The coming divorce decline

Unless something changes outside the demogosphere, the divorce rate is going to go down in the coming years.

Divorce represents a number of problems from a social science perspective.

• • Most people seem to assume “the divorce rate” is always going up, compared with the good old days, which are supposed to be the whole past but are actually represented by the anomalous 1950s.
  • On other hand, social scientists have known for a few decades that “the divorce rate” has actually been declining since the 1980s. That shows up in the official statistics, with the simple calculation — known as the refined divorce rate — of the number of divorces per 1,000 married women.
  • On the third hand, the official statistics are very flawed. The federal system, which relies on states voluntarily coughing up their divorce records, broke down in the 1990s and no one fixed it (hello, California doesn’t participate). In the debate over different ways of getting good answers, a key 2014 paper from Sheela Kennedy and Stephen Ruggles showed that the decline in divorce after 1980 was mostly because the whole married population was getting older, and older people get divorced less. That refined divorce rate doesn’t account for age patterns. When you remove the age patterns from the data, you see a continuously increasing divorce rate. Yikes!
  • On the fourth hand, Kennedy and Ruggles stopped in about 2010. Since then, the very divorce-prone, multi-marrying, multi-divorcing Baby Boomers have moved further out of their peak action years, and it’s increasingly clear that divorce rates really are falling for younger people.

In my new analysis, which I wrote up as a short paper for submission to the Population Association of America 2019 meetings, I argue that all signs point to a divorce decline in the coming years. Here is the paper on SocArXiv, where you will also find the data and code. And here is the story, in figures (click to enlarge).

1. The proportion of married women who divorce each year has fallen 18% in the decade after 2008. (There are reasons to do this for women — some neutral, some good, some bad — but one good thing nowadays is at least this includes women divorcing women.) And when you control for age, number of times married, years married, education, race/ethnicity, and nativity, it has still fallen 8%.

2. The pattern of increasing divorce at older ages, described by Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin as gray divorce, is no longer apparent. In the decade after 2008, the only apparent change in age effects is the decline at younger ages, holding other variables constant.

3. The longer term trends, identified by Kennedy and Ruggles, which I extend to 2016, show that the upward trajectory is all about older people. These are prevalences (divorced people in the population), not divorce rates, but they are good for illustrating this trend.

4. In fact, when you look just at the last decade, all of the decline in age-specific divorce rates is among people under age 45. This implies there will be more older people who have been married a long time, which means low divorce rates. Also, their kids won’t be as likely to have divorced parents, although more kids will have parents who aren’t married, which might work in the other direction. (You can ignore then under-20s, who are 0.2% of the total.)

5. Finally, to get a glimpse of the future, I looked at women who report getting married in the year before the survey, and how they have changed between 2008 and 2016 on traits associated with the risk of divorce. They clearly show a lower divorce-risk profile. They are more likely to be in their first marriage, to have college degrees, to be older, and to have no children in their households (race/ethnicity appears to be a wash, with fewer Whites but more Latinas).

6. Finally finally, I also looked at the spouses of the newly-married women, and made an arbitrary divorce-protection scale, with one point to each couple for each spouse who was: age 30 or more, White or Hispanic, BA or higher education, first marriage, and no own children. Since 2008 the high scale scores have become more common and the low scores have become rarer.

7. It’s interesting that the decline in divorce goes against the (non-expert) conventional wisdom. And it is happening at a time when public acceptance of divorce has reached record levels (which might be part of why people think it’s growing more common — less stigma). Here are the trends in attitudes from Pew and Gallup:

That’s my story — thanks for listening!

Demographic facts your students should know cold in 2018

Here’s an update of a series I started in 2013.

Is it true that “facts are useless in an emergency“? Depends how you define emergency I guess. Facts plus arithmetic let us ballpark the claims we are exposed to all the time. The idea is to get our radar tuned to identify falsehoods as efficiently as possible, to prevent them spreading and contaminating reality. Although I grew up on “facts are lazy and facts are late,” I actually still believe in this mission, I just shake my head slowly while I ramble on about it.

It started a few years ago with the idea that the undergraduate students in my class should know the size of the US population. Not to exaggerate the problem, but too many of them don’t, at least when they reach my sophomore level family sociology class. If you don’t know that fact, how can you interpret statements such as Trump’s, “I’ve created over a million jobs since I’m president,” referring to a period when the U.S. population grew by 1.3 million?

What’s a number for? Lots of people disparage the nitpickers when they find something wrong with the numbers going around. But everyone likes a number that appears to support their argument. The trick is to know the facts before you know the argument, and for that you need some foundational demographic knowledge. This list of facts you should know is just a prompt to get started in that direction.

Here’s the list of current demographic facts you need just to get through the day without being grossly misled or misinformed — or, in the case of journalists or teachers or social scientists, not to allow your audience to be grossly misled or misinformed. Not trivia that makes a point or statistics that are shocking, but the non-sensational information you need to make sense of those things when other people use them. And it’s really a ballpark requirement (when I test the undergraduates, I give them credit if they are within 20% of the US population — that’s anywhere between 262 million and 394 million!).

This is only 30 facts, not exhaustive but they belong on any top-100 list. Feel free to add your facts in the comments (as per policy, first-time commenters are moderated). They are rounded to reasonable units for easy memorization. All refer to the US unless otherwise noted. Most of the links will take you to the latest data:

 

Fact	Number	Source
World Population	7.5 billion	1
U.S. Population	328 million	1
Children under 18 as share of pop.	23%	2
Adults 65+ as share of pop.	16%	2
Official unemployment rate	3.9%	3
Unemployment rate range, 1970-2018	3.9% – 11%	3
Labor force participation rate, age 16+	63%	9
Labor force participation rate range, 1970-2017	60% – 67%	9
Non-Hispanic Whites as share of pop.	61%	2
Blacks as share of pop.	13%	2
Hispanics as share of pop.	18%	2
Asians as share of pop.	6%	2
American Indians as share of pop.	1%	2
Immigrants as share of pop	13%	2
Adults age 25+ with BA or higher	30%	2
Median household income	$55,300	2
Total poverty rate	13%	8
Child poverty rate	18%	8
Poverty rate age 65+	9%	8
Most populous country, China	1.4 billion	5
2nd most populous country, India	1.3 billion	5
3rd most populous country, USA	327 million	5
4th most populous country, Indonesia	261 million	5
5th most populous country, Brazil	207 million	5
U.S. male life expectancy at birth	76	6
U.S. female life expectancy at birth	81	6
Life expectancy range across countries	51 – 85	7
World total fertility rate	2.4	10
U.S. total fertility rate	1.8	10
Total fertility rate range across countries	1.2 – 7.2	10

Sources:
1. U.S. Census Bureau Population Clock

2. U.S. Census Bureau quick facts

3. Bureau of Labor Statistics

5. CIA World Factbook

6. National Center for Health Statistics

7. CIA World Factbook

8. U.S. Census Bureau poverty tables

9. Bureau of Labor Statistics

10. World Bank

Handy one-page PDF: Demographic Facts You Need to Know in 2018

Family sociology supplements for Fall 2018

People on a beach. Photo by PNC / https://flic.kr/p/29rYnfu

This year we released the second edition of my book The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, for fall. And my new book, a collection of essays, came out this spring: Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible, from University of California Press. (Also this year I sued the president.) But I keep writing blog posts about families, so I can update the list of syllabus supplements for this fall. (More resources are on the teaching page.)

So here are some new, and some old, organized by topic. As always, I appreciate your feedback.

1. Introduction

• Interview: Independence, uncertainty, defamilialization: I did a radio interview on family trends, and drew on some themes related to modernity and individualization that show up in Chapter 1.
• Science finds tiny things nowadays (Malia edition): Malia is a very rare name, but modern social science can detect even tiny fluctuations — a few hundred families per year, out of millions who have children — to show the Obama effect.
• Demographic facts your students should know cold in 2018: Here are 30 facts we should all be familiar with before getting too far in this course — or in life.

2. History

• Visualizing family modernization, 1900-2016: Teen marriage is down and divorce is up, with graphics and maps showing the trends in every state.
• African American marital status by age, Du Bois replication edition: Updating a figure from the great Black historian, and visualizing family change.
• Two examples of why “Millennials” is wrong: Don’t take this “generation” label for granted. It’s an arbitrary designation, and on closer scrutiny it doesn’t define a coherent group.

3. Race, ethnicity, and immigration

• Who are you gonna marry? That one big assumption marriage promotion gets totally wrong: Black and White women have different marriage markets, and the economic prospects of the men in the pool matter. (This follows a new paper on race and marriage markets, which ties to Chapter 3 of The Family.)
• Made in America, by immigrants (children): “Children of immigrants” is not such a simple concept. This shows where the mothers and fathers of children of immigrants were born.
• Six grueling demographic indicators of Detroit’s decline (and some pictures): The population dropped 64% since 1950, and shifted from 16% Black to more than 80% Black. The city that remains is a demographic disaster.

4. Social class

• The failure of the success sequence: Should the government use this formula to get young people to keep themselves out of poverty? I wrote an essay about it.
• New data show change in the class (identity) structure: What’s the trend is social class identification, and how does it relate to actual income?
• Policy, politics, and promoting education versus marriage: Instead of blaming poor women for not being married, how about decreasing the number of poor women, by increasing access to higher education?

5. Gender

• My, what dimorphic parents you have! Updating Disney dimorphism to include Moana, with a look at extremely different parents.
• Transgender discrimination is sex discrimination: A brief argument for using the law on sex discrimination to protect transgender rights, in response to the former Obama administration’s education reforms.
• Prince Charles and Princess Diana height situation explained: Following up on an example in the book, what are the true facts, and do they matter?

6. Sexuality

• On artificially intelligent gaydar: Did someone really create an algorithm to detect gayness? Critique and implications of a new study.
• Couple fact patterns about sexuality and attitudes: Updating trends on attitudes toward homosexuality; and same sex behavior, identity, and attraction.
• What was I supposed to do, not report the results? What if it’s true that women are more likely to wear red on dates — does that mean our sexual behavior is “hard wired”? I don’t think so.

7. Love and romantic relationships

• Is dating still dead? The death of dating is now 50 years old, and its been eulogized so many times that its feelings are starting to get hurt.
• Online dating: efficiency, inequality, and anxiety: I’m skeptical about efficiency, and concerned about inequality, as more dating moves online. Some of the numbers I use in this post are already dated, but this could be good for a debate about dating rules and preferences.
• Is the price of sex too damn low? To hear some researchers tell it in a recent YouTube video, women in general — and feminism in particular — have ruined not only sex, but society itself. The theory is wrong. Also, they’re insanely sexist.

8. Marriage and cohabitation

• Who’s happy in marriage? (Not just rich, White, religious men, but kind of): A look at trends in marital satisfaction. Extra credit: See how this research was presented in an article in Bloomberg.
• Data analysis: Are older newlyweds saving marriage? Some methods and data on post-recession marriage trends.
• Marriage update: Less divorce, and less sex: Divorce is down across the board, but American married couples are also having sex less often than they used to.

9. Families and children

• Modernity, parenting, and families: The first chapter from Enduring Bonds is available as a free sample.
• Are middle children going extinct? The number of children per family has fallen over time, and one effect of that is that fewer children grow up sandwiched between older and younger siblings.
• Fertility trends explained, 2017 edition: Birth rates have dropped a lot, and it’s not just the Great Recession. In fact, it might already be about the next recession. Also looks at birth rates by age, and compares the U.S. to other countries.

10. Divorce, remarriage, and blended families

• The liberalization of divorce attitudes proceeds apace: More and more Americans think divorce is morally acceptable, and should be easier to get.
• How low is too low for divorce?: An update on divorce rates through 2015, and a question we don’t usually ask.
• Check that: Most marrying people are remarrying above age 31: As the age at first marriage rises, second and third weddings are taking a larger share of the limelight.

11. Work and families

• Why male and female ‘breadwinners’ aren’t equivalent (in one chart): Pushing back on the tendency to call women who earn $.01 more than their husbands “breadwinners.”
• How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality? In this New York Times essay, I argue for paid family leave, reduced work hours, and public child care.
• What drives the rise of stay at home fathers? How you interpret the trend depends on how you define stay at home fathers. With the “hardcore” definition, stay at home mothers still outnumber stay at home fathers 24-to-1.

12. Family violence and abuse

• Survivor bias and the 92% of Southern Black men who support spanking: With NFL family violence in the news, I asked why so many Americans rationalize spanking by referring to their own childhoods.
• Getting beyond how the ‘Factual Feminist’ is wrong about the prevalence of rape: It’s not perfect, but if you had to pick a number it’s reasonable to estimate that one in five women will be a victim of rape in their lifetime.
• Final proof there is no human tragedy Brad Wilcox will not exploit in order to promote marriage: Did he really just say that women should get married if they don’t want to be raped? (In fact, marriage and rape have both fallen a lot in the last few decades.)

13. The future of the family

• Against Trump’s family separation policy: My critical commentary on the policy of separating children from parents at the border, with a petition signed by a thousand researchers and practitioners.
• Get your dependency ratio off my lawn: Old people are doing more work than they used to. A new way of showing how much weight they pull now.
• 2016 U.S. population pyramid, with Baby Boom: The latest age distribution, with data and instructions for making pyramids in Excel.

Amend your ASA/Sage author agreement!

This is a followup to a previous post, and contains some duplication.

I have spoken well of the policy that permits authors to post preprint versions of their papers before submitting them to journals of the American Sociological Association. That means you can get your work out more broadly while it’s going through the review process. The rule says:

ASA authors may post working versions of their papers on their personal web sites and non-peer-reviewed repositories. Such postings are not considered by ASA as previous publication.

The policy goes on to ask that authors modify their posted papers to acknowledge publication if they are subsequently published. That’s all reasonable. This is why SocArXiv and other services offer authors the opportunity to link their papers to the DOI (record locator) for the published version, should it become available. This allows citation aggregators such as Google Scholar to link the records.

The problem

Unfortunately, the good part of this policy is undermined by the ASA / Sage author agreement that authors sign when their paper is accepted. It transfers the copyright of the paper to ASA, and sets conditions under which authors can distribute the paper in the future. The key passage here is this:

1. Subject to the conditions in this paragraph, without further permission each Contributor may …

• At any time, circulate or post on any repository or website, the version of the Contribution that Contributors submitted to the Journal (i.e. the version before peer-review) or an abstract of the Contribution.
• No sooner than 12 months after initial publication, post on any non-commercial repository or website the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication.

This is not good. It means that if you post a paper publicly, e.g., on SocArXiv, and then submit it to ASA, you can’t update it to the revised version as your paper moves through the process. Only 12 months after ASA publishes it can you update the preprint version to match the version that the journal approved.

This policy, if followed, would produce multiple bad outcomes.

One scenario is that people post papers publicly, and submit them to ASA journals for review. Over the course of the next year or so, the paper is substantially revised and eventually published, but the preprint version is not updated until a full year after that, often two years after the initial submission. That means readers don’t get to see the improved version, and authors have to live with people reading and sharing their unimproved work. This discourages people from sharing their papers in the first place.

In the other scenario, people update their preprints as the paper goes through the revision process, so they and their readers get the benefit of access to the latest work. However, when the paper is accepted authors are expected to remove from public view that revised paper, and only share the pre-review version. If this were feasible, it would be terrible for science and the public interest, as well as the author’s career interests. Of course, this isn’t really feasible — you can’t unring the bell of internet distribution (SocArXiv and other preprint services do not allow removing papers, which would corrupt the scholarly record.) This would also discourage people from sharing their papers in the first place.

The individual solution

Fortunately, you are a volitional agent in a free market information ecosystem, and you don’t have to just sign whatever PDF some corporate conglomerate puts in front of you. My suggestion is that you amend the agreement before you sign it. After receiving your acceptance, when the managing editor sends you the author agreement for your signature, politely notify the editor that you will be happy to sign the agreement with a minor amendment. Then strike through the offending text and add the amendment. I recommend the following text:

• No sooner than 12 months after initial publication, post on any non-commercial repository or website the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication.
• At any time, post to SocArXiv (a non-commercial, open-access repository) the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication, with a DOI link and bibliographic reference to the published Contribution.

Then sign the agreement and return it. Here’s a visual depiction of the amendment:

Don’t panic! Yes, this publication may be the last thing standing between you and tenure or a better job. But the journal will not cancel your publication when you do this. The very worst thing that will happen is they will say “No!” Then you can roll over and accept the original agreement. (After the dust settles, I’d love it if you let me know this happened.) People amend these agreements all the time. Give it a try!

Here’s the relevant passage in “Alice’s Restaurant” (@ 14:32)

And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation,

And if you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into The shrink wherever you are, just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony – they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out.

And friends they may think it’s a movement And that’s what it is, the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar. With feeling.

Fix the policy

So, what possible reason can there be for this policy? It is clearly intended to punish the public in order to buttress the revenue stream of Sage, which returns some of its profits to ASA, at the expense of our libraries, which pay for subscriptions to ASA journals.

I assume this policy is never enforced, as I’ve never heard of it, but I don’t know that for a fact. It’s also possible that whoever wrote the Publications policy I linked above didn’t realize that it contradicted the Sage author agreement, which basically no one reads. I also assume that such a policy does not in fact have any effect on Sage’s profits, or the profits that it kick backs to ASA. So it’s probably useless, but if it has any effects at all they’re bad, by discouraging people from distributing their work. ASA should change this author agreement.

I just got elected to the ASA Publications Committee, so I will add making this change to my platform, which I outlined here. I’m not optimistic about making policy changes at ASA in the current environment, but I am sure that the more people who join in the individual efforts, the greater our chances will be.

Michael Kimmel’s American Sociological Association Award

UPDATE: I am disappointed to report that the American Sociological Association did not follow this advice, and announced Kimmel as the winner of this award at their annual meeting award ceremony — while falsely claiming that he was “unable” to be there.

How the American Sociological Association can stop Michael Kimmel from winning the Jessie Bernard Award.

The ASA meetings are happening now in Philadelphia, and the association is confronting the case of Kimmel, a famous senior sociologist who specializes in men and masculinity studies from a feminist perspective. He was named as the winner of the association’s Jessie Bernard Award, which recognizes feminist sociologists. After the award was announced, but before it was formally given to him (which was to happen at the conference), the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled, bootlegged) reported that a former student accused him of sexual misconduct, and a senior sociologist affirmed the existence of rumors about a long history of sexual misconduct, in particular unwanted advances and demeaning comments toward women. Another former student, Bethany Coston, accused Kimmel of sexism and abusing students who worked for him. Kimmel told the Chronicle he would “delay” accepted the award to give people time to file complaints against him.

ASA has no authority over Kimmel. You don’t need to be a member of ASA to practice sociology. All the association can do is revoke people’s membership, although doing so publicly would presumably have damaging reputation effects. To do that, ASA would need to do an investigation, and that takes time (not a time specified by Kimmel, but time nonetheless).

However, because the award has not yet been awarded, so to speak, it would be entirely appropriate for the award committee to reconvene and continue consideration of the award in light of the new information that they have. This does not require a full investigation, because it is action limited to the award, which has not yet been formally bestowed. It doesn’t require action by the association’s top leadership. If committee decides they no longer believe he should win the award — which I believe is the correct decision — then he doesn’t get it. The leadership only has to acknowledge the decision. That’s my suggestion.

The very idea of a man winning a feminism award, over the objections of the feminists in the association, and maybe over the objections of the award committee members themselves, while he is under investigation for sexual harassment and other abuse, is intolerable for the association. Reconvening the committee solves the immediate crisis, and allows the association to pursue an ethics case on its own time.

Some people will object to this action because they want more procedural fairness. But an award is a privilege, not a right. Losing an award is not a death sentence, it’s not career-ending. It’s not even job-ending. It’s not an overreaction. It’s a prudent response to the emergence of credible damaging information. The association should err on the side of not giving a major award, which is totally discretionary, to a person under this major cloud. If it all blows over and turns out to be a big misunderstanding, give it to him later.

If the alternative is between doing nothing, or next to nothing, even for six months — and the fallout from that — versus the decision to not award the award, which some people may perceive as unfair, the choice is clear. You can’t give the award under these conditions, and there is no reason to drag that decision out. The MeToo experience has shown that swift institutional responses are considered prudent and reasonable, while dallying and equivocating is harshly punished by public opinion.

To respect the sentiments of the membership, and to protect the association from well-deserved humiliation, ASA has to find a way not to give this award to Michael Kimmel, and the award committee is the appropriate body to make that decision.

Visualizing family modernization, 1900-2016

After this post about small multiple graphs, and partly inspired by two news reports I was interviewed for — this Salt Lake Tribune story about teen marriage, and this New York Times report mapping age at first birth — I made some historical data figures.

These visualizations use decennial census data from 1900 to 1990, and then American Community Survey data for 2001, 2010, and 2016; all data from IPUMS.org. (I didn’t use the 2000 Census because marital status is messed up in that data, with a lot of people who should be never married coded as married, spouse absent; 2001 ACS gets it done.)

An important, simple way of illustrating the myth-making around the 1950s is with marriage age. Contrary to the myth that the 1950s was “traditional,” a long data series show the period to be unique. The two trends here, teen marriage and divorce, both show the modernization of family life, with increasing individual self-determination and less restricted family choices for women.

First, I show the proportion of teenage women married in each state, for each decade from 1900 to 2016. The measure I used for this is the proportion of 19- and 20-year-olds who have ever been married (that is, including those married, divorced, and widowed). It’s impossible to tell exactly how many people were married before their 20th birthday, which would be a technical definition of teen marriage, but the average of 19 and 20 should do it, since it includes some people are on the first day of their 19th year, and some people are on the last day of their 20th, for an average close to exact age 20.

I start with a small multiple graph of the trend on this measure in every state (click all figures to enlarge). Here the states are ordered by the level of teen marriage in 2016, from Maine lowest (<1%) to Utah (14%):

This is useful for seeing that the basic pattern is universal: starting the century lower and rising to a peak in 1960, then declining steeply to the present. But that similarity, and smaller range in the latest data, make it hard to see the large relative differences across states now. Here are the 2016 levels, showing those disparities clearly:

Neither the small multiples nor the bars help you see the regional patterns and variations. So here’s an animated map that shows both the scale of change and the pattern of variation.

This makes clear the stark South/non-South divide, and how the Northeast led the decline in early marriage. Also, you can see that Utah, which is such a standout now, did not have historically high teen marriage levels, the state just hasn’t matched the decline seen nationally. Their premodernism emerged only in relief.

Divorce

Here I again used a prevalence measure. This is just the number of people whose marital status is divorced, divided by the number of married people (including separated and divorced). It’s a little better than just the percentage divorced in the population, because it’s at least scaled by marriage prevalence. But it doesn’t count divorces happening, and it doesn’t count people who divorced and then remarried (so it will under-represent divorce to the extent that people remarry). Also, if divorced people die younger than married people, it could be messed up at older ages. Anyway, it’s the best thing I could think of for divorce rates by state all the way back to 1900.

So, here’s the small multiple graph, showing the trend in divorce prevalence for all states from 1900 to 2016:

That looks like impressive uniformity: gradual increase until 1970, then a steep upward turn to the present. These are again ordered by the 2016 value, from Utah at less than 20% to New Mexico at more than 30% — smaller variation than we saw in teen marriage. That steep increase looks dramatic in the animated map, which also reveals the regional patterns:

Technique

The strategy for both trends is to download microdata samples from all years, then collapse the files down to state averages by decade. The linear figures are Stata scatter plots by state. The animated maps use maptile in Stata (by Michael Stepner) to make separate image files for each map, which I then imported into Photoshop to make the animations (following this tutorial).

The downloaded data, codebooks, Stata code, and images, are all available in an Open Science Framework project here. Feel free to adapt and use. Happy to hear suggestions and alternative techniques in the comments.

Legal risks in reporting on academic sexual harassment

Gossip, according to Google Images

This is on the nuts and bolts of reporting sexual harassment.

Last fall my colleague Liana Sayer and I offered to help people report on sexual harassment in academic sociology (other posts on this: #MeToo). Although we have corresponded with a number of people, we have yet to make any public reports. One reason for that is legal risk.

The first advice I got from a number of people was to get a lawyer, and to get libel insurance. I did both of those things (libel turns out to be a kind of personal injury, like hitting someone in your car, so you can get covered for it under an umbrella policy).

After attending a media law conference (long story), and having gathered enough evidence to consider moving ahead with publication in one case, I spoke to several lawyers, and eventually retained Constance Pendleton, a media law expert and partner at Davis Wright Tremain. Here is some of what I learned from speaking with her.

First, if the case involves harassment within one workplace (school), it may be better to go through the official reporting procedure rather than making a public case, at least from the perspective of protecting the accuser. This involves lawyers and documents, which is good. However, for reasons I mentioned here, that often doesn’t work. And that process often ends with a promise of confidentiality that shields the harasser from public exposure (a key institutional goal of many university sexual harassment officers).

Second, the risk of getting sued as an individual is high. We don’t have a lot of experience in the current context with lawsuits against accusers, but the cases that have come forward have often involved major investigations by big organizations, not individuals publishing accusations on their blogs. So it’s hard to know how they will play. However,  even the cost of “easily” winning a case is likely to be a lot, something in five figures. And in the process, the accuser you are trying to protect could be forced to testify, or at least produce an affidavit, even if you have kept them anonymous in the story. Truth is a defense against libel, but if your true statement is “someone told me this,” you can still be found responsible if you can’t prove that what the person told you is true, or if it can be shown you acted maliciously in reporting it.

In the case of being sued, the things you need are the things a good journalist would want in reporting such a story, such as original documents, contemporaneous records, witnesses, and so on. There is a reason for that: journalists who report this stuff are heading off such lawsuits themselves. But I didn’t fully appreciate some key differences between a citizen journalist and a real news organization. These include the reputation of the news organization, which shields them (practically if not legally) from charges of acting maliciously. Also, they have lawyers already, so it doesn’t cost them as much to defend cases. And they have an interest in defending their reputation, so everyone knows they will fight. Finally, there are some legal protections for revealing information if you do it in the public interest, and that’s an easier case for news organizations to make. (This is my shallow, lay understanding of the situation, not legal advice).

Regardless of my thoughts on procedural fairness, which is hotly debated, these are reasons why I wouldn’t report on rumors alone, or report a case where I didn’t know the accuser’s identity and had no way of verifying the supporting information.

News reality

Given all this, The best thing might be for a news organization to report the story, rather than reporting it independently. I haven’t ruled out the latter course, but it’s much riskier. (And there may be hybrid solutions, such as writing a reported piece as a freelancer for a news organization.) Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, news organizations that are interested in reporting on sexual harassment are getting bombarded with cases to report. They have to choose selectively from among these cases, and the variables involved are beyond my control.

In the case of Michael Kimmel, for example, reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled, bootlegged), the story includes one accuser who requested anonymity, and one senior sociologist who affirms the existence of rumors, and the charge is unwanted advances and demeaning comments. In this environment, that would not normally be enough to warrant a news story by a major publication, naming the accused. Not very much evidence and not such an egregious case (no reported threats, quid pro quo, or violence). That’s not an excuse, that’s a fact of the media landscape. The difference here is Kimmel is famous, and that he is “delaying” receiving a major award (plus it’s an award for being a feminist). If you brought the same facts and evidence to a news organization, but about a non-famous senior sociologist, you are unlikely to make it past editorial triage.

In summary, the very cases that I most want to expose — the common harassment that occurs between non-famous people all the time in academia — are difficult to work with. Risky for the citizen journalist, but maybe not important enough to jump the line at major news organizations. That said, I still favor public exposure as an approach in this environment, where policies remain weak and formal proceedings are unlikely to produce satisfactory results — but harassers and their employers are on the defensive and much of the public is watching and willing to get involved. And I still want to help. But it’s harder than I thought it would be. Live and learn.