills that they need to do well in workforce... Saldo: You mean, they're better educated, or they've taken other steps and make themselves a stronger, a stronger, a stronger candidate. Misra: Exactly. So I think women have absolutely done what they can. But the Norwegian data and data from other countries seems to suggest that if the government steps in and provides that little bit more of support for working parents, then we'll see these pay gaps disappear. Saldo: Is there any sense that best practices, say from Norway, are being looked at by anyone here to say, "Hey, here's how we have, here's a potential legislative solution for this problem"? Misra: I think that there is increasing interest in these kinds of policies. So as far back as the 1990s, there were states who started adopting some pre-k programs oriented toward four-year-olds, and even three-year-olds. And those were states that really realized that they needed to get in on the beginning of this, because it's actually something business owners like to, it has all sorts of positive incomes, outcomes for, for children, and, and education, if you sort of start them with education a little bit earlier. So those were some moves that happened then. In recent years, the moves have been more at the state level around paid leave. So a number of states have now adopted paid leave, either using unemployment insurance or other kinds of mechanisms to make sure that people can take a maternity leave, or paternity leave around the birth or an adoption of a child and support them to maintain their ties to the workforce. And like in a place like California that has the paid leave, we again, are seeing much better outcomes for mothers. Saldo: And it seems really here in the United States, at least for the short term, that employers are sometimes taking the lead, whether that's Netflix that we hear about, you know, they're offering a year of paid leave, or Facebook. Were you surprised to see that employers, who are, in one way, sort of holding folks back, holding these women back by not paying them equal wages, but here we have other employers who are saying, "you know what, here, let's give you a year of paid leave." Misra: And, it's really interesting, because employers, in part, are using these policies to attract the best workers. They want a diverse workforce. They want a workforce that, you know, women put a lot of time and effort into their education. They don't want to invest in workers and then have them disappear because there aren't supports in place when their children are very young. So I think employers identified, hey, this was a great solution for us. And it's really interesting, like in California, where there's a paid leave, the employers that already had leaves that they paid for, for their workers are much more likely to inform their workers of the state leave, because the state leave means that they pay less. Saldo: Wow, wow, so.. Misra: So middle-class workers are more likely to take advantage of it. Saldo: One more quick question. This came up a lot in the presidential campaign, this concept of paid leave. And are you seeing a shift in the cultural landscape around this larger discussion of paying women in the work, women, female mothers in the workforce? Misra: I think so. I think that because there are so many more families with working parents, both fathers and mothers, it's just been an enormous shift in public opinion, and people really think that this is the right, right thing to do, the right way to go. I really expect that we'll see in the next decade, decade and a half, a pretty substantial shift in the U.S. Transcript Carrie Saldo: There is new research on how mothers in the workforce are penalized for having children. Joya Mishra of the UMass School of Public Policy and Sociology outlined that research in a paper titled "Motherhood Penalty: the Wage Gap Between Women with Kids and Those Without." I spoke with her about that research, how the United States fares compared to other countries on this issue—not well—and whether new laws might help reverse this disparity. Joya Misra: The United States is really exceptional in its lack of support for families with children. So we do have a few things. We have the earned income tax credit, that families, that families with children receive. But there are many other policies that other countries have, so like family allowances, payments to families with children, universal childcare. So the same thing that we have for K through 12, in terms of public schooling, is available in most countries, for children below six or below five. Saldo: And even before that, paid leave, right, for new parents? Misra: And even before that. So paid leave started getting adopted in the very early years of the 20th century. So around 1904, 1908, a lot of countries put paid leaves in place. By now, pretty much every country except for, for really poor countries and the U.S. have a paid parental leave. Saldo: So most, so just to recap what you just said, most industrialized countries, except for the United States, have some form of paid leave for their parents? Misra: Well, that's the thing. What's interesting about it is, it's not just that most industrialized countries, but most countries have maternity leave. So poor, rich, all over the world, everybody sort of supports the idea of maternity leave. The U.S. is very exceptional. And we do have FMLA, which provides... Saldo: Family Medical Leave Act, right? Misra: Family Medical Leave Act, which allows parents to take off some time around the birth of a child. But, because it's unpaid, many families can't afford to take the leave. Saldo: Right, so what that leave does is protect your job, essentially, so that it's there when you decided to come back, if I understand it correctly, right? Misra: Exactly, exactly. Saldo: So, in your research, which you coauthored with some other folks, you use this phrase "the motherhood penalty." Where does that phrase come from? Misra: The motherhood penalty—it's been used by different researchers probably since the late 90's. So I think either Michelle Budig and Paula England or Jane Waldfogel actually coined the term. And it's been used to show that there's this consistent penalty that mothers appear to, to pay in the, in the labor market, that they are paid less than childless women who have all of their other same characteristics. Saldo: And some of those characteristics include what, education? And so give us some of the specifics Misra: Education and job experience, you know, what kinds of jobs they're in. Saldo: So really on paper, they would be comparable. If if the employer didn't know that they had a child, they'd looked kind of the same, right? Misra: Exactly, exactly. And there are even like a really, really interesting audit study and experimental study that Shelley Correll did, where she sends resumes to employers, and on some of the resumes, they say that the person is involved in a community organization and on some they say, a parent-guardian organization in a school. And then she looks to see which ones get callbacks and what is the recommended salary. And it's so interesting, because the men who look on paper like they're fathers are more likely to be called back and are more likely to get higher wages offered to them, and the ones that look like they're mothers on paper are less likely to get called back and are offered lower wages. So even there, like, you know, they're just looking at the paper—there's no other difference that they could possibly be observing—motherhood seems to carry a penalty. Saldo: So in your recent paper, you looked at three periods of time. So, this is, we're not even talking about oh, 40 years ago this was the case. You looked at 1986 to 1985, 1996 to 2004, and 2006 to 2014. Overarching, and we'll talk about specifics in a minute, but overarching, what did you find? Misra: Well, what we hoped to find, what we would have liked to find, is that because over that same time period, women have really increased their experience, so they've been spending more time in the labor force, and they've increased their education. So women are very highly educated these days in the U.S. Saldo: So to your earlier point, they look better on paper. Misra: They look better on paper today than they did maybe in the mid-80's. And so what we would hope to find was that motherhood penalty had reduced over this time period, and we could say, you know, "we've really made progress on this. Employers are treating women sort of equally, whether they have, whether they're parents or not." Saldo: But what you actually found was... Misra: What we found was that the penalty has remained pretty much stable over that time period. So it really hasn't changed over time, and... Saldo: More than 30 years, there hasn't been a significant amount of change here. Misra: Despite the fact that we know, that we've seen enormous change in women's labor force participation, their education, their experience, like all of the things that should be affecting wages. Saldo: Something that you said in the report, I want to quote. It says, the report says, "There remain stubborn differences in pay between childless women and mothers." And more specifically, you found that women who have one child versus women who don't have a child, there's a difference there. What's the pay gap among that group? Misra: Well, it depends a little bit on the time period, but we could sort of say that there's about a 13% pay difference. Saldo: So someone with a one child, a woman with one child is going to make 13% less than someone who is comparably educated but just does not have a child. Misra: Exactly. Saldo: Do you know why that is? Misra: Well, the research can't tell us really that much about why that is. We definitely tried to like suss out, we use different statistical techniques to try to suss out whether there was something going on, like, for example, mothers with one child are just less motivated. The data doesn't seem to suggest that. It really does seem like there's a penalty there. Saldo: And so in continuing with the research, when you looked at mothers who have maybe two or more children, difference there, right, when compared to a woman who's childless and working? What's that difference? Misra: So that becomes more like a 17% difference. So it definitely increases the more children that people have. And that's, like, just rock-solid stable over this entire time period from the 80s through the teens. Saldo: So they're being penalized more if they have more children, or... Misra: Yes, for the most part, you're penalized more, the more children you have. And the way we modeled it was to think about, okay, well, there are mothers with one child, mothers with two children, mothers with three or more children. Another way people model it sometimes is to do it just as number of children. And what they usually find is there's somewhere between a four and seven percent effect for each child. Saldo: Wow. And so I know that you've a lot of, you've looked at this research over a period of years too, and you've also compared it, as we said, to other countries. In terms of pay, what do we know about that, the United States versus other countries? Misra: Well, the wonderful thing about this is that there actually seems to be a solution to the problem. So in countries that have adopted policies that really support working parents, really all working parents, including parental leaves for fathers and mothers, including childcare availability that's subsidized by the government, so it becomes sort of like the educational system, in those countries, we really have seen the motherhood penalty drop off. There's a great study that's based on data in Norway that shows that over the same time period that we were looking for the U.S. the motherhood penalty disappeared. So it was there at the beginning, but it really disappeared. And it's, you know, certainly mothers have really focused on making sure that they have the skills that they need to do well in workforce... Saldo: You mean, they're better educated, or they've taken other steps and make themselves a stronger, a stronger, a stronger candidate. Misra: Exactly. So I think women have absolutely done what they can. But the Norwegian data and data from other countries seems to suggest that if the government steps in and provides that little bit more of support for working parents, then we'll see these pay gaps disappear. Saldo: Is there any sense that best practices, say from Norway, are being looked at by anyone here to say, "Hey, here's how we have, here's a potential legislative solution for this problem"? Misra: I think that there is increasing interest in these kinds of policies. So as far back as the 1990s, there were states who started adopting some pre-k programs oriented toward four-year-olds, and even three-year-olds. And those were states that really realized that they needed to get in on the beginning of this, because it's actually something business owners like to, it has all sorts of positive incomes, outcomes for, for children, and, and education, if you sort of start them with education a little bit earlier. So those were some moves that happened then. In recent years, the moves have been more at the state level around paid leave. So a number of states have now adopted paid leave, either using unemployment insurance or other kinds of mechanisms to make sure that people can take a maternity leave, or paternity leave around the birth or an adoption of a child and support them to maintain their ties to the workforce. And like in a place like California that has the paid leave, we again, are seeing much better outcomes for mothers. Saldo: And it seems really here in the United States, at least for the short term, that employers are sometimes taking the lead, whether that's Netflix that we hear about, you know, they're offering a year of paid leave, or Facebook. Were you surprised to see that employers, who are, in one way, sort of holding folks back, holding these women back by not paying them equal wages, but here we have other employers who are saying, "you know what, here, let's give you a year of paid leave." Misra: And, it's really interesting, because employers, in part, are using these policies to attract the best workers. They want a diverse workforce. They want a workforce that, you know, women put a lot of time and effort into their education. They don't want to invest in workers and then have them disappear because there aren't supports in place when their children are very young. So I think employers identified, hey, this was a great solution for us. And it's really interesting, like in California, where there's a paid leave, the employers that already had leaves that they paid for, for their workers are much more likely to inform their workers of the state leave, because the state leave means that they pay less. Saldo: Wow, wow, so.. Misra: So middle-class workers are more likely to take advantage of it. Saldo: One more quick question. This came up a lot in the presidential campaign, this concept of paid leave. And are you seeing a shift in the cultural landscape around this larger discussion of paying women in the work, women, female mothers in the workforce? Misra: I think so. I think that because there are so many more families with working parents, both fathers and mothers, it's just been an enormous shift in public opinion, and people really think that this is the right, right thing to do, the right way to go. I really expect that we'll see in the next decade, decade and a half, a pretty substantial shift in the U.S.

Lesson 35 intro

We have all seen those soulful, heart-wrenching commercials. You know the ones: the camera pans over to a small, skinny child squatting in the dirt while an American voice describes her living conditions. The voice asks for a small monthly donation to help support the child, who lives without adequate nutrition, education, or shelter. This child lives in absolute poverty in a nation that likely has a low share of the overall global wealth. This lesson will look at the forces of stratification throughout the world.

Global Stratification Transcript

We live in a global economy in which wealth flows freely around the world. Because of economic exchange, nations around the globe are stratified. Nations with a high concentration of wealth are called high-income nations, or core nations. Those whose wealth is low or increasing are called middle-income nations, or semiperiphery nations. And those who are poor are called low-income nations, or periphery nations. Periphery countries have little of the infrastructure that core nations have. People lack access to basic institutions, such as high schools and banks, which enable people to live prosperous lives. Many people in periphery countries struggle to find enough to eat and to receive basic healthcare. In addition to a lack of institutions and physical infrastructure, the poorest nations are also often plagued by political conflict and violence making it difficult for them to grow. Semiperiphery nations are modernizing. These countries include India and China, where much of the population continues to live in underdeveloped, rural areas, but where cities have all the conveniences associated with modern life. Core nations are generally found in Europe and early British colonies, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. These countries' wealth can be attributed to the industrial revolution, which raised productivity and created new wealth. Later European colonies were not so lucky. The colonial powers exploited these countries' mineral resources and cheap labor. Without the ability to develop independently, these former colonies continued to occupy the same economic relationship with their colonizer even after independence. European countries drilled for oil, exported timber, and built roads, reaping the profits from these endeavors, and sending the profits to their shareholders in Europe. Stratification throughout the globe has occurred for the same reason as stratification within nations: capitalism and industrialization created relationships of production that advantage certain groups over others. In the following sections, we will explore the forces and effects of globalization.

intro

What is the first question you ask when you hear someone is pregnant? Most expectant mothers will say that the question they hear most often is "Is it a boy or a girl?" Even before a child is born, the people around are uncomfortable imagining a person without a gender attached. Realizing how often an expectant mother is asked about gender calls out the category's importance. Gender is a central category of social life, and therefore a central category of sociological study. Brittney Griner dunks at the 2015 WNBA All-Star game. By Danny Karwoski. An article in the New York Times, and the readers' responses to it, displayed some phenomena that sociologists think are worthy of study. On June 2, 2015, the New York Times ran an editorial calling for the basket in women's basketball games to be lowered from the standard 10 feet to increase viewership for the W.N.B.A. Citing the fact that men are, on average, seven inches higher than women, the author Asher Price argues that a lower basket would "inject excitement into the game" by allowing the female players to dunk more often. More excitement, she argued, would lead to a larger audience. She ended her piece by imagining what a women's game could be like: "Imagine a pivotal moment in a W.N.B.A. game on prime-time TV—a steal, a breakaway and, now, suddenly, as a full house stands in anticipation, a player rises to the hoop to triumphantly stuff the ball?". Many commentators disagreed strongly with the proposal to lower the basket for women's games, instead arguing for raising the basket for men. Why? They argued that while dunks were crowd-pleasers, they lowered the overall intricacy of the game and the skill needed to play it. Some commentators pointed out that dunks were, in fact, outlawed from 1967-1976 because they were thought unfairly to advantage taller men. As it turns out, the average height of men playing basketball has increased from 6'4" in 1950-51 to 6'7 in 2015". The men playing the original game in 1891 were even shorter. The argument for raising the basket in the W.N.B.A. points to the fact that biology is not a timeless, unchanging given. Sociologists believe sex characteristics are much more fluid than people commonly recognize. The controversy over how to adjust the women's game suggests the important history of gender stratification. Gender*, as opposed to sex, is what a culture ascribes to biological sexual differences. It's what the people in a culture agree is natural for men or women to do or be. Basketball was invented in 1891. Because only men were publicly competing in sports and athletic events, the game was developed for them. Even as the average heights of men grew, the height of the basket did not change and the prevalence of dunking grew. Now when fans discuss changing the game, they think of "modifying" it for women. Price imagines the tension-filled final moments of a game in terms of the dunking that is the primary component of the men's game now. This history puts women on a lower level, the gender that is shorter and therefore has to be accommodated by changing the game—never mind that the short men of the 1890s didn't dunk and many shorter men today can't dunk. In the social imagination men (as a whole) can dunk and women (as a whole) can't. This is the kind of binary thinking sociologists identify as key to gender construction. Sociologists note that current inequality or stratification* is often determined by long-established social structures that shape how we think about different categories of people. Sex, gender, and gender stratification show up in many cultural realms. Biological sex characteristics take on cultural significance as meaningful differences between the two genders. Ideas about what is natural for women and men can lead to gender stratification, the promotion of one gender, usually men, above the other, usually women. Gender stratification can be seen in the United States as a set of interrelated phenomena given that men more often occupy positions of power, earn more money, and contribute less to household work in their homes.

the symbolic interactionalists approach

While functionalist and conflict approaches focus on large-scale implications of differences between the sexes, symbolic interactionism examines how those differences are demonstrated by interactions between men and women in everyday life. Symbolic interactionists are particularly interested in gender socialization. For instance, how does a man paying for dinner reflect gender roles*? Symbolic interactionism would suggest that the man is demonstrating his masculinity, fulfilling his role as the provider. Likewise, the woman whose dinner he is paying for is demonstrating femininity by submitting to the man's gesture and accepting what he is providing for her. This is what sociologists Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman call "doing gender," or behaving in ways that subtly show the effect of gender socialization and continue the constructs of masculinity and femininity. "Doing gender" can be more subtle as well. For example, symbolic interactionists might study how often women and men apologize for a slight social infraction or how people differently interpret a man or a woman making eye-contact during a conversation. Many studies have shown subtle, but consistent, ways in which men and women are socialized to behave as "men" and "women."

race and ethnicity

Whites are 41 percent of people in poverty, but at 61 percent of the overall population, they are less likely to be poor than other racial groups. Almost all other racial groups, with the exception of Asians, were overrepresented among the poor relative to their percentage of the U.S. population: Latinx of any race: 28 percent of the poor; 17.8 percent of the general population Black: 22 percent of the poor; 12 percent of the general population Two or more races: 2.2 percent of the poor; 1.9 percent of the population American Indian/Alaska Native: 1.5 percent of the poor; 0.8 percent of the population

lesson 33 intro

Who becomes an inventor in the United States? A group of economists studied the relationship between patents filed and the class of the inventor's parents. The economists found that children from the top 1 percent of families were 10 times as likely to file a patent as those from below-median-income families, even when, as children, the inventors had similar math test scores. Children who grew up in neighborhoods with "a high innovation rate" were more likely to invent themselves. The study targets one narrow path to success, but its findings suggest how widespread the effects of social status are. We think of inventors as exceptionally creative individuals—the kind of individuals who can become rich through their own abilities. But here, as elsewhere, the strong effects of social forces on individuals' lives are evident. This lesson will introduce you to different ways societies build hierarchies, hierarchies which give some individuals more opportunity than others.

glass ceiling

a certain rank or position in an organization beyond which women have difficulty being successfully promoted

multinational corporation

a corporation located in a country that does business throughout the world

developing countries

a country that currently lacks the resources and structures to provide advancements, comfort, and productive work opportunities for the majority of its residents

developed countries

a country that reflects indications of advancement, comfort, productivity, such as quality infrastructure (good roads and highways or efficient power grids) and a well educated and technologically sophisticated workforce

core countries

a developed nation that is fully industrialized and part of the dominant group in the global economic system

self-concept

a fixed understanding that an individual has of themselves regardless of social context

stereotype

a generalization about an entire category of people, it is generally presumed to describe a particular member of the category

racial-ethnic stereotype

a generalization made about an entire racial or ethnic category of people

Gini coefficient

a measure of income or consumption inequality; a Gini coefficient of 0 percent indicated perfect equality (everyone earns or consumes the same amount); while a Gini coefficient of 100 percent indicated complete inequality (1 person owns everything)

semi-periphery countries

a nation that has undergone some industrialization and economic development, but which is still developing

periphery countries

a nation that lacks the industrialization and wealth of other countries, under world systems analysis periphery nations transfer wealth to core nations

sigma

a negative label attached to a person, behavior, or circumstance to distinguish that person or thing from the rest of society

affirmative action

a policy that requires institutions to favor unrepresented minorities when determining whether to recruit or promote them

ascribed status

a position someone occupies because of qualities such as family or personal appearance, that he or she cannot change

achieved status

a position that someone has earned through his or her own personal qualities

caste

a social and economic category within a caste system, into which a person is born, determining his or her economical status within society, and which cannot be changed

matriarchal

a society in which men hold the dominant power

patriarchal

a society in which men hold the dominant power

master status

a special status that more completely defines a person than the status he or she has

class system

a system of social stratification based on the principle that (in theory) people in this life can move from stratum to stratum on the strength of their own efforts or lack their of

sexual harassment

a type of discrimination or abuse of power consisting of verbal or physical abuse of a sexual nature

world system analysis

an analysis by Emmanuel Wallerstein that divides the world into nations from most to least wealthy; core, semi-periphery, and periphery nations; the core nations dominate the world economically and politically

capitalist

an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital good rather than by the government

status

an individual's position in a group or society defined by certain associated benefits and responsibilities

implicit bias

bias formed and harbored unconsciously through one's lifelong interaction with people, media, school, and even language

feminist

both a sociological perspective and political movement that recognizes inequalities so that society provides equal treatment of and opportunity for all genders

explicit bias

conscious known bias that a person harbors towards or against a particular group

Laws, whether to promote or discourage discrimination, often do this in the following ways:

define the group, define the behavior, define the mindset

the relationship between wealth and power

ealth allows a person to exert influence in certain areas of society. This is especially true politically; wealthy people can protect their business interests by donating to the campaigns of politicians who write legislation. They can donate to causes or organizations that they find worthy. Company ownership shapes company policy and, indirectly, society. People who own equity or stock in a company have a say in how the company is run. Companies, in turn, shape society. A great example of this is a company that adopts a socially or environmentally responsible policy despite the fact that it doesn't have to. The values of those who control companies shape how the companies operate. Wealth and power perpetuate one another. Just as people can use their wealth to exert power, so they can use their power to get more wealth. Therefore, it is quite easy for a wealthy person to use his or her wealth to boost his or her social standing. Steve Jobs, for example, became an iconoclast for innovation and design. Donald Trump has used wealth accrued from business ventures as a platform to break into politics. Wealth can be used to maintain the social classes and wealth gap. No wealthy person would say that they are deliberately keeping the poor in poverty. In fact, many wealthy Americans donate generously to charities, spearhead humanitarian efforts, and support fair business policies. However, Marx wasn't entirely wrong that capitalism and equality can be at odds with one another. The social and economic systems that perpetuate wealth can be manipulated so that the wealthy keep and grow their wealth. By concentrating the wealth at the top, there is less available for the poor. Wealth can be passed indirectly through private schooling and legacy college admissions that give the children of the wealthy an advantage.For example, taxation is a topic that is closely tied to the debate about wealth inequality. When examining U.S. tax brackets, the poorest pay the lowest percentage in overall taxes, the next income level pays a slightly higher percentage, and so on. If that trend were to continue, the top earners would pay the highest percentage of all income groups. In reality, the trend line levels off for top earners and dips back down. Looking at this trend over time, the ultra rich pay a significantly lower percentage in taxes than they used to in prior decades. So, while unequivocally the wealthiest Americans pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the poorest Americans, there is some debate over whether this group is using their power to pay less than they should.This topic is so controversial because economists debate the best strategies for taxation. Should the trend line for taxation percentage continue to the upper rungs of society? Should we institute a flat percentage rate for all tax brackets? Should business owners, who keep the economy afloat, be taxed heavily? Should the poor be taxed at all? This is an intensely complicated, even philosophical issue. How should we run our society?

instrumentality

emphasis on tasks, goals, and external affairs of the family unit regarding status, reputation, and relationship to other social institutions

expressiveness

emphasis on the internal affairs and emotional balance of the family unit

ethnic enclaves

geographic areas that have a high concentration of a particular ethnicity, prevailing culture norms, and in some cases distinct economic systems

caste system

hereditary and hierarchical structuring of social classed within traditional Hinduism

stratification

hierarchical arrangement of large social groups based on their control of resources

perspectives within feminism

in 2013, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, a book of career advice based on her own experiences of corporate successes and failures. Sandberg's book quickly became so popular among mainstream channels that it was lauded as a modern feminist manifesto by numerous media sources, like Forbes Magazine, TIME Magazine, and Oprah Winfrey. In the book, Sandberg offers advice to women who want to break through the glass ceiling, such as not shying away from compliments, taking risks on career opportunities ("lean in"), asserting themselves in meetings, and insisting on a fair work/life balance with their domestic partners. However, not all feminists agreed with Sandberg's premises. Author and activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by the pen name of bell hooks, who embraces a more inclusive branch of feminism called "intersectional* feminism," criticized Lean In and the mainstream praise surrounding it. According to hooks, Sandberg's book leaves out due consideration of other social factors that contribute to unequal treatment, such as race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and ability. Intersectional feminists like hooks take all of these factors into consideration because viewing gender inequality from a singular perspective of White, upper-class, heterosexual, able-bodied people would be ignoring the struggles of others in more disadvantaged situations. These others might never have the opportunity to "lean in" as she advocates. As such, bell hooks has dubbed people who uphold the tenets of Lean In "faux feminists." She laments that Sandberg did not read more feminist theory before publishing her best-selling book since feminist thinkers have been working for decades to understand and address the issues of intersecting social systems. "These thinkers insisted that everyone acknowledge and understand the myriad ways race, class, sexuality, and many other aspects of identity and difference made explicit that there was never and is no simple homogenous gendered identity that we could call 'women' struggling to be equal with men. In fact, the reality was and is that privileged White women often experience a greater sense of solidarity with men of their same class than with poor White women or women of color."

life expectancy

is the average age at which people die within a country. A high number indicates not only adequate food for most of the population, but also access to health care, which improves both life expectancy and quality of life.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

is the most common measure of the size of a country's economy. Gross Domestic Product is measured either by adding up what everyone in the country earned over a certain period of time or by adding up what everyone in the country spent over a certain period of time. Either way, greater GDP indicates more money for the people within the country and hence a more prosperous nation.

wealth

is the total assets owned by a country and its population less its debt. Wealth is clearly correlated with health outcomes. Improving sanitation, particularly building toilets, decreases infant mortality by a third.

heteronormativity

promoting heterosexuality or assuming that heterosexuality is the default sexuality.

gender

refers to socially constructed meanings, beliefs, and practices used to separate "feminine" and "masculine"

gender roles

societal norms and conventions that define what behaviors and characteristics should be aligned with each sex

social mobility

the ability for people to change their class positions in society

glass escalator

the act of men in female dominated occupations being promoted through the ranks at a faster rate than their female coworkers

STEM fields

the areas of study and profession in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

holisms

the assumption that any aspect of a culture is integrated with other aspects so that no dimension of culture can be understood in isolation

poverty line

the definition of financial circumstances below which an individual or family is considered "poor" usually determined by census statistics

social stratification

the hierarchical arrangement of large social groups based on their control of basic resource

stratification

the hierarchical arrangement of large social groups based on their of basic resource

urbanization

the increase of population in city areas, mainly due to mass migration, and the subsequent growth of urban areas to accommodate the increase of numbers

heterosexuality

the orientation in which one's primary sexual attraction is towards the opposite sex

slavery

the ownership of another human being

feminization of poverty

the phenomenon of their being far more woman living in poverty than men

socialized

the process by which people learn how to be members of their society

sanctions

the reward or punishment that people in a society give to other in response to their upholding or violating social norms; they are how social norms are enforced

poverty

the state of being poor or living without a certain amount of materials and possessions that would otherwise make life comfortable or luxurious

relative poverty

the state of living below in impoverished circumstances compared to the comfort and wealth of the rest of society

absolute poverty

the state of living without reliable access to basic resources needed for survival, such as nutritious food, clean water, and decent shelter

modernization theory

the theory that states that less developed countries will benefit from the transfer of skills and technology for more developed countries and become more prosperous as they modernize

systemic racism

the underlying societal attitude that derives any form of racism

intersectional

theory that holds that class, race, and gender are all intertwined, and interact to create different levels of disadvantage in society

bourgeoisie

those who own or control the means of production

basic needs

what every human needs in order to survive, be healthy, and be protected, such as nutritious food, clean water, and decent shelter

sexual assault in the military

A highly controversial topic in the United States today is how sexual assault is handled in the military. In 2014, the RAND National Defense Research Institute conducted a study to assess the rates of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military. The study surveyed approximately 560,000 U.S. active- and reserve-component service members and also gauged their opinions and beliefs about the incidents. The study reports that about one percent of active male service members and 4.9 percent of active female service members were sexually assaulted in the past year—an estimated total of 20,300 service members. Of the women who reported their experience of assault, 52 percent said they received retaliation after they made their report, whether it was of a professional or social nature. The laws that deal with these crimes are complicated and often frustrating for victims; even if perpetrators are found guilty in court, their commanding officers can overturn the ruling. Christine Nangle, a writer for the comedy sketch series Inside Amy Schumer, shines a light on this difficult issue in her sketch, "A Very Realistic Video Game," which uses a fictional video game to show a military sexual assault victim's attempt to get justice. The video, while made for comedic purposes, nonetheless has been praised for its accuracy of representing the difficulties that sexual assault victims face in the military. You can watch the sketch by clicking here; this video is optional.

what is scapegoat theory

According to the scapegoat theory*, prejudice arises from the frustration of those who are economically or socially disadvantaged, who then turn that aggression against others who are lower on the social hierarchy. As John Dollard and his colleagues noted in the 1930s, frustration leads to aggression—but when a person cannot act aggressively toward the economic or social institutions oppressing him, he will take out his frustration by blaming an innocent third party. Racial and ethnic minorities, because they have little power or social standing, are frequently used as scapegoats.

government and sexual harassments

All employees are protected against sexual harassment because of provisions of the Civil Rights Act. When workplace procedures for handling sexual harassment fail, state and federal agencies protect and enforce the rights of an individual. However, not all victims of sexual harassment will report their experience. This can be due to a variety of circumstances, but part of it is due to the way society views sexual harassment victims. There is a pervading myth that many sexual harassment victims make false reports intentionally to hurt the accused party, although research has shown that these happen rarely, around five percent of all rape claims. Due to this perception, victims find themselves facing an uphill battle with the burden of proof. But hard evidence is difficult to obtain, as such situations can quickly deteriorate into a "he said, she said" back-and-forth. As a result, about half of all sexual harassment claims cannot be proven, and no action is taken against the harasser. Victims also tend to face criticism and judgment from their coworkers. Even if their claims are believed, coworkers may demand to know why the victim didn't put a stop to the harassment. Even more injudiciously, victims may be perceived as "asking for it" from the way they dress and therefore blamed for their own harassment. Whether or not these critiques have any merit, they are extremely discouraging for any victim considering to speak up about their experience. Backlash can also come in the form of the victim losing their job if their organization does not side with them. There have been many high-profile cases of sexual harassment in the media, and in many of these cases, the phenomenon of victim blaming* can be seen, wherein mass media and social media are quick to judge the victim as either a liar or overly passive. The sexual harassment allegations against Bill Cosby and Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi are two such cases where this conversation is brought to the forefront. In both cases, women who spoke out publicly about their sexual harassment were either disbelieved and ignored or verbally abused by people coming to the defense of their beloved icon.

the difficulty of categorizing by ethnicity

Broad ethnic labels can be deceptive, as they can obscure the often significant differences between segments of a particular ethnic group. Within the Latinx community in the United States, for instance, Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans are united by a common language, but they tend to differ in many other respects, including political affiliation. Further, simple ethnic labels also overlook the fact that many Americans boast a mixed or multiethnic heritage: the golfer Tiger Woods, for example, is often referred to as an African American and Thai, but his background also includes forebears who were Chinese, Dutch, and Native American. Finally, like race, ethnicity is a social construct. This is supported by the fact ethnicity is (to a degree) fluid, contextual, and self-determined. A group's sense of ethnic identification can grow weaker or stronger depending on social circumstances. It is common for immigrant groups to seek to identify with the native-born population, at least to some extent, by adopting some of its cultural values or practices. This is commonly seen in the practice of linguistic assimilation*, in which an immigrant group gradually abandons its native tongue and adopts the language of its new country. But prejudice and discrimination can also result in stronger ethnic identification among an oppressed ethnic group, as members rally around their common culture in the face of shared hardship.

what is culture theory

Culture theory*, also known as cultural transmission, states that prejudice is a learned behavior. Because prejudice is part of the culture that surrounds us all, it is present in all members of society, to a greater or lesser degree. The "culture of prejudice," (which includes negative stereotypes incorporated into movies, television shows, advertising, and popular music), teaches us to view certain categories of people as inherently inferior and others as superior.

unequal pay for the same work

Discrimination in pay among employees with the same or very similar jobs at a company Example: The three male project managers at a company all earn more than the five female project managers, although there is no measurable difference in the quality of their work.

comparable worth

Discrimination in pay among jobs with similar skill sets and educational requirements based on whether the jobs are dominated by men or women. Example: In 2018, the average salary for the predominantly female "Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners" was $25,570, while the average salary was $26,110 for the predominantly male "Janitors and Building Cleaners".

key characteristic of implicit bias

Everyone has implicit biases, even people who swear themselves to be fair and impartial. Implicit and explicit (outright, stated) biases are similar but not the same. They function using different frames of mind—a person's conscious and unconscious mind. However, they can influence and even reinforce each other. Implicit biases tend to be directed towards out-groups, but it's still possible to hold biases against in-groups. Implicit biases affect a person's behavior! Implicit biases are malleable; therefore, the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned and replaced with new mental associations.

feminine

a socially constructed way of describing personality, traits, characteristics, and interests that are traditionally linked to female bodied people.

masculinity

a socially constructed way of describing personality, traits, characteristics, and interests that are traditionally linked to male bodied people.

race

For many Americans, race is never explicitly defined. We are forced to cobble together a peripheral understanding of race based on the information we absorb throughout our lives: in history class, from the media, and from our community. This is problematic because our sources are often flawed. False perceptions perpetuate an incomplete understanding of race, and tense relationships based on centuries of histories of racial injustice make it a hard topic to approach. Race* is a category, created socially, based on a person's physical traits such as skin color or facial features. Historically there has been some debate as to whether race is a biological category, a socio-cultural one, or both. The research has shown that there isn't enough difference in our genetic make-up for race to be a biological category. There's as much variation within a population as between populations. But, you might argue, there's a cultural component! People who look the same often come from the same spot on the globe and have a shared history and culture. Fair point. Culture and heritage play a significant role in a person's sense of identity. This speaks to a person's ethnicity*, which is a shared sense of cultural, ancestral, and national identity. Race and ethnicity are often confused, believed to be the same thing, or simply misunderstood. This confusion is largely because these two concepts are so closely intertwined; for example, a person's physical characteristics can help serve as a marker of their belonging to a particular race or ethnicity. As concrete categories, however, both race and ethnicity are fairly subjective; they can change depending on time, location, and context. The definition of "Black" has changed throughout history and still holds different meanings depending on one's current location. Further, the definition of someone's race or ethnicity is (often) in the eye of the beholder. It's possible to ascribe someone to a particular ethnic category to which they feel absolutely no belonging. It is also possible to make false assumptions based on physical characteristics. For example, imagine a woman who is commonly mistaken to be Latinx but who is actually of Middle Eastern origin. How does she identify? Perhaps she was born in Germany and identifies as German, with little sense of identification to her Middle-Eastern roots. However, while race and ethnicity are difficult to get ahold of, they are socially meaningful. Race and ethnic heritage can be linked to shared historical oppression and current experiences with discrimination and prejudice, as well as to more positive experiences, such as shared cuisine, speech patterns, values, and traditions. Because of this commonality, the ties that bind people within a race or ethnicity can be deeply meaningful. Race and ethnicity often comprise a large part of a person's identity. This is why, sociologically, the discussion of race and ethnicity is so important. These forces drive the way we view others and ourselves, the stereotypes we hold, the actions we take toward others, and as a result, the way in which we construct our societies. (Please note in this course the ethnic category "Latinx" refers to people who originate from Mexico or Central and South America. However, when referring to sources that use alternative terms, such as "Hispanic" or "Latin American," we adopt their naming practices for the sake of clarity. It is noteworthy that even the category of "Latinx" is problematic because it does not account for the multitude of other ethnic categories that groups actually use to identify and distinguish themselves.)

the functionalists approach

Generally speaking, the functionalist approach supports maintaining the gender binary and well-defined gender roles. Functionalist sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales endorsed having a husband and wife each take on separate roles in order to balance and stabilize the family, which would therefore balance and stabilize society as a whole. Although Parsons and Bales did not explicitly identify men as "providers" and women as "nurturers," they did divide the sexes in a similar way: men should demonstrate instrumentality*, or a focus on taking care of practical tasks and goals, while women should demonstrate expressiveness*, or a focus on the family's emotional dynamic. In other words, men concerned themselves with external affairs, like finances and social status, while women concerned themselves with internal affairs, like ensuring that there was harmony among all the family members. The definitions differ slightly from traditional gender definitions, but in many ways the end result is the same: the men take care of work and money, and the women take care of the home and children. This approach was developed in the 1950s, during which men and women were socialized* to believe that they belonged in these familiar gender roles. There has since been plenty of evidence of women who do not want to be confined to the home and men who would rather be more involved with their families, which means this theory is rather restrictive by modern-day standards. Furthermore, functionalists only focused on a traditional heterosexual marriage, but other types of family units (such as households run by same-sex couples or single parents) where such rigid gender roles do not apply are becoming more and more common.

pluralist society

a society in which race and ethnic groups have a distinctive lifestyles and cultural traditions, but have equal social standing and political power

the hostile work environment harassment

Hostile work environment sexual harassment results from other gender-based conduct, whether it is intended or not, that is unwelcome and has the effect of creating a work place environment that is hostile, offensive, intimidating, or humiliating. It is a more common form of sexual harassment than quid pro quo harassment. Determining which conduct is unlawful can involve more subjective judgments. In contrast to quid pro quo, which only a supervisor can impose, a hostile environment can result from the conduct of supervisors, coworkers, customers, vendors, or anyone else with whom the victimized employee interacts on the job. What are some of the behaviors that have contributed to a hostile environment? They include: unfulfilled threats involved in a sexual quid pro quo discussing sexual activities telling off-color jokes displaying sexually suggestive pictures or screen-savers on a computer using demeaning or inappropriate terms sabotaging the victim's work engaging in hostile physical conduct granting job favors to those who participate in consensual sexual activity using crude and offensive language

what is implicit bias

Implicit bias*, on the other hand, is a bias that is harbored unconsciously. These are associations, preferences, and prejudices formed in the back of a person's mind without him or her even knowing it... and they are impossible to avoid! The act of existing in the world, interacting with people, viewing media, attending school, and even learning language softly imprints subtle biases into the subconscious. Often these cannot be explicitly realized; they are observable as an aftermath of the person's actions. Implicit bias is measured using the IAT (Implicit Association Test), developed by Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues. The test's premise is a person is able to sort and match items more efficiently when the association to its pair is well-established in the mind. So, the test looks a) for the type of association made and b) how quickly the match can be made. While humans learn implicit bias toward or against all kinds of groups, organizations, and people, the IAT has produced some interesting findings with regard to race. To test biases toward or against race, participants in an IAT were asked to pair Black and White faces with positive or negative words. The study showed that there is a positive bias toward White, and a negative bias against Black, regardless of whether the participant is White or Black.

beyond high school

In 1960, men earned 65 percent of the college degrees awarded; as of 2016, women earned 57 percent of all college degrees awarded. Black women have traditionally gained more college diplomas than Black men; currently, Black women earn 66 percent of diplomas awarded to Black students. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, for the first time in 2017, the number of women enrolling in U.S. medical schools exceeded the number of men. In 2017, women represented 50.7 percent of medical school matriculants. Women were also 51.3 percent of law school matriculants in 2016. Women, however, are underrepresented in other important professional measures within the legal profession. For example, while more women go to law school, they are only 38 percent of the legal profession as a whole. Women are only 19 percent of equity partners in law firms and only 35 percent of the administration at law schools. The experience of women in the law and medical professions mirrors women's achievement as a whole: although they now attain greater educational achievement than men, they still suffer from a wage and prestige gap.

what is pluralism

In a pluralist society*, all racial and ethnic groups are distinct but have equal social standing. Minority groups do not have to give up their distinctive lifestyles and cultural traditions in order to avoid prejudice and discrimination, and all groups have a roughly equal share of resources and political power. In the United States, pluralism is a social value for many people who celebrate America as a "salad bowl" of many racial and ethnic groups, and it is pluralistic to the extent that all these groups have equal standing under the law. But the U.S. is not fully pluralistic: many Americans are not accepting of cultural differences, as seen in the continued efforts to make English the nation's official language. Additionally, some racial and ethnic groups do not have equal social standing or an equal share of resources and political power.

kindergarten through highschool

In terms of academic performance, girls generally have better grades than boys (even in math and science), and boys generally have higher test scores. Within standardized tests, boys score slightly higher on math and girls slightly higher in reading, but those differences emerge over time. Most studies find little or no difference in test scores in math and reading in early elementary school. From elementary school on, girls are more eager to learn and better behaved in class, social skills that some researchers believe may lead to their better grades. Girls take more difficult classes and more AP classes in high school than boys.

define the group

In the first place, laws must purport that distinct groups of people exist and often describe how they are distinct. As we've seen, there is no significant biological basis for the classification of groups of people by race, so the racial categories are often based on false or arbitrary criteria. Virginia was one of the first colonies to codify slavery into law. In 1662, it passed a law clarifying that children of White masters and Black slaves would be slaves, who "serve according to the condition of the mother." This law was written specifically to be a convenient technicality for White masters impregnating their Black slaves. It was a way to maintain more slaves but otherwise an arbitrary determinant of legal status based on heritage. Technically, those children were half-White. Over the generations, slaves could have an almost entirely European genetic heritage and still be slaves. This law determined that Black heritage, and Blackness, was intrinsically tied to slavery. It legally placed Black people in an inferior status to White people and laid the foundation for the perpetuation of slavery itself after the abolition of the slave trade. This way of considering race eventually, in the twentieth century, led to the "one drop" rule (a drop of "Black" blood makes the person Black). To illustrate exactly how arbitrary this was, often court cases were used to establish a Black ancestor in order to determine a person's race. This came to the surprise of a few people who believed themselves White but did not realize that they were legally Black because a drop of Black ancestry existed in the family tree!

policies related to incarceration

Many policies are covertly aimed at minorities or are used to disproportionately target minorities. Policies like "stop and frisk" can be used to target minorities. Higher percentages of minorities in places like New York and Los Angeles have been stopped and searched. Black people are disproportionately targeted for drug possession, despite the fact that both populations use drugs at comparable rates. When being sentenced, minorities are given longer sentences for the same crimes as White people, and more children are charged as adults. Higher rates of incarceration, due to the laws that allow it, have a profound effect on the social and financial well-being of the populations being targeted. Incarceration can be financially taxing for the family that is left behind and for the incarcerated person's ability to find adequate employment or housing after release.

race and the law

Most people know that in the 1700s and 1800s, Africans were forcibly brought to the United States to serve as slaves, most prominently in the South. At the time, there was a common cultural practice called indentured servitude, in which someone would volunteer to be a servant for a period of time (without pay) for some benefit, such as passage to Colonial America. People of both European and African descent were indentured servants, though some Africans were slaves. Since both indentured servants and slaves were considered personal "property," individual colonies (later states) regulated their treatment. Gradually, over time, the Colonial law made a distinction between European indentured servants and Negro (Black) slaves, who experienced "servitude for natural life." What is difficult but important to recognize is that these laws did not just create distinctions on the basis of a pre-existing race or ethnicity, rather they themselves created and perpetuated social concepts of race.

W.E.B. DuBois

One of the first sociologists to theorize race was W.E.B. DuBois, who worked on race relations in the early twentieth century. He argued that racial oppression gave Black people a kind of double consciousness*, the ability to see more deeply into White mainstream society because they were pushed outside of it. His most famous work The Souls of Black Folk is a work of history, sociological theory, and participant ethnography. In the introduction, DuBois lays out racism as the most significant problem for the upcoming century—the book was published in 1903. In the book itself, DuBois attempts to give White people the ability to see life from the perspective of Black folks. He does this both by explaining how racial injustice created the problems Blacks were accused of bringing on themselves but also through telling the life-stories of Black individuals, so White people could have a better sense of what it felt like to experience persistent systematic racism and oppression.

conclusion

Overall, society's preference for men in higher-ranking, higher-paid positions shows its bias toward males as leaders and females as supporters. However, there has been some progress in equalizing the genders in the workplace in the past 50 years. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was established to eliminate the gender wage gap by requiring employers to give equal amounts of pay to female and male workers in the same job. Since the Equal Pay Act was established, the difference in annual earnings between men and women has certainly narrowed; in 1970, women earned about 62 percent of men's earnings, but by 2015 that figure was 82.5 percent. There continues to be political debate around what can be done to treat the genders fairly in all fields.

the quid pro quo harassment

Quid pro quo cases are generally based on a specific incident or a limited number of incidents. Hostile work environment situations are based upon multiple instances of offensive behavior. Quid pro quo harassment involves employment actions (firing, demotion, promotion, or denial of promotion). This kind of unlawful sexual harassment can be committed only by those who can make, or effectively influence, employment actions. Quid pro quo often involves a supervisor threatening to fire a subordinate unless he or she provides sex favors ("put out or get out") and then firing the subordinate for refusing. It is against the law whether a subordinate 1) refuses and is fired or penalized or 2) grants the sexual favors and avoids the threatened employment action. Who is considered a supervisor? The EEOC defines as a supervisor anyone who has the authority to make or recommend decisions affecting the employee or to direct the employee's daily activities.

race and ethnicity

Race and ethnicity play a large role in dictating our societal structure, interactions, and even our personal identities. Many people think that race and ethnicity are biological categories. However, both are social constructs. There is no single, concrete way to biologically define them. Evidence of this is the fact that racial categories change from culture to culture, from continent to continent, and over time. However, we have spent centuries integrating these concepts into the way our societies function and our personal identities. In this sense, race and ethnicity are as real as time. For example, slavery was legal in the United States for many years. This legally affected Black people's access to resources, ability to own property, to move freely about the country, and to maintain their families together. Even after the abolition of slavery, laws affected equal access to wealth and resources. Currently it is illegal to discriminate against race or ethnicity; however, these laws still must define race and ethnicity in order to prevent discrimination against it. And, discrimination still occurs. Prejudice (negative attitudes against certain groups) mean that the existing laws can be bent or used to perpetuate racism. While the United States is still battling these negative attitudes, we have made significant strides since slavery.

intro

Race, and the attitudes surrounding race, have defined some of the most critical moments in world history. Yet, the concept of race is not often examined on the most fundamental level. What is it? Is it a person's physical characteristics? Is it his or her ancestors' origins? Is it his or her culture? Is it how he or she identifies? What criteria must a person meet to be considered of a certain race, and who decides whether they meet that criteria? Most importantly, why and how does a person's race matter? This lesson will provide some terms and history to help you make sense of race in the United States.

define the behavior

Racial laws distinguish between groups not only by listing the qualitative differences but also by highlighting how each group should act and be treated. American slaves could not vote, could not be educated, and could not move freely about the land of their own volition. They had no right to maintain their marriages or protect their children. In 1669, a Virginia law stated that since slaves' term of service could not be extended (they were already serving for life), the only way for White masters to discipline them was through corporal punishment. White masters who killed their slaves should not be charged with a felony since they presumably had no intention of killing their own property, and murder cannot happen without "prepensed malice" (Virtual Jamestown, n.d.). Under this law, slaves were killed, but the occurrences were not legally classified as murder. The laws across the Colonies were not uniform. Other Colonial laws made willful killing or mistreatment of a slave a crime, and some White men were hung for having killed slaves. Even after the abolition of slavery, new laws surrounding race were enacted. The enactment of so-called Jim Crow laws throughout the South enforced rigid segregation of Black and White, in a classic example of institutional discrimination.

individual racism

Racism has many forms. Most often we think of racism as an individual's negative attitude, harbored against a particular race or ethnicity. However, racism can be positive, negative, overt, or covert. It can exist within an individual, or it can be expressed by the policies or actions of an entire societal system. Here we will focus on racism harbored by individuals. Later, we will discuss institutional and systemic racism.

what is segregation

Segregation* is defined as the physical and social separation of different racial or ethnic groups. Some segregation is self-imposed, such as the Amish in America, some are part of a larger social organization within a society, such as the distance between different castes in India, and some are imposed by the dominant culture, such as Jim Crow laws in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s began the dismantling of the legal structure of American segregation, but de facto segregation that is, segregation in actual fact, remains a reality in many areas. In 1989, Massey and Denton coined the term hypersegregation to describe a pattern of residential segregation in which minority residents are highly concentrated in a small, compact area and have little contact with people outside their neighborhood. Newer research by Massey and Tannen shows that the number of hypersegregated neighborhoods has declined by about half since 1970, but that approximately a third of Black residents living in cities still resided in hypersegretated areas in 2010

the STEM gender gap

Sociologists have long studied why, when women receive the majority of college degrees, they remain underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 36 percent of bachelor's degrees in STEM fields were awarded to women. This underrepresentation is particularly important since girls' test scores would predict a much narrower gender gap in these professions, which tend to pay better-than-average salaries. Gender roles and stereotypes obviously have an enormous influence on how girls think of themselves and what careers they consider pursuing as they grow up. But sociologists Joscha Legewie and Thomas DiPrete have argued that the high school environment can have an impact on later college plans. Specifically, they identify two factors that can increase girls' participation in STEM fields. First, high schools that offer more advanced math and science courses narrow the gender gap in later STEM pursuits. Legewie and DiPrete write, "A strong high school curriculum in math and science provides more opportunities for concrete experiences of interest and competence and thus provides a partial antidote to gender stereotyping and the discouragement of girls' interest in STEM fields.". In other words, in schools with hard math and science courses, girls learn first-hand that they can succeed in these subjects, dispelling stereotypes that informed their previous self-concept. The second factor Legewie and DiPrete identified as impacting girls' decisions to pursue STEM fields in college was the gender segregation of extracurricular activities. In schools with more gender-segregated extracurricular activities, gender becomes more salient. Students are more likely to think about their genders and be influenced by gender stereotypes. In schools where extracurricular activities are less segregated by gender, girls pursue STEM fields in college to a greater extent

Prejudice

Stereotypes form the basis for prejudice*, which is a negative attitude toward an entire category of people—often, but not limited to, ethnic or racial minorities. Like stereotypes, prejudice ascribes the same characteristics to all members of a group. One of the most virulent forms of prejudice is racism, which is the set of attitudes and practices used to justify treating one race as inherently superior or inferior to another. Conflict Perspective on Prejudice The conflict theory of prejudice* assumes that class conflict is inevitable in society and that those in the dominant class will use prejudice as a means to oppress those in the economically-deprived lower classes. Promoting prejudice against one ethnic group say, Mexican immigrants working as itinerant farm laborers, benefits the dominant class because it provides a rationale for paying those workers less. Promoting ethnic prejudices among members of the laboring classes also benefits the dominant class by dividing the lower classes and making it harder for them to unite against their oppressors. Lower class workers are more likely to feel prejudice toward minorities during difficult economic times when competition for jobs and other economic benefits becomes more intense. Sociologists have advanced several other theories to explain the origin and workings of prejudice:

what is stereotypes

Stereotypes play an interesting role in both the creation and reinforcement of racial categories. A stereotype* is a generalization about an entire category of people; it is generally presumed to describe a "typical" member of that category. Stereotypes can apply to many different categories, including gender and social class. Stereotypes that are based on race or ethnicity are known as racial-ethnic stereotypes*. Interestingly, stereotypes can help form racial categories. Saperstein et al. performed an analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a study that interviews individuals periodically throughout the course of their lives. The analysis showed that race is not perceived to be the same over time. Over several years of interviews, both the interviewer's perception of the subject's race and the subject's self-perception of his or her own race were liable to change. Most interestingly, the interviewer was more likely to assess the subject as African American if he or she experienced life events that played into the negative racial stereotype of African Americans, like arrest or imprisonment During an interview with the study's author on Morning Edition, NPR correspondent Shankar Vedantam noted, "...what this research suggests is that it's not just our perceptions of race that drive our stereotypes, but our stereotypes that drive our perceptions of race" While most stereotypes are negative, some can be positive, such as the belief that members of a certain ethnic or racial group are better students or better athletes than members of other groups. Whether they are positive or negative, all stereotypes are inherently inaccurate because they ascribe the same characteristic to all members of a particular group. Stereotypes are based on the salience principle*—the idea that we categorize other people on the basis of what is most noticeable (i.e., most salient) about them. Gender is a salient characteristic because it is one of the first things we will notice about a person. Similarly, age, skin color, race, and certain other physical characteristics are salient characteristics. In other cultures, such as the Middle East, religion may also be a highly salient characteristic. For example, Sikh people are often identifiable by their cultural head wraps, known as turbans. (It should be noted that Sikh people may also consider themselves, or be considered in some countries, as an ethnicity as well as a religion.)

housing and geography

Systemic and institutional racism pervades the real estate industry as well. Minorities are told about fewer available homes, denied appointments to see homes, and shown fewer units than equally qualified White candidates. This means that their housing search is longer, more expensive, and that they have fewer available options to choose from. Mortgages are routinely lent to minorities at higher prices (that is with significantly higher interest rates). This means that they must pay more money to own the same homes as White people. As a result of these laws and historic segregation, minorities are often concentrated in poorer, urban areas. These areas do not see the same investment or availability of services as do predominantly White areas.

what is genocide

The most extreme pattern of group interaction is genocide*—the systematic killing of one group of people by another. History holds many examples of genocide, including the large-scale killing of indigenous people in the Americas by European explorers and settlers. The twentieth century saw several instances, including the killing of one million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I; the Holocaust, which saw six million Jews along with a quarter-million Roma (Gypsies) killed by the Nazis; the Holomodor, or "Hunger-Extermination," engineered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, which resulted in up to 7.5 million deaths in the Ukraine in the 1930s; and the murder of up to two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in the late 1970s. More recently, "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans and Darfur and tribal genocide in Rwanda have claimed up to two million more lives.

the conflict approach

Unlike the functionalist approach, the conflict approach perceives society's enforced differences between the sexes as inequality. The conflict approach recognizes that, historically, men have retained dominant positions over women, and that there are far more patriarchal* societies than matriarchal* societies in the world. Men may have initially had this power because their physical size and strength allowed them to perform more dominant roles than women, who were more confined by reproductive and childrearing duties. However, as humans have become part of industrialized societies, this sexual division is no longer necessary for the species' survival. As such, conflict theorists believe that any inequality based on these sex differences is inhibiting for women. For this reason, women are often viewed as a minority group—although they make up half of the population. Conflict theorists perceive differences in the sexes not as two halves of a whole that maintain harmony and balance, but as an unequal social structure in which men reap more rewards for their contributions to society than women do. For instance, since men are expected to be concerned with affairs outside of the home, they are more likely to rise to positions of authority in private businesses, politics, and so on. For example, men are vastly overrepresented in positions of political leadership. In the United States Congress, in 2019, women held the highest number of seats they had ever had: 127 members were female out of 535 representatives.

gender and education

We have already examined how gender shapes a society's expectations from the moment a woman announces her pregnancy. Such gender divisions continue throughout an individual's life; you are always treated a certain way based on your gender, whether it is obvious or not. The gender socialization* that begins in a child's home shifts once that child enters school. A child's apparent gender tends to affect how that child is treated by both teachers and peers. Sometimes this treatment is plain and visible, but sometimes it may also have more subtle long-lasting effects on the child's self-understanding. Research has shown persistent gender differences in education, although the causes and consequences of those differences are debated. As much as boys and girls learn about society's gender differences at home and from the media, some of the most forceful socialization occurs in schools, where they spend most of their time in their most formative years. Schools' approach to gender has both overt and covert impacts on an individual's formation of self. As certain socialized ideas of gender are passed along in schools, children internalize what the world expects of them and are set on paths that they might not have naturally turned to.

institutional and systemic racism

While it is no longer legal to overtly discriminate against non-White people, existing laws can be bent to cater to prejudice. Presently in the United States, there exists a mix of institutional racism and systemic racism. Institutional racism* is racism embedded into institutions: policies, laws, and practices that disproportionately favor or disadvantage one race over another. Systemic racism* is the underlying societal attitude that drives any form of racism. If the values of society favor one race over another, then institutional racism is likely to occur. Systemic racism can be observed frequently in the undertones of the national narrative; in fact, the media was accused of setting a double standard during its coverage of several riots that occurred in 2013. Routinely, Black violence is examined as being a problem indicative of that race's culture, while language examining White violence uses an entirely different lens. White people rioting after sporting events, or in one extreme case during a Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire, were called "rowdy partiers."

ethnicity

While race is based on the perception of physical or biological characteristics, ethnicity speaks to culture. Ethnicity* is a shared sense of cultural, ancestral, and national identity. People identify themselves, or others, with a particular ethnic group based on common heritage, language, religion, or traditions. Ethnicity is conceptually different from race, which is based on the perception of physical or biological characteristics. However, they are closely intertwined because many regions have prevailing physical characteristics, because many people conflate ethnicity and race, and because both are integrated into an individual's fluid and nuanced sense of identity.

prejudice

an evaluation and unjustifiable attitude toward a group and its members

discriminations

an intentional or unintentional act which adversely affects a person or group's opportunity because of race, color, religion, sex, disability, marital status, national origin, age, or other factors

sexual harassments

at work is defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when: submitting to the conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment, or an employee's submission to, or rejection of, the conduct or request is used as a basis for employment decisions, or the conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an employee's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment. Sociologists see sexual harassment as stemming from a conception of heterosexual masculinity in which it is natural and appropriate for men to "dominate" women. One recent study found that sexual harassment might be the harasser's attempt to counteract female power. Most commonly, sexual harassment is directed at females by males, but 16.3 percent of the sexual harassment charges received by the EEOC in the fiscal year 2011 were filed by male. Any adult female may experience sexual harassment, but men most often experience it when they do not conform to the stereotypes of masculinity.

what is assimilation

refers to the process by which ethnic groups gradually give up their distinctive culture and traditions and adopt the patterns of the dominant culture. Assimilation is valued by those who conceive of America as a "melting pot" of many different races and ethnicities. Many immigrants also see assimilation as a strategy for avoiding discrimination by the dominant social group and achieving upward social mobility. Assimilation is generally a voluntary process, but it is sometimes mandated by the dominant group. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, many Native American children were sent to boarding schools where they were given English names, forced to speak English, and required to practice Christianity. It is important to note that assimilation refers to changes in ethnicity but not race. The children of a Korean immigrant might not speak Korean or eat Korean food, but they will still remain "Asian" in the eyes of American society.

gender wage gap

the designation of a given occupation as either "female" or "male" typically based on societal perception of gender roles

gender wage gap

the difference between the average earnings by men and the average earnings by women

social stratification

the hierarchical arrangements of large social groups based on their control of basic resources

segregation

the physical and social separations of different racial or ethnic groups

assimilation

the process by which ethnic groups gradually give up their culture and transition to adopt the patterns of the dominant culture

Assimilation

the process by which ethnic groups gradually give up their distinctive cultures and tradition to adopt the patterns of the dominant culture

victim blaming

the rational (often unfounded) the victim of abuse or assault are partially or entirely at fault for their suffering

salience principle

the sociological principle that states that we categorize other people on the basis of what is most noticeable (most salient) about them

Salience Principle

the sociological principle that states that we categorize other people on the basis of what is most noticeable (salient) about them

genocide

the systematic killing of one group of people by another

scapegoat theory

the theory that prejudice arises from the frustration of those who economically or socially disadvantaged, who then turn that aggression against others who are lower on the society hierarchy

scientific racism

the use of scientific theories, techniques, or research to rationalize racism, categorization, or people and racial superiority

conflict theory of prejudice

theory that assumes that class conflict is inevitable in society and that those in the dominant class will use prejudice as a means to oppress those in the economically deprived lower class

intersectionality

theory that holds that class race and gender are all intertwined and interact to create different levels of disadvantage in society

cultural theory

theory that states that prejudice is a learned behavior; because prejudice is a part of the culture that surrounds us all, it is present in all members of society to a greater or lesser degree

quid pro quo harassment

when a person in authority, usually a supervisor, demands sexual favors of a subordinate as a condition of getting or keeping a job benefit