Asked about the impact of gender-specific toys, colors and activities, Kane tells the North Texas Public Media program Think that these choices “are not just about whether we train boys and girls to be different. It’s about whether we might be reproducing structures that systematically disadvantage girls and women.”

What’s more, Kane says, while we often believe that all gender differences in children are natural, many are actually the result of specific parental and societal choices and reinforcement.

In her interview with Southern California Public Radio’s Take Two, she says that by choosing gender-specific opportunities and surroundings for our children, “we’re constructing these categories of boys and girls and kind of convincing ourselves that it’s inevitable.”

But it’s not inevitable, she says.

Referring to the fact that many of the parents she interviewed in the study wanted to offer their children a wider range of possibilities but feared social judgments, Kane notes, “One of my hopes with this book is that…we may realize there are more of us who want to see some kind of relaxing of those constraints than we might otherwise realize, so in that sense it wouldn’t be so hard to swim upstream.”

That might mean choosing neutral colors and toys that “would be interesting to any small human being.”

• View story from Take Two of Southern California Public Radio, Oct. 25, 2012

• Listen to interview from Think of Dallas-based Public Media for North Texas, Oct. 30, 2012 

In celebration of her appointment as Whitehouse Professor of Sociology at Bates College, Emily Kane leads a panel discussion on Disrupting Privilege: Inequality, Community and Social Change at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., Bates College.

Panel participants include three of Kane’s former students who now counsel, teach and advocate around issues of health, the environment and gender. A reception in Chase Hall immediately follows the presentation, and the public is invited to attend both events free of charge.

Kane is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in sociology and completed an honors thesis addressing social and political tolerance. After three years of working in human resources, she earned a masters degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on the role of ideologies in reproducing gender inequality in the contemporary United States. She began her faculty career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and joined the Bates faculty in 1996.

Chair of the sociology department and a member of the program in women and gender studies, Kane’s Bates course offerings range from examining race and class to teaching quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Over the years, her teaching has been recognized with an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan (1989); the Departmental Citation for Excellence in Teaching (1991) the university-wide Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (1994) at the University of Wisconsin; and Bates’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999).

Kane’s scholarly interests include public opinion research on beliefs about inequalities of gender and race, as well as qualitative analyses addressing the production of gender through parenting. Her research has been supported by internal grants from the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, and Bates College, as well as by the National Science Foundation. Her published work appears in a range of scholarly journals, including Annual Review of Sociology, Gender & Society, Journal of Family Issues and Public Opinion Quarterly.

Long interested in race, class, gender and sexuality-based inequalities and in social change, since coming to Bates Kane has become increasingly interested in community engagement. Through the encouragement of the former Center for Service-Learning and now the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, her courses often include opportunities for service-learning and community action projects. This year, through support from a Mellon Learning Associate grant, she is developing community-based research partnerships with her students, who have worked on topics including minimum wage, home-buyer education, neighborhood perceptions and identity, and community participation in development. Additional courses featuring such community engagement include “Unequal Childhoods,” which she will team-teach with Professor Georgia Nigro during Short Term 2007, and a seminar on “Public Sociology,” which she will teach for the first time in fall 2007.

Kane succeeds Nigro and John Kelsey, professors of psychology, to become the college’s third Whitehouse Professor.

Three of Kane’s former students will participate  in the panel discussion. Rebecca Gasior Altman, Bates Class of 1999, is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University, where her current research and teaching interests include “green” health care, health social movements, food security, public participation in science, and the role of science in how marginalized groups organize for environmental health and justice.

Christine D. Tronnier is a clinical social worker at John Umstead Hospital, a state psychiatric facility in Butner, N.C., where she has worked with children and adolescents as well as on the adult admissions unit.

Kimberly Whipkey, Bates Class of 2006, serves as the Maine grassroots organizer for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, an organization committed to providing, promoting and protecting access to reproductive health care and comprehensive sexuality education.

The Whitehouse Professorship was established in 1985 with a gift to the endowment from David ’36 and Constance Whitehouse. Born and raised in Auburn, Whitehouse earned his M.B.A. from Harvard University after graduating from Bates. He served in leadership positions at the Container Corporation of America his entire career, retiring in 1980 as vice president. The Whitehouses passed away in the spring of 2000 and are survived by four adult children

The past retains its power to surprise today’s students, as Alison Vander Zanden ’06 learned during the winter.

In a research project for the course “Sociology of Gender,” taught by professor Emily Kane, Vander Zanden was the latest student to delve into the regulatory “Bates Blue Books” and advice booklets that prescribed the limits of student life at the college.

Seeking to explore ways that social forces, such as institutional expectations, form a person’s gender identity, Vander Zanden wondered what the Bates of past years said about how female and male students should behave. She was shocked to encounter a system of gender segregation and discrimination that, up until 30-odd years ago, was all too familiar to generations of women attending nearly any college (and Bates was among the more progressive schools in this regard).

“Holding a Blue Book that a woman had pored over, trying to figure out what the regulations were — that’s what I feel when I hold that book too,” she says. “I try to imagine what her relationship to Bates was like. It’s really an interesting thing, and it’s actually kind of emotionally draining.”

Vander Zanden looked at every Blue Book from the prototype, the 1915–16 “Regulations for the Administration of Bates College,” into the 1970s. “Regulations,” for example, contained two matriculation pledges. The men’s began with an active voice: “I hereby pledge myself as a condition of my membership in Bates College,” followed by nine fairly general do’s and don’ts.

The women, meanwhile, passively pledged “to be governed by the following principles,” whose 15 very specific regulations regulated what to do with free time (not much) and who to spend it with (not men). It was a tradition that lasted in spirit, if not in specifics, until the tenure of President Hedley Reynolds and the early 1970s.

The parietal rules, with their exhaustive routines for signing in and out of women’s dorms, were “an incredible system, and must have required miles and miles of books on shelves to keep track of,” Vander Zanden says. The system also required a certain tolerance for contradiction as, she says, “it relied on the competence of the very people” — female students — “it calls not competent.”

Vander Zanden points to some tidbits from the advice booklets issued to first-year students by the men’s and women’s students in the 1950s. Quiz: Can you tell which gender received the booklet “The Straight Scoop” and which got “Hi, New Betty Bates”?

“As a women and gender studies major, I find this stuff fascinating, especially in its overtness,” Vander Zanden says. “Feminists obviously still argue that gender discrimination still exists, but to see segregation laid out so clearly is fascinating.”