Children Aware Of White Male Monopoly On White House

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2008) — Challenging the idea that children live in a color or gender blind world, a new study from The University of Texas at Austin reveals most elementary-school-age children are aware there has been no female, African-American, or Hispanic President of the United States. And, many of the children attribute the lack of representation to discrimination.

Rebecca Bigler, professor of psychology, and a team of researchers at the university and the University of Kansas have published their findings in the October issue of the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.

During 2006, more than a year before Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama entered the presidential race, the researchers interviewed 205 children between the ages of five and 10 about their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about the similarities among U.S. presidents. In three studies, children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds answered questions about the absence of female, African-American and Hispanic presidents.

The researchers found most children are aware that women and minorities have been excluded from the U.S. presidency. Although most of the children believed people of all races and genders should be president, they offered surprising answers as to why only white males have held the nation's highest political office:

One in four participants said it is illegal for women and minorities to hold the office of president;
One in three children attributed the lack of female, African-American and Latino presidents to racial and gender bias on the part of voters; and
While some children expressed the belief that prejudice shapes how adults vote, another third of the participants said members of the excluded groups lacked the skills to hold the position.
"The U.S. presidency is a high profile case of racial and gender exclusion," Bigler, director of the Gender and Racial Attitudes Lab at the university, said. "And because this topic is not typically explained to children, they appear to create their own explanations for the exclusion."

Children generally were optimistic about the possibility that they could become president, the researchers found. However, girls who attributed the lack of female presidents to discrimination were more likely to report they could not become president. In contrast, African-American children who identified discrimination as the reason for the lack of diversity showed an increased interest in becoming president.

[To read the entire story, go to: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081005121335.htm ]

"Opting out"? The effect of children on women's employment in the United States

Heather Boushey
Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, USA
Published in: Feminist Economics,
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Abstract
In the United States, a recent spate of popular media attention has focused on whether mothers, especially highly educated mothers in their thirties, are increasingly "opting out" of employment. This paper uses data from the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine whether children cause women to exit employment. This paper finds that the "child effect" on women's employment has fallen since the end of the 1970s. The child effect was -21.8 percentage points in 1979 and has fallen consistently over the last two decades to -12.7 percentage points in 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, the child effect grew from -11.1 to -12.7, but the change was statistically insignificant. Recent declines in women's employment may be more an effect of the weak labor market for all women, mothers and non-mothers, rather than an increase in mothers voluntarily choosing to exit employment. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content?content=10.1080/13545700701716672