There are many forms of inequality in the U.S. labor market and in workplaces, including, for example, inequality across gender, race/ethnicity, social class, immigration status, sexual orientation, and parental status; and across dimensions and outcomes including pay, hiring opportunities, job authority, performance evaluations, and promotion decisions. This first-year seminar provides a deep dive into labor market inequality and specifically focuses on the causes, consequences, and opportunities to change inequalities arising from discrimination. We will consider questions such as: What are the causes of inequality and discrimination? How have causes and patterns of inequality changed in recent history? How do legal, academic, and other institutions understand discrimination, and how do these understandings differ from the lived experiences of people who may face discrimination? What forms of information would offer convincing evidence of discrimination? What are the consequences of labor market inequalities and how do experiences of discrimination shape future opportunities? Finally, we will consider what organizations and individuals can do differently to evaluate labor market or workplace inequality, develop solutions to reduce these forms of inequality, and implement sustainable changes.

People have many ideas about gender. These ideas organize our social lives in important ways and often in ways that we do not even notice. They are often so taken for granted that we simply assume they are part of the “normalˮ or natural way that life works. Together in this course, we will investigate the taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding sex and gender to reveal how gender is built into our institutions and everyday lives. This course requires critical self-reflection examining our motives, behaviors and reactions, and how they challenge or reinforce gender norms. Furthermore, this class requires connecting our experiences and those of others to broader trends in the social environment in which we live. In doing so, we will critically examine how gender creates, maintains, and reproduces differences and inequalities that play out in our everyday lives, including socioeconomic structures, patterns of interactions in groups, and socialization processes at the individual-level. Central to the study of sex and gender, we will identify and explain the ways in which gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and social class constitute interrelated and interlocking systems, and we will investigate how social characteristics like country of origin and ability status shape gendered experiences and outcomes. We will assess sociological explanations for gender inequality. Finally, we will apply these sociological arguments, concepts, and ideas to social issues, current events, and our lived experiences.

Social stratification explores the unequal distribution of resources in our society and the processes through which those resources are distributed unevenly. In this course, students will develop an understanding of how inequality is produced and reproduced in American society; understand and critique the major theories and methods used in the sociology of stratification; and think critically about how norms, structures and policies form the basis for stratification and think creatively about what changes would foster greater equality. Some of the main questions we will address include: What is social stratification and how is society “stratifiedˮ? What do the extremes of social inequality look like? How does the organization and structure of reward systems in our society create and reinforce unequal opportunities and outcomes across race, gender, and social class? How does one climb the ranks in society? What are the social institutions that contribute to, and sometimes attenuate, stratification? What are the consequences of social stratification for individuals? And where do we go from here?

This is an advanced seminar style course that takes a broad theoretical approach to understanding gender as a social phenomenon. There is increasing consensus among sociologists of gender that gender is not primarily an identity or role that is taught in childhood and enacted in family relations. Instead, gender is an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as significantly different categories, and organizing social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference. We will begin with an examination of the key theoretical works in sociology that address this conceptualization, focusing on social processes that occur at the macro, meso (interactional), and micro levels. We will consider how gender intersects with other axes of inequality, including class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. We will also examine the gendered body, asking what is the relation between “the natural” and “the social.” We will then apply these theoretical approaches as we explore the processes by which gender difference and inequality are maintained or changed in contemporary American society. Students will then develop a research proposal where they apply a multi-level perspective of gender to an empirical problem of their own choosing.