Study Finds Employers Are Less Likely To Interview LGBT Women | ThinkProgress

It would be interesting too see the impact of such a study in small towns were everyone assumes they know your personal life.   Not to knock the study but this is telling me something I already know, although it does put numbers to a face, so to speak.

A new study finds that similarly qualified queer women receive significantly fewer callbacks than their straight peers when applying for jobs.

Emma Mishel, a doctoral student in the sociology program at New York University, conducted the study by generating a pair of test résumés, which she submitted to more than 800 administrative, clerical, and secretarial job openings in New York City, Washington, D.C., Tennessee, and Virginia. The résumés were similarly qualified, and for each application, she would flip a coin to randomize whether the Cornell University grad or the Columbia University grad had experience as a leader in her school’s LGBT student organization or just a general progressive organization.

Because the indicator was an LGBT organization, Mishel refers to “queer women” throughout the study, because the applicants might have been perceived as any variation of LGBT identity. In a footnote, she explains that “queer” has become “an umbrella term for anyone identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

The study found that the applicant who did not have an LGBT indicator was 29 percent more likely to be contacted for a interview than the applicant who did,,,

By applying to jobs in different locations, Mishel hoped to assess what impact LGBT employment protections may have played in the results. Interestingly, though callback rates were lower in general for Tennessee and Virginia (perhaps because the applicant’s home address was in New York), rates of discrimination did not actually vary across the locations. Thus, the study suggests that having protections does not directly lower the amount of discrimination that takes place.

Study Finds Employers Are Less Likely To Interview LGBT Women | ThinkProgress

Discredited Regnerus Study Continues Its Reign of Error | Hatewatch

For the anti-gay movement, call it the gift that keeps on giving. The thoroughly discredited study by University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus that was released July 2012 has turned up yet again, this time in the initial brief filed on behalf of the state of Utah in its fight against marriage equality. A federal judge ruled in December that Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court granted a stay in January, and the lawsuit is currently wending its way through the appeals process.

The brief, filed by the state’s legal team late last night (beating the deadline by 30 minutes), suggests that children will somehow be endangered by marriage equality, and the Regnerus study is supposed to lend credence to the false claim that children raised in same-sex households fare worse in many ways than in households with opposite-sex couples.

However, Regnerus’ data does not support that conclusion, as he himself has admitted. Hundreds of sociologists have noted the study’s flawed methodology while the American Sociological Association slammed the study in a March 2013 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, documents obtained by the American Independent suggest that Regnerus was recruited to conduct the study in order to use its findings to influence possible Supreme Court decisions regarding marriage equality and in fact may also have been coached about how to discuss the study publicly.

In spite of all that, since its publication, the study has been used in several amicus briefs that oppose marriage equality and it has been cited as justification for anti-gay policy at home and abroad. Last September, a Russian lawmaker cited the study in conjunction with his proposed bill to deny gay and lesbian parents custody of their children. The study may also have played a role in the passage of laws against “gay propaganda” in Russia that have encouraged open homophobia and, in some cases, violent attacks.

Discredited Regnerus Study Continues Its Reign of Error | Hatewatch

Going Solo: A Brief History of Living Alone and the Enduring Social Stigma Around Singletons | Brain Pickings

An interesting piece Personally I am enjoying living alone as I am enjoying being "single." For the first time I am not with someone and only have myself to answer too which has given me freedom explore aspects of my self that for too long laid dormant. Altho I have become a bit lazy, which I'm enjoying too. Only thing I would change, is where I live. I would have more anonymity in the urban setting and more chances at socialization if I so choose,,,

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle admonished:

"The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god."

Indeed, the ancient world held exile as the most formidable form of punishment, second only to execution, though in Greek tragedies it was often regarded as a fate worse than death. For more than two millennia, this fear and loathing of solitary life endured and permeated the fabric of society. In 1949, Yale anthropologist George Peter Murdock surveyed some 250 “representative cultures” across history and geography, and concluded:

"The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society. No exception, at least, has come to light."

Yet our relationship with solitary life has undergone a radical shift in the recent past. So argues NYU sociology, public policy, and media professor Eric Klinenberg in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone — an ambitious exploration of what Klinenberg calls the “remarkable social experiment” that our species has embarked upon over the past half-century, juxtaposing the numbers with the enduring social stigma around singleness.

[,,,]
Klinenberg goes on to explore the forces and factors that have sparked the transformative social experience of living alone, which has in turn changed not only the way we understand ourselves and our most intimate relationships, but also the way we structure our cities and orchestrate our economies, demonstrating that solo living affects the lives of nearly everyone in the social ecosystem. He points to four key developments driving this cult of individualism, championed by Emerson and Thoreau: (1) The wealth generated by economic growth and the social security provided by the modern welfare state (“Put simply, one reason that more people live alone than ever before is that today more people can afford to do so.”); (2) the communications revolution (“For those who want to live alone, the Internet affords rich new ways to stay connected.”); (3) mass urbanization (“Subcultures thrive in cities, which tend to attract nonconformists who are able to find others like themselves in the dense variety of urban life.”); (4) increased longevity (“Because people are living longer than ever before — or, more specifically, because women often outlive their spouses by decades rather than years — aging alone has become an increasingly common experience.”).

Going Solo: A Brief History of Living Alone and the Enduring Social Stigma Around Singletons | Brain Pickings

A flop??

They called this "experiment" a flop, but was it? I am a strong believer that music soothes the savaged soul. It would be interesting to know if the exposure to the music had any effects on the remainder of the commuters day as a whole. At least subconsciously.

"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

More intelligent(?) design,,,the "study" in this case

Not to defend this $27 million hunk of junk depicted as science, BUT what else would they have expected as the outcome of this so called study. As a deistic agnostic who holds that the bible has no authority in my life, this would be the last place I would go and spend $23. In addition I am a card carrying lesbian. Of course I would feeling "weirded out" in such a place.

Sociology-students-visit-Creation-Museum-feel-weirded-out from csmonitor.com - StumbleUpon