The penetration of women into academe is growing, but at what cost? Babies get in the way and require valuable time away from a job that otherwise requires intense attachment and commitment, and so if women are to compete and advance at acceptable rates, they choose to postpone family. Do men make the same sacrifices? Is this fair to the children whose parents may be enmeshed in the demands of work and emotionally, even physically, absent. Inquiring sociologists want to know.

An educator speaks about pedagogy, critical thinking, and connecting with students. Education is about creating a safe place for exploration, for confronting the hard social, political, and psychological realities of our existence. But it’s also about honesty, exposure, and trust. It is not easy moving beyond the rigid and stereotyped roles of the cardboard educator, but we try to be more than the boxes we find ourselves in.

Functionalism has long had a bad name in sociology as the handmaiden of elite interests, justifying all manner of inequality and power abuse by implying (and sometimes suggesting outright) that these things are “functional” for our society. As this article demonstrates however, this need not be the case. Functionalism can provide a useful rubric for understanding modern society and need not be the handmaiden of conservative thought.

While traveling recently, I stopped at a fast food restaurant with my 6-year-old daughter. When we sat down at the table to eat, she disappointedly pulled a pink care bear out of her cheeseburger meal. When I asked her what was wrong she asked why the woman had given her a care bear when she wanted a transformer. She went on to explain to me that she liked boy’s toys because she was a tom boy. Why did the fast food worker assume that my daughter wanted the care bear? Why is the transformer considered a boy toy?