Dear readers,

After much consideration, I have decided that it is time for me to retire this blog.

The primary reason for such is: as some of you may already know, I also maintain another blog on my Asian-Nation site. I have maintained that site and blog longer than this one and it focuses more specifically on current events and issues related to Asian Americans.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is just too much overlap between these two blogs, so to save me the time necessary to maintain both of them, I will concentrate on just maintaining my Asian-Nation one. At the same time, I will expand the Asian-Nation blog somewhat to include much of this blog’s focus on race relations in general and its connections to higher education.

You can still browse through the Archives of this blog or use the search function in the right hand column to review any and all of my previous posts from the past four years, but this will be the last post on this blog.

Below is a list of the most recent posts on my Asian-Nation blog and I encourage you to continue your participation by switching over to read my Asian-Nation blog. Thanks and hope to hear from you again soon.

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Latest Posts at Asian-Nation

I’m not shy about it -- even professors need a spring break too. So I’m off to visit some friends and do some camping in North Carolina for a few days. Hopefully I’ll return in one piece and be back blogging on Friday. See you then.

March is Women’s History Month and to commemorate it, the Census Bureau has again released their “Facts for Features” page that contains various demographic and socioeconomic data and statistics about women in the U.S.. Here are some of the more notable figures:

153.6 million: The number of females in the United States as of Oct. 1, 2007. The number of males is 149.4 million.

$32,649: The median annual earnings of women 16 or older who worked year-round, full time, in 2006. Women earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by men.

98 cents: The amount women ($48,586) in the District of Columbia, who worked year-round, full time, earned for every $1 their male counterparts earned ($49,544) in 2006. Among all states or state equivalents, the district was where women were closest to earnings parity with men. Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey were the only states where median earnings for women were greater than $40,000.

32%: Percent of women 25 to 29 who had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2006, which exceeded that of men in this age range (25 percent). Eighty-eight percent of women and 84 percent of men in this same age range had completed high school.

894,000: The projected number of bachelor’s degrees that will be awarded to women in the 2007-08 school year, who are also projected to earn 380,000 master’s degrees during this period. Women would, therefore, earn 59 percent of the bachelor’s and 61 percent of the master’s degrees awarded during this school year. In addition, women would earn a majority (52 percent) of first-professional degrees, such as law and medical.

More than $939 billion: Revenue for women-owned businesses in 2002. There were 116,985 women-owned firms with receipts of $1 million or more.

Nearly 6.5 million: The number of women-owned businesses in 2002. Women owned 28 percent of all nonfarm businesses. Nearly one in three women-owned firms operated in health care and social assistance, and other services, such as personal services, and repair and maintenance. Women owned 72 percent of social assistance businesses and just over half of nursing and residential care facilities.

37%: Percent of females 16 or older who work in management, professional and related occupations, compared with 31 percent of males.

22 million: Number of female workers in educational services, health care and social assistance industries. More women work in this industry group than in any other. Within this industry group, 11 million work in the health care industry and 8.4 million in educational services.

62.4 million: Number of married women (including those who are separated or have an absent spouse) in 2006. There were 59.8 million unmarried (widowed, divorced or never married) women.

5.6 million: Number of stay-at-home mothers nationwide in 2006, up from 4.6 million a decade earlier.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year or so, you may have heard that tomorrow is Super Tuesday and my home state of Massachusetts is among those states holding primaries. In case you’re interested, I have made up my mind who I will be voting for, and who I feel is the best choice to be the next President of the United States: Barack Obama.

I won’t bore you by reiterating all of the reasons why more and more people like me have come to this conclusion. All I really want to say is that I am really, really, tired of the status quo. The status quo has made our nation less physically and emotionally secure, more hated around the world, and more divided among ourselves.

It is not a cliche to say that we need things to change, right now. And for me, Barack Obama is the best way to begin this process of change, of healing, of reconciling our past with our future, of restoring the strength, pride, and unity of this country -- to remind all of us why this country is the greatest country in the world.

I don’t expect him to miraculously change everything overnight if elected. But I genuinely feel that Barack Obama is the candidate brave enough to set the example and to lead us forward into the 21st century.

While many college students would argue that their main goal in getting a college education -- at least academically as opposed to socially -- is to receive the “credentials” necessary to get a well-paying job once they graduate (i.e., the degree and diploma, 4.0 GPA, etc.).

However, academics like me try to convince them as just as important, and perhaps even more important, is the goal of learning how to think -- acquiring the skills necessary to organize your time, problem-solve, collect and analyze information and data, write effectively, etc.

As it turns out, according to new research from a national survey of employers, managers and executives in the corporate world seem to agree with us -- they tend to value skills over credentials:

Overall, 65 percent of those surveyed believe that new graduates of four-year colleges have most or all of the skills to succeed in entry-level positions, but only 40 percent believe that they have the skills to advance. . . .

The employers were asked to rank new graduates on 12 key areas, and the grads did best in teamwork, ethical judgments and intercultural work, and worst in global knowledge, self-direction and writing. . . .

What the employers appear to want are intensive, personally evaluated projects, not more testing. . . . Forty-six percent said it would be very effective and 70 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to have students complete an advanced project as seniors, demonstrating knowledge in the major and in problem-solving, writing, and analytic skills.

And 69 percent said it would be very effective and 83 percent said it would be very or fairly effective to see an evaluation of a supervised internship where students apply college learning in a “real-world setting.”

The results appear to contradict statements from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and many politicians that the business community is demanding tools that allow for comparisons of colleges on how they perform in certain areas.

The other key point to appreciate from the article is that, in addition to valuing skills over credentials, the employers also noted that in terms of assessing student skills, they value substantive, in-depth evaluations over “standardized” tests that the current administration favors.

In short, these are two areas in which we academics have been emphasizing all along. Hate to say it, but we told you so . . .

Hopefully, most Americans know by now that climate change is a reality and that much of it is caused by human activity. But to properly understand the global context of climate change, we need to understand that citizens in some countries and cities around the world are in greater danger to their physical safety than others. With that in mind, Time Magazine reports that a new study from the Blacksmith Institute has identified the top ten most polluted cities around the world (the list is unranked):

• Sumgayit, Azerbaijan
• Linfen, China
• Tianying, China
• Sukinda, India
• Vapi, India
• La Oroya, Peru
• Dzerzhinsk, Russia
• Norilsk, Russia
• Chernobyl, Ukraine
• Kabwe, Zambia

The article notes that according to the World Bank, 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China. Overall, India’s environment is a little better but as the article notes, it’s mainly because India is growing more slowly than China. Pretty scary.

The U.S. certainly has its own environmental problems, but as I wrote about in my other blog on food safety in China, it is a little humbling to know that in the entire global context, we Americans are actually very lucky and that we generally have it much easier than millions, even billions of other humans around the world.

Issues surrounding women and racial minority college faculty have been a recurring them in my blog, especially in regard to the challenges that they face in succeeding that frankly, White male professors are less likely to face. Along those same lines, Inside Higher Education reports that a new study argues that while colleges and universities often have welcoming-sounding policies in place, the actual collegial climate in a particular department may be quite different for women and minority junior faculty:

[T]he study pointed to the importance of remembering the difference between establishing sound policies (which many institutions have done) and making sure that they are effective and working for everyone (which is more difficult). “A change in policy does not necessarily mean a change in practice or climate,” [the study’s authors] said.

In many cases, colleges that have adopted policies may need “to drill down” to the department level to see why they are or aren’t working. The breakdowns on climate and collegiality are important, Trower said, because professors entering academe today are more likely to place a high value on such qualities than were previous generations of academics, who might have been more likely to accept a lousy a climate at a prestigious institution. . . .

Women see upper limits on teaching and committee assignments as a more important issue than do men. Women are more likely to value stop-the-clock policies on tenure, child care, and the availability of paid or unpaid personal leave. Junior faculty who are not white are much more likely than their white colleagues to see child care and a spousal hiring program as important.

Actually, the study’s finding that what exists in principle at the university level doesn’t always translate smoothly onto the departmental level is not new. In fact, this discrepancy occurs frequently as departments have a lot of latitude in determining how to take action on particular university-wide “goals” such as who to hire and what benefits to give to particular professors.

In my relatively limited experience as a faculty member, I recognize that there are both benefits and drawbacks to giving departments significant power to implement general university-wide goals. However, when it comes to diversifying faculty to be more inclusive and welcoming towards women and racial minorities, the White male establishment culture that exists in many departments is an incredible barrier to overcome.

One of the first things that students learn in any course that discusses gender disparities in the workplace is that on average, women earn less money than men, even after controlling for qualifications, years of experience, occupation, etc. -- about 11% less than men. There are many different sociological factors for this inequality, but the Washington Post has an article that highlights one that doesn’t get a lot of attention -- women are less likely to negotiate for a higher salary, partly because they are more likely to be looked down upon than men who do the same thing:

The traditional explanation for the gender differences that Babcock found is that men are simply more aggressive than women, perhaps because of a combination of genetics and upbringing. The solution to gender disparities, this school of thought suggests, is to train women to be more assertive and to ask for more. However, a new set of experiments . . . offers an entirely different explanation.

A new study . . . found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice".

So in other words, women entering the workforce are frequently faced with a no-win scenario: they can stay quiet, not negotiate, and accept a lower starting salary than their male coworkers and have that initial disadvantage accumulate over the years in the form of lower total earnings, or they can be assertive and negotiate a higher starting salary but then suffer the “social penalty” of being judged as pushy or arrogant.

Yes, the gender double standard unfortunately still exists. I’m also pretty confident that the same pattern also exists for workers of color, many of whom are also likely to be offered a lower starting salary than their White counterparts but also face the same dilemma of either negotiating and being judged, or not negotiating and starting the cycle of inequality all over again.

This pattern, whether it exists for women or workers of color, is another example of the insidious nature of discrimination -- it doesn’t necessarily result from a single person who purposely decides to favor one group over another, but rather is the result of a convergence of different subtle prejudices that combine and accumulate over the years, leading to a pattern of behavior and expectations that favors one group over another.