by Lisa Wade

The average man thinks he’s smarter than the average woman. And women generally agree.

It starts early. At the age of five, most girls and boys think that their own sex is the smartest, a finding consistent with the idea that people tend to think more highly of people like themselves. Around age six, though, right when gender stereotypes tend to take hold among children, girls start reporting that they think boys are smarter, while boys continue to favor themselves and their male peers.

They may have learned this from their parents. Both mothers and fathers tend to think that their sons are smarter than their daughters. They’re more likely to ask Google if their son is a “genius” (though also whether they’re “stupid”). Regarding their daughters, they’re more likely to inquire about attractiveness.

Read More

by Noelle Chesley

Have you ever noticed what is not “modern” about ABC’s celebrated sitcom Modern Family? Spoiler alert: all of the households in this TV world are headed by a breadwinner father. We get to see a gay couple raising a daughter and a second inter-ethnic marriage with children, but we can’t seem to get rid of the idea that men, and especially fathers, work to support their families while at-home parents (often mothers) do the bulk of caregiving and domestic tasks.

Breadwinning is both an economic arrangement supported through policy (think maternal leave policies) and a gendered social arrangement that pushes men into primary employment and women into primary caregiving roles. While a number of key trends undermine support for breadwinner employment—stagnant wages, increased job instability, and women’s growing educational attainment among them—2013 research by Karen Kramer and her colleagues documents that about 30% of U.S. married couple families with children maintain male-breadwinner households, and this number has held steady for the past two decades.

Social commentators have also noted growing numbers of female breadwinners. In 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that 40% of mothers were breadwinners, up from just 3.5% in 1960.

In a time when work and family arrangements are increasingly diverse, what can the experiences of contemporary breadwinner workers tell us more generally about work, and life outside it, today?

Read More

by Allison J. Pugh

Income inequality is a major focus in today’s national agenda.  From the White House to the campaign trail to the halls of Davos, political and economic elites are joining a public conversation about the vast disparities between the top and bottom of the economic ladder.

But these conversations about income inequality lack one crucial focus:  job insecurity.

For lower income workers, studies indicate that knowing you’ll have a job next week is as important as the size of the paycheck that’s coming.  My own research shows that the impact of job insecurity extends beyond the individual worker or the workplace, and is felt at home, by spouses, parents, children and others.  The withdrawal of employer commitment raises the salience of commitment in all aspects of life.

Read More

by Kristen Myers

Fox News in Chicago recently invited me to do a Father’s Day segment during the noon news hour explaining how “Dads today are better than ever!” Aiming for a feel-good piece celebrating dads, they prompted me to talk about how “real men” cuddle with their children. On the one hand, I cringed at the use of the term, “real men.” What is a “real man?” Although sociologists have shown that there is no one right way to be a man, the notion of “real” manhood remains salient in the popular imagination. The expression, “real men do x,” is typically used to call men out, to shame those who don’t do x into “manning up.” The popularity of language like “real men man up” reminds us that the rules we’ve made for men haven’t actually relaxed all that much, even though some dads are able to interact with their children in ways that their own dads never could have.

On the other hand, Fox News was using the expression “real men cuddle” ironically, to encourage traditional men to do something non-traditional, like show emotion. This gave me an opportunity to focus on ways that men can do things differently than they have in the past, how they’re “undoing gender,” as Francine Deutsch would say. More men today are able to physically and emotionally bond with their children without risking a blow to their manhood. The Pew Research Center has documented trends in the work world and the household that are permitting dads to be more involved than ever in childrearing and housework.The time is ripe for men, no matter how traditional, to take advantage of these shifts. Sometimes these men must be pushed out of their comfort zones in order to take the first steps.

Read More

by Kevin T. Leicht

Sociology is at risk of losing what credibility it has because we have latched onto ways of studying inequality that are not suited to new economic arrangements.

What are those ways? They started as truths that now represent half-truths or worse – we just repeat them and think we’re doing something to produce insights into how inequality is produced and maintained.

We can’t end inequality by closing group gaps

Let’s start with the most basic of these habits and beliefs – The belief that most social inequality is tied to race and gender. Empirically this is not true and it hasn’t been for at least thirty years.

There is far more social inequality within demographic groups than there is between them.

There is overwhelming evidence to support this claim. The ratio of mean household income in the top 5 percent to the mean household income in the bottom 20 percent within racial groups has grown from 4 to1 to 11 to 1 from 1970 to 2014. Gini ratios – a common measure of income inequality – have increased uniformly for all racial/ethnic groups and converged. From 1970 to 2014 gender and racial gaps in income have been closing. Gender gaps have closed in part because men’s real earnings have fallen, not because women’s earnings have risen.

We can’t educate our way out of the inequality

But this isn’t the only bad habit we’ve fallen for. We’ve also been sucked into the myth that extreme inequality is mostly about educational opportunities.

Read More