The new employment realities.

Nancy Folbre's good new post on the "Super Sad True Jobs Story" reminded me that I haven't updated the Black-White women's employment gap graph since last fall.

As you may recall, before the recession Black women had higher employment rates than White women. Since...

I can't wait to see historian Jo B. Paoletti's forthcoming book "Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America." Her work is profiled in a new Smithsonian.com article my friend Scott showed me. I used an article of hers to write about historical changes in the social...

The latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is out, with a report on teen birth rates in the U.S. The press release announces, "U.S. Teen Birth Rate Fell to Record Low in 2009." (The report has information about birth control, virginity and sex education as well.)

The CDC's

Forget the war on Christmas. What about the fall of Mary?

I'm posting this a little before Easter to give The Media time to work up the story by the weekend. Here it is: For the first time in the history of the United States of America, the name Mary...

Thanks to a tip from Bill Bielby, I found myself listening to Diane Sawyer on ABC say, "There is a new chapter tonight in this very serious battle of the sexes..." This is what she looked like as she said it:

That thing you might have heard, about women's work, income and property ownership -- it's not true. (And yes, I really am a feminist.)

If you're a feminist you've probably seen this. You may have even repeated it: verbally, on your blog, on a flyer, on Twitter, in your book...

Where does the Black-White gap in support for marriage rights come from?

The Washington Post details the last-ditch efforts by Black Christian leaders in Prince George's County, Maryland to stop the state from legalizing homogamous marriage.

The county, just outside Washington, D.C., is "the nation's most affluent and...

Have you said "homogamy" today?

The latest issue of the Journal of Family Theory and Review is out. A young journal, in only its third volume, it's well worth a look. For example, the current issue features an interesting debate on gender display and housework between Oriel Sullivan, Esther...

I have a dream that one day children of all nations, races and ethnicities will have the same (low) rates of asthma.

The other day I linked to a new set of tables and charts from the CDC on health disparities. There are great kernels of sociology lessons...

Which came first, the closed nursing home or the doubled-up household?

The recession-driven spikes in multigenerational households and cohabiting couples are making families feel the love a little more proximately. These are spikes in longer-term trends; another one is the race and class disparity in reliance on nursing...

North Carolina's Supreme Court voids "second-parent" adoptions by homogamous couples.

Related Topics, by Judy Shapiro, calls my attention to a very aggressive anti-gay-parent ruling by the N.C. Supreme Court, which retroactively voided the adoptions of same-gender spouses. The decision, in the case Boseman v. Jarrell, went beyond the...

The hows and whys of multigenerational living during the recession.

A new article in the NY Times describes the experience of multigenerational families living together during financial hard times. This pattern and its implications should be an important part of recession studies in the coming years.

Extended families may live...

What are we going to do with the new Google tool? Consider "parenting."

I remember reading a column by the Times' Lisa Belkin last year, in which she wrote about the decline of over-parenting and the rise of the hip new nonchalant parenting. It's a series of fads, she...

Now that $250,000 is the official definition of a "rich" family, let's compare budgets.

The Washington Post reports that "$250,000 is etched in the minds of policymakers and pundits as the number that separates the middle class from the wealthy."

To see how the other 2.9% of couples live,...

Picking up today's New York Times, I was terrified by the cover image. An army of Chinese hackers was apparently coming for me. Their image seemed to have been captured in the Wikileaks document dump:

On closer inspection,...

While women integrate, men accumulate.

The National Science Foundation has published new numbers on the PhDs granted in 2009, with a nice interactive tool allowing users to track trends from 1979. The gender trends are striking.

This is a chance to elaborate on my post describing a recent article...

An in-depth look at how some Black men see their marriages.

Research on marriage trends, and the reasons behind them, tends to focus on the decline in marriage -- especially among African Americans. That's not crazy, given the dramatic nature of those trends:

In the early 1990s, Arline Geronimus proposed a simple yet profound explanation for why Black women on average were having children at younger ages than White women, which she called the "weathering hypothesis."

It goes like this: Racial inequality takes a cumulative toll on Black...

Give or take, a billion people are undernourished (on Earth, which is as far as the data extend). It's been a very rough couple of years for world hunger, but the UN estimates that 2010 is looking a little better than last year.

Maybe they're trying to get height right this time.

The British royal family has got a marriage on its hands, and this time it involves a man who appears to be respectably taller than his bride.

Prince William's father was, let's admit it, shorter than Princess Diana. (UPI's Glenne Currie's...