Comments on William Wilson\u27s The Truly Disadvantaged: A Limited Proposal for Social Reform

This is an important book which has already had a major impact on discussions of poverty, race and public policy in the United States. Wilson is to be commended for his willingness to step boldly into the arena of public discourse in an effort to blaze a new trail between the rock of conservative thinking on the underclass and the hard place of contemporary liberal perspectives. His project-the refocusing of the liberal perspective and the definition of a bold new public policy agenda is inherently controversial. Wilson is quite correct in his assertion that the conservative perspective captured public attention and policy initiatives in the Reagan era, and that that agenda has resulted in a real deterioration in the living conditions of the urban poor

Panel Two: Who\u27s Minding the Baby?

This publication is a transcript of remarks made by multiple law professors discussing the relationship between race, gender, and class and focusing on feminism and the challenges faced by working mothers

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who\u27s Minding the Baby?)

A central characteristic of our current gender arrangements is that they pit ideal worker women against marginalized caregiver women in a series of patterned conflicts I call gender wars. One version of these are the mommy wars that we see often covered in the press between employed mothers and mothers at home. Employed mothers at times participate in the belittlement commonly felt by homemakers. Also mothers at home, I think, at times participate in the guilt-tripping that\u27s often felt by mothers who are employed. These gender wars are a central but little understood characteristic of the gender system that grew up after 1780, which historians call domesticity. One of the basic arguments in the book is that gender has proved unbending in the sense that we\u27ve progressed from the original form of domesticity, the breadwinner/housewife version, to the contemporary form of domesticity, the ideal worker-marginalized caregiver system. This modern form is what I sometimes call an attempt again to invent a language that is widely accessible, the dominant domestic ecology. I found that if you call it the sex-gender system, people feel somewhat differently than if you call it the dominant family ecology. The important point is that these gender wars, which are an inherent characteristic of domesticity, are seriously undertheorized by feminist theorists. I think they\u27re really important, because they go to the core of building an effective coalition for gender change with respect to this work-family axis, these economic meanings of gender that Adrienne and I are focusing on. The classic strategy of American feminists has been that women should achieve equality by performing as ideal workers along with the men, with child care delegated to the market. I call this the full commodification model, until Adrienne came up with a far better name. She calls it the delegation model. So I\u27ll call it the delegation model. Delegation to the market in this country, which was originally conceived of to involve some degree of social subsidy, has become delegation to a largely unsubsidized market in which child care workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the society. They also have extremely high rates of turnover, which is not good because children need continuity of care. The result is a delegation model that is not likely to appeal to nonprivileged people, because in this social context, delegation means that working-class people, who a generation ago had access to the same kind of mothercare that middle-class people had, today have only market child care that reflects their disadvantaged class position

Panel Two: Who’s Minding the Baby?

This publication is a transcript of remarks made by multiple law professors discussing the relationship between race, gender, and class and focusing on feminism and the challenges faced by working mothers

Panel Two: Who’s Minding the Baby?

This publication is a transcript of remarks made by multiple law professors discussing the relationship between race, gender, and class and focusing on feminism and the challenges faced by working mothers

The Evolution of Copulation Frequency and the Mechanisms of Reproduction in Male Anolis Lizards

The evolution of many morphological structures is associated with the behavioral context of their use, particularly for structures involved in copulation. Yet, few studies have considered evolutionary relationships among the integrated suite of structures associated with male reproduction. In this study, we examined nine species of lizards in the genus Anolis to determine whether larger copulatory morphologies and higher potential for copulatory muscle performance evolved in association with higher copulation rates. In 10–12 adult males of each species, we measured the size of the hemipenes and related muscles, the seminiferous tubules in the testes, and the renal sex segments in the kidneys, and we assessed the fiber type composition of the muscles associated with copulation. In a series of phylogenetically-informed analyses, we used field behavioral data to determine whether observed rates of copulation were associated with these morphologies.We found that species with larger hemipenes had larger fibers in the RPM (the retractor penis magnus, a muscle that controls hemipenis movement), and that the evolution of larger hemipenes and RPM fibers is associated with the evolution of higher rates of copulatory behavior. However, the sizes of the seminiferous tubules and renal sex segments, and the muscle fiber composition of the RPM, were not associated with copulation rates. Further, body size was not associated with the size of any of the reproductive structures investigated. The results of this study suggest that peripheral morphologies involved in the transfer of ejaculate may be more evolutionarily labile than internal structures involved in ejaculate production

Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy

Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy is the culmination of 18 months of research interviews across the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). Conducted by the HuMetricsHSS Initiative as an extension of their previous work on values-enacted scholarly practice, the interviews focused on current systems of evaluation within BTAA institutions, the potential problems and inequalities of those processes, the kinds of scholarly work that could be better recognized and rewarded, and the contexts and pressures evaluators are under, including, as the process progressed, the onset and ongoing conditions of COVID-19. The interviews focused primarily on the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. Interviewees outlined a number of issues to be addressed, including toxicity in evaluation, scholars’ increased alienation from the work they are passionate about, and a high-level virtue-signaling of values by institutions without the infrastructure or resources to support the enactment of those values. Based on these conversations, this white paper offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to address systematic injustice, erasure, and devaluation of academic labor in order to strengthen the positive public impact of scholarship