Home care workers, uncared for

The Carsey Institute‘s Kristin Smith has written a brief on the plight of home care workers — the home health aides and personal care aides that play a growing role in our patchwork network of care work.

The news now is that these workers are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act — which offers the protection of minimum wage and overtime pay — but the U.S. Labor Department has proposed to bring them under its aegis.

According to the Department of Labor:

Many of these workers are the primary breadwinners for their families. Of the roughly 2 million workers who will be affected by this rule, more than 92 percent are women, nearly 50 percent are minorities, and nearly 40 percent rely on public benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home health care aides earn about $21,000 a year and many lack health insurance.

Smith’s analysis uses 2011 federal data. She shows that home care workers are more likely to work overtime, and more likely to work part time, than direct care workers in hospitals and nursing homes:

And they are more likely to be working part time for involuntary reasons:

Finally, their median wages — and the wages of those in the bottom quartile of the occupation — are lower than those of hospital and nursing home workers:

Smile, you’re a home health care worker! (or you’re fired)

As Nancy Folbre as explained, the economics are bad here. Besides the bad hours, bad pay, bad working conditions, lack of unions and lack of state protections, there are some structural problems. Paid home health care is competing with unpaid family care. That means the decision about whether to pay for professional care weighs against the value of a (usually female) family member’s unpaid work. That drives down the cost of home health care — which means more than a million women get lower wages, and women’s work is devalued. And so on. Breaking that cycle requires either a wage increase (sadly, that includes bringing them under the minimum wage law) or government subsidies.*

*One attempt to beat these economic odds and support long-term care, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS Act), was supposed to be a premium-based long-term care support program, and it was passed as part of Obamacare. However, with the rule that it be self-funding, and solvent, while paying a cash benefit for life to eligible beneficiaries, the administration said it couldn’t be done after all. Actually paying for care isn’t cheap.

Pink and blue kid(s)

Jo Paoletti got a nice cover write-up from the UMD magazine Terp, for her new book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. I especially love the cover photo:

The photo(s) is (are) by John T. Consoli, linked without permission. This is a great exercise for noticing how we internalize gender norms. If you thought even for a moment that one of these kids is a boy and the other is a girl, you’re busted as a product of socialization. (I won’t reveal the “true” answer.)

This is much better than my own crude Photoshop version:

I’ve done a series of posts on color and children, which you can find here. That led me to do a survey on color preferences, which got close to 2,000 responses to the question, “What’s your favorite color.” Based on a simple color chart provided, these were the responses:

More than the gender breakdown, I wanted to see if the nurture-versus-nature element of color preference could be teased out in a single survey. So I asked people if they had children, and the gender of their children — figuring that might reflect some “adult socialization.” And that modest result is what I found. From the abstract:

This study asks whether the gendered social environment in adulthood affects parents’ color preferences. The analysis used the gender of children to represent one aspect of the gendered social environment. Because having male versus female children in the U.S. is generally randomly distributed, it provides something of a natural experiment, offering evidence about the social construction of gender in adulthood. The participants were 749 adults with children who responded to an online survey invitation, asking “What’s your favorite color?” Men were more likely to prefer blue, while women were more likely to prefer red, purple, and pink, consistent with long-standing U.S. patterns. The effect of having only sons was to widen the existing gender differences between men and women, increasing the odds that men prefer blue while reducing the odds that women do; and a marginally significant effect showed women having higher odds of preferring pink when they have sons only. The results suggest that, in addition to any genetic, biological or child-socialization effects shaping adults’ tendency to segregate their color preferences by gender, the gender context of adulthood matters as well.

The paper has been provisionally accepted and should be published in a peer-reviewed journal near you soon.

Jo’s excellent blog is here, where you can read about her new project, exploring the rise and fall of unisex clothing for children.

Charles Murray on his propaganda playing field

I have some notes on Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart, and the reactions to it, for a would-be essay. Since I haven’t read the book yet, I’m not ready to write that essay, but there are some things you can say without reading the book. Maybe this will be handy or interesting for those who operate in the faster information lanes.

First, remember who we’re dealing with: Murray is not a scholar doing (peer reviewed) research to advance our collective understanding of social life. He is a political propagandist. So we can hold him responsible primarily for the consequences of his work rather than its scientific veracity (which does require reading the book). He works for the American Enterprise Institute, a charitable-in-the-legal-sense front for corporate interests, which launders the tax-free contributions of its donors — a who’s-who of right-wing elites — to create “expert” opinion that in turn shapes and justifies the actions of government leaders.

Of course, they are not alone in this, but they are leaders of the form. This is from their latest annual report:

By treating their representatives as legitimate experts we play into their diabolical schemes.

Stop the presses

In addition to wasting everyone’s time in Congress, AEI is also very effective at promoting their representatives’ work in the media — where hardly anyone does more than mention AEI in passing. Murray’s book has been reviewed not once, but twice in the New York Times. And AEI achieved a near-perfect placement record among the Times‘s top columnists, including David Brooks (“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important”) and Ross Douthat (“brilliant”), Paul Krugman (“the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback”), and Nicholas Kristoff (“he’s right to highlight social dimensions of the crisis among low-skilled white workers”). The latter two are critical, too, but not enough to overcome the adage about publicity. (The Times also ran a good roundup by Thomas Edsall.)

The marketing campaign includes, naturally, advance bashing of sociologists, the small corner of academia that did the best job of debunking his last big book, The Bell Curve. ”I am sure there are still sociology departments where people would cross themselves if I came into the room,” he smirked to the Chronicle of Higher Education. But in that article, sociologist Dalton Conley is quoted as calling Murray, “probably the most influential social-policy thinker in America” (before offering some critical comments as well).

As Anne Coulter might say, though, “our sociologists” aren’t so bad. Brad Wilcox, for example, has joined the fawning chorus at the Wall Street Journal (which previewed the book), declaring we (Whites) are “a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness … The scope and cost of government grows, and liberty withers, when the family breaks down.”

Like old times

Like Newt Gingrich, Murray uses the looming specter of Black pathology to whip up apocalyptic fears among Whites (while somehow convincing some people he’s not a racist because he describes “America” with data on Whites). The two were anti-welfare soul-mates in the 1990s, when Murray wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal called “The Coming White Underclass” (10/29/93), which was a preview of Coming Apart.

He wrote then:

Every once in a while the sky really is falling, and this seems to be the case with the latest national figures on illegitimacy… now the overall white illegitimacy rate is 22%. The figure in low-income, working-class communities may be twice that. How much illegitimacy can a community tolerate? Nobody knows, but the historical fact is that the trendlines on black crime, dropout from the labor force, and illegitimacy all shifted sharply upward as the overall black illegitimacy rate passed 25%. … But the brutal truth is that American society as a whole could survive when illegitimacy became epidemic within a comparatively small ethnic minority. It cannot survive the same epidemic among whites.

For what it’s worth, the “illegitimacy” rate is 41% nationally, and 29% for non-Hispanic Whites. And, of course, the crime rate is through the … floor. So, look to him for reliable predictions about whether “American society as a whole [can] survive” at your own risk.

His solutions then, in addition to zeroing out welfare for single mothers, included dropping the sentimental attachment to letting people raise their own children:

Those who prattle about the importance of keeping children with their biological mothers may wish to spend some time in a patrol car or with a social worker seeing what the reality of life with welfare-dependent biological mothers can be like.

This is a very partial rundown. Feel free to add your own links in the comments.

Divorcing our way to prosperity

Matthew Yglesias had a funny post recently about how the backlog of divorces, births and young people waiting to move out from the parents’ homes is holding back the economy. It’s true, strictly speaking. But no one really wants more divorces just to stimulate the economy, right? That would be as crazy as wanting more marriages just to stimulate the economy — which must be crazy, because it’s exactly what Brad Wilcox has advocated (hopefully just to see if his deep-pockets corporate sponsors are paying attention to what he does with their slush funds).

All that is why it was funny to see the Wilcoxian Elizabeth Marquardt take offense at the Yglesias piece. “Sure, America, get divorced and go shopping,” she huffed. “A divorced household means two refridgerators rather than one, and what could be better for the economy?” Of course, waste is consumption, and consumption is a good way to get out of a recession. As Yglesias put it:

 There are millions of “missing” households in America that can appear—through childbirth, divorce, or moving out—very suddenly if people get a bit more in their pockets.

Put another way, all those divorces waiting to happen are really shovel-ready households, ready to be formed. But what kind of moral view of the family is that?

Seriously, I have to put my foot down on this. I don’t want either divorces or marriages just because one or the other stimulates more shopping — even if it means shopping for cool new beds:

That image is from a post by Mike Konczal, who believes the recession is reducing divorces. His data is a little old. I’ve done quite a bit on this issue, and my latest leaning is in the direction of the recession creating a backlog of divorces that may already be showing themselves, with an uptick in the number of couples reporting divorce in the 2010 American Community Survey and Google divorce searches trending upward.

When the economy improves — and more new households are formed, by people moving out, for better or for worse — the improvement will be good news, and the boom in broken marriages will be good or bad depending on whether they were good or bad divorces, not because they are good or bad for “the economy.”

Marriage rights, writ wrong

With the big decision striking down California’s Proposition 8 — which banned homogamous marriage — the terminology used is not today’s lead story. But it is a good time to reflect on it.

So, here are the results of last’s weeks Family Inequality reader poll, which asked two questions:

• When the state permits marriage between pairs of men or women, what do you call it?
• What to you call marriage between a man and a woman?

With more than 400 page views, there were 58 responses to the first question, 42 to the second, and here is how they broke down:

As I wrote in, “Homogamy Unmodified,” we appear to be largely in an uncomfortable terminological state that pairs “marriage,” which refers to unions between men and women, with “same-sex marriage.” In other words, for a good share of readers, “the normative or hegemonic case requires no specification while others carry a modifier.” It’s not our fault; it’s a tough situation.

Here’s a little bit of perspective to help sort it out.

First, on the positive side, this response from someone who I don’t know:

I adopted your terms for it when you first published the post on hetero/homogamous. These words are so incredibly useful, since I write about sex and gender a lot, and have discussed heterogamous couples with the same gender presentation, etc. It sounds nicer than same-sex marriage and provides an equal term for “opposite-sex” (bleh!) marriage.

That’s the leading 3% for you: Bold, confident, comfortable in her terms. Much more common is a response like this, which I received via email:

[Homogamy] is a fine term for researchers, and I fully get why you like it. But it will never catch on with the press and public, and anyone using it in a speech or a press statement would be met with blank stares and/or hostility for using such big academic words…

I know for a fact this person is wiser than I am, and I can’t disagree. But I hope that’s not true in the long run.

The long run

Consider one piece of historical precedent: polygamy and monogamy. There was a time when monogamy and polygamy were obscure scientific terms. Here’s a footnote that might have elicited some blank stares in 1887, when Herbert Spencer published the third edition of The Principles of Sociology:

The federal government’s war on Mormonism at the end of the 19th Century brought polygamy to the American reading public’s attention, both as a practice and as a term. Here’s the ngrams chart showing the frequency of polygamy and monogamy from 1840 to 2008 in American English:

Most of the references to monogamy back then seem to have been in scientific writings or political discussion of polygamy. Now, of course, it’s a commonly-understood term for a lifestyle choice:

So, try not to get too hung up on the moment, on today’s research paper or the way you learned “homogamy” in grad school. We should try to take the long view (especially those of us who have tenure).

Graphing poverty rates and numbers, cutting room floor edition

Here are some poverty graphs I guess I’m not going to use in my book.*

I keep data in my head in graphical form. Which means that I need to make a graph, or see someone else’s, before I can really learn the pattern. But truthfully, even looking at other people’s graphs doesn’t make it sink in as well as making my own. So I make a lot of graphs just to look at before I write.

Here’s some of what I was thinking about poverty. These use the official poverty-line cutoff for 2010.**

In this case, I wanted to show how many people in poverty live in each family type, and juxtapose that with the poverty rates for each group. Basically, filling in the facts behind the observation that there are lots of poor married-couple families, even though they are relatively unlikely to be poor. Including age breakdowns is probably what doomed this to too-busyness.

The next one was supposed to do the same thing for age and gender, instead of family type. But after I got this far I started to want to put numbers on it, and that seemed to just defeat the purpose of this kind of graphic.

Anyways, after I get done basically writing the book, I hope to spend some quality time with the graphic experts at Norton as they make all this stuff really work.

*Look for the breakthrough textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality and Social Change, from Norton in 2013. Hopefully you’ll find it!

** That is, from the March 2011 Current Population Survey, which asked about annual income the previous year. The data are here in great detail. Note this official poverty-line is quite problematic in describing real-life conditions, but it’s still not bad at showing the relative well-being of different groups. As I discussed in this briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families (links provided there), new work on a more accurate poverty measure better captures the inability to meet basic needs. It shows, for example, fewer children and more seniors in poverty as a result of welfare policy (children) and runaway medical costs (seniors).

Poll: What do you call homogamous marriage?

With another state (Washington) set to become the seventh to allow it, and Maryland teetering on the brink, I thought of asking Family Inequality readers what you call it — that is, the marriage of pairs of men or women, or what we scientists (by which I mean, me) call homogamy.

There are different contexts for this, so let’s ask the question about professional or formal use (e.g., teaching, research, a letter to the president). If you use different language in different settings, maybe discuss that in the comments. Try to answer with the language you actually use, not what you think is best.

For some people (like the news media), that’s the easy part. They don’t usually talk about the “other” kind of marriage as a category. Do you? If so, what do you call it?

I never tried a poll before. I hope it works. If the categories don’t suit you, please say something in the comments. Thanks.

Now that you’ve taken the poll so you can’t be swayed, here has a few of the posts I’ve written on this before:

• Take my words for it: homogamy and heterogamy
• What is the opposite of gay marriage?
• Homogamy: start the presses
• Marriage equality action
• Civil rights bonanza (demographic fiasco)
• High marks for Census

Grad Seminar: Gender, Work, and Family Syllabus

Here is the reading list for my new seminar, Gender, Work and Family. It’s a required course for grad students at U. Maryland who plan to take the comprehensive exam in GWF. The full syllabus, with assignments, etc., is here. I go back and forth on a handful of issues: breadth versus depth, country case studies versus comparative studies, books versus articles, and including my own research. I’m open to suggestions, and feel free to add your recommendations in the comments.

Anyway, feel free to use it for whatever you like. The links here will mostly hit pay walls unless you’re authenticated with a subscribing university.

January 31 – Research overviews

• Bianchi, Suzanne M. and Melissa A. Milkie. 2010. “Work and Family Research in the First Decade of the 21st Century.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72:705-725. Link
• Ferree, Myra Marx. 2010. “Filling the Glass: Gender Perspectives on Families.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72:420-439. Link

February 7 – Stalled progress toward equality

• Cotter, David, Joan M. Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman. 2011. “The End of the Gender Revolution? Gender Role Attitudes from 1977 to 2008.” American Journal of Sociology 117(1):pp. 259-289. Link
• England, Paula. 2010. “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled.” Gender & Society 24(2):149-166. Link
• Pettit, Becky and Stephanie Ewert. 2009. “Employment Gains and Wage Declines: The Erosion of Black Women’s Relative Wages since 1980.” Demography 46(3):pp. 469-492. Link

February 14 – The persistence of gender inequality

• Ridgeway: Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World.

February 21 – Work-family

• Williams: Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.

February 28 – Studying work-family decisions

• Cha, YJ. 2010. “Reinforcing Separate Spheres: The Effect of Spousal Overwork on Men’s and Women’s Employment in Dual-Earner Households.” American Sociological Review, 75 (2): 303-329. Link
• Percheski, Christine. 2008. “Opting out? Cohort differences in professional women’s employment rates from 1960 to 2005.” American Sociological Review, 73 (3): 497-517. Link
• Read, Jen’nan G. and Sharon Oselin. 2008. “Gender and the education-employment paradox in ethnic and religious contexts: The case of Arab Americans.” American Sociological Review 73 (2): 296-313. Link
• Read, Jen’nan Ghazal and Philip N. Cohen. 2007. “One Size Fits All? Explaining U.S.-born and Immigrant Women’s Employment across Twelve Ethnic Groups.” Social Forces 85(4):1713-34. Link

March 6 – Race, class and intersectionality

• Furstenberg, Frank F. 2007. “The making of the black family: Race and class in qualitative studies in the twentieth century.” Annual Review of Sociology 33:429-448. Link
• Harknett, Kristen and Arielle Kuperberg. 2011. “Education, Labor Markets and the Retreat from Marriage.” Social Forces 90(1):41-63. Link
• Choo, Hae Y. and Myra M. Ferree. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities.” Sociological Theory 28(2):129-149. Link

March 13 – Economics and feminism

• Hartmann, Heidi I. 1981. “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework.” Signs 6(3):pp. 366-394. Link
• Nelson, Julie A. “Feminism and Economics.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9(2):131-148. Link
• Folbre, Nancy and Julie A. Nelson. “For Love or Money – Or Both?” Journal of Economic Perspectives , Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 123-140. Link

March 20 – SPRING BREAK

March 27 – Housework studies

• West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2):125-151. Link
• Sayer, Liana C. 2005. “Gender, time and inequality: Trends in women’s and men’s paid work, unpaid work and free time.” Social Forces 84(1):285-303. Link
• Sayer, Liana C. and Leigh Fine. 2011. “Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework.” Social Indicators Research 101(2):259-265. Link
• Gupta, Sanjiv. 2007. “Autonomy, Dependence, or Display? The Relationship Between Married Women’s Earnings and Housework.” Journal of Marriage and Family 69(2):399-417. Link

April 3 – The gender pay gap

• O’Neill J. 2003. “The Gender Gap in Wages, circa 2000.” American Economic Review 93(2)309-314. Link
• Budig, Michelle and Melissa Hodges. 2010. “Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution.” American Sociological Review 75(5): 705-728. Link
• Cohen, Philip N. and Matt L. Huffman. 2003. “Individuals, Jobs, and Labor Markets: The Devaluation of Women’s Work.” American Sociological Review 68(3):443-63. Link
• Blau, Francine D. and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2007. “The gender pay gap: Have women gone as far as they can?” Academy of Management Perspectives 21(1):7-23.

April 10 – Occupational segregation

• Cartwright, Bliss, PR Edwards, and Q Wang. 2011. “Job and industry gender segregation: NAICS categories and EEO-1 job groups.” Monthly Labor Review 134(11):37-50. Link
• Charles, Maria and Karen Bradley. 2002. “Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education.” American Sociological Review 67(4):573-599. Link
• Matt L. Huffman, Philip N. Cohen and Jessica Pearlman. 2010. “Engendering Change: Organizational Dynamics and Workplace Gender Segregation, 1975-2005.” Administrative Science Quarterly 55(2):255-277. Link

April 17 – Gender, family and women’s empowerment in Asia

• Desai, Sonalde and Lester Andrist. 2010. “Gender Scripts and Age at Marriage in India.” Demography 47(3):667-687. Link
• Rammohan, Anu and Meliyanni Johar. 2009. “The Determinants of Married Women’s Autonomy in Indonesia.” Feminist Economics 15(4):31-55. Link
• Cohen, Philip N. and Wang Feng. 2009. “The Market and Gender Pay Equity: Have Chinese Reforms Narrowed the Gap?” Pp. 37-53 in Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, Deborah S. Davis and Wang Feng (eds.). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Link

April 24 – Masculinity and fathering

• Connell R.W. and J.W. Messerschmidt JW. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19(6):829-859. Link
• Parrenas, Rhacel S. 2008. “Transnational fathering: Gendered conflicts, distant disciplining and emotional gaps.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34(7):1057-1072. Link
• Milkie, Melissa A., Kendig, SM, Nomaguchi, KM and Denny, KE. “Time with Children, Children’s Well-Being, and Work-Family Balance among Employed Parents.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72(5):1329-1343. Link

May 1 – Generational change in work-family perspectives

• Gerson: The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family.

May 8 – State policy

• Esping-Andersen: The Incomplete Revolution: Adapting to Women’s New Roles. Polity.

Maryland’s marriage rights bottleneck

Last year I wrote that Black Christian leaders in Prince George’s County, Maryland, were the political force that blocked the state’s marriage-rights legislation from passing. According to the Washington Post, despite the “state’s reputation as one of the nation’s most liberal states,” the percentage of people here who support gay and lesbian (homogamous) marriage rights is about the same as the national average. That’s because of a large population of Christian African Americans who oppose the law, it appears.

Here is the breakdown of the Post‘s latest poll:

Among Democrats, the gay/lesbian marriage divide has got to be one of the sharpest between Blacks (41% support) and Whites (71% support). Evidence from the General Social Survey (reported here) attributes the race difference to the denominational and religiosity differences between Blacks and Whites. (Of course, 41% Black support is not negligible.)

Those on the wrong side of history appear to be swimming against an insurmountable demographic tide (or whatever). Barring a dramatic turn of events, all the evidence points toward popular support for marriage rights becoming a solid majority in the next few years. That shows in the trend over time, as well as the age split, in the Post poll. Sooner or later, I think, either the churches will decide to change or the population will swim out from under them, dunking them in the drink of political history.

Googling racism, votes for Obama, and population composition

This post contains racially offensive language.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a PhD student in economics at Harvard, has analyzed Google searches for racially offensive terms across metro areas, and tested for a “racial animus” effect on the vote for Obama in 2008.* The results are pretty strong:

 The baseline proxy that I use is the percentage of an area’s total Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the word “nigger” or “niggers.” … A one standard deviation increase in an area’s racially charged search is associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in Barack Obama’s vote share, controlling for John Kerry’s vote share. The results imply that, relative to the area with the lowest racial animus, racial animus cost Obama between 3 to 5 percentage points of the national popular vote. … The statistical significance and large magnitude are robust to numerous controls including local unemployment rates; home state candidate preference; Census division fixed effects; changes in House voting over the same period; prior trends in Presidential voting; and a variety of demographics controls.

This is a creative way to measure racism — not perfect, but nothing is. And he did a fair amount of experimenting and tinkering with the measures to make sure it wasn’t fluky. Very nice.

Racism at the population level

Another thing that jumped out at me in the paper, however, was the finding among the control variables that racist searches are more common in markets with higher proportions of Black residents. This raises a potentially difficult issue with the whole Google-search method, since we don’t know who is doing the searching. Does his finding suggest that Blacks are doing racist searches? I don’t think so. I previously looked at state-level correlations between race/ethnic composition and search terms, and it looks to me like the most correlated search terms are indeed being performed by those groups. For example, Americans Indians live in states where people Google “Indian Health Service” and Blacks live in states where people Google stuff about historically Black colleges and universities (and Whites apparently Google AC/DC songs).

But at lower levels of correlation, I would expect the presence of one group to affect the search behavior of others. An obvious example is how Southern states mostly vote Republican in national elections — more Blacks equals more conservative voting, even though the great majority of Black voters vote Democratic. The higher rates of conservatism among Whites in those places outweighs the presence of Democratic-voting Blacks. (The effect on Whites was discovered before Blacks could vote in the South, but remains true.)

We also know from way back that inequality between Blacks and Whites is greater where Blacks are more highly represented in the population, and there’s good evidence at least some of this is due to increased racism by Whites. I’ve found this for earnings for both men and women, for middle and working class workers; and, with Matt Huffman, for occupational segregation and access to managerial positions. Only some of that research has actually measured racial attitudes, however. Google gives us a chance to look from a different angle — at the private behavior, not expressed attitudes, of populations.

Here’s one take, jumping off from Stephens-Davidowitz’s paper: searches for “nigger jokes.” This seems like something Blacks are unlikely to be looking for on Google.** But the searches are more common in states with larger Black populations:

Removing West Virginia, which is an extreme outlier on the jokes variable (more than 3 standard deviations from the mean), the correlation between searches for “nigger jokes” and Black population percentage is .48. Here’s the scatter plot (the non-Southern states have the pink centers).

And here’s the regression numbers for the relationship:

That positive relationship, tapering off, fits the long-standing pattern, as seen for example in this 1998 paper, which tested the percent-Black on common attitude measures in the General Social Survey (the figure estimates are net of a variety of controls):

All adding to the accumulating evidence for search behavior as a valuable research tool.

* Thanks to a tip from Rachel Lovell.

** Some searches seem even better for this purpose, such as “funny nigger jokes,” but fortunately there isn’t enough searching for that to get state-level frequencies, according to Google.