Social Justice Commons^™

Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch

Sociology

Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize …

Teaching & Learning Guide For Disability And Climate Justice, Molly M. King, Maria A. Gregg, Ana V. Martinez, Emily Y. Pachoud

Sociology

Disability is widespread: nearly one in four Americans has a disability (Taylor, 2018) and disability cuts across demographic categories. Among individuals aged 15 and over, 12.6% had some type of mobility disability; above age 65, it is nearly 40% (Brault, 2012). Mobility disabilities heighten vulnerability to climate change and climate-related disasters (UNHCHR, 2020). Reduced information resources and mobility, increased health risks, and a lack of visibility in climate change discourse put people with disabilities in a more vulnerable position in the climate crisis. However, this vulnerability can be mitigated through relevant and sufficient access to information, risk mitigation …

Disability And Climate Change: A Critical Realist Model Of Climate Justice, Molly M. King, Maria A. Gregg

Sociology

Existing literature on climate change as an issue of environmental justice documents the heightened vulnerability of people with disabilities to the effects of climate change. Additionally, there are numerous studies showing that access to information is a prerequisite for perceiving risk and taking action. Building on this work, our review seeks to understand how physical disability relates to perceptions of climate-related risk and adaptations to climate-related events. We introduce a critical realist model of climate justice to understand the relationships between the environmental features that disable, risk perception and information seeking, and adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. In …

The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects Of Covid-19 On Scientific Productivity, Molly M. King, Megan E. Frederickson

Sociology

Academia serves as a valuable case for studying the effects of social forces on workplace productivity, using a concrete measure of output: scholarly papers. Many academics, especially women, have experienced unprecedented challenges to scholarly productivity during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors analyze the gender composition of more than 450,000 authorships in the arXiv and bioRxiv scholarly preprint repositories from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis reveals that the underrepresentation of women scientists in the last authorship position necessary for retention and promotion in the sciences is growing more inequitable. The authors find differences between the …

Addressing Exclusion In Organizations: Social Desire Paths And Undocumented Students Attending College, Laura Nichols

Sociology

With data from a national study of a network of 28 private, non-profit colleges in the United States, I show how the individual actions of high school and college staff became collective “social desire paths” to introduce new organizational practices to enroll students who were undocumented. In interviews with staff, four factors emerged as important in enrolling students: (1) the way social desire paths started as ad hoc processes and then were entrenched through the collective and similar responses of staff; (2) identification of financial, administrative, structural, and cultural barriers to inclusion that formed the basis for the development of …

Reducing Poverty In California…Permanently, Conway Collis, David Grusky, Sara Kimberlin, Courtney Powers, Sandra Sanchez, Marion Coddou, Erin Cumberworth, Jonathan Fisher, Jared Furuta, Jasmine Hill, Molly M. King, Yana Kucheva, Ryan Leupp, Ana Matosantos, Natassia Rodriguez, Rachel Wright

Sociology

If California were to seriously commit to equalizing opportunity and reducing poverty, how might that commitment best be realized?

This is of course a hypothetical question, as there is no evidence that California is poised to make such a serious commitment, nor have many other states gone much beyond the usual lip-service proclamations. There are many reasons for California’s complacency, but an important one is that most people think that poverty is intractable and that viable solutions to it simply don’t exist.

When Californians know what needs to be done, they tend to go forward and get it done. When, …

Why Is There So Much Poverty In California? The Causes Of California’S Sky-High Poverty And The Evidence Behind The Equal Opportunity Plan For Reducing It, David Grusky, Marion Coddou, Erin Cumberworth, Jonathan Fisher, Jared Furuta, Jasmine Hill, Sara Kimberlin, Molly M. King, Yana Kucheva, Ryan Leupp, Marybeth Mattingly, Natassia Rodriguez, Charles Varner, Rachel Wright

Sociology

The purpose of this report is to describe the current state of poverty in California, to discuss concrete steps that could be taken to reduce poverty in California, and to present the best available evidence on the likely effects of those steps. We take on an important but infrequently-posed question: If California were to seriously commit to reducing poverty, how might that commitment best be realized?

This is of course a hypothetical question, as there is no evidence that California is poised to make such a serious commitment, nor have many other states gone much beyond the usual lip service …

Health Inequality, Sarah A. Burgard, Molly M. King

Sociology

There are many reasons why poverty matters, but it is especially troubling that it affects such fundamental outcomes as health and access to health care. If poverty did not bring about all manner of health risks, we would likely be somewhat less troubled by it. But of course poverty and other forms of social and economic disadvantage do often translate into deficits in health and health care. The purpose of this brief is to examine long-term trends in American health and to lay out the current state of evidence on the extent to which health and health care are unequally …