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INSTRUCTOR: In this screencast, we're going to try
and fly through four different things here, the
stratification by race, ethnicity, gender, and age.
So we're going to go quickly on this one.
But what's what?
When we first talk about race and ethnicity, a lot of times
people don't understand what the difference is.
A racial group, think of physical differences, OK?
Ethnicity, think of a national origin or a cultural
difference.
Now which one is most easy to notice?
That would be obviously a racial situation.
One of the problems with Hitler during World War II was
when trying to identify the Jews, sometimes he didn't know
who they were because it wasn't as obvious.
So that's kind of the difference
between race and ethnicity.
When we talk about prejudice and discrimination, there's
also a difference here.
Prejudice is a person's attitudes toward something.
Discrimination refers to their behavior.
So a person could be prejudiced but potentially not
be discriminatory.
They may feel certain ways or have certain attitudes but may
not act on those attitudes.
Now if we take what we just learned and we talk about
discrimination today and, in particular, like hate crimes,
if we look at the hate crimes and the percent of motivation
behind those hate crimes, I can tell you these percentages
have changed almost none at all in the last 10 years.
They've remained very, very constant with just slight
differences.
And you see that most of the hate crimes
are related to race.
Why?
Because that's the easiest thing to see, and therefore
people tend to discriminate against it.
They're going to be more likely to discriminate.
Diversity in the United States.
When we talk about diversity, we have become a much more
diverse country.
We are diverse now in terms of like eating establishments,
restaurants, things like that, education,
a variety of places--
the workplace.
But the one place where we still are least likely to be
diverse is in where we live.
People still tend to live in communities with other people
of their particular race and/or ethnicity.
You can see kind of a chart here in terms of, how diverse
is the United States?
If you look at Indiana right here, Indiana is ranked 33rd
in terms of diversity within the United States.
Where is the most diverse state?
That would actually be Hawaii.
It's ranked number one for the most diverse.
In terms of jobs and occupations, how fair is the
situation in the United States today?
Well, it's still not totally fair.
It's not where we should be.
We refer to a glass ceiling.
And glass ceiling is kind of an invisible barrier that
tends to block certain people, based on either their sex or
their race or their ethnicity, from management positions or
higher level positions.
So in other words, it's OK for a woman or a minority male to
get to certain positions, but when it comes to management,
there tends to be kind of a glass ceiling there that's
hard to break through.
Currently in the United States, if a female and male
are tending to do the exact same job, have the same
responsibilities, on average, a female earns 78% of what the
male tends to earn.
Now some occupations are better than others at
equalizing those things.
But there's some positions where it's dramatically
different simply because one person's a male
and another's a female.
Now things are improving.
In the Fortune 500 Companies within the United States, we
set a new record just last year, in 2012.
18 of those companies, 18 of those 500
companies, had women CEOs.
That's a new record.
If you look back basically 10 years, it's improved by 2 and
1/2 times the number of CEOs back in the early 2000s.
So it's good and bad.
Now if you look at it, that's a good trend,
but think about it.
That's 18 companies out of 500 that have women CEOs.
Not a good record overall.
Affirmative action.
Affirmative action is a program that actually kind of
evolved out of the Civil Rights era.
Affirmative action--
a lot of people have misconceptions about
what it refers to.
Let me explain.
Affirmative action is designed to basically encourage or help
out women and minority males in terms of getting jobs or
getting an education, getting various positions, things like
that, but only if they have equal qualifications to
someone else who's applying.
Let's say that two people come in for a job.
You have a female or a male minority and you
have a white male.
If they are equal in terms of their evaluation, in terms of
their criteria, what background they have--
if they are equal, affirmative action requests--
encourages, anyway--
that companies will hire the female or the minority male.
Now this does not have anything to do with quotas.
Some people think, oh, companies have a certain quota
or a certain number of minorities or women that they
have to hire.
That's not the case.
That is not what affirmative action's all about.
If two people go in for a job and one person--
doesn't matter who-- is clearly superior in terms of
their qualifications, that person should get the job.
Now affirmative action, it does have some negative
implications for a lot of people.
A lot of people still, around the country, will look at it
and say, well, it's nothing more than reverse
discrimination.
But affirmative action has helped, in terms of getting
females and minorities into higher-level
positions as well.
Let's talk about gender roles stratification by gender.
Now first of all, it's one of my pet peeves, but gender
refers to masculine and feminine.
It's not male/female.
So many people misconstrue that nowadays.
On surveys and things like that, you see gender, and it's
nobody's business.
But gender refers to masculine and feminine.
And in the United States, and really worldwide,
socialization--
when we start socializing kids literally at birth, we begin
to treat them differently based on whether they're
wearing a little blue cap or a little pink hat.
And those gender roles begin very, very early in life.
Now it's kind of interesting how different things play out.
Back in the 1970s, there was an experiment done on college
campus where they took a group of males and a group of
females and they gave them a story.
They gave them the first line of a story and had the males
and females complete the story.
And the story began--
the males got a version of the story that said, "At the end
of first term final exams, John finds himself at the top
of his medical school class." And then the males were
supposed to finish that story.
Girls got the exact same thing, except instead of John,
it was Anne.
So "Anne found herself at the top of her medical school
class."
Now this was in the early 1970s.
The researchers evaluated the stories, and evaluate it based
on how successful that John or Anne ended up being.
It was unbelievable.
John tended to be pretty successful.
I think the success rate for John was somewhere around 70%
to 80% of the stories, ended up which John being
successful.
Anne was a total disaster.
I think it was under 20% of females actually had a success
story for Anne.
I mean, they would do things like, "At the end of first
term finals, Anne finds herself at the top of her
medical school class, trying to decide whether to jump or
not." In other words, she's at the top of the building, and
she's trying to figure out whether to go overboard.
That kind of creates a whole thing.
What the researchers found at that time, they believed
females actually had a fear of success.
Now this was right around the time period when a lot more
females were now beginning to enter the workforce and so on.
So is it true today?
I don't think so.
I don't think you see that at all.
But it has changed dramatically over the last 30
or 40 years now.
Again, small strides.
Women in politics, increasing dramatically in the last 20
years, and the workforce, again, since the '70s and
early '80s.
Some of the consequences--
one of the things that occurs is if a woman's actually
working outside the home, that creates a
little bit of an issue.
Because if the guy's also working, now Mom and Dad both
come home at 4, 5, 6 o'clock at night, and now who takes
care of the kids?
Who fixes dinner?
Who does the laundry?
That sort of thing.
And what we've found is that in many--
I'd say most--
households, the women are still tending to do far more
of the household chores, so to speak, than the males.
And they've actually got a term for this.
They refer to it as the second shift.
It's the female's second shift of the day.
They've already worked outside the home.
Now they come back and they have to work inside the home.
But a lot of families and a lot of places throughout
America are having to change the way they do child care.
Family leave policies are different.
And a lot of places are now, especially with internet
access and things like that, creating alternate work hours
as possibilities for their employees.
Last thing we're going to talk about is the graying of the
United States-- or in other words, stratification by age.
And you can see the percent of the population over 65 is
increasing dramatically.
Americans 100 and older represent the
fastest-growing age group.
And in fact, the 90-and-over group has almost tripled over
the last 30 years to 1.9 million in 2010.
And it's expected that people 90 and over, that that group
is going to quadruple over the next 40 years.
So it's huge, in terms of the number of older people in the
population.
Now this is not just the US.
This is worldwide, OK.?
And you can see on this chart that not only is the percent
of older people, 65 and over, increasing dramatically, but
you also have a big decrease in the percent of youth that
we're having.
And you can see that the number of people estimated--
about 9.1 billion people, in the world by 2050.
Now to give that a little bit more realism there, the world
population increases by about 75 million annually, which is
adding a United States, in terms of population, every
four years.
That's amazing.
Now what are some of the issues?
Well, older people, they're going to be
working in the workforce.
That kind of takes away jobs for younger people.
We may end up having to change the retirement age, in terms
of making it, instead of age 65 or 62, maybe the retirement
age is going to be 68 or 70 or 75.
I've seen some companies already doing that.
And the big issues for America--
what are we doing in terms of Social Security and Medicare?
Those are some huge issues within our culture today, in
terms of trying to provide those types of income and
services for older people in America.
And yet it's just devastating our federal budget.
So the answers to those are still to come, those
questions, here in the near future.