Abstract
Sociology and empathy, why women aren’t running the world (yet), divorce in decline, and should you or shouldn’t you read the comment section? New research from the journals.
Keywords
Why Don’t Women Run the World?
Who runs the world? Girls? Not quite. Women constitute only 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 24 percent of Congress, and only 30 percent of University presidents. This has led to questions about inherent biological gender differences that lead more men into these roles. In Social Psychology Quarterly, Susan R. Fisk and Jon Overton debunk that myth, finding that barriers to success in leadership roles are suppressing women’s ambitions to pursue leadership positions. Specifically, they look at the difference in penalties for men and women when leadership failures occur and how that impacts women’s aspirations.
Women on a mission
Martijn Schornagel, Flickr CC
The authors argue that gender discrimination and harsher penalties for leadership failure are to blame for male domination in executive roles. Research finds that women are much more likely to face harsh penalties, such as reputational loss for mistakes when they are in leadership positions. Fisk and Overton test the power of these penalties by conducting survey experiments. They presented participants with different scenarios of leadership failure to uncover attitudes about gendered penalties. Their aim was to discover if women and men were aware of any gender differences in penalties and how that influenced ambition.
They found that men and women both believe that women face greater penalties for failure in leadership than men. Further, they found that when the cost of leadership failure was higher for women, their ambition for those roles significantly decreased. Rather than a difference in biological traits, this suggests that discrimination is a key factor in women’s decision-making process. The authors argue that discrimination against women leaders is not only harmful to them, but it also disempowers them to pursue leadership positions in the first place.
Does Sociology Breed Empathy?
While developing students’ empathy isn’t a universal goal among sociology faculty, many instructors feel it is an important foundation for helping students develop their sociological imagination. Without empathy, it may be harder for students to understand the structural factors that shape the lives of people different from themselves. A few studies have examined empathy in the classroom, but measures and findings are inconsistent and only analyze individual, short-term class exercises.
In their article in Teaching Sociology, Ashley Rockwell, Chris Vidmar, Penny Harvey, and Leanna Greenwood investigate whether sociology courses promote empathy development among 619 undergraduate students over the course of an entire semester. They collected and analyzed data on student characteristics and perceptions of instructors, instructor interviews and teaching philosophies, and used a scale that measured student empathy at the beginning and end of the semester. They expected that completing an introduction to sociology course would increase empathy among undergraduates generally, and that different teaching styles could differentially impact this development.
The authors found that a variety of factors influenced changes in levels of empathy among participants, including participant characteristics, instructor characteristics, and classes that have been taken. Students who identified as conservative were significantly less likely to develop increased empathy. However, students who cared more about what the instructor thought of them or were in majors receptive to sociological ideas were more likely to experience greater positive empathy change.
Empathy development was negatively affected by a greater focus on writing in instructors’ teaching methods. Most importantly, the findings strongly suggest that taking introductory courses in sociology, compared to courses in other disciplines, results in greater increases in empathy. Having taken previous courses in sociology also compounded this empathy development. These findings suggest that exposure to basic sociological ideas stimulates empathy development, largely regardless of instructor characteristics or goals, to produce such empathy.
Do Universities Want Black Students?
Increasingly, colleges and universities are looking to diversify the racial makeup of their students. However, previous studies reveal the limits of these efforts. Intraracial discrimination is the idea that white gatekeepers sort Black students based on a clear preference for Black people with less racial consciousness. In a groundbreaking study, Ted Thornhill tests this theory with regard to college admissions counselors at predominantly white colleges and universities.
A 2014 Black Lives Matter march down I-35 in Minneapolis, MN
Fibonacci Blue, Flickr CC
In Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Thornhill analyzed the email responses of 517 White college admissions counselors to “fake” prospective Black students. To do so, he created four types of emails. Thornhill also created and tested a list of “racialized” Black names for the made-up Black students. Lastly, the author compiled a separate list of admissions counselors to send emails to. Each email was personalized, explained where the student had learned about the college or university, talked about extracurricular involvement, and a question about if the student would be a good fit (based on their interests). The first two emails indicated no race consciousness from the students. The made-up students indicated no involvement or interest in race or racism; these included nondescript and environmental sustainability emails. The other two emails indicated a clear race consciousness. These include emails of racial unity and antiracist interests and involvement. Each email depicted varying degrees (none to high) of race-based consciousness, interests, and involvement.
The White counselors responded to non-race conscious Black students’ emails 65 percent of the time. Conversely, Black students with racial consciousness (racial unity and antiracist narratives) had a response rate of only 55 percent. Black students that showed clear antiracist views had the lowest response rate among the four student types. The other findings showed that men counselors were 25 percent less likely than women counselors to respond to students guided by anti-racism work. In terms of the students, Black female students from all email types were more likely to receive responses from counselors. The largest difference the author finds is that there was a 37.5 percentage point advantage in the response rate for Black female students interested in environmental sustainability over those who shared anti-racist interests by White male counselors. These findings suggest that while many colleges/universities do want Black students, they only want a certain type of Black student.
Gaslighting Doesn’t Mean Crazy
Gaslighting is a form of intimate abuse in which one person manipulates the other into questioning their own sanity. Despite the growing presence of gaslighting in our everyday language, it has remained understudied by sociologists. In the American Sociological Review, Paige L. Sweet argues that gaslighting is rooted in social inequalities, especially gender, sexuality, and race. Its attachment to social characteristics makes gaslighting a more harmful tactic.
Using interviews with 43 women recruited from domestic violence support groups, Sweet builds a theory of how gendered stereotypes and structural inequalities are mobilized in gaslighting strategies. Abusers use macro-level inequalities in micro-level abuse; people with less structural power do not have the means to gaslight a partner. Women are most commonly the victims of gaslighting, while men are often the perpetrators because of their structural positioning. Perpetrators use the association between femininity and irrationality to make women seem unreliable and “crazy.” However, any person can be feminized and made to seem irrational, therefore gaslighting can occur in both same-sex and non-romantic pairings.
An argument in a mall in Atlanta, Georgia
Tom Driggers, Flickr CC
The experience of gaslighting also differs across institutional vulnerabilities because rationality is also classed and racialized. For example, immigration status may be mobilized against undocumented women, while for Black women, gaslighting is more likely to occur in the context of police and court systems. Abusers may undermine the sanity of their partners during interactions with the police and during divorce or child custody hearings, institutions in which Black women are uniquely vulnerable. Stigmatized sexualities may also be mobilized against victims. One interviewee reported that her abuser used her bisexuality to make her seem hypersexualized and unfit to parent. When stereotypes about sexuality intersect with racial stereotypes, they become even more powerful in gaslighting the victim.
While the focus of analysis here was domestic violence in heterosexual partnerships, a sociological theory of gaslighting can be expanded to other unequal intimate relationships. In any relationship where inequality exists, vulnerabilities can be mobilized to harm the less powerful person.
Is Divorce in Decline?
Jeremy Brooks, Flickr CC
In marriage, certain issues (e.g., money, infidelity, lack of communication) may lead to divorce. According to Philip Cohen’s recent article in the journal Socius, certain relationship protective factors, however, may create a future where divorce becomes a rare occurrence. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) between 2008 and 2017, Cohen analyzes the odds of divorce among women who are newly married. Cohen’s analysis shows that the divorce rate dropped by ten points over this period, even when taking into account age, years of marriage, marriage order, place of birth, education, race, and ethnicity.
Cohen’s results reveal that the odds of divorce among women varies slightly depending on their age and whether they were newly married. On one hand, the risk of divorce has lowered for younger women. On the other hand, women 45 and older have a higher probability of encountering divorce compared to women their age in previous years. These older women can hold on to hope in knowing that divorce rates going forward are unlikely to increase. For the younger women, their likelihood of divorce will only continue to lower as they age, a result of the historical patterning that follows marital duration.
For those newly married, Cohen finds that their odds of divorce are lowered due to higher education, waiting longer for marriage, and having never been married before. So what does this all mean for our own relationships? Similar to the reading of tea leaves, not much. It does, however, tell us a great deal of what to expect at the societal level going forward.
Don’t Read the Comments?
Veganism is the practice of abstaining from animal products, but can it teach us something new about how we see ourselves? Jenny Davis, Tony Love, and Phoenicia Fares show that it can. In Social Psychology Quarterly, the authors use veganism as an identity to integrate theories of the self and broaden research methods.
A snippet from the comments section from a December 2016 YouTube video entitled, “How Your Body Transforms On A Vegan Diet”
YouTube
Veganism is unique because it is simultaneously individual and collective as an identity and a practice. To study what this means for social psychological theory, the authors analyzed responses to two viral YouTube videos on veganism. One video takes a negative stance towards vegans through misinformation. The second video, recorded by a vegan, acts as a response to the first, and takes a positive stance. The comments were used to look at how vegan commenters responded to the perceived identity threat or support. Responses were analyzed by emotion words and total word count. Collectively, the two videos had over 250,000 views and 9,000 comments and replies.
Drawing on existing theories of identity, the authors hypothesize that vegan YouTubers will respond more negatively and use more words in response to the video that is unsupportive of a vegan identity. In contrast, the authors predict that responses to the pro-vegan video will remain positive. This is because when important identities are threatened by others, the owner of the identity often behaves in ways to reconcile that inconsistency with the way they think and feel about themselves.
The authors’ findings are consistent with their hypothesis. The negative video received more negative responses by vegans and used more words than the video that positively supported a vegan identity. The difference in emotional sentiment between the two videos was also found to be significant. Davis, Love, and Fares’ study is in line with previous findings and bridges together theories across disciplines of social psychology and social movements.
So, should you read the comments? These authors provide a case for revisiting why we should, showing how the comment section can broaden the way researchers think about digital methods and theories of self.
On page 1 of the Fall 2019 issue of Contexts, there is an error in the abstract for feature article Love Me Tinder. This error also appears online. The correct text should read:
Are “hook up” apps leading to a new kind of dating culture on college campuses? Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are having a different impact on the lives of college students versus older daters. Many students are using these apps to circumvent the romantic gatekeeping that campus party culture has long dominated.
Unfortunately, we published the wrong book cover for the book review Twenty Years in the Culture of Fear by Daniel Harrison published in the Fall 2019 edition of Contexts. We regret this error. The correct book cover is pictured here.