This article, for me, touched on two important things. One is the obvious gender inequity for single mothers in the workforce. The other is the ability of Sociology to tackle the complexities of society and help us advance the important conversations of our time with empirical data.
I’ll start with the latter. As I am deeply engaged on many civic levels – from government all the way to grass roots organizing, with many organizational affiliations in between. The thing I find most unsettling is the inability of leadership to actually tackle the complexities of some of the most controversial subjects of our society. Many political tactics are filled with attempts to leverage weight and relevance to get things done. This is very much the bull in the china shop, lacking the articulation and sensitivity for any social issue that might be needed to move society along in a manner that educates us and grows as we progress. Current political means leave society more confused and less educated, so that it is not virtually impossible to bring us up to speed in large numbers. What these researchers were able to do with a very two sided argument about gender inequality in the labor force was remarkable. They took all the arguments and designed a laboratory experiment to control for the various potential arguments. These arguments about potential causes are often treated as if they can’t be tested for. In fact, many of these arguments are an attempt at dispelling accusations of prejudice by saying that no one can tell if the treatment one gets isn’t because of another variable. Well, these researchers ran an experiment that controlled for those variables. I thoroughly enjoyed that.
The next feature of this study is the gender inequity itself and what might be the next step for Sociology to determine. I’d like to take a measure of single mothers who’ve been at their job for ten years or more and look at how their compensation has changed over those ten years. If there are a considerable number of cases where compensation hasn’t changed, I’d like to find a way to observe some of the factors that drive a single mom to stay in such a position, is this the same for non mothers. I’d like to somehow discover if a single mother’s loyalty to providing for her family is somehow making her a soft target for employers to disregard and otherwise take advantage of. If this is indeed happening, I think that this creates a toxic environment of lack of fulfillment that leaves a mother drained and not rewarded, further producing a toxicity that may be being carried into the home and resulting in young people who lack to the emotional and structural support needed to achieve healthy development. I know that this makes a lot of leaps and assumptions, but I also believe that Sociology provides us the tools to get there, as we should always be using these tools to evaluate us as a society and how we might improve.