Mads Meier Jæger, Stine Møllegaard
Julien Larrègue, Frédéric Lebaron, Hervé Perdry, Nicolas Robette
Using population register data from the Netherlands, we analyze the child penalty for new parents in three groups of couples: different-sex and female same-sex couples with a biological child and different-sex couples with an adopted child. With a longitudinal design, we follow parents’ earnings from two years before to eight years after the arrival of the child and use event study models to estimate the effects of the transition to parenthood on earnings trajectories. Comparing different groups of couples allows us to test hypotheses related to three types of within-couple differences that are difficult to disentangle when studying only heterosexual biological parents: relative earnings, childbearing, and gender. Our results offer strong support for gender as the main driver of divergent child penalties. The gender of their partners is more consequential for mothers’ earnings trajectories than is childbearing or the pre-parenthood relative earnings in the couple.
Weverthon Machado, Eva Jaspers
Using population register data from the Netherlands, we analyze the child penalty for new parents in three groups of couples: different-sex and female same-sex couples with a biological child and different-sex couples with an adopted child. With a longitudinal design, we follow parents’ earnings from two years before to eight years after the arrival of the child and use event study models to estimate the effects of the transition to parenthood on earnings trajectories. Comparing different groups of couples allows us to test hypotheses related to three types of within-couple differences that are difficult to disentangle when studying only heterosexual biological parents: relative earnings, childbearing, and gender. Our results offer strong support for gender as the main driver of divergent child penalties. The gender of their partners is more consequential for mothers’ earnings trajectories than is childbearing or the pre-parenthood relative earnings in the couple.
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Aaron Gullickson
Understanding how outcomes for biracial individuals compare with those for their monoracial peers is critical for understanding how patterns of racial inequality in the contemporary United States might be shifting. Yet, we know very little about the life chances of biracial individuals because of limitations in most available data sources. In this article, I utilize American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2019 to examine the risk of being clearly behind expected grade among biracial and monoracial K-12 students, helping to fill a gap in our understanding. With large sample sizes for most biracial groups, I am able to estimate grade retention risk for biracial students with enough precision to differentiate even modest differences in risk relative to monoracial groups. The results indicate that for most biracial groups, biracial students have risk similar to their lower-risk monoracial constituent group. Although biracial students tend to have favorable family resource characteristics, controlling for these characteristics does little to change the overall placement of their outcomes.
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Selcan Mutgan, Jonathan J. B. Mijs
Drawing on individual-level full-population data from Sweden, spanning four decades, we investigate the joint growth of income inequality and income segregation. We study Sweden as a “least likely” case comparison with the United States, given Sweden’s historically low levels of inequality and its comprehensive welfare state. Against the background of U.S.-based scholarship documenting a close link between inequality and segregation, our study provides an important insight into the universality of this relationship. Using entropy-based segregation measures, we analyze trends and patterns of income segregation between and within income groups along different sociodemographic dimensions—migration background and family type. Our findings reveal that growing income inequality in the last 30 years has been accompanied by a sharp uptake in income segregation, especially for the bottom quartile of the income distribution who are facing increasing isolation. Income segregation is most extensive for individuals with children in the household, among whom it has increased at a higher rate than those without children. Interestingly, income segregation is lower among non-Western minorities than among majority-group Swedes. We conclude that changes to the welfare state, liberalization of the housing market, and rapid demographic changes have led Sweden onto a path that is difficult to distinguish from that taken by the United States.
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Shira Zilberstein, Michèle Lamont, Mari Sanchez
This article analyzes how young adults draw on cultural resources to understand their identities, aspirations, and goals when taken-for-granted scripts of success are perceived as less desirable or achievable. Drawing on pragmatism, we propose the concept of “plausible futures” to capture how people rearrange elements within cultural repertoires as a practical and moral project to define their identities, aspirations, and goals. We draw on interviews with 80 college students concerning how they understand their future aspirations, including how they define personal success and broader social goals, when they face unpredictability in, and dissatisfaction with, achieving dominant meritocratic and socioeconomic ideals. We find that respondents combine elements from four cultural repertoires to work toward and envision their future: the American dream and neoliberalism, the therapeutic culture, ordinary cosmopolitanisms, and a “Gen Z” cohort narrative. The combining of elements from each repertoire enables a hybrid set of cultural tools that hold to tenets of hard work and self-reliance while accommodating the quest for greater recognition and inclusion. We show that respondents combine cultural elements based on their ability to connect elements to futures perceived as viable and valuable.
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Kristian Bernt Karlson, Ben Jann
As sociologists are increasingly turning away from using odds ratios, reporting average marginal effects is becoming more popular. We aim to restore the use of odds ratios in sociological research by introducing marginal odds ratios. Unlike conventional odds ratios, marginal odds ratios are not affected by omitted covariates in arbitrary ways. Marginal odds ratios thus behave like average marginal effects but retain the relative effect interpretation of the odds ratio. We argue that marginal odds ratios are well suited for much sociological inquiry and should be reported as a complement to the reporting of average marginal effects. We define marginal odds ratios in terms of potential outcomes, show their close relationship to average marginal effects, and discuss their potential advantages over conventional odds ratios. We also briefly discuss how to estimate marginal odds ratios and present examples comparing marginal odds ratios with conventional odds ratios and average marginal effects.
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Patrick Bergemann, Austin L. Wright
In many settings, witnesses can report wrongdoing to internal authorities such as officials within an organization or to external authorities such as the police. We theorize this decision of where to report as rooted in the policing of group boundaries, as the use of different reporting channels symbolically affirms or disaffirms affiliation with different social categories. As such, both witnesses and other social actors have an interest in where witnesses report. We evaluate this theory using villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where witnesses could report externally (e.g., to the national police) or internally (e.g., to village elders). We show how responses to wrongdoing arose from the interaction between self and others’ attitudes toward the Taliban, and we reveal how reporting can be simultaneously punitive for the wrongdoer and affiliative for the category to which the wrongdoer belongs.
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Joseph Workman, Paul T. von Hippel, Joseph Merry
It is widely believed that (1) children lose months of reading and math skills over summer vacation and that (2) inequality in skills grows much faster during summer than during school. Concerns have been raised about the replicability of evidence for these claims, but an impression may exist that nonreplicable findings are limited to older studies. After reviewing the 100-year history of nonreplicable results on summer learning, we compared three recent data sources (ECLS- K:2011, NWEA, and Renaissance) that tracked U.S. elementary students’ skills through school years and summers in the 2010s. Most patterns did not generalize beyond a single test. Summer losses looked substantial on some tests but not on others. Score gaps—between schools and students of different income levels, ethnicities, and genders—grew on some tests but not on others. The total variance of scores grew on some tests but not on others. On tests where gaps and variance grew, they did not consistently grow faster during summer than during school. Future research should demonstrate that a summer learning pattern replicates before drawing broad conclusions about learning or inequality.
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Xuege (Cathy) Lu, Shinan Wang, Letian Zhang
Why do people engage with similar others despite ample opportunities to interact with dissimilar others? We argue that adversity or setbacks may have a stronger deteriorative effect on ties made up of dissimilar individuals, prompting people to give up on such ties more easily, which, over the long run, results in people forming ties with similar others. We examine this argument in the context of Association of Tennis Professionals tournaments, using data on 9,669 unique doubles pairs involving 1,812 unique players from 99 countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that doubles pairs with players from different countries are more likely to dissolve after a setback, especially if those countries lack social trust and connections with one another; this reality further contributes to the individual player’s increased tendency to collaborate with same-country players in the next tournament. Our study has direct implications for interventions for diversity and inclusion.
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Eurythmics or Xenakis? Cultural Tastes (Are Not Made of Genes): Comment on Jæger and Møllegaard, “Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences”