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Nancy DiTomaso is Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick. She is also the author of our latest book, The American Non-Dilemma, which provides a comprehensive examination of the persistence of racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era and how it plays out in today's economic and political context.

Q: Let’s start with the title of your book, a reference to the landmark text by Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma. Myrdal argued that white Americans would eventually face the contradiction or dilemma between their belief in American values such as equality and fair opportunity on the one hand, and the growing attention to racial inequality on the other. You argue, however, that for many whites, no such dilemma currently exists. Why do you believe whites are "uncertain allies in the struggle for civil rights"?

More Research on Racial Inequality
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A: Myrdal’s argument, contrary to the way it is often portrayed, is that white Americans would experience a moral dilemma because of the contradiction between the foundational beliefs held by all Americans toward equality before the law and fair play and the growing evidence at the time he was writing of racial inequality in the politics of the 1930s, as well as in the racial dimension of World War II (i.e., a fight against an ideology of racial supremacy in Germany and Japan), which he claimed was understood around the world. He believed that this moral dilemma would lead some whites, especially in the North, to use both law and social movements to bring about an end to the racial caste system, especially in the South.

I found in my analysis, however, that in the post-Civil Rights period, the framing of racial inequality in terms of racism and discrimination, that is, of some whites doing bad things to or holding back nonwhites, especially African Americans, contributes to an American Non-Dilemma. Because whites do not have to actively exclude or do bad things to blacks in order to benefit from racial inequality, they do not experience the kind of moral dilemma that Myrdal believed would move them to support social change. Thus, in the post-Civil Rights period, I argue that it is whites helping other whites that may be as much a factor in reproducing racial inequality as whites discriminating against or expressing racist feelings towards blacks and other nonwhites. Indeed, most whites say they believe in civil rights, believe that equal opportunity is the standard of fairness, and believe that everyone should be rewarded for their efforts. They do not readily think about the extent to which they drew on the social resources and help from family, friends, and acquaintances in order to get their own jobs. Yet, I found that this is how the interviewees in my study found most of their jobs throughout their lifetimes.

Q: One of your main arguments is that the national conversation on racial inequality remains too focused on racism, or racial discrimination. Instead, you say we should focus on “in-group favoritism” in terms of whites helping other whites. Explain how this dynamic works, and why you think it’s a better frame for thinking about racial inequality.

A: Because whites disproportionately hold jobs with more authority, higher pay, more opportunities for skill development and training, and more links to other jobs, they can benefit from racial inequality without being racists and without discriminating against blacks and other nonwhites. In fact, I argue that the ultimate white privilege is the privilege not to be racist and still benefit from racial inequality.

In my study, I found that 99 percent of the interviewees found 70 percent of the jobs they had held throughout their lifetimes with the added help from family, friends, or acquaintances, who provided them with inside information not available to others, such as when a job was available, used influence on their behalf, or actually offered them an opportunity or a job. That is, although all of the interviewees said that equal opportunity is the standard of fairness, almost all of them actively sought "unequal opportunity” in their own lives. The last thing that they would want was to have to compete equally in the job market, when finding a job that paid a living wage, provided benefits and some job security was so important to having a decent life. Given this, most wanted to find ways to “get ahead” or to “gain advantage.”

Over the past month or so, we've shared excerpts and data from our new book, The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, which analyzes boys' stagnating educational achievement over the last several decades. Yesterday, Claudia Buchmann, a co-author of the book, appeared on the MSNBC show The Cycle to discuss the volume's research:

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Judging from the number of articles on the subject in the media, there is a persistent concern that Americans are growing increasingly isolated from one another. Have changes in family patterns and the rise of the Internet reduced the strength (and the number) of our social ties? Do we have fewer numbers of confidantes, friends, and relatives to turn to? In the latest issue of Contemporary Sociology, Naomi Gerstel reviews Claude Fischer's latest RSF book Still Connected: Family and Friends in America since 1970 and finds a convincing -- and "stunning" -- finding that "there has been no decline of community, no decline of connections":

In Still Connected, Claude Fischer provides an account of the manifold ways in which we have remained engaged with family and friends from 1970 to 2010. [...] Fischer quite convincingly shows that notwithstanding demographic changes and technological developments, Americans still manage to visit, talk, and help others about as much as they did before such changes occurred. Here, Fischer is continuing a debate he had in the pages of the American Sociological Review where he criticized Miller McPherson and his colleagues for suggesting that many Americans are now so isolated that they have no one with whom to share important matters. Fischer shows that the percent of social isolates is ‘‘virtually nil’’ and the number has remained about the same over the past four decades. Moreover, Americans now see relatives as often, maybe their mothers even a little more; they talk more to friends, both in person and virtually, than they did in the 1970s. And their feelings about these connections have changed little as well. Americans experience no more loneliness and maybe even less. They still value family life, even three-generation households which have continued to rise since Fischer wrote this book.

Last week, we shared data from our new book, The Rise of Women, about the persistence of gender segregation in higher education. The trend is a puzzling one: women have made extraordinary gains at all levels of education over the past fifty years, but they are still underrepresented in engineering and the physical sciences (and overrepresented in the social sciences and humanities). More worryingly, gender persistence in academic majors has remained relatively stable for the past two decades.

Why don't more women choose to major in the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)? In chapter eight of the book, authors Claudia Buchmann and Thomas DiPrete examine several prominent theories (presented below). Their own analysis shows that the high school years are crucial to understanding trends in gender segregation. Between grades 8 and 12, girls tend to lose interest in the sciences, possibly because of prevailing stereotypes that link ability in sciences with masculine identity. They suggest that science-intensive high schools could make a big difference: "Some schools may do an especially good job of eroding common stereotypes that link majoring in a STEM field with masculine identity. Recent evidence suggests that schools with strong science and math curricula are particularly good at delinking STEM fields from masculine stereotypes."

Here are the major arguments they make in the chapter:

1. Gender Segregation in Majors Is Not About Intellectual Ability

Using data from HSB, NELS, and ELS, Mann and DiPrete (2012) found that math test scores explain even less of the gender gap in physical science and engineering majors than was found in the College and Beyond data analyzed by Turner and Bowen (1999). Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman (2003) similarly assessed the most commonly asserted causes for women’s underrepresentation in the hard sciences and engineering fields. Like Turner and Bowen (1999), Xie and Shauman concluded that the gender differences in science majors are not due to gender differences in math ability or math training in high school, since these gaps have closed. Nor are they due to girls’ lower participation in high school math and science course work.[...] These findings are consistent with other studies that also find gender differences in math and science achievement, as indicated by standardized tests, to be too small to explain gender differences in math and science education or occupations (Hyde 2005; Hyde et al. 2008; Spelke 2005).

2. Girls Are Not Necessarily Driven by Different Career "Values"

[Recent] research suggests that gender differences in values have little power to explain gender differences in choice of college major. As Mann and DiPrete (2012) note, values related to career-family conflict have not impeded the trend to full gender equality in law and medical schools, even if gender segregation persists in the choice of specialties within these two professions. In a direct assessment of the role of values in choice of major, Mann and DiPrete used data from HSB, NELS, and ELS to assess the impact of three dimensions of values: aspirations toward having a family, the importance of money and success, and the importance of helping others. They found that students who value the importance of helping others and who have stronger family aspirations are less likely to major in the physical sciences or engineering, while those who value the importance of helping others are more likely to major in the biological sciences. However, these effects were small; they accounted for very little of the gender difference in majoring in STEM versus non-STEM fields and also very little of the gender difference in the distribution of majors within STEM fields.

In their RSF book Whose Rights? Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion, sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza present fascinating new data on what Americans think about the counterterrorism agenda put in place after the 9/11 terror attacks. Their evidence comes from three national telephone surveys conducted between 2007 and 2010; their surveys included embedded experiments that sought to track whether key factors -- information about a hypothetical terrorist attack, for example, or national identity cues -- affected attitudes towards policies like torture or stricter airport security. Below are three broad conclusions, along with explanatory excerpts from Brooks and Manza's book:

1. 'Threat Priming'
A theorem of classical social psychology is that the successful deployment of threats tends to generate highly illiberal and rights-restricting responses on the part of individuals. Threat is often easy to manipulate and more motivating than simple fear. Our experiments complement this scholarship in two ways. First, with respect to time, our results extend previous estimates with new survey data and experiments spanning the years 2007, 2009, and 2010. Second, using comparatively modest experimental cues—typically involving a single-sentence reference such as “What if the government was responding to a terrorist act that had just taken place?”—we find significant impacts on survey responses.

We have been struck by the strength of the threat results on both counts. [...] As we discussed in chapter 4, threat primes are the single largest effect in experiments in which they are deployed. We have also been surprised by the magnitude of such impacts in 2010, nearly a decade after the original 9/11 effects. Far from declining in efficacy, threat priming appears remarkably potent.

2. American Citizenship
[We] find novel evidence for the operation of national identity as a significant lens through which Americans view policy. In our experiments, when respondents are primed to think that American citizens are the target of coercive policies, support tends to decline significantly. Similarly, an alternative cuing of policy targets as foreign nationals tends to raise support. We find the American public gives priority to their own rights and liberties but shows far less willingness to extend protections to the rest of the world’s citizens. This underlying restriction is notable in its own right and parallels rather provocatively the far greater rights violations meted out to foreign nationals in the war on terror.

Experimental cues involving national identity characteristics operate the same among whites and nonwhites and among self-identified Christians versus others. Even more telling evidence comes from our experiments manipulating the national identity status of a key insider group (Christians) and a second outsider group (people from the Middle East). So powerful is the impact of U.S. citizenship status that its experimental manipulations can prompt respondents to display indistinguishable affect toward these two initially polar groups. Under experimental conditions, Christians who are not U.S. citizens now elicit the same degree of emotional warmth as people from the Middle East who are U.S. citizens. American citizenship status, in short, is remarkably important as such, and not just as a cover for other, different identity attributions.

In our last post on our new book, The Rise of Women, we presented seven charts that document the rapid gains women have made in education during the latter half of the 20th century. Women are more likely than men to persist in college, obtain degrees, and enroll in graduate school. But even as the number of advanced degrees earned by women has increased dramatically, gender segregation in fields of study has stubbornly persisted. Men and women in college choose different majors, a trend that has major implications for gender segregation in the workplace. The following two charts, also taken from The Rise of Women, show the academic trends among male and female college students:

Authors Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann explain the data presented above:

These figures demonstrate that sharp differences persist in the distribution of degrees within each gender. No single field of the seven dominates the male distribution, though business degrees have constituted the largest share since the late 1970s, while engineering and other health and education degrees constitute the second and third largest shares. The natural and life sciences constitute the smallest shares throughout the thirty-five-year period.

The trends for females in figure 8.4 look quite different than the trends for males. First, degrees in other health and in education constitute a much larger share of the degrees for women than for men. This category constituted over 60 percent of the degrees earned by women in the early 1970s, and its share fell toward 40 percent as opportunities for women increased in other fields. Over the past twenty years, however, this area has held a steady and even slightly increasing share of the advanced degrees for women. Another prominent trend shown in figure 8.4 concerns business degrees, which constituted a rapidly growing share of degrees for women until the mid-1980s and a more gradually growing share thereafter. Degrees in medicine, dentistry, and law also constituted a growing share of all degrees earned by women until the mid-1980s, but since then their share has gradually fallen, even though the female share of all degrees awarded in these areas has grown continually throughout this period (see figure A.12). Degrees in physical science, mathematics, and engineering have constituted a relatively small share of all degrees earned by women from the early 1970s to the present day (emphasis added).

Writing for The Atlantic, Philip Cohen, a sociologist and creator of the excellent blog Family Inequality, praises our latest book, The Rise of Women:

The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools is both ambitious and modest in its goals: Sociologists Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide an ambitious analysis of why and how girls are outperforming boys in high school and going on to get a disproportionate share of college degrees. However, the authors modestly remain within their subject matter and avoid the unsupported claims about women's looming social dominance that have inflated much of the conversation about gender dynamics today.

This allows us to have a reasonable, valuable conversation about an important problem: the failure of the education system to help a majority of students to reach their academic potential. We clearly do not have a problem of over-education among women. Even among Whites alone, women as well as men are graduating college at rates lower than those in the most educationally advanced societies (which used to include the United States). Rather, we have a dysfunctional system that underperforms for men more than for women.

Rather than focusing on the full range of educational failures, DiPrete and Buchmann focus on a low-hanging fruit policy question: How can we improve college degree attainment for the approximately one-third of students who are ready to graduate college but do not, because they do not have the resources, they change their minds for some reason, or they are not adequately supported in the endeavor?

Our latest book, The Rise of Women: The Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools provides a detailed and accessible account of women's rapid educational gains over the past 50 years. It also examines several enduring policy problems, such as stagnating male college graduation rates, and why women continue to lag behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. Below, we have compiled seven charts from The Rise of Women that show recent trends in the gender gap in education, along with a brief explanation of each figure (also taken from the book):

The figure above reports trends in GPA over time for male and female students. Several points are noteworthy. First, the figure shows an increase in overall GPA between 1972 and 2004 for males and females of about 0.4 to 0.5 on a 4.0 GPA scale. A statistically significant female-favorable grade gap exists for each time point, and the size of these gaps remains relatively constant, ranging from about 0.24 to 0.30 over the period.

Women born in the late 1950s and early 1960s (who were of college age during the 1980s) overtook men in their rates of completing bachelor's degrees. On a cohort-by-cohort basis, the male college graduation rate peaked around the birth cohort of 1950 and then remained essentially flat for about fifteen birth cohorts. By 2010 twenty-six- to twenty-eight-year-old females had a more than eight-percentage-point lead in college degree receipt over their male counterparts. This constitutes an enormous change in the relative position of men and women in a very short period of time.

The figure displays trends in men’s and women’s completion of master’s degrees from the 1969–1970 school year to the 2009–2010 school year. Just over three decades ago, in 1969–1970, more men than women completed master’s degrees: 143,083 master’s degrees were awarded to men, compared to 92,481 awarded to women (Snyder and Dillow 2012). But from 1980 onward, women’s rate of master’s degree completion grew more rapidly. By 2009–2010, women were awarded roughly 50 percent more master’s degrees than men—417,828 versus 275,197.

Women’s growth in professional and doctoral degrees has been slower than that for bachelor’s or master’s degrees, and they have only recently reached parity with men in professional and doctoral degrees. In 1970 men completed sixteen times more professional degrees than women did. But since 1982, the number of professional degrees completed by men has declined slightly (from 40,229 in 1982 to 34,661 in 2010), while women’s professional degree completion has increased almost twentyfold—from 1,534 professional degrees in 1970 to 30,289 in 2010.

In 1969-1970, women comprised almost 40 percent of all students awarded master's degrees, but they comprised only 11 percent of students awarded doctoral degrees and 6 percent of students awarded professional degrees. Women's share of master's degrees has grown over the past three decades, and women currently comprise 60 percent of students earning master's degrees.

The number of degrees earned by women differs enormously across these fields (and therefore the counts are reported on a log scale). Women have increased the number of advanced degrees they earn in all fields since the early 1970s. Since the 1980s, women have earned more than 50 percent of the advanced degrees in the social sciences and humanities as well as in other health professions and education; the same has been true in social sciences and humanities since the mid-1970s. In life sciences, women achieved parity and then surpassed men in advanced degrees in the early years of the current decade. They have nearly reached parity with men in the combined fields of medicine, dentistry, and law, and they have been heading steadily toward parity in advanced business degrees. Women’s share of total degrees in physical sciences and mathematics is lower than in these other fields, but their steady gains in physical sciences and mathematics show no sign of plateauing.

Yesterday, we looked at some of the lessons from Great Britain's recent push to expand access to preschool education. Today, we examine the preschool experience in France, where almost all children are enrolled in preschool at the age of three. First established in 1882, preschool -- or ecole maternelle -- has a long history in France, but the universal access that currently exists largely stems from reforms adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, according to Christelle Dumas and Arnaud LeFranc, enrollment rates for three-year-olds increased from around 35 percent to more than 90 percent. Preschool conditions in France are similar to primary education -- instructors generally receive the same level of training as primary school teachers, and children receive a substantial amount of instruction (typically six hours per day, four days a week, and thirty-six weeks per year).

In their chapter in From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage, Dumas and LeFranc exploited this rapid rise in enrollment to assess the impact of preschool education on students' educational and labor market outcomes. Their study is important because there are relatively few assessments of universal access preschool programs; most research, at least in the United States, has focused on targeted experiments such as the Perry program. Dumas and LeFranc offer a generally positive assessment: they conclude that one additional year of French preschool reduced the probability of repeating first grade, and that attending preschool for two and three years, rather than one year, increased participants’ monthly wages by 3.2 percent and 3.6 percent respectively when they entered the labor market. Here is their summary of their main findings:

We find evidence that preschool has significant and lasting positive effects and helps children succeed in school and secure higher wages in the labor market. The effects on school performance are observed at different ages and through a variety of outcomes (number of repetitions, test scores, diplomas). Identification of long-lasting effects contradicts the results of Magnuson and her colleagues (2007) for the United States. More precisely, preschool does not provide a one-shot advantage but, rather, makes children more likely to succeed at each step of their schooling career and in the labor market. This suggests that this early intervention manages to affect more than just the cognitive level of the children. Unfortunately, the data do not allow us to identify what changes for the children who have attended preschool. Are they more able to concentrate? Have they developed social skills? Do they assimilate rules more easily? The answer is probably a mix of these mechanisms, but is a matter for future research to explore.

In May 1997, the New Labour government in Britain announced plans to provide universal and free preschool for all four-year-olds within two years. The new entitlement, expanded to include three-year-olds in 2004, dramatically raised preschool enrollment rates (previously among the lowest in Europe) and narrowed gaps in enrollment between richer and poorer families. In her book, Britain's War on Poverty, Jane Waldfogel reviews Britain's preschool experiment and suggests lessons for the United States, an instructive exercise as President Obama now begins his own push to expand access to preschool education. An excerpt from the Waldfogel's book is published below:

A large body of evidence documents that high-quality preschool programs increase children’s school readiness, with particularly large effects for the most-disadvantaged children. Hence, expanding quality preschool programs can raise overall school readiness as well as close gaps between low-income children and their more-affluent peers. However, not all preschool programs are alike; the evidence suggests that higher-quality programs yield larger gains. Research in Britain, for example, strongly suggests that children learn more in preschool when they are in school- or center-based settings (as opposed to less formal types of child care settings) and when those programs are led by staff who have a university degree.

Yet, as I highlighted in my discussion of the reforms, some of the programs that British three- and four-year-olds attend are not formal school- or center-based programs, and relatively few are led by university-educated staff. In this regard, the British experience offers a cautionary note for the United States, which, like Britain, has a heavily privatized child care system and one in which the type and quality of provision is highly variable. If the United States follows the British example and provides subsidies that parents can take to a wide range of child care programs, the quality of that provision will vary widely, and the gains that have been seen from the best-quality preschool programs will not be realized. Fortunately, there are many other models to draw on, including the universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States itself, which are now operating in several states, with programs located in the public schools or in approved preschool settings that meet standards set by the public schools. These universal pre-kindergarten programs have a strong track record of promoting children’s school readiness and have been well received by parents, who view them as part of the public education system. Thus my recommendation: The United States should draw inspiration from how quickly and decisively Britain moved to universal preschool provision, but should draw on the best evidence on U.S. preschool and pre-kindergarten programs in deciding what type of provision to support.