 Hi, everyone. I'm Julia. I work for WW Norton. Hi, Philip. I'm happy to introduce Philip Cohen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Philip is the creator of the family inequality.com blog. And he's also the author of the Family Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, which is his textbook with Norton that we are publishing in the third edition in September. So it'll be available for spring 2021 courses. Philip has also published extensively on the Gender Division of Labor within families, family structure and health disparities. And his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and he's appeared on NPR and MSNBC. You can follow him on Twitter frequently at Family Unequal. So with that, I'm happy to turn it over to Philip. I just had a quick look at the names of the people who are here. Welcome, everybody. Thanks so much for having me to do this. It's just great to see so many sociologists in one place and all the people who are doing the good work of sociology in these extremely troubling times. So I hope you're all, at least, I hope you're all finding the sources of support that you deserve as you're doing this extremely challenging task at this very difficult moment. So if I can help, I'm glad to. Good. Okay, so I'm Philip Cohen. There's my contact information. I welcome you to contact me anytime to talk about these or other sociology issues. I, like Julia said, the book is called The Family Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change. I mean, that is my framework for teaching family sociology. So that's the talk that I will give. And I'll sort of, I will kind of go through each of those pillars of the approach and give some examples also give some examples of sort of workshop elements that that we have in the book that I've been using, which are either individual or small group or large group exercises and I'll give some examples of those. Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change. The framework that I use sort of takes diversity as a sense of, as an array of choices and options and differences that are some voluntary, some not voluntary, but it's the proliferation of difference when it comes to family life. And we have, you know, we've concentrated on kind of four types, cultural, legal, political, and technological things in the social environment that facilitate a wider array of family structures and family experiences. And the nice feature about this for me that works with students is talking about different types of diversity. Race and ethnicity are what people think of first, probably after that gender, but family structure and trajectories through family life and the interaction of the different kinds of diversities. It's a recurring theme and it comes up all the time. So I'll give some examples of that. Diversity, Inequality. We have all these options and diversity is all about, oh, choice and freedom and look at all the different things we can do, but of course they're not really freely chosen. And the amount of constraints and the type of constraints are vary a lot and that's one of the, that's one of the key, that's a way of framing the issue of inequality is what choices do you have, life chances and the labor sensor. In terms of families, that's like family structure and the interaction of things like health and wealth and well-being with family life. So there's also different types of inequality in terms of, I'll run through a few different of those. It's not just rich and poor people or race and gender, but a set of inequality relationships. Diversity and inequality, social change. So my basic theoretical framework is modernity and modernity theory and demographic perspectives. I do, you know, as an intro course, probably for most of you, family's an intro level course. So we do like the big three theoretical perspectives and so on, but I tend to frame my own sessions on modernity theory, sort of the institutionalization of the individual and I use a lot of demographic data and sort of to contextualize the trend. So I'll give some examples of those. Some people maybe in your advanced courses are going to call this something like the neoliberal world order when we talk about the elevation of choice as a way of something to hold everybody accountable. So yes, you have freedom, but on the other hand, if you're poor, it's your fault, right? So that's sort of the dilemma of modernity in the sense of individuality in an unequal society. So diversity and equality and social change. Okay. Let me give some specific examples. More people living more different kinds of lives than before. Okay. So and that's kind of a startling thing to say in the sense of like, how could you quantify that? Are we really have more differences than we used to? You know, you can cut things infinite ways, but I make a case that we do, that there are more differences in a variety of ways. Here's an example. When we talk about the census, sorry, this one is blurry, but that helps with the historical feel of it. This is the 1960 census and the relationships, the family relationships, the household relationships that they gathered information on. List persons in this order. This is the 1960 census form. The head, his wife, unmarried sons and daughters, married sons and daughters, other relatives, other persons. And then there's the six categories listed there. Head, wife, son, daughter, other relative, non-relative inmate. Okay. Good people who didn't live in households at all. So that's six categories. 1960, 1980, nine categories. They added brother, sister, father, mother, partner, roommate. Partner and roommate. Okay. Some of those were romantic and some were not. They weren't really differentiating. It was still, they were afraid it was like rude to ask about unmarried couples at the time. Up to 80, up to nine by 1980, 1990, you see the images are getting less blurry, I guess also. 1990, they now identify adopted children, but they're still with the natural born, natural born and the stepson and daughter are new category. Also grandchild is the new category. They now separate out unmarried partner as a separate category from housemate roommate and foster child is there now. So we're up to 11 categories in 1990. 2000 is up to 15 categories. Now adopted son and daughter are separate and parent in law, son and daughter in law and foster child is its own category now. So that start, it's the, it's partly that these categories are becoming more common and partly the recognition of the importance of these, of these differences for the things that we use census data for, for programs and, and government spending and welfare and I mean social welfare and social welfare programs. We actually lost the category in 2010, but the same, the same framework. You see the, these actually go in the order of first related and then unrelated. So husband, wife, biological adopted stepfather, father, grandchild, the first column is all related, parent in law, son in law, other relative on the right hand side. Those are all related. Then there's really a line there and you get to the unrelated rumor housemate unmarried partner. Unmarried partners not considered relatives in 2010. So they're not, when they calculate the poverty rate, they don't include the income of the unmarried partners as of 2010. 2020, we're up to 16 categories and now we have, now we have the sex of the partners. So opposite sex, husband, wife, opposite sex unmarried partner, which are now moved up into the relative category. Okay, anyway, you get the point. So the increasing number of categories is one way of capturing the diversity and it's also a way that we talk about the diversity that to some degree was already there, but I think there's both, there's both more diversity in terms of family structures and more recognition and incorporation of those different types. When you, when you look at the demographic data, you can see diversity in the sense of these differences, these different categories increasing in size. This is 1900 to the present and the bottom categories married couple households. And you can see the sort of the rise of conformity through the first half of the 20th century, 1960 being the most, the, the census where there was the most dominance of the married couple household. And after that, sort of the peacock's tale of diversity, where it's not that one new kind of household replaces the old kind of dominant household, but rather the proliferation of categories, especially people living alone, extended families, that's a lot of grandparents and more single parents. But I put this in the sense of increasing diversity rather than say the demise of the married couple dominant family. It's both, but it's not one thing replacing it. It's a dominant, highly conformist society being replaced by more difference. You can, so you consider the common, the common framing of diversity, often starting with race ethnicity. You can calculate a diversity score, which I show here. That is, that's the probability that two people selected at random are in different categories. So diversity in terms of race ethnicity, at least with these six categories, increased from 0.29 to 0.57 over that 50 year period. So the probability that two people chosen at random are in a different category is increased. So that's not surprising. We know about increasing race ethnic diversity. Religious diversity also has increased. You can, you can slice the religions different ways that's calling Catholics and Protestants to different religions. You can slice it, you can slice those up further or not. Also, the nuns are a very big group. If you want to consider that a religious preference that contributes to the diversity. And then I'll get to another example of this diversity a second. But first, let me drop into one of the workshops that we do. When you try to do, when you want to make this real for people, you know, in some ways, depending on who's in your classes, it's going to be obvious, like, oh, I look at all these different people in different groups and different traditions. I like doing sort of an on the ground instant research exercise like this, the YouTube wedding. You can go on YouTube, you can do it live in the class, you can have them do it as an assignment. And everybody get a wedding video and then sort of you give them a worksheet and they break it down. There's a lot of, you know, there's new wedding videos uploaded every second on YouTube. You can search by ethnicity, by gender, you can search by location, religion. And then I just get people to sort of make a list of the parameters of the weddings they're looking at, how big, how formal, what are the family configurations, how expensive, who's paying, how are people expressing themselves? Is it raucous? Is it sedate? Is it, in any ways, is it professionally or amateurly produced and so on? And this is just a nice way of looking at these things because there's obviously important moments in people's lives and also times when people are doing, they're acting in traditional ways often. So it's the things that are unspoken about just the way a wedding should be or they're deliberately sometimes, of course, countering traditions. And so how are they deciding to not go with the tradition? So it's a good kind of entree into diversity and personal life. So I like the YouTube wedding exercise. Okay, while I'm on this diversity kick, one of the, I use the example of race, ethnicity of religion. But when you talk about like the decline of the married couple family being replaced by lots of others, a similar thing happens with age at marriage. The age at marriage is rising. You can see here, the age at first marriage, it was at its lowest point on about 1950 and 60. And now it's risen. So men are getting married on average the first time around 30, women around 20, 27 and a half or something like that. But it's not that everybody's getting married at older ages. Really, what's happening was everybody was getting married young. And now we have more choices. Some people are getting married older, which pulls up the average, but you miss the diversity story. So here's a way of showing the diversity. That 1960 curve shows a huge peak in 20 to 24, when almost half the people got married in that five year window in their lives and altogether about 80% of people are married before 25. And the peak has moved. So the mean age at marriage is risen, but the curve is also flattened out. So you also have more diversity in age at marriage. You have more people marrying at older ages, while some people are still getting married at younger ages. And so it's harder to, if it's harder to essentially assume that somebody got married at 24, you know, than it used to be. Or the dominant age now is not as dominant as it used to be. We have more diversity in the age of marriage, just an example. Everyone's options are constrained, but to different degrees. So we're in this frame of look at all this difference and look at all these things that maybe are choices and maybe aren't. And who gets to make choices and what choices do they get to make? I've been using this four types of inequality for a long time. Inequality between families is just one kind of inequality, rich families and poor families. This is just the poverty rate showing God knows what's happening with the poverty rate now through 2018. You can see their poor families and families that are not poor. This is about 12% of total of the population are in poor families in 2018. And then there's the types of families. So just in this to single mother families and everybody else, of course, lots of different ways you can cut that up. Single mother families traditionally at a higher risk of poverty. I mean historically at a higher risk of poverty for reasons that are obvious to all of you. So inequality between families is just one kind of inequality. Inequality within families, we often think of gender. Gender is the big kind of inequality within families. We can look at something like housework trends for that. These colors are looking a little similar on this figure. I'm sorry. The dotted lines are men. And the heavy line is housework and the thin lines are childcare. Just shows women's housework declining from the 60s to the present and men's increasing but only until the 80s. Men's childcare still increasing a little. But the idea is however much inequality there is within families, a lot of it is gender. It's one of the things we want to talk about inequality between families and equality within families. You can cut the inequality within families a lot of other ways. We also talk about the earnings difference between spouses. Of course not all couples are men and women. The other kind of inequality that's also about families is who gets a family. And who gets the family that they want more to the point. We don't want to assume that everybody wants the same kind of family. So if people are not married it means like they're having marriage denied to them. Some of them are, some of them aren't. And some of the ways that this works are demographic. This isn't from the textbook. This is from a research pick where I did with Joanna Pepin. Basically for every metropolitan area in this figure there are two dots. One for black women and one for white women. The x-axis shows you the sex ratio of unmarried people. So as you go to the right there are more men, more single men for every single woman. And as you go up it's their probability of marrying in a model with other controls. And the gist is to the right of the zero line is where most of the white dots are. So most white single white women are living in metropolitan areas where there are more single men than single women. Almost all the black women are on the other side. They're in the case where there's a shortage of men per woman. And then both for both groups there's a positive slope. So the more men there are the more likely they are to get married. Okay we could talk all about the framing of marriage as desirable and interracial marriage and so on. But basically what we'll get into when we talk about this is the shortage of black men is incarceration, mortality, intermarriage, which are all differed by gender. And these are all ways that we talk of the inequalities that we are concerned about work their way out in the sense of who gets to have the family that they want, who gets to make that choice. And so you know in that for example in polygamous societies where rich men have lots of wives obviously there's a lot of poor men who get no wives. So this sort of historically has always been one of the ways that inequality works out. Obviously the big story for us who are more than 18 years old is in terms of access to family structure. It's been marriage equality. We talk about this a lot. I really like it as as we talk about families in their institutional context. I like this quote, I'm a 45-year-old woman. I've been in love with a woman for 10 years. I don't have a word to tell anybody about that. Our friends, our family, our society, our community, our parents and each other. So I just love that the formal institutional designation of marriage even in the most intimate way gives a couple a language to speak to each other. It's a great way sort of state and society interaction who gets to get married is a great story of power and inequality. And so I use that example. Okay. For putting the family choices in historical context and the sort of generational change which comes up a lot with gay marriage I think it was about 2000, somewhere in 2009 or 10 was the first time I had no debate in my class about same-sex marriage. And I realized I had to change my script. I couldn't get any students that may be different for some of you to express the opinion that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Possibly it was because there were already students in the room who had gay parents. And so all of a sudden it became like rude, interpersonally. So it's fascinating to watch that happen, of course, a big story. I like this as an exercise. The reason I like this is partly because it is difficult to get people to talk about their prejudice and biases as I'm sure you know. If you ask, you know, do you disapprove of whites and blacks getting married you're going to be hard pressed to find somebody who says they do. But if you ask your parents, would your parents mind? Would your grandparents mind? It's a good way to get people talking about how they were raised and reflecting on who they are now versus what they were thought. So what you end up happening is sort of X's, if you do hash marks or whatever with a sheet, you get more people making marks down on the bottom right as the relationship gets more intense from close friend to date to living together to marrying. And you go back in time, you and your parents, your grandparents, you have a lot of people saying, yeah, my grandparents wouldn't want me to marry somebody from X group. But I wouldn't mind. And then I definitely wouldn't mind being close friends with somebody and so on. So this is a nice way of visualizing sort of cohort or generational change and also showing how those investments in borders between groups matter more as you move to the more formal commitments from friendship to marriage. This is a simple exercise but I've had good luck with it getting conversations going because people who are like don't want to be racist and don't feel that they are racist, they may feel empowered and they feel good about talking about how their grandparents are racist or not. But sometimes they get that conversation going. Okay, so the elevation of choice to an ideal is great and terrible in the sense that we have choices. On the other hand, it comes with this framework of individual accountability or responsibility. And if it goes wrong, it's your fault. So let's talk a little bit about the demographics of social change and some of that framing now. A lot of demographic ways you can slice the big changes sort of of modernity or a century or so. This is a great, I just love this comparison for how things have changed. You know, the life expectancy rising from 45 to 80 over a century and a quarter and the birth rate, a birth per thousand falling from 30 to 10 are round numbers. So people live longer with fewer children. Children live longer. Children are more likely to survive. You probably know all these things. I'm just looking at ways to use the demographics to talk about the structural underpinnings of how family life has changed. I like to ask people, you know, how many people have a relationship with their great grandparents? I never met my great grandparents. A lot of our kids in school today have. And with fewer siblings, they have more relationships, more the vertical relationships they have. They could know their grandparents have a deep relationship with their grandparents for 40 or 50 years and it's different from the olden days. So I like this kind of comparison. Fewer siblings, longer life. Okay demographic. The population pyramids, we do a little bit of demography like this. You know, the great thing about demography, it's basically arithmetic. It's just ways of lining up the arithmetic of population. The pyramid is a nice illustration. It just shows, you know, more kids compared to old people in the old days than now. You see the bulge of the baby boom rising through the middle there. So you can sort of see how birth rates now change how many 50-year-olds there will be in 50 years. You know, if we have a huge drop in births next year as it appears very likely that we will, that's something that will be with us forever. On the other hand, you know, the people who will be 100 at the turn of the century are our students now. You know, the tomorrow centenarians are in our classes now. So demography is great in the sense that you can't reduce the number of people who were born last year no matter what you do. They can die but they still were born. Okay, obviously I love demography. Okay, for putting some of these for some of these sequenced and interrelated kind of trajectories and paths, this is an exercise I love. I've been doing this for a while and this can be done individually or in groups also. I mean you can have people go home and do it individually or and then for groups you can pool the data. So I'll show how this works. You do, you basically, this is a calendar. They pick somebody to interview and they fill out this life history calendar with them. It's a work family history. And the nice thing about this, you know, if you hit all the money and all the time in the world, you do a longitudinal study and you track people. But if not, you can do something retrospective and get people to recall. And you can tell pretty good work family stories with this very simple tool. So basically, as they're interviewing somebody, they work from left to right and top to bottom on this on this table with them. So when did what were the major events? When did you get married? When did you get divorced? When did you have kids? When did people die in the family? So that's what you start with and people will remember those. I remember I was 24 when I got married. I remember I was 31 when I got divorced or whatever. And then you work your way across the things that are a little harder to remember the details of but you think the respondent synchronizes them with the things they do remember. So in this case, she married Tom when she was 24. It's easy for her to remember that she lived with him for about a year before they got married. So in the third column, you see her living with Tom at age 23. Tom is there until they got divorced. Okay, then Tom is Tom is out. But you can also see the other events that were going on in this fictionalized family. Jen is born after a couple years of marriage. And then her mother moves in. Her father dies and her mother moves in when she's 29. And then she gets divorced two years later. Now in the interviews, you can ask some questions like what is the connection here? What is that? Is there any meaning to this sequence? Two years later, two years after her mother moves in the year of her divorce, she goes to nursing school. She goes back to school. Now you're all the way up into the third category education employment. So you see the full-time work switches to part-time work when her baby is born, then she goes back to school. Okay, so you can start getting people to think about the work, family, intersections in this historical context of was school an option? How is it going to be paid for? What was the meaning of moving in with Tom before they were married? Was there any flak over that? What were the opportunities for her? Where did she get the idea of nursing school? So it's when you, if each person can fill out a calendar like this, if they convert these to various, I have a worksheet for this where they do this in a binary way like ones and zeros, and then you can sum up the categories and make some data. Here's just one example. The nice thing about this, I'm going to go back for a second. The nice thing about this is you interview one person, but you get data for every row. So it's a way of kind of making an unrealistically large sample. Okay, so I'm going back forward now. What's the employment rate for women by marital status and age? Very simple thing you can do. You know, if you have 20 or 30 or 50 students and each one gives you a calendar with 30 rows, that's a lot of data points. And you can ask, you can look at the age relationship with employment for women, say you can do it for men too, but men's lives tend to be more flat on employment. So look at that. Women who aren't married have their highest employment rates in their 30s. Women who are married have low employment rates at that age because they're presumably having children there. So depending on how advanced you want to get in terms of methods, you can do little models, you can do, you can make tables, you can pull it all together. I aggregated over years, so I sort of have a file building up of this. This sheet is from 341 calendars. I want to have a big class for a couple of semesters. Okay, so you're getting a historical story going and you can spin out, you can make your connections to diversity and equality and social change by telling these individual stories. Hey, sociology. Okay, in this category of social change, I talk a lot about what makes, what people think about this. That is, is the diversity we're experiencing a good thing or a bad thing? Is it the collapse of the demise of the family or is it, or is it the freeing ourselves from the constraints of the past? This is a great question that the Pew Research Center asked on one of their surveys. It's about 10 years old. They haven't redone it. I really wish they would ask the same question again. These days, there seems to be a growing variety in the types of family arrangements that people live in. Overall, do you think this is a good thing, a bad thing, or don't you think it makes a difference? I like this because good thing, bad thing, no difference sort of corresponds to liberal, conservative, and radical views of the family. That is, to take the middle view, it's no difference. Whatever people want is fine. Conservatives are upset about the decline of, of the so-called traditional family, and then radicals are saying good riddance. It should be gone. We should be getting rid of. It's nice for, if you look at these by age, by how often they attend religious services and the political orientation you see, it sort of matches up with that left-right view, without being a simplistic left-right view because it lives at least three views. Anyway, I like this. Then we do a workshop exercise where we take, say, five issues in terms of policy or cultural practice, unmarried parenthood divorce, remarriage, same-sex marriage, open adoption, things where there's been sort of undeniable social change and increased diversity and acceptance or tolerance and also political conflict, cultural conflict. We sort of map out what would the conservative opposition to these trends look like, liberal tolerance of these trends is sort of the tolerance of diversity versus the critical embrace, the, the idea that we should have, that we should get rid of the old ways. So the, the, the, the embrace of the new. So this turns out to be, again, like the issue of social distance and the grandparents, sometimes it's easier to describe other people's political views, especially on culture wars issues than their own, especially if they're feeling like they might be in a minority in the class, describing other people's positions sometimes is easier. At least maybe I'm just, I cop out on that. I don't like to put people in the spot for what's your opinion, but maybe some of you are better, better at doing that than I am. Okay. I like for the, for the lived experience of diversity, I love names. If you've followed my blog or read any of my stuff, you'll see I talk about names a lot. I love the idea of the change, the how childhood has changed and how, how something so intimate is the name you give, the trend in that telling us something about society over. Shocking to me, maybe, or maybe, or maybe not to you that almost 14% of children born in the US in 1840 were named Mary, girls were named Mary. That's a lot of people given the same name. We never had that much dominance before, or since. I actually don't know too much before. I went back to 1780 on this by looking at the 70-year-olds in 1850, the 1850 census. The iPhone's people have the names on there because it's all public now, the old censuses. So I went back to 1780. I have some other, you can look at other lists of names. The wives of parents of confederate generals, there are some New England towns have full registries. Elizabeth was very common, but Mary, nothing was ever as big as Mary. Mary was number one until 1961, but look how much Mary fallen by 1961, already almost all the way down to 2% of girls being given the name Mary in 1961. And then just collapse now. Now Mary is not very common at all. And the neat thing about this for just sociology and social science, what I get a kick out of, is the regularity of this, that people don't coordinate the names they give to each other over time, but somehow the name Mary has a trend where there's 4 million kids, 2 million girls, and somehow if you knew the number of girls named Mary in the last five years, you can predict amazingly accurately how many girls are going to be named to Mary next year. It's bizarre. All those very personal individual decisions fit in a trend like this. Anyway, obviously not everybody shares this interest, but I enjoyed putting that out there. In terms of diversity and social change, one way to think about this is the dominance of the most popular names. So if you look at the top hundred girls named, and girls have had a little bit more name diversity action than boys, or whatever reason to talk about. In the 40s, about two thirds of girls were given names in the top hundred, and now it's down to about 30% of girls have names in the top hundred. So not only are fewer kids named Mary, but fewer kids are given the top name, Ava, or whatever is the number one name, nowadays has nowhere near the kind of popularity and conformity that it once did. I use the example for thinking about diversity and individuality. In the old days, you know, you had three kids named John. I mean, partly you weren't sure they would survive, and you wanted to make sure one of them ended up named John, and partly people just didn't think that, you know, maybe I don't know what it was like to live in 1800. It seems to me that people didn't really just think every child was so different from every other child. Anyway, diversity and individuality, and they kind of go together, but in a very unequal frame. Okay, so I'm actually going to wrap on that. Diversity and equality of social change, a few workshops, some data, some demographic trends, and I would love if we have some, if our facilitators can arrange to do some questions. I would love to take some questions on sort of the teaching stuff or any of the data things that came up or whatever. So I'll stop there. In the chat, do you discuss anticipated trends in the future? It's a good question I do. There is in the book at the end of every chapter, there's a trend to watch where I talk about something with data that I'm sort of, it's sort of an introduction to a sort of a social science perspective like, what are we keeping eye on these days or unanswered questions which are good for sort of taking, for introducing uncertainty. So it's not like I know everything and we can tell you everything that will happen. So some of the trends to watch are things like, what will be the effect of pornography on personal relationships? Or what about the oldest old, the people living past 100? Or what about the innovations at state and local level when the federal government is gridlocked? So we talk about work family policy and stuff that has been done at local level. So what can we learn from that? So I do try to, I don't like to make predictions. I find a much better way is to, is to raise, is to sort of flag issues of let's talk about where this might be going. Demography helps you a lot. I mean, demography can make projections. Predictions are a little different, but you can say, look, hey, we have fewer kids born this year. So no matter what happens, there's going to be fewer adults. Could you address the cultural shifts, causes the influence changing to climate merits? Okay, great question, really great question. You know, it's interesting. So I put on, it really is an interesting question. So I, I talk a lot and family sociology people talk a lot about poverty, insecurity, instability and the things that make people get married less. You know, how do people get married when they're when they're unemployed or something? And the conservative response is, hey, people got married during the depression. So obviously the culture has changed. It's interesting, the culture has changed. Not being married is more of an option than it used to be. And so it's not that people don't appreciate marriage. You know, I'm in the category of people who think we put marriage on more of a pedestal than we used to. And that's one of the reasons why it's declined. People want it to be perfect. They want to have an Instagram wedding. They want to have a marriage they can be proud of and feel like they're, they can show, they can show themselves in the world that they're doing it right. And until they could do that, you know, there's great interviews in the, I have a couple of these in the book. You know, we've been living together for years, but you know, I don't want to get married until we can afford a house. You know, this kind of stuff drives conservatives bananas. Why don't you just get married now? You know, like we did. But you know, they have people have a high standard for it. So I do think there are structural things. And I do think like the sex ratio and poverty and incarceration, all those things are very real. On the other hand, the culture has changed not so much to denigrate the value of marriage, but to make the alternatives acceptable in interesting ways. So that's kind of how I think about it. I recall that you've made the case for keeping the family. Thank you. And equality and inequity. So yes, it was a very deliberate choice to call it the family. You know, the Journal of Marriage and Family used to be called, I'm old enough to remember, Journal of Marriage and the Family. Feminists took that out because we didn't want to have one kind of family anymore. And I'm totally appreciative of that. But the way I think of the family is, and I described this in my theoretical framework, it's an institutional arena. It's like the workplace or the economy. The family isn't one kind of family. The family is that social space where we have a certain kind of relationship, certain roles and expectations. So the family includes good families and bad families and big families and little families and married families and unmarried families and gay couples and straight couples and so on. So that's all the family. Okay, inequality and inequity. I think I'm not sure where I get this, some sort of formal definition. Inequity, I think of as unfairness and inequality, I think of as objectively unequal quantities of something. So inequity means you're being treated unfairly. Inequality, if you have two people and they're different amounts of money, that's inequality even if it's totally fair. So inequity is just a different question. It's a sub question of inequality. That's how I think of it. Okay, it's most of your class organized in U.S. trends. Great question. Global perspectives. Well, you know, Norton did a big survey when I started this. There was not much demand for global stuff in this book among U.S. teachers. And it's partly a problem with U.S. sociology. Partly it has to do with the way people's schedules are crammed in. I do almost everything about the U.S. in this book. There's a tradition in family sociology that I don't love so much, which is there are a few common comparisons that we make, like arranged marriage and polygamy and the caste system. And there's like a few things about other societies that everybody knows about and that we teach. And it's kind of superficial. I have some of that in there. But I have not found a great way to do global stuff in a way that doesn't lose more teachers than I gain. So I'm interested in that. And some of the work that I have done is cross country comparisons. The people who study social policy do that a lot. And there's like big poverty and welfare and all that stuff. The country comparisons are huge. And so that's an obvious place. And I do have some of that in there as far as working hour time and family leave. There's a box on the FMLA and the grotesque shortage of family leave in this country. But I try to pick just a few examples of things that are really relevant instead of just things that are sort of cultural stereotypes. Good question. Current social movements like Black Lives Matter. Well, so I'm teaching now for the first time this fall. And I think that's a great question. I don't do a lot of movements. I guess we talk about gay marriage, same sex marriage movement. I think the one of the big struggles with as far as racism and anti-Black racism in particular has to do with sort of the good news, bad news, blaming issues. And I have found very difficult. For example, when I talk about the lower marriage rate among Blacks, I talk about incarceration. To some people that sounds a lot like I'm saying Blacks are criminals. When I say, wow, look at these incarceration rates, they're really high. To me, that's like, that's horrific. We have mass incarceration. We have to do something about that. It's just really difficult and important to have that conversation where you say, what are my assumptions when I say this is a big problem? Am I assuming this is about criminality? Or what am I talking about when I do this? And by just confronting that, it works for me. It's a great question. And I just don't really do movements in the class. So good question. Okay. You think there'll be less babies next year? Yes. Okay. So first there was there was an idea that, oh, because of the quarantine, we'd have more babies, like, oh, but that's not really the way fertility works. It's not really that when you stick couples together in their house, they just have more babies, because we have modern birth control, basically. I think there's a number of reasons to be quite sure we're going to have fewer babies. One, people don't want to have babies right now, more than they suddenly do want to. So, you know, some people, you never know how people will react, but it seems quite clear, more people are going to say, eh, then we'll say like, yeah. Okay. So that's one. Two, people are just meeting less, right? A lot of in the US, a lot of our births are unplanned. A large number of our births are unplanned. So isolation and staying home is just like less sex, less people meeting, less new relationships. It's just going to be less, less children. I thought I hit three reasons. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm quite sure there will be less. Now there's already some data, Gutmacher, the Gutmacher Institute already did a survey where they asked about if your fertility plans had changed, something like 30 something percent of women said that they were either definitely or probably or something going to have fewer children because of this. I mean, it was a, it's, it's a kind of a leading question because of this. Are you changing your mind? But it's going to be, it's going to be less. Okay. Is this course caught at the community college level? Yes, it is. I don't know, not as much. I think the sort of the level that my book is written at is, is like, is like the large state school sort of difficulty level. So I teach it at the University of Maryland. It's not too easy for my students at the University of Maryland, but it's not too hard. The, I do my best. We work on jargon, less jargon. I don't talk about the neoliberal world order. I try to use, I try to just be clear on the writing and the figures, and there's a reason for every figure and it relates to the check. So I try my best. I don't do a lot of, I don't do a lot of like advice, like how to stuff. Some, some family sociology courses include like different kinds of birth control and how they work and stuff like that. More like family studies in the old sense. I don't really do that. Are research findings unified clear on the positive value of married and direct intact traditional families? No. That's amazing. No. Does the research show different types of family structures and better outcomes? Okay. On the issue of like our two parent married couple families better for children, two things about that. Three things about that. One is all the research on that is extremely complicated and difficult because of selection. People who are better off choose that kind of family arrangement more often and then they do better. So that's a big problem with the research on that. I said three. I shouldn't promise three things. Number two, different kinds of privilege go together. So the people who have the privilege of a certain kind of arrangement get benefits from exercising that privilege as well as from the other things in their lives. So that's one thing. The third thing is one way that we think about this more is that stability is good for kids more than more than what kind of parents you have besides like obviously wealth is you know and housing and healthcare and all that stuff is important. Stability turns out to be good. So some of the research that tries to differentiate between type of family and like number of transitions or people coming and going from the household or other things that are difficult in kids' lives. Transitions tend to go with other stuff like violence and abuse and so on. So it tends to be stability is better for kids and that to me makes more intuitive sense than like traditional families are better, not just politically because it rubs me the wrong way but I think it logically makes sense. And of course there's going to be correlation there. You know the more privileged, more stable, more traditional families will have some advantages. On the other hand some obvious disadvantages like for gay people and so on. Okay.