Our intrepid graduate editor and longtime board member Jacob Otis will be signing off from TSP this winter after several years of outstanding leadership and service. Jake’s vision, enthusiasm, and care for his work and for the project of public sociology has been a driving force in the TSP board throughout these years.

In his public work for our site, Jake has covered topics like restorative justice, intimate partner violence, and social welfare. Behind the scenes, Jake has been faithfully managing all things organizational at TSP – scheduling, editing articles, finding photos, making videos, posting features, organizing holiday parties, leading weekly board meetings, and more. He is also the founding editor of TSP’s own American Journal of Unfinished Sociology =).

Outside of TSP, Jake has published articles in places like Social Work, Qualitative Social Work, and Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine. He is also the Director of Restorative Programming at St. Croix Valley Restorative Services, a Research Associate and Trainer at the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, a Sr. UX Researcher at gotoresearch, and a father to four young children.

Jake has successfully defended his PhD dissertation in the School of Social Work and will begin the new year as Dr. Otis. We will miss him here at TSP, but are excited for his next steps!

Check out some highlights from Jake’s tenure with us at TSP – the “best of” Jake Otis – below!

• Social Expectations of Forgiveness (World Suffering, 2025)
• Social Isolation and “Loneliness” of Young Adults (TROT, 2025)
• What Do We Know About Child Tax Credits? (TROT, 2022, 2023, 2025)
• Just a Few Bad Apples? Social Science Research on Police Complaints (TROT, 2022)
• Surging Strikes (TROT, 2022)
• Domestic Violence and the Pandemic Lockdown (Discoveries, 2021)
• Mental Health Co-Response Teams (TROT, 2021)

As an academic, I often find myself traveling internationally. During one such weary wait at a busy, ‘award-winning’ airport, I wrestled with boredom by watching a mum trying to help settle her cranky child with an assortment of books and crayons. Nothing worked. Finally, the child settled with a tablet and a shrill-voiced, cheer-manufacturing character. The mother appeared to be in her fifties, the child no older than preschool age. Had my socially irreverent, politically incorrect mother been with me, she would no doubt have commented on the maternal age and launched into a familiar tirade about the ‘challenges’ of ‘late’ motherhood. Yet, as we all know, the tantrums of preschool years are rarely quelled by youthfulness—or by reason.

Globally, women are increasingly postponing marriage and childbirth. For example, recent data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) comprising of all birth records (2016-2023) in the United States show that not only has the average maternal age risen across all racial and ethnic groups, it is particularly striking for first births among ‘older’ mothers. Specifically, for mothers ages 30-34, the percentage of first births has increased from 22% to 25% while for mothers age 35 and older it has risen from 10% to 13%.

Demographers attribute this shift in life-course aspirations to rising levels of women’s education, greater economic independence, wider access to contraception, and evolving social norms surrounding marriage and motherhood. The Washington, D.C.–based Population Reference Bureau, for instance, highlights how these changes generate a “virtuous cycle” in poorer nations: improvements in mothers’ education enhance reproductive health outcomes, which in turn foster gains in girls’ education.

While the connection between education and empowerment continues to underpin development imaginaries in the Global South, in industrialized Western contexts, postponement of marriage and childbearing is more often articulated through the language of individual agency and liberal political ideology. Curiously, irrespective of the wealth of the nation or maternal age, the social project of motherhood continues to be entangled in cultural and moral judgments about what is considered good, desirable and appropriate.

The Anatomy of Midlife

How do women in wealthy societies with high levels of educational attainment navigate the social expectations of motherhood when it occurs in midlife? In one of my recent research projects, I interviewed professional women in Germany who pursued assisted reproductive interventions in their 40s as part of their family-building journeys. Most reported giving birth in their early to mid-40s, often financing treatments out of pocket (around € 5000) in private healthcare facilities. Given that Germany records a mean age at first birth higher than the EU average (approximately 32 years, according to Statistisches Bundesamt), it is perhaps unsurprising that the women I spoke with—many of them senior academics at German universities—framed their decision to have children later in life in terms of deliberate “motivations.”

These “motivations” revolved around fulfilling professional aspirations that ensured financial stability, fostered personal independence, and cultivated a sense of preparedness for more mature parenting. Yet, because women’s bodies are continually surveilled through the lens of a fixed “biological clock,” late motherhood is often cast as risky, deviant, or miraculous—what is sometimes termed the “last-chance baby”, the women I spoke with felt an unwitting obligation to explain their decisions. This could be because their encounters with the biomedical world were inundated with memories of scans, graphs, probabilities and statistics, reminding them of their ‘advanced’ age, depleting egg reserves and overall, a timing that was either off or a ‘window’ that was closing on them.

Undoubtedly, midlife is messy, confusing and an ill-founded topic.  Feminist writer Margaret Gullette—author of prize-winning monographs such as Aged by Culture and Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel—describes midlife as a pervasive cultural fiction and ‘middle-ageism’, as a socially constructed disease of the 20th century: an ambiguous life stage marked simultaneously by promise and decline. My interlocutors spoke about how they navigated this cultural tension in their everyday lives as new mothers. While they could, to some extent, “mitigate” moral judgments about the “lateness” of their motherhood by participating in bourgeois rituals of contemporary parenting—birthday parties, playdates, and the like—the expectations placed on them were often heightened. Because they had made the “radical” choice to postpone childbirth in favor of professional success, was it not assumed that they should now raise exceptionally capable or “smarter” children?

Whither Midlife Crisis

To be sure, we have come a long way in challenging the cultural pathology of the dreaded “midlife crisis”—a trope once synonymous with growing pains, waning sexuality, receding hairlines, and declining estrogen. Today, midlife, especially the years leading into and beyond retirement, increasingly overlaps with the gerontological imaginary of the Third Age—a life stage framed by continuing productivity, vitality, independence, and a sense of agelessness. Within this context, mothering at midlife can be interpreted as a sign of success and resourcefulness.

Sociological studies (here and here) on older motherhood reveal how professionally accomplished women often frame their transition into this phase as one of maturity and preparedness. In doing so, however, they inadvertently reinforce a moral hierarchy of “good” and “responsible” mothering, distinguishing themselves from younger and professionally inexperienced mothers. In fact, this regulatory idea of mature parenting has been conceptualized as ‘ageing capital’ by Lahad and Hvidtfeldt (2019) in their textual analysis of midlife motherhood in Denmark and Israel. While this ideology may have been shaped by a combination of political, cultural, and demographic factors—such as Denmark’s social welfare state or Israel’s Zionist eugenic discourse—it was middle-aged women who were entrusted with the role of moral agents and good mothers in both contexts.

It is perhaps of no surprise that for my interlocutors, the validation of their “late” reproductive timing as a moral good produced an intriguing social paradox: on the one hand, it liberated them to pursue parenthood through reproductive technologies and biomedicine; on the other hand, it disciplined them into framing biological mothering as a compulsory rite of passage for realizing the ideal of womanhood.

Indeed, this study revealed that circulating ideologies of “responsible parenting” are disproportionately borne by middle-aged mothers who are caught in the neoliberal fever dream of performance, personal productivity, and optimal childrearing. The celebratory fiction of midlife as emancipatory or empowering is, in this sense, rarely rewarding for women in cultures that continue to value them primarily for their professional productivity and/or reproductive capacities. When the life course is measured through the arithmetic of milestones, gains and losses, challenges and opportunities (apologies to psychologists), women’s lives—as mothers, carers, providers, and whole persons—remain governed by the impossible ethic of everything, everywhere, all at once.

Additional Readings

• De Clercq, E., Martani, A., Vulliemoz, N., & Elger, B. S. (2023). Rethinking advanced motherhood: A new ethical narrative. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 26(4), 591–603.
• Lee, M., & Finlay, J. (2017, August). The effect of reproductive health improvements on women’s economic empowerment: A review through the Population and Poverty (PopPov) lens (Report). Population Reference Bureau.
• Lulle, A. (2024). Midlife geographies: Changing lifecourses across generations, spaces and time. Policy Press.
• Samanta, T. (2023). Social egg freezing as ambivalent materialities of aging. Journal of Aging Studies, 67, 101183.
• Thompson, C. (2007). Making parents: The ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. MIT Press.

This article is republished from the Conversation, read the original article here.

Most school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere – there are typically warning signs.

A year before a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opening fire in his high school math class in Winder, Georgia, on Sept. 4, 2024 – killing two teachers and two students – authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting.

When they interviewed the boy, who was 13 at the time, he denied making the threats. The father told police there were hunting guns in the house but that the boy didn’t have “unsupervised access” to the weapons.

The FBI said in a statement on the day of the shooting that there was “no probable cause for an arrest” and that local law enforcement “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.”

Teachers at the school had been supplied with special identification cards with panic buttons a week prior to the shooting. While authorities credit the ID cards with preventing the shooting from being worse than it was, the action still came too late to stop the killings.

In many ways, the story mirrors dozens of similar stories that we, a sociologist and psychologist, have collected in recent years in our effort to study the lives of mass shooters. It typifies what we believe is one of the biggest challenges that schools face when it comes to averting school shootings: recognizing and acting upon warning signs that school shooters almost always give well before they open fire.

In our database of U.S. mass shootings since 1966 – defined as incidents in which four or more victims were murdered with guns in a public location and with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs – there have now been 15 shootings at K-12 schools. The first took place in Stockton, California, in 1989.

Seven of those school shootings occurred in the past decade, including the second and third deadliest on record: Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 (21 dead) and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 (17 dead). The deadliest in history occurred in December 2012, when 20 children and six adult staff members were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In all, 138 people were killed in the attacks and at least 177 people were injured.

What we know about mass school shooters

When the Columbine High School massacre took place in 1999, it was seen as a watershed moment in the United States. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting at a school in the country’s history.

Twenty-five years later, it ranks fourth.

Despite the billions of dollars invested in school safety since Columbine, school shootings have become more frequent and more deadly. Beyond the mass shootings that grab the headlines, a gun goes off in an American school almost every day.

Our research and dozens of interviews with school shooting perpetrators, survivors and first responders suggest that part of the problem is law enforcement and school officials. Influenced by myths and misinformation about Columbine, they still don’t know enough about mass school shooting trends to recognize the warning signs.

The majority of mass school shootings were carried out by a lone gunman, with just two – Columbine and the 1998 shooting at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas – carried out by two gunmen.

The choice of “gunmen” to describe the perpetrators is accurate – all but one of the mass school shootings in our database were carried out by men or boys. The average age of those involved in carrying out the attacks was 18 — the youngest was 11 and the oldest was 32. As juveniles, a majority of school shooters used guns borrowed or stolen from parents, caregivers and other significant adults in their lives.

After every school shooting, people say “we never thought something like this could happen in our community.” However, mass school shootings happen most frequently in small suburban or rural communities like Winder, Georgia. There, the suspect is a 14-year-old student at the school. This is unsurprising. Most school shooters have a connection to the school they target. In our database, we found that 15 of the 17 school shooters were either current or former students.

For most perpetrators, the mass shooting event is intended to be a final act. The majority of school mass shooters die in the attack. Of the 17 mass school shooters in our database, eight were apprehended. The rest died on the scene, nearly all by suicide – the lone exception being the Robb Elementary shooter in Uvalde, who was shot dead by police.

Preventing the next school shooting

Inspired by past school shooters, some perpetrators are seeking fame and notoriety. However, most school mass shooters are driven by despair and generalized anger; over 80% of school mass shooters showed signs of a crisis before the shooting, including depression, mood swings, agitation, isolation, trouble with daily tasks and other noticeable behavior changes.

Most importantly, over 90% leaked their plans ahead of time to others, preempting their attacks by leaving posts, messages or videos warning of their intent. School shooters communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help.

The key to stopping these tragedies is being alert to these warning signs and acting on them immediately. Even if investigators don’t have enough evidence for an arrest, they can continually monitor students and help connect them to school- or community-based services or interventions, including peer-mentoring or mental health treatment. Simply criminalizing or punishing threats increases the risk for violence by worsening grievances with the school.

At the same time, parents can be reminded to keep guns secure. Almost all shootings by children and teens can be prevented by safe storage of firearms and accountability for adult gun owners. When a weapon is stored separately from its ammunition, locked and unloaded, it is much more difficult for someone to quickly use it in a violent attack.

Portions of this article originally appeared in previous articles written by the authors and first published on Feb. 8, 2019, and May 25, 2022.

This article is republished from the Conversation, read the original article here.

Though the college career of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark ended with a disappointing loss, the point guard’s record-breaking season helped fuel widespread interest in this year’s NCAA women’s college basketball tournament.

The women’s Final Four garnered higher television ratings than the men’s Final Four. Then the women’s basketball championship game between South Carolina and Iowa didn’t just draw in more viewers (18.9 million) than the men’s championship game the following night (14.8 million); it also had more viewers than every World Series game since Game 7 of the 2019 World Series and every NBA Finals game since Game 5 of the 2017 NBA Finals.

Does this represent another brief moment in the sun for women’s sports? Or will this shining moment extend far into the future?

Since Title IX’s passage in 1972, women’s sports have occasionally experienced big ratings and massive crowds. In 1983, nearly 12 million viewers tuned in as the University of Southern California, led by star forward Cheryl Miller, bested LSU in the basketball championship game. And more than 90,000 fans attended the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in Pasadena, California.

The media briefly focused on these events, before returning to business as usual: giving men’s sports outsized attention.

But this moment feels different. Many fans, journalists and scholars are wondering if this is the dawn of a new era of women’s sports, with more coverage, increased viewership, heightened interest and bigger investments continuing in the future.

The long eclipse of women’s sports

I’ve spent over 30 years studying the intersections of gender, sports, media and culture.

Since 1989, my colleagues and I have been tracking the quantity and quality of coverage of men’s and women’s sports on televised news and highlight shows. Every five years, we collect a new batch of data. We’re in the middle of collecting data for the eighth time, the results of which will be published in 2025. (In 2019, we added online and social media content to our analysis.)

In our samples, we’ve consistently found that women’s sports on televised news and sports highlight shows generally comprise between 3% and 5% of the coverage, measured in minutes and number of stories. Over the years, there have been a few spikes driven by high-profile international sporting events, such as the 1999 Women’s World Cup and the Olympics. The newsletters and social media accounts of the same networks in our sample also mirror the dearth of television coverage, with about 4% to 5% of the content focused on women’s sports.

Our findings are not unique. Hundreds of studies on the routine coverage of sports have similarly found that media coverage of women’s sports rarely exceeds 10% of total sports coverage. This is a recurring pattern across media platforms – print, TV, radio, social – in English-speaking countries.

Leapfrogging the gatekeepers

Yet while research on traditional media – television, newspapers, magazines – was relevant at the time of these studies, it does not fully capture the explosion of other ways to consume sports over the past decade.

Fans can watch highlights on X, formerly known as Twitter, and short-form video apps. Podcasts like “Hear Her Sports,” “The Gist of It,” “Tea with A & Phee” and “Attacking Third” directly appeal to women’s sports fans. Streaming platforms such as Fubo TV and Women’s Sports Zone on Roku offer a range of live women’s basketball and soccer games, which helps build and sustain a fan base. And niche media outlets centered on women’s sports, like Just Women’s Sports, offer a diversity of content and perspectives.

Women athletes, along with women’s teams and leagues, no longer need to rely on newspapers, magazines and TV networks to reach fans. They can simply directly engage with them on social media, producing and pushing content that bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.

Leveraging feminism

A few decades ago, conventional wisdom held that “sex sells sports.” Media executives focused on the sex appeal of female athletes to attract male fans and viewers. The thinking went that women simply weren’t interested in sports.

But my colleague Dunja Antunovic and I observed an important shift in sports media starting in the mid-2010s: the mobilization of feminism and principles of equality to promote and sell women’s sports.

In one chapter of our latest book, “Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports,” we focus on how women’s sports leagues and teams, as well as their corporate sponsors, have used the imagery, language and slogans of feminism and social justice movements to sell merchandise and tickets.

The WNBA has a long-standing commitment to racial and social justice, whether it’s through promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement, mobilizing voters or advocating for reproductive justice.

During the 2018 season, the WNBA’s “Take a Seat, Take a Stand” campaign highlighted how proceeds from tickets would go to organizations that advocate for women. The video accompanying the campaign interspersed scenes of WNBA games with scenes from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.

Meanwhile, Budweiser’s “We Won’t Stop Watching” and “It’s Worth Watching” campaigns during the 2019 Women’s World Cup and National Women’s Soccer League season directly addressed the lack of media attention for women’s sports.

In December 2023, University of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley popularized T-shirts featuring the slogan “Everyone watches women’s sports” – a flip of the dismissive excuse used to justify the lack of women’s sports coverage. The shirts were produced by the media and commerce company Togethxr, whose founders include current and former women athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Sue Bird and Simone Manuel.

Being the change they want to see

While corporations and leagues deserve credit for highlighting the value of women’s sports, it’s also important to acknowledge how female athletes themselves have been driving change.

Caitlin Clark’s pursuit of the NCAA scoring record became must-see TV for millions of fans. The dazzling play of LSU’s Angel Reese, UConn’s Paige Bueckers, Southern California’s Juju Watkins and South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardosa – each now a household name – also contributed to the tournament’s record ratings.

The activism of women athletes through the years has also created visibility for women’s sports.

In March 2019, the U.S. women’s national team players sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination. In 2022, the two sides came to an agreement on a multimillion dollar settlement and a promise to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams.

In 2021, Oregon’s Sedona Prince posted a viral video of the disparities in the weight rooms at the women’s and men’s 2021 NCAA tournament. The clip drew national media attention and prompted the NCAA to conduct a gender equity review.

Yet, gender disparities persist.

It was only two years ago that ESPN began broadcasting the entire NCAA women’s basketball tournament. Last year was the first year since the 1980s that the women’s tournament was broadcast on network television. The NCAA negotiated a television rights deal that permitted the men’s tournament to have its own contract, while packaging the women’s tournament with other NCAA championship games.

The gender equity review conducted in the wake of Prince’s viral post estimated the value of the women’s tournament to be between US$81 million and $112 million. The NCAA had previously pegged the number at $6 million to $7 million. The new contract estimates the value at $65 million – an improvement, but still well below what the independent review estimated.

I don’t know whether this year’s tournament games are a harbinger of a new era or if they’re simply another example of the unevenness of social change in women’s sports.

But I find hope in the women athletes who are advocating for equality, in the diversity of media platforms that are correcting long-standing patterns of unequal media coverage, and in the voices of journalists and fans who are dedicated to telling stories about women’s sports.