Inequalities

Tag: gender

  • How did Kools become Black, and Marlboros White?

    In 1971, a team of ethnographic researchers conducted focus groups with 24 African American young men in Chicago to explore the men’s sense of identity as well as their hopes and frustrations. The authors concluded that although the African American men strived for social and economic success, they were constantly turned away by racism and […]

  • Why erotic capital still matters

    [This is the second half of a piece Saving Erotic Capital From Itself that I began last week] “Good looks don’t matter” “Nonsense, that’s just something ugly people tell their children” So says The Simpsons, as ever capturing the way of the world (h/tWill Self). Given the problems I identified in the first part of the […]

  • Saving ‘erotic capital’ from itself

    It’s not hard to guess why it got so many column inches.  The sociological concept of ‘erotic capital’?  A book by an academic that calls itself ‘Honey Money’, a title adapted from a saying of Jakarta prostitutes?  An evidence-based claim that prostitution and surrogacy should be completely legalised?  And an argument that it is ‘patriarchy’ […]

  • Unequal, competitive, and macho?

    As international data gets more readily available, we see ever-more papers that look at the relationship of inequality with something new. Still, I was slightly taken aback to see a paper – in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), no less – that related inequality to preferences among women for masculinized faces.

  • Alcohol and the irrelevance of inequality

    Almost every day, we’re fed another piece of inequality in the news – another example of the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, another case where better-off parents have secured the successes of their children over the less well-off. Coming home from a fabulous BSA event on inequality last week, I felt flooded with […]

  • Place, Race, Gender, and Wellbeing

    In Ben’s interesting post from Thursday he mentions a project underway by some of his LSE colleagues to apply Amartya Sen’s capabilities framework to inequality in Britain. Here in the United States the Social Science Research Council has undertaken the “American Human Development Project,” adopting the United Nation’s Human Development Index (which is itself inspired […]

  • Bringing Home the Bacon, and Cooking it Too

    In the groundbreaking 1989 book “the Second Shift,” Arlie Hochschild makes the argument that the women’s movement helped to break down gender discrimination in the workplace, but did very little to address inequality in household domestic labor. The working women portrayed in her book are chronically burning the candle on both ends — working a […]

  • Male ego as a cause of the gender pay gap

    It’s the sort of research finding that seems perfectly designed for one of those free newspapers you can pick up in big cities: ‘women shy away from competitive workplaces’.  And it’s partly true – a great new real-life experiment does show large differences in how men and women treat competition at work, and this may […]

  • The future is female

    Usually articles about how ‘the future is female’ are the stuff of weekend newspaper supplements and free newspapers – by which I mean they’re quite entertaining, but they’re basically junk. But I just read this article in The Atlantic and I thought it was worth sharing – it made me think about the changing nature […]