The Federal welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), has not kept up with the growing number of poor people in need of assistance. The Obama stimulus plan included $5 billion to help states cover increasing TANF costs expected with the recession, but only $1 billion have so...

The U.S. lags seriously behind in preterm births and infant mortality.

A recent CDC report finds that the U.S. lags seriously behind almost all European countries on two key indicators of women and children's health: preterm births and infant mortality.

Preterm births and infant mortality are related, sequentially. That...

A major summit meeting with "400 government officials and academics from 65 countries" has concluded in Istanbul with the adoption of a declaration calling for "worldwide efforts to achieve gender equality and empower women."

The declaration has a nice statement on gender inequality:

Gender inequality is deeply...

The National Marriage Project, under the editorship of the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, has released a report titled The State of Our Unions, 2009: Money and Marriage. It has a lot of useful information on marriage and families, with some editorial bending in the pro-marriage-and-family direction.

My beef here...

After visiting with women in managerial jobs, and the apparent stall in their progress - and the idea of mandating equal representation at the top of the corporate ladder (as in France and Norway) - here's something on the cultural side: movies.

On receiving her lifetime achievement...

Surrogacy as a response to infertility goes back a long way. By my literal reading of biblical stories, both Abraham and Jacob had wives (Sarah and Rachel, respectively) who, after remaining "barren" for years, offered up their handmaidens as surrogates for their husbands' heirs.

With the recent New York Times...

Even when parents make an effort to talk to their kids about sex, adolescents' sexual experience is often a step ahead of them. Apart from its emotional consequences, the health implications of this disconnect are serious, and seriously unequally distributed.

A new study in Pediatrics shows that by the...

After discussing some widening employment inequality between Black and White women, as well as large and in some cases growing health disparities, the final installment of this miniseries turns to news on racial discrimination and its repercussions for Black women, especially those who are poor. Much of the...

The employment and wage disparities now widening between Black and White women appear alongside substantial - and possibly increasing - health disparities. As the recent concern over breast cancer advice shows, Black and White women often inhabit different worlds in our healthcare system.

Consider the infant mortality rate,...

In both the current situation (the recession) and in the medium run (the last few decades), Black women are losing ground - relative to Whites, and in some cases absolutely. What is going on?

Life not at the top

As long as same-sex couples can't get married, research can't tell us much about what same-sex marriage will be like -- especially how legal recognition might affect their social legitimacy in the eyes of others, as well as their commitments and investments as partners and parents. The main...

Who needs marriage? When it comes to suicide, at least, the answer is: "men."

Jessie Bernard famously argued that every marriage is really two marriages, his and hers - and his was more beneficial than hers. We know, for example, that both men and women have more family income...

The principle of equality for children is fundamentally at odds with the American interpretation of the principle of equality for adults. We defer parenting to parents at the cost of equality for their children. This happens in myriad ways, lots of which involve education. Just as adults are free to...

Another year, another round of stranger-assault hype around Halloween. (Spoiler alert: Halloween is safe. Unless you're the civil rights of a sex offender.)

Last year, sex offenders on parole or probation in some states were required to post signs shooing off potential trick-or-treaters, although some more draconian rules were...

Sometimes demography is the boring gray lining under the shimmering silver cloud of social change. The people who fill out surveys want demographic data to reflect themselves as individuals -- celebrating their hard-fought identities -- but demography wants to understand them as groups. Social scientists would rather have an accurate...

In addition to their other beliefs, most Christian Evangelicals hold two unyielding moral positions: vehement opposition to pre-marital sex, and vehement opposition to real sex education (as opposed to preaching against premarital sex). In recent years, they have been much more successful at realizing their goals with regard to the...

UPDATE: News of the "gender testing" is leaking out, supposedly showing that she has internal testes and much higher than average levels of testosterone for a woman. This is not supposed to lead to her retroactive disqualification, because it is considered a medical condition of which she was not...

Early sexual activity is risky for adolescents. Without proper sex education the health risks are large, and even with sex education there may be negative social and emotional consequences. But, despite what you might have read in today's headlines, sex at age 12 is not the norm for poor children....

Because individual well-being is so dependent on family connections and shared resources, the question of who gets a family, and what kind of family they get, is an important one for inequality in our society. Both children and adults may be denied the opportunity to form or live in the...

I love driving. But it's also a great source of ill will in society. I don't just mean driving is a stage where bad character is performed. It is an experience that inevitably creates bad emotions. If driving makes you angry, bitter or fearful, don't blame yourself (or those driving...