I really learned quite a lot this quarter about how processes in our everyday lives inform the way social inequality works and affects different groups of people. For example, in our very first neighborhood video (reposted below), I discussed how my mostly White, middle-upper class neighborhood thrived on comparison and competition. Many parents and students pitted themselves against one another to fight for the best grades on the path to "success" as doctors or lawyers. But it was not until our class discussions about neighborhoods and later readings on cumulative advantage, reference groups, and institutions that I realized my neighborhood is only one piece of a much broader constellation of social factors that contribute to inequality.

As a bourgeoise White guy growing up in an over-educated town, I had tunnel vision when it came to expectations of success as a consequence of the reference groups available to me. Although none of us were raking in millions, it reminded me of the piece by DiPrete et al. (2010), “Compensation Benchmarking, Leapfrogs, and the Surge in Executive Pay.” Although we discussed how neighborhoods and schools vary considerably, people at my school could not be happy unless they were able to secure a path to lawyer-hood or doctor-dom because their only comparisons were each other. This neighborhood effect, then, likely creates blinders for students who grow up in this environment that prevent them from considering or possibly even appreciating that not everyone is losing sleep over getting an A. In fact, some families, like Dasani's, make the priority a legitimate struggle to feed their children and get them a proper education.

Gender and Sexism in Video Game Culture

I was particularly struck by our readings on gender because they helped me to think more critically about gender and sexism within an area of my own interest: video games. The gender readings spoke primarily about key outcomes that matter for social inequality, such as whether women are able to obtain employment and earn comparable wages to men. Some of the takeaways from the readings included that beliefs about gender circulate in our society and sometimes disadvantage women. This was true in Correll's (2004) “Constraints into Preferences: Gender, Status, and Career Aspirations," where she primed experiment participants with beliefs about gender and competency that then shaped later career aspirations. The "World’s Toughest Job" video showed how beliefs matter, as well, as many of us were reminded that we typically do not think of motherhood as a real "job" that accrues thankless hours of work. I think these beliefs about women circulate in other extracurricular parts of our lives, too, and in ways that matter for not only women's participation but also their safety.

Feminists have long critiqued the media for poor representations of women that position them as, for example, oversexualized subordinates to men. Only recently, however, have video games been subject to these same times of critiques that were lobbed at producers of other media like advertisements, movies, and television. For example, video games like Grand Theft Auto allow players to improve their health if they pick up prostitutes off the street and sleep with them in their car. And it is not just the video games, too, but also the culture of participation that surrounds it. Video game conferences, like E3, increasingly hire "booth babes" to attract and entice their mostly male attendees. Where the rubber hits the road, however, is when women decide to speak out against this sexism. Anita Sarkeesian produces a video blog called Feminist Frequency where she discusses these issues, many of which overlap with our discussions of gender and social inequality. But as a consequence of her discussions she is met with many very harsh critiques, and even threats, from broader social media.

The above image is an example of the types of harassment Sarkeesian received from trying to start a discussion about gender and sexism in gaming. I think it illustrates how important it is that the themes we discuss in this class related to social inequality are important. These readings show how important it is to not only have evidence-based conversations about how inequality operates in our society. But our section discussions a full class video panels also provide us with what I think matters most -- an understanding of how sociological phenomena that operate in our everyday lives and in our own interests and activities can be bound up in inequality. If we think critically about our own social position and come to conversations with an open mind we can develop better solutions for the road ahead.