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A Conversationwith Philip Cohen
BY ANDREA LAM
Q: In a number of your articles, you discuss gender and race inequality as it occurs in theworkplace. What are your thoughts on how social and cultural factors encourage theseinequalities to be reproduced and/or enforced? Have you observed any recent trends that mightindicate improvement in these areas?
One o the incredible eatures o modern society is how certain kinds o work are so strongly associated with certain kinds o people. In act, the very categories o people (such as man and woman) and o jobs (janitor / housecleaner) are partly reproduced by these associations. Modern workplaces don’t haveormal, 100% exclusive rules about who does what work, but the patterns are very strong — and they are always implicated in inequality, because I know o no systematic division o labor without inequality in its rewards as well.As ubiquitous as these divisions are, however, how exactly they are reproduced is not completely clear. Sociologists remain divided, or example, over how the dierent actions and ideas o men and women on the “supply” (employee) and “demand” (employer) sides inuence the segregation o menand women into dierent jobs. In terms o recent trends, we are witnessing gradual changes in someareas toward integrating jobs by gender and race/ethnicity, but the progress is slow. One o the things wetry to do is look at the rates o change in dierent places, or in dierent kinds o work, to understand what drives those changes. Is it law and policy, politics and social movements, globalization, technology?Tese are some o the pressing research questions now.
Q: You recently co-authored with Claudia Geist an article on contemporary gendered divisionsof housework (“Headed Toward Equality? Housework Change in Comparative Perspective”, in
Journal of Marriage and Family
73, August 2011). What methods did you use in gathering the datafor this study? What did your ndings indicate about the future of gender inequality within thefamily?
One o the great advances in data collection has been the development o big comparative surveys. Weused one such survey – the International Social Survey Program — which has gathered inormationabout how couples divide housework in about a dozen countries since the 1990s (and it now includesmore than 30 countries). From previous research (some o it with ormer students Jeanne Batalovaand Makiko Fuwa), we know that there are big dierences in the how couples negotiate over unpaidhousework, with very dierent patterns across nations. Claudia and I wanted to know whethercountries with less equal divisions o labor between men and women were catching up or alling behindin the global trend toward more equality — and that is what we ound, although the pattern is not thatstrong, so “convergence” is a long way o at this rate.
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Q: You are a strong proponent of using the terms “homogamy” and “heterogamy” in discussionsof unions such as marriage and cohabitation, rather than “same-sex” and “opposite-sex” or“different-sex,” respectively. Could you talk a bit about your decision to use these terms and whyyou feel that they should be adopted?
Classifcation o categories — and their names — is a core unction o science, and the decisions wemake toward that end matter a lot. With amily types, there is a long history o classifcation usingGreek and Latin terms — such as “monogamy” and “polygamy” or the number o spouses people(men, originally) have, “hypergamy” or marriage between people o unequal statuses, “exogamy” ormarrying outside the group, and so on.I became concerned about our language or same-gender marriage when I noticed a double-standardin which people talked about “marriage” (unmodifed) when they were reerring to couples including aman and a woman, but “same-sex marriage” when they were talking about gay or lesbian couples. Whenpressed, people usually say “opposite-sex,” which I think reinorces the dichotomization o men and women in harmul ways.Anyway, in trying to decide what to do about this, I looked at “homosexual” and “heterosexual,”and realized “hetero” means “dierent” rather than opposite — which is good. And i you look back at the history o the terms “homogamy” and “heterogamy,” you see they have come to be used orsimilarity and dierence within couples (such as ethnicity or education level) in which the partners arealready presumed to be o dierent genders. But in the 19
th
century “homogamy” was used or same-sexreproduction among plants. So I am pretty sure that i marriage rights had been extended to gay andlesbian couples 150 years ago, social scientists would have called them “homogamous.”My main goal is to promote serious scientifc consideration o our categories and terms or amiliesand relationships. I we end up with “homogamy” and “heterogamy” I think that would be progress.Tat’s the argument I made in the article “Homogamy Unmodifed” in the
Journal of Family Teory and Review
this year.
Q: On your blog, Family Inequality (www.familyinequality.com), you analyze a wide variety ofarticles and data that discuss the complex relationships between families and inequality. Howdo you select what articles to analyze?
I am very suggestible. And one o the ways I try to integrate things that I am learning mysel is to replay them verbally and represent them visually — to mysel, my students, and now, thanks to the blog,anyone who will listen. So must o what I write is a description o something I have learned — even i it’s just new evidence or something I already understood (or thought I understood). Te great thingabout a blog — although it’s sad, too — is that it’s so ephemeral. I don’t have to worry about beingcomprehensive and covering everything, since it’s just a small stream eeding the river o inormation(and other things) that everyone sees.
Q: On Family Inequality, you occasionally make use of Google Correlate (correlate.googlelabs.com), which “uses web search activity data to nd queries with a similar pattern to a targetdata series”. What are your thoughts on the relationship between sociology and Internet searchdata?
What I like about looking at search patterns is it’s a representation o what people really do, not whatthey say they do or think. I think it oers great opportunities to measure behavior in something likereal time. Google realized this when they came out with the u tracker — which uses searches or usymptoms as an indicator o inection rates. I think we could do the same thing, or example, withertility rates. It takes many months to get real birth data counted up and released by the government.But Google knows how many people searched or “pregnancy workout” and “baby shower gits”yesterday.Beyond such practical uses, though, I am always looking or ways to see and understand regularitiesin social behavior. For example, how is it possible that out o the 2 million girls born last year, my prediction or how many would be named Mary was only o by 22? I didn’t do anything ancy, justtracked the trend in the number o Marys over time (http://bit.ly/mary_buying_time). Most people
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