Social justice link roundup

This page can be used as a repository for links and citations related to social justice. For information specifically relating to recent controversies about feminism in the atheist and skeptic communities, see Misogyny Wars.

If you see a green arrow next to a resource, that means that the resource is a research study. If you add a research study or find one on the page that has not been marked yet, please place {{arrow}} in front of the link.

A general trigger warning applies to the links in this article, but resources with a red triangle are considered to be unusually likely to trigger. Please proceed with caution. If you find a resource that should be marked, please add {{warn}} in front of it.

Privilege

What is privilege?

This section contains general resources to understand the concept of privilege and some of its effects.

• "Check my what?" On privilege and what we can do about it is itself a useful links roundup, as well as a resource covering common arguments about privilege, what it is, and how to approach situations where you have it.

• Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege is a 101-type of post, explaining how privilege influences the way we experience various situations and why “I wouldn't mind it if someone did that to me.” is not a good rule of thumb for assessing the impact of an action over persons lacking your privilege.

• Privilege, Oppression and Difference. This article discusses the tendency in discussions of privilege to blame differences in individuals and populations for the creation of oppression, and the effect of blaming those who are different for that oppression, concluding that blaming difference performs maintenance on privilege.

• What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field. This study discusses the complex relationship between researchers who possess relative privilege and the construction of experiments or research, as well as on the interpretation of their findings. The researchers discover the apparent exercise of privilege in the construction of research and its interpretation, and provide an analysis of the implications of their discovery.

• When the rug is pulled. Ian Cromwell on the effect of stereotypes on people who want to think of themselves as individuals.

Specific types of privilege

This section contains resources on the effects of specific kinds of privilege.

• FAQ: What is Male Privilege? is a 101-level explanation of privilege, with a specific focus on male privilege.

• "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is a basic resource about white privilege.

• Prosecution and Race: The Power and Privilege of Discretion. This article discusses the use of judicial discretion on non-white defendants, and the role racial privilege plays in the lower conviction and sentencing rates of white defendants.

• Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism. This article discusses the role of white privilege in the problems with labeling and having access to appropriate resources for Black students in the K-12 special education system.

• Inequality as Ingroup Privilege or Outgroup Disadvantage: The Impact of Group Focus on Collective Guilt and Interracial Attitudes. This study demonstrates differences in behavior and measures of bias in a group of white subjects when presented with statements or asked to generate statements emphasizing black disadvantages or white advantages. The results demonstrate that white subjects respond with increased guilt and decreased expression of racism, suggesting that the presentation inequality in terms of outgroup oppressions allows ingroup members to avoid negative emotions and justify prejudice.

• Color-Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Function of Erasing the Color Line in Post Race America. This paper discusses the attempt to negate social and racial inequalities via the construction of the concept 'colorblindness', and that negation's effect on the maintenance of white privilege.

• Christian Privilege: Breaking a Sacred Taboo. This paper discusses the confluence of white male privilege and the privileges accorded the dominant religion in the US.

Privilege checklists

Privilege checklists are a tool to help people who are privileged think about the ways in which privilege might affect their lives. They are frequently useful in the initial removal of privilege blinders.

• Things I Don't Have To Think About Today is a checklist by John Scalzi covering many axes of privilege.

• The Male Privilege Checklist is at Alas! A Blog.

• A list of privilege lists contains links to several different "privilege checklists" and related material.

Intersectionality

Between kinds of oppression

• Geek Feminism Wiki-- Intersectionality. This is a basic explanation of what intersectionality is and why it is important.
• MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT, from Tiger Beatdown, is a passionate post explaining the importance of intersectionality in terms of its actual effects on the author's life and feminism, notably calling the kyriarchy the "shit puff pastry."

• Ain't I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality. This paper revisits the historical debates over the category 'woman', in light of the wars and occupation in Iraq, in order to demonstrate that intersectionality is relevant to, and offers the best chance of understanding the multidimensional nature of oppression.

• Re-Thinking Intersectionality. This paper discusses problems with methodology and essentialism which unfortunately plague the intersectionality movements from the late 1980s and early 1990s, dissecting the ways in which essentialism continues to pervade even a movement designed to provide the tools for complex analysis, in order to provide the tools with which to provide greater and greater nuance with which to understand the intersections between different kinds of oppression.

• Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color. This paper critiques the willingness of intersectional scholars and policy to group the experiences of persons to general categories like 'Black' or 'women', which the author believes contributes to group tensions. The author uses statistics and incidences of violence against women of color to discuss unique problems facing women of color in instances of violence and offers a better, intersectional lens with which to evaluate the issue.

Microaggressions

• The Microaggressions Project, now updated very rarely, catalogues accounts of microaggressions.
• The Everyday Sexism Project collects incidents of everyday sexism, many of which are microaggressions.

Allyship

• The Wages of Virtue, from Crommunist's blog, discusses the importance of being an ally, in spite of the fact that, as he explains, one is not entitled to applause or rewards for being an ally.
• How to deal with being called out, from My Internet Brain, is a Tumblr post describing best practices for an ally who is called out for problematic behavior.

• What's your room number? from the Crommunist blog discusses the tendency of privileged people to assume that they are entitled to be listened to and responded to patiently despite ignorance of the subject matter, and explains why this is problematic.

• Don't Be That Guy by synecdochic, which centers on interactions between men and women, is a lengthy post describing some behaviors that would-be male allies should avoid, explaining in detail why they are harmful or creepy, and discussing how to avoid them.

• The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck is a post at Shakesville describing the predicament and feelings of many feminist women when the men they care about express misogyny or fail to act like good allies. This piece is the source of the phrase "Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?"

• On Being a No-Name Blogger Using Her Real Name, by Kate Harding, is a post about online harassment of women that goes into the importance for decent men who do not actually hate women of being a good ally and not engaging in misogynistic jokes or banter, based on the likelihood that men who hate women are present among their friends.

• How to Be An Ally, by Kinsey Hope at Genderbitch, gives a list of do's and don't's for people who want to be allies.
  • “Omg Ur So MEEN!” PseudoAlly Tears And Why We Don’t Care is also from Genderbitch, responding to the claim that her hostile tone drives away allies.
    

• Engaging Men as Social Justice Allies in Ending Violence Against Women: Evidence for a Social Norms Approach. This paper discusses a set of studies concerning the effect of perceived social norms on the willingness of men and women to treat consent and assault as important issues. Results demonstrate that changing societal norms plays a critical role in prevention efforts and enlisting male allies.

• The Development of Social Justice Allies During College: A Phenomenological Investigation. This small scale study investigates conditions which contribute to the identification of undergraduate students as social justice advocates, concluding that several were important: precollege egalitarian values, access to information on social justice, engagement in meaning-making, confidence building and opportunities to act as social justice advocates.

• A note to those who say they oppose sexism and misogyny in the atheist-skeptical movement, from Salty Current, is a reminder that opposing sexism will make some people uncomfortable.

Rape and rape culture

See also Survivor stories.

Prevalence and effects of rape and sexual assault

• RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, has general statistics about rape, abuse, and sexual assault, including prevalence, reporting rates, victims, and offenders.

• The Sexual Victimization of College Women a National Institute of Justice Research Report.

• The FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2011 (still uses old definition for rape)

• The FBI's Uniform Crime Report, 1991-2010 (uses old definition for rape)

• The National Center for Victims of Crime reports statistics summaries and provides links for support
• Rape and sexual assault of women: the extent and nature of the problem - Findings from the British Crime Survey

What is rape culture?

• Rape Culture 101 is a post from Shakesville defining and describing the features of rape culture. The post incorporates a number of links to further information and examples for specific features of rape culture.

• Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced, by Phaedra Starling guest blogging at Shapely Prose, describes the risk-assessment strategies used by some women to cope with the prevalence of rape, and offers tips for interacting with women in a way that respects their boundaries and safety.

• Shuffling feet: a black man’s view on Schroedinger’s Rapist, by Ian Cromwell at the Crommunist blog, discusses the parallel sometimes drawn between women's risk assessment around men (as described in Schroedinger's Rapist) and racist white people's reactions to black people, and explains that as a black man, the author uses a number of strategies to make white people around him more comfortable, and wishes that those who do not experience anti-black racism first-hand would not exploit it as a convenient weapon.

• Another post about rape, by Harriet at feminist blog Fugitivus, discusses some ways in which the socialization of women contributes to rape culture, dismantling several common victim-blaming arguments.

• Surviving Rape: What I Want Other College Students to Know About Title IX, by Dana Bolger at Fem2.0, is an article in which the author refers to her own experience as a rape survivor on a college campus, discusses the obligations of colleges to rape survivors under Title IX, and comments on their failures to uphold them.

• The Rape of Mr. Smith (PDF) is a story illustrating what it would be like if society blamed robbery victims in the same way as rape victims are blamed.

• This insightful comment by mythbri on Pharyngula may be useful in illustrating the nature of rape culture to people who are new to the concept, especially those who are resistant to the idea because of society's treatment of rape as a serious crime in theory.

Understanding predatory behavior

• Meet the Predators from the Yes Means Yes blog is an explanation of two large-scale surveys, one by David Lisak and Paul Miller and one by Stephanie McWhorter, which sought to understand the attitudes of a certain subset of undetected, self-confessed rapists.

• Predator Redux, also from Yes Means Yes, discusses research by David Lisak into the modus operandi of predatory rapists.

• What Does A College Rapist Look Like? by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux writing at care2 is a shorter explanation of some of David Lisak's research on rapist behavior.

• Mythcommunication: It’s Not That They Don’t Understand, They Just Don’t Like The Answer, from Yes Means Yes, explains some conversation analysis research by Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith that shows that women do not say "no" in unusually unclear ways in sexual interactions, and men who claim not to have understood "no" because it was not expressed clearly enough frequently understand it expressed the same way in other contexts.

• Boundaries, by Nora at Another Feminist Blog, documents a twitter conversation between the author and user @DMBIII. @DMBIII repeatedly ignores the author's stated boundaries in hitting on her, then has a misogynistic outburst of anger because she refuses to give in. She uses the conversation as an example of rape culture in action and explains why. This post was linked and briefly discussed at Almost Diamonds (After you say no), as a demonstration of why "Why don't you just say no?" is not useful advice.

Rape jokes and other sexist humor

• A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar, from the feminist blog Fugitivus, is a comprehensive discussion of the effects of rape jokes on survivors and why they are generally not funny.

• Rape is Hilarious is a post from Shakesville where Melissa McEwan attacks a particularly violent rape joke by shock jocks Opie and Anthony by recounting her own rape experience. Comments are notable for extreme misogyny.

• Survivors Are So Sensitive, also from Shakesville, was written during the Penny Arcade "Dickwolves" fiasco in response to critiques of rape jokes being misrepresented as oversensitivity or as claims that "your rape joke will directly cause someone to go out and commit a rape" (quoted from the article). It explains the "rape culture" argument and discusses "triggering."

• Do you laugh at rape jokes? is a post by Soraya Chemaly at Fem2.0 explaining what was particularly wrong and unfunny about Daniel Tosh's gang rape threat, as well as discussing rape jokes in general and how they fit into rape culture.

• The Enjoyment of Sexist Humor, Rape Attitudes, and Relationship Aggression in College Students is a study by Kathryn M. Ryan and Jeanne Kanjorski. The study found, among other things, that in men, enjoyment of sexist humor was correlated with aggression toward women and self-reported likelihood to rape.

• Effects of exposure to sexist humor on perceptions of normative tolerance of sexism is a paper by Thomas E. Ford, Erin R. Wentzel, and Joli Lorion. The results supported the idea that sexist humor affects the perceptions of men with hostile sexist attitudes, who perceive that the social situation is tolerant of sexism and therefore feel less negatively at the thought of themselves engaging in sexist behavior.

• No laughing matter: Women's verbal and nonverbal reactions to sexist humor, by Marianne LaFrance and Julie A. Woodzicka, describes an experiment in which women's responses to sexist humor were studied. The women experienced adverse effects from being exposed sexist humor, which were measured in both verbal and nonverbal responses.

• More Than “Just a Joke”: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor describes two experiments in which men with hostile sexist attitudes were exposed to sexist humor and then asked to make decisions about women's organizations. Following exposure to sexist humor, the men's hostile sexist attitudes appeared to impact their decision-making about those organizations more significantly than those attitudes affected men exposed to neutral humor.

• Harassment, Male Privilege and Jokes that Women Just Don't Get is a blog post describing the link between internet discussion norms (including the use of jokes about sexual violence) and male privilege.

Rape with male victims

• 1 in 6 is a site dedicated to providing resources for male survivors of rape.

• Male Rape Survivors and Victim Blaming, by James A. Landrith writing at The Good Men Project, works to dismantle common victim-blaming arguments used specifically against male survivors of sexual violence.

• The Military's Secret Shame, from Newsweek, at The Daily Beast, discusses sexual assaults against men in the military. The article includes information on the harms specific to military rape survivors, as well as information on why men who have been raped in the military often do not report.
• Male Rape: The Resilient Taboo is a blog post on HuffingtonPost about men who have been raped.

• Strictly Moderated: Open Thread For Male Survivors is a thread at No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? which contains many personal accounts of rape by male survivors. Useful in conversations in which the possibility of rape of males is being denied.

Social justice and fiction

• What Do You Mean When You Say You Want Strong Female Characters? discusses the demand for "strong female characters" in light of intersecting oppressions - for instance, the stereotyping of black women as "strong and stoic" and trans women as "secretly men."

Category X

System justification

• Evidence of System Justification in Young Children. This study on children demonstrates a tendency, in children as young as 5, to engage in narratives which favor in-group selection and favor along the lines of relative advantage to which they belong.

• Attitudinal Ambivalence and the Conflict between Group and System Justification Motives in Low Status Groups. This paper discusses the result of two studies on subjects in high and low status groups, and on women and men, testing for in-group preferences, ambivalence, the results of a 'Just World' theory and system justification. The results demonstrate a pattern in low status groups and women of greater in-group ambivalence. Low status groups also displayed less in-group preference, but high status groups displayed more in-group preference and less in-group ambivalence.

• The Psychology of System Justification and the Palliative Function of Ideology. This paper discusses why low and high status group members tend to engage in system justification.

• Complimentary Justice: Effects of "Poor but Happy" and "Poor but Honest" Stereotype Exemplars on System Justification and Implicit Activation of the Justice Motive This paper tests the effect of moral stereotypes about people from the highest and lowest brackets of income, discovering that exposure to negative stereotypes tended to result in greater system justification, but that exposure to negative stereotypes also activated concerns about justice.

• Social inequality and the reduction of ideological dissonance on behalf of the system: evidence of enhanced system justification among the disadvantaged. This set of studies uses data from five surveys of the US population, discovering that system justification, the belief that economic inequities are necessary and belief in a meritocracy is strongest in the poorest parts of the population, and in Southern states.

• System Justification Theory and Research: Implications for Law, Legal Advocacy, and Social Justice. This paper discusses system justification, in terms of theory and history, and weighs the implications for various legal and organizational structures designed to deal with the general public.

• System Justification in Responding to the Poor and Displaced in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This paper discusses the threat to system justification offered by the general inadequacy of the response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the confluence of stereotypes about the poor and persons of color with that dissonance.

• Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. This study, of over 22,000 persons in 12 countries, demonstrates links between several mental states, including the fear of death and dogmatism, and politically conservative thinking, tracking system justification as a way to understand the personal motivations for change-resistant, politically conservative ideology.

Why feminists are so interested in the body and emotions

• Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. This book chapter gives an overview, both philosophically and in terms of theory, of why the question of bodies and the individual is so important to feminism and discussions of rights.

• Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. This paper discusses the body as a site for control in Western Culture.

• Depicting Women as Sex Objects in Television Advertising: Effects on Body Dissatisfaction. This set of studies interviews both men and women being shown a series of sexist commercials, nonsexist commercials or no commercials. The findings concluded clear trends in body evaluation delineated by gender. After exposure to sexist commercials, female subjects rated themselves as larger than they were, and expressed a larger gap between their ideal body and their current body. Male subjects rated themselves as smaller, but also expressed a greater range between their ideal and current body size.

• Growing Up in the Culture of Slenderness: Girls' Experiences of Body Dissatisfaction. This study interviews girls for body dissatisfaction and idealized bodies. Girls as young as 8 in the study expressed body dissatisfaction which was comparable to the dissatisfaction expressed by adult women.

• The Body and Social Theory. This is the entire book, posted online. It discusses the evolution of the body as focus for social theory.

• The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity. This chapter discusses the relationship between the social construction of femininity and what were once called nervous or hysteric disorders, focusing on hysteria, agoraphobia and anorexia nervosa.

• The Effects of Exposure to Feminist Ideology on Women's Body Image. The link is to a dissertation which studied the relationship of women to their bodies and to eating before and after being exposed to feminist ideology, concluding cautiously that women experienced gains in satisfaction with their body image after exposure to feminist ideology, as well as gains in the expression of feminist ideology.

• Body Image: Focus Groups with Men and Boys. This study interviewed men and boys on issues of body image, idealized male images and masculinity, discovering discourses of guilt and blame for violations of 'correct' body images, and discusses the ramifications of social pressure on men and boys.

• Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification. This paper explores the history of the male body in advertisement, discovering that the male body has been objectified in ways common to female subjects and concluding with a discussion of the implication of male objectification on men and society.

• Packing History: Count(er)ing Generations. This article discusses cross-generational understandings of the queer body and presentation of sexuality and gender.

• From Metrosexual to Retrosexual: The Importance of Shifting Male Gender Roles to Feminism. This paper discusses the commodification of men, suggesting that the question of male identity is best made room for in feminism because both men and women have been commodified, and therefore made objects, in commercial culture.

• Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity. This study finds that young men interviewed about their appearance had a strong tendency to discuss not just physical maintenance, such as gym and workout times, but also themselves as positioned in culture and societies. These findings lead a discussion about men's bodies as sites for cultural reproduction and societal control.

• The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power. The researchers for this study have previously focused on AIDS/HIV transmission among various populations as a way of articulating a methodology for sexual risk. The book is written on a set of studies of sexual risk in young adult populations, and discovers that heterosexuality is privileged and masculinity is privileged in ways which exacerbate sexual risk-taking.

Stereotype threat

• Women make safer financial decisions when faced with sexual stereotypes, at Not Exactly Rocket Science, describes the results of a study by Priyanka Carr and Claude Steele about how stereotype threat affects women's financial decision-making. Also contains links to several other studies about stereotype threat.

• Black students perform more poorly on standardized aptitude tests when reminded of racial stereotypes. This study, performed by Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, uses four separate experiments to measure the effect of priming black students with racial stereotypes and telling them that their aptitude is being measured before testing their performance. The net result noted a clear vulnerability for Black students, due to stereotyping and the pressures associated with living under negative social expectations for performance.

• Stereotype threat and women's math performance. This study, performed by Steven J. Spencer, Claude M. Steele and Diane M. Quinn, tests performance of male and female students on difficult math tests, given a clear trend in the literature on the subject noting performance gaps based on gender. They discovered that if the students are told before the test that it does not distinguish by gender, performance on math tests is significantly better for female students. When the test was described as noting gender differences, female students performed significantly poorer than their male peers.

• Reducing the Effects of Stereotype Threat on African-American College Students by Shaping Theories of Intelligence. This study, performed by Joshua Aronson, Carrie B. Fried and Catherine Good, tests ways to make students more resistant to stereotype threat through introducing different conceptions of intelligence. The researchers found significant gains in enjoyment of academic activities and in academic performance for students encouraged to believe that intelligence is malleable, instead of fixed.

• Knowing is Half the Battle: Teaching Stereotype Threat as a Means of Improving Women's Math Performance. This study, performed by researchers Michael Johns, Toni Schmader, and Andy Martens, tested whether informing women about stereotype threat increased their performance in threatening testing situations. Male and female subjects took two math tests, about which they were informed that the test is either a problem-solving or math tests. Subjects were tested without being informed of stereotype threat for both the original math or problem-solving tests. For the third test, students were informed of the effect of stereotype threat on women's performance. Female subjects who experienced anxiety on previous tests enjoyed performance gains after being informed of stereotype threat.

Implicit bias

• Racism And Meritocracy makes a case that improving diversity in Silicon Valley hiring practices would lead to more meritocratic outcomes, and that the current lack of diversity is due to implicit bias and stereotype threat, both of which are easily reduced, rather than to overt racism and sexism or inherent differences in aptitude.

• Project Implicit has a series of online tests meant to measure the presence of several kinds of implicit bias.

• What? Me Sexist? An article discussing how implicit gender bias of the voters hurts the advancement of women in politics.

• Implicit Bias. This booklet was prepared for the court system, in order to help educate law enforcement professionals about implicit bias. The booklet is easy to read and fairly straight-forward.

• Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations. This legal article discusses the phenomenon of implicit bias and its connection to poor outcomes in legal cases involving African-Americans.
• Demonstrations of Implicit Anti-Fat Bias: The Impact of Providing Causal Information and Evoking Empathy. This set of studies looks at the bias based on common conceptions of the cause of obesity, using a set of subjects exposed to the common conceptions for obesity. These subjects displayed a higher rating of implicit bias using the Implicit Association Test. Subjects in a second experiment were given narratives about discrimination faced by obese persons, which tended to reduce overweight persons' implicit biases scores, but did not change the biases of the control group.

• The Law of Implicit Bias. This article discusses the implications for harassment law in the general population, given that implicit bias has been demonstrated to be society-wide, and suggests that the law provides the best tool for dismantling implicit biases.
• Implicit Bias and Contact: The Role of Interethnic Friendships. This paper is on two studies performed on White participants, using the Implicit Association Test, self-report and a friendship questionnaire. Participants who had interethnic friendships tended to have less implicit bias, but only 2 of the 7 measures of explicit bias. Even though the difference measured did not indicate a comprehensive change in bias, the value of interethnic friendships and contact is supported by the results.

• Implicit bias in Impression Formation: associations influence the construal of individuating information. This paper discusses the formation of impressions when the subject is presented with ambiguous behavior by a person belonging to a group. The researchers find that interpretation of ambiguous behavior is mediated by bias concerning the group, and that associative strength of attribution and disposition was indirect, mediated by the impact of association on the identification of the ambiguous behavior.

• Forgotten Racial Equality: Implicit Bias, Decisionmaking, and Misremembering. This paper is about the tendency for judges and juries to unintentionally misremember the facts in racially biased ways. The researcher uses a series of scripts involving remembering details with or without non-white actors, and finds that participants consistently misremember and ascribe motivation to characters who are non-white. Results also appeared not to be a function of explicit racial bias, but of implicit biases. Implications for the US Justice system are discussed.

• Social Justice in Our Minds, Homes, and Society: The Nature, Causes, and Consequences of Implicit Bias. This report discusses the relationship between implicit and explicit biases, and moderating factors. The author distinguishes between declarative and procedural models for implicit bias, and discusses differences in formation and actions to confront those biases.

• Seeing Through Colorblindness: Implicit Bias and the Law. This article summarizes the tendency in the law and society to assume that we live in a 'colorblind' society, and creates a template for addressing these assumptions in an evidence-based fashion.
• Priming Christian Religious Concepts Increases Racial Prejudice. This paper discusses a study designed to test covert bias and general attitudes about ethnic groups after using terminology commonly used in Christianity. The results displayed a clear hike in the rates of covert bias and general affect toward African-Americans after study subjects had been exposed to Christian terminology.

• Implicit Bias, “Science,” and Antidiscrimination Law. This paper, published in the Harvard Law Review, takes issue with the concerns about implicit bias raised by Gregory Mitchell and Philip Tetlock, concluding that while Mitchell and Tetlock may have pointed out the need for greater study, their challenge rests on several questionable normative decisions which affect their ability to critique the field of implicit bias as a whole.

• Implicit Bias and the Pushback from the Left. This paper discusses the challenges facing scholars and persons in law presented by implicit bias, and discusses the political uneasiness which implicit bias provokes in persons on the right, and the surprise push back of persons on the left.

Chilly climate

• Is It Cold in Here? is a blog post by Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics explaining what a "chilly climate" is, describing some ways in which chilly climates are created and mitigated, discussing Elevatorgate, and suggesting strategies for change.

• Intending to Stay: Images of Scientists, Attitudes Toward Women, and Gender as Influences on Persistence Among Science and Engineering Majors. Much of the research on retention in the STEM disciplines has focused on the deficits and deficiencies which are purported to be the cause for poor retention in STEM disciplines among female students and non-white students. This study focuses on reasons that these students stay in STEM disciplines, noting that images, attitudes and gender were all significant, if not uniform, influences on whether or not these students persisted in their disciplines. Women were more sensitive to perceived fairness in the classroom, such that even small gains in perceived classroom climate (less chilly climates) saw gains as great as 58% retention for each point on the scale on which students were asked to rate fairness.

• The Conceptual Politics of Chilly Climate Controversies. The author of this paper traces the debates over the meaning of the word 'equity' on college campuses in Canada, leading to an analysis of what the conceptual debates say about the state of equity on college campuses.

• Context Factors Related to Women's Attrition from a Graduate Science Program: A Case Study. This study follows graduate students in Chemistry at a major research university, surveying male and female students, as well as male and female faculty, to discover why female students suffered from a much greater attrition rate than male students. The findings demonstrated pervasive problems in the climate at that university, including faculty who were proud that they had never graduated a female Ph.D. student and a tendency in faculty and students to blame female graduate students for leaving the academy based on work-life balance or intellectual deficiency.

• Learning Professional Competence and Confidence: The Link between Instructional Practices and Learning Gains for Female and Male Students. This study investigated the relationships between instructional practices and students' feelings of competence and inclusion in college engineering classrooms, concluding that the classroom and department climate is a significant factor in retention efforts, especially for female students.

• Sexual Harassment and Assault: Chilling the Climate for Women in Academia. This study (n = 1037) discusses the overall chilling or negative effects which are found to be perceived in female students who have experienced harassment or assault while attending college. The paper also discusses re-victimization in this population, and the effect of the chilly climate on those students.

Hostile and benevolent sexism

• The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism. This study, with 2,250 male participants, proposes an inventory used to distinguish different types of sexism and the correlated beliefs about women and gender which characterize both hostile and benevolent sexism. The findings suggest that the men surveyed expressed ambivalence about women, with men who scored higher on hostile sexism expressing greater antipathy and men who scored higher on benevolent sexism expressing more positive feelings about women. Both hostile and benevolent sexism was co-present with the belief in stereotypes, with hostile sexism corresponding to more or exclusively negative stereotypes and benevolent corresponding to positive stereotyping.

• Beyond Prejudice as Simple Antipathy: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism Across Cultures. A cross-cultural study of whether male dominance and/or dependence on women can be correlated with hostile or benevolent sexism. The study finds that hostile and benevolent sexism correlate across cultures, that the presence of hostile or benevolent sexism is a predictive factor in ascribing classes of attributes to women, the women are more likely to reject hostile sexism as a function of the sexism in a culture, and that the relative levels of hostile and benevolent sexism in a culture are predictive for gender inequity.

• But She was Unfaithful: Benevolent Sexism and Reactions to Women who Violate Traditional Gender Role Expectations. This paper examines the role of benevolent sexism in rape myth acceptance and victim blame for victims like sex workers or role deviants, and finds that benevolent sexism plays a role in the blame of victims.

• The "True Romantic": Benevolent Sexism and Paternalistic Chivalry. This study confirms a strong correlation between persons who measure high on the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory for benevolent sexism and paternalistic chivalry, given women who conform to traditional gender roles. The study did not find a correlation between hostile sexism and paternalistic chivalry.

• Insidious Danger of Benevolent Sexism: Consequences for Women's Performance. These studies find that benevolent sexism is considerably worse for women's performance than hostile sexism, and that much of the effect was due to mental intrusions women experienced about their sense of being competent.

• 5 reasons there aren’t more women in atheism

On strategy

Activist styles and strategies

• The Revolution Will Not Be Polite: The Issue of Nice vs. Good by Rachael at the Social Justice League is an article explaining that "niceness" is not a virtue in itself, and explaining the unwillingness of many social justice activists to respond well to calls for politeness.

• [Activist Modus Operandi] Methods of Communication by Kinsey Hope at Genderbitch discusses four different styles of activist communication (Nuker, Appeaser, Emoter, and Logic Bomber) and describes some advantages and pitfalls of each.
• "Don't Feed the Trolls" is Bad Science, by Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds, responds to the "Don't feed the trolls" argument by explaining why staying silent in the face of trolling is ineffective.
• Don't Feed the Trolls! at Skepchick spells out the unspoken implications of this common attempt to silence victims of online harassment.

Derailing, trolling, and other antifeminist tactics

For a list of kinds of trolls you may encounter as a feminist, see Antifeminist trolls.

• Derailing for Dummies is a lengthy list and explanation of various common maneuvers used consciously or unconsciously to derail conversations about privilege or oppression.

• Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog seeks to help prevent feminist discussions from being derailed by the need for constant rehashings of 101-level material by providing resources and responses to typical derailing or disruptive questions.

• Intent! It's fucking magic! from Genderbitch uses vicious sarcasm to point out the inadequacy of "intent" as a defense of oppressive behavior.

• On "Bitch" and Other Misogynist Language is a 101-level Shakesville post that refutes several arguments commonly made in favor of the continued use of sexist slurs by men. The post addresses the "European usage" argument, the "reclaiming" argument, the "not a misogynist"/"intent" argument, "comparison to racist slurs trivializes racist slurs" argument, and the "PC police" argument.

• The Without Sanctuary project, an argument in pictures and history against the use of the word 'lynch' casually to describe negative public opinion about rape and rape culture, using postcards sent through the US mail service until 1960.

• Why do humans reason? This paper discusses the act of reasoning as the product of argumentation, persuasion and the attempt to justify one's actions, giving a mechanism for confirmation bias and a nice foundation to the reason why feminists are willing to argue.

• Excuses for sexist incidents, cataloged at Geek Feminism Wiki.

• Why "everyone's entitled to their opinion" is a lie, from the Crommunist blog, explains why this common and frustrating debate-ending line is wrong.
• Extending the benefit of the doubt, also from the Crommunist blog, explains what some people miss when they ask marginalized people to extend the benefit of the doubt to people who may be making innocent mistakes.

Sexual harassment, hate speech and First Amendment challenges

Please note: the articles in this section are part of a series of ongoing arguments about the reach of harassment law and the ways in which it is seen to be congruent with the First Amendment. The use of google scholar will net you information on the opposing side of this debate.

• When Equal Opportunity Meets Freedom of Expression: Student-On-Student Sexual Harassment and the First Amendment in School. This paper discusses the situation facing schools in the K-12 system when they attempt to treat the endemic problem of harassment between students. It contains a good summary of case law concerning harassment and the Constitutional amendments which concern harassment.

• Asian Pacific American Women and Racialized Sexual Harassment. This article specifically discusses racial stereotyping and its role in sexual harassment, along with the case law which is pertinent to a discussion of the First Amendment.

The Sweep of Sexual Harassment Cases. This article is a ten year (1986-1996) analysis of trends in the courts pertaining to the interpretation of sexual harassment law and how it is seen to interact with the First Amendment.

• Sexual Harassment Law: has it gone too far, or has the Media? This paper discusses the effect on the general public of the media's treatment of harassment law, framing the resistance to understanding sexual harassment in terms of the treatment of such laws as overly obtuse, coaching compliant behavior as always in violation of the rights of the speaker, as anti-sex. The result are public opinions which are utterly disconnected from court interpretations.

• Racial Harassment as Discrimination: A Cautious Endorsement of the Anti-Oppression Principle. This paper discusses racial discrimination and the First Amendment, in the light of the harassment of Black college students and harassment from which white students are protected by virtue of race.

• Strange Fruit: Harassment and the First Amendment. This paper discusses the current Supreme Court interpretation of harassment and the First Amendment, concluding that the interpretations which cast the harasser as victimized by the authorities are in danger of missing the reason why the trend to consider hate speech and harassing speech a violation of Title VII, and of missing the lack of conflict between harassment policies and the First Amendment.

• Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment. This paper discusses how the trivialization of cyber harassment based on gender denigrates the civil rights of women as they enter online spaces.

• Free Speech and Hostile Environments. This paper discusses why free speech debates are not and should not be a mechanism for employers to avoid liability in the regulation of working environments.

• Through the Looking Glass: Racial Jokes, Social Context, and the Reasonable Person in Hostile Work Environment Analysis. This paper takes an in-depth historical look at the basis for racialized humor in the US and how that impacts both the current reasonable person standard and the interpretation of hostile work environments.

LGBT love stories

Commenters, please add your own love stories here; they can be as short or long as you like. This is not just about marriages! although that's largely what we've collected so far.

• When I first met my husband I was working at a massage booth in the mall. He passed by and thought I was handsome, but couldn't afford a massage at the time, so he didn't approach me. A few days later, a friend invited me back to his place for a bit of fun, and I learned that L (my husband) lived with him and a few other people at the time. L and I hit it off that night, and he called me the next day to ask if I wanted to actually go out somewhere. We've been together ever since, seven years and counting now. -Dalillama, Schmott Guy

• This is what family looks like, from Minnesotans United for All Families.

• At last, they say 'We do', a slideshow from the Times Union.

• Happy Couples photo albums from Wipe Out Homophobia.

• Grandparents video from Freedom to Marry.

Economics

Social justice and economics contains information on the wage gap, women in STEM professions, sexual harassment in the workplace, and gender, race, and class intersections.

Reproductive freedom

Reversible contraception

According to PZ repeated studies show risk of abortion is drastically reduced when women can access long acting reversible contraception without financial or other impediments. The religious right opposes contraception as well as abortion, presumably they want enforced abstinence or enforced unwanted pregnancy.

General information

• Why Personhood and Equal Rights for Women is a Life and Death Matter and a Human Rights Issue is a comprehensive 24-page fact sheet by Jacqueline S. Homan detailing the importance of reproductive freedom. The fact sheet addresses medical issues resulting from pregnancy and childbirth, ethical arguments about consent, and the harm caused by religious privilege that clashes with women's human rights.

• Guttmacher Institute's resources on abortion: fact sheets about abortion in the United States and worldwide, summaries of US state policies, policy articles, research articles, media kits, slide shows, audio, video, and other reports.

• Gilda Sedgh et al., Induced abortion: estimated rates and trends worldwide, The Lancet (13 October 2007). Study by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute. Article is free to the public; just register a free account or use BugMeNot.
  • New data on abortion incidence, safety illuminate key aspects of worldwide abortion debate: summary of Sedgh 2007.
  • Eliminating unsafe abortion worldwide. Comment by Beth Fredrick in The Lancet on Sedgh 2007.
  • Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the World Health Organization's Department of Reproductive Health and Research, explained that this study shows that laws do not affect women's decisions to abort, but where abortion is illegal it is medically unsafe.

• The "woman as baby-factory" attitude in U.S. medical policy: I Am Not A Womb, I Am A Woman by Alma A. Hromic on Swans (2006). (There's a short commentary here.)

• Regulating Women's Bodies by Jan Bauman on Swans (2006)
• Female genital mutilation and obstetric outcome: WHO collaborative prospective study in six African countries. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68805-3[1]. Free but login is required for full text; just register a free account or use BugMeNot.
  • (Article based on this study) Female Genital Mutilation in mothers increases infant mortality as much as 55% (WHO study, 2006). Up to 20 out of every 1,000 babies born in Africa die as a direct result of their mothers' "circumcision."

• World Health Organization's Reproductive Health pages: topics include FGM, unsafe abortion, violence against women, gender (sex selection), and sexual & reproductive heath for adolescents.

• Abortion safety is the key to maternal health (2010). "The Royal Society of Canada and its counterparts in the other G8 countries note that the risk of a woman dying as a result of pregnancy or childbirth is one in seven in the poorest parts of the world and is more than 80 per cent preventable. In fact, "Up to 40 per cent of maternal and infant deaths could be averted with improved access to contraception and measures to reduce unsafe abortion. ...abortions performed by unskilled providers or under unhygienic conditions because of local laws banning abortions account for 13 per cent of maternal deaths." Furthermore, "Provision of effective contraception for approximately 200 million women who have none would prevent 23 million unplanned births, 22 million induced abortions and 14,000 pregnancy-related maternal deaths each year."

Personal experiences

• I'mNotSorry.net is a site where women can share their stories about abortions that they do not regret. This is useful in discussions with people who insist on treating abortion as always being a terrible experience and a painful choice.

• "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion": When the Anti-Choice Choose is a 2000 article by Joyce Arthur collecting anecdotes from abortion providers and clinic staff about anti-choice women who choose abortion.

• The only good abortion is my abortion, by Maggie Koerth-Baker, describes the author's experience with deciding whether or not to have an abortion under terrible circumstances: her other alternative is to suffer a miscarriage.

• Anatomy of an unsafe abortion, by Dr. Jen Gunter, is a short and somewhat graphic piece describing what can happen medically when an unsafe abortion by a badly trained doctor goes wrong.

• In Daily Kos, William F. Harrison tells "Why I provide abortions."

• My good abortion by Ericka Lutz on Literary Mama.

• Alas, a Blog: "What if your mother was pro-choice?" Some mentions of blood and gore in the comments.

• In her book, The Tree of Life, Fredelle Bruser Manyard recounts the death of a former student in the mid-1970s: Fredelle Bruser Maynard on abortion: The death of Mary Ellen Cann. Fredelle was a concentration camp survivor.
• I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me talks about abortion from the perspective of a woman who loves her life, but nonetheless believes that she and her mother would have been better off if she had been aborted.

• A doctor who started practising, I think, in the early 1900s, wrote a pseudonymous biography about how and why he started performing abortions: Confessions of an abortionist (1939) from the Bank of Wisdom online library.

Masculinity

• Men, Masculinities and Feminist Theory. This chapter from a larger book gives an overview of several different waves of feminism and their relationship to masculinity, ending with the intersectionality which defines the most current wave of feminism. The discussion includes disagreements over the role and threat proposed by traditional conceptions of masculinity.

• But what about Teh Menz!?!1! is a post by Edwin writing at the Crommunist blog discussing the importance of the study of men as gendered beings.

• Toxic Masculinity (part one) and Toxic Masculinity (part two) are posts on Jadehawk's Blog explaining the concept of toxic masculinity and describing some of its harms. Part one focuses on environmentalism, and part two focuses on sex. Toxic Masculinity Hurts Children Too, also on Jadehawk's Blog, and Toxic masculinity and the cost of gender stereotyping at And Cabbages, and Kings give further examples of the harm that can be caused by toxic masculinity.

• Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: Is Masculinity Impossible? is a post by Greta Christina on the unfair, unattainable expectations of men imposed by normative masculinity.

• Men who explain things is an amusing personal account by Rebecca Solnit at the LA Times Online of dealing with a man who took it upon himself to explain to her the book she had written - and he hadn't read.

• Andrea Carnaghi, Anne Maass, and Fabio Fasoli, Enhancing masculinity by slandering homosexuals: the role of homophobic epithets in heterosexual gender identity, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (December 2011).

Disability, mental health, and neurodiversity

See Against crazy-blaming for more resources on mental illness ableism.

The social model of disability

• Social Model Diagram. This is a graphic depicting the social model of disability.

Feminism and disabilities

• Personal and Political: a Feminist Perspective on Researching Physical Disabilities. This paper discusses the state of disability research, suggesting that it would benefit from interviewing across demographics, that it would benefit from considering the lives of persons across demographics and could learn considerably from feminism's insistence that the lives of persons with physical disabilities are important, in addition to discussing the political relevance of not studying across demographics.

• Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory. This paper lays out the necessary steps, including methodology, for creating feminist studies of disability. The study of disabilities is thought to provide necessary depth, strengthening, challenge and expansion of feminist theory.

• Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability. This book chapter discusses the changes in the life of persons who become disabled, by way of setting up a feminist view of the personal, political and theoretical challenges bought up by disability in a world of the able-bodied.

• Impairment and disability: constructing an ethics of care which promotes human rights. This paper discusses how to create a philosophical and ethical framework for treating disabled persons equitably and promoting their rights, rather than dependency.

Additional link roundups and resource lists

• Social justice resources is a massive list of resources at Brute Reason.
• This is a resource post for all the Good White Person™s out there is a link roundup for well-intentioned white people who want to learn more about anti-racism.

Statistics tutorial

These links are intended to provide a concise primer for reading the statistics in some of the papers linked to this page.

• Statistics Tutorial, StatTrek

• WISE Tutorials, Claremont University

• NASA, Goddard Institute tutorials

• Stat tutorials for the programs SPSS, SAS, WINKS, R and Excel

Glossaries for terms and concepts in the links

• McGraw Hill's Glossary of Sociology

• The APA's Glossary of Psychological Terms

• Wikipedia's entry on Experimental Design

Timelines and historical information on feminism

• The Path of the Women's Rights Movement

• Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement This collection sponsored by Duke University is a collection of papers from various points in the history of the Women's movement. Super cool.

• Documenting Difference: A Multimedia Anthology of Materials Concerning Race, Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the US. This collection, hosted by the UMass, is a idiosyncratic but fascinating look at issues in the mentioned categories, including newspaper illustrations, photographs, advertising and papers from various periods in US history.

• Women and Social Movements in the US: 1600-2000

• Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Women's Party. This Library of Congress collection is only one of their many, content-rich collections on moments in women's and Civil Rights history.