Discrimination in the form of sexual harassment has been in the headlines for weeks now, but new poll results being released by NPR show that other forms of discrimination against women are also pervasive in American society. The poll is a collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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One of the paradoxes of racial discrimination is the way it can remain obscured even to the people to whom it’s happening. Here’s an example: In an ambitious, novel studyconducted by the Urban Institute a few years ago, researchers sent actors with similar financial credentials to the same real estate or rental offices to ask about buying or renting a home or apartment. In the end, no matter where they were sent, the actors of color were shown fewer homes and offered fewer discounts on rent or mortgages than those who were white.
Valery Pozo still gets angry thinking about it. It was about a decade ago, and the immigrant communities in her hometown, Salt Lake City, were on edge because of recent immigration enforcement raids in the area. Pozo’s mother, an immigrant from Peru, was on the sidelines at her son’s soccer game when another parent asked whether she was “illegal.”
“To me, that was clearly a racist question and a racist assumption,” Pozo recalled.
But her mother saw it as a harmless comment, despite Pozo’s best efforts to convince her that it was something bigger.
What’s in a name? A lot, according to a new study from researchers at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, both in Canada.
The study found that job applicants in Canada with Asian names — names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin — were 28 percent less likely to get called for an interview compared to applicants with Anglo names, even when all the qualifications were the same.
In the kitchen of a small colonial house in Springfield, Mass., Edanry Rivera and Louis Mitchell do-si-do around a coffee maker, handing off the creamer and reaching for a refill.
“Coffee is the lifeblood of my very existence,” says Louis Mitchell, 57, a bald transgender man with a graying goatee.
Mitchell owns this home. Rivera, a 27-year-old trans woman, rents a room. Many days, to avoid scoffs, stares and physical threats, Rivera never leaves the house.
“Once I step out there, it’s war, sometimes, with people,” Rivera says.
Ask any educated person what the placebo effect is, and almost all of them will be able to tell you. They will also accept, without any arm-twisting, that the placebo effect is real. After all, there is no real controversy around placebos — it’s well established that they work. And yet, any time I’ve suggested to an educated person that the placebo effect may be working on them — that they might as well be taking sugar pills for their colds instead of vitamin C — I get strenuous denials in response.
Many of us are ready to accept that placebos can work in general, just not on us. A similar dynamic exists with implicit biases.
When he started working as a bartender a few years ago in Seattle, Howie Echo-Hawk says he began experiencing discrimination. First, a bar manager told him to get a respectable haircut.
“I had a Mohawk, which is the traditional style of my people and I wore it because of that,” he said. Echo-Hawk is a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma.
Knox College in Illinois this week canceled a planned production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, based on student protests that it is racially insensitive. But unlike some faculty members involved in parallel controversies elsewhere, theater professors at Knox blame themselves for not properly framing the play for students, rather than students for being unwilling to deal with uncomfortable speech and ideas.
Study suggests women with male partners face bias in searches for junior faculty members.
The search committee chair said of a job candidate, “She seems to have the highest potential based on limited information.”
The other search committee members agreed — with regard to her qualifications. But other issues quickly came up. One committee member said, “Some people think it’s unlikely she’d come because of her boyfriend. He’s a [names the boyfriend’s occupation], and [the city where her other offer is] is really the best for that.”
When Amy Chua published “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ” in 2011, a book about how she raised two high-achieving daughters, people took notice. Chua is Chinese American and both daughters were on their way to Harvard, with an impressive roster of activities that included excelling at piano and violin.
Chua described how she built a household run on strict discipline and unyielding, sky-high expectations, what she called traditional Chinese parenting techniques. An excerpt from the book ran in The Wall Street Journal under a blunt headline that made clear the implications, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. ”