Understanding how carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) can be decoupled from economic growth is an important part of planning for climate change mitigation. A variety of critical environmental theories contend that the oppression of marginalized groups is interconnected with the mistreatment and destruction of nature. As a result, social equity, or the removal of barriers of structural inequality, often coincide with environmental quality and reduced environmental degradation. To date, there is limited research on the dialectical relationship between inequality, economic growth, and the environment. The present study seeks to further understand the relationship between social inequality and the environment by assessing how gender equality decouples economic growth from CO₂ emissions. We construct a fixed-effects panel regression model with robust standard errors that accounts for clustering in 140 nations to assess how gender inequality interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO₂ emissions per capita. Our findings indicate that in nations with more gender equality, the association between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions is much lower than in nations with higher levels of gender inequality.

This study examines how the digital affordances of Tinder shape the (hetero)sexual scripts of young womxn. Findings indicate that while Tinder alleviates the boundaries of an on-campus hookup culture, the app has yet to completely rewrite the sexual and romantic scripts of young adults. Instead, participants describe the development of a hybrid hookup script. This multilevel script reintegrates traditional dating scripts, which are absent in an on-campus hookup culture, while maintaining the expectation of a hookup. Yet, not all participants enacted the hybrid hookup script to the same extent. Facing a lack of same-race matches and compounding racist and sexist interactions, womxn of color were overrepresented among those who opted out altogether. Overall, by situating this study within a broader nexus of scholarship on gendered sexual scripts and technological affordances, results offer a new interpretation of young adult sexuality that accounts for the sociotechnical mechanisms shaping contemporary (hetero)sexual scripts.

We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights, we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical travel destinations are outside of downtown Porltand and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.

Using unique, nationally representative data that asks individuals about their surname choice in marriage, we explore heterosexual men’s nontraditional surname choice. We focus on how education—both absolute and relative to wives’—correlates with nontraditional surname choice. Following class-based masculinities theory, we find that men with more education are less likely to choose a nontraditional surname. Despite being more egalitarian in attitudes, men with more education are more likely to have careers that give them privileged status in their marriages and may have “more to lose” in their career by changing their name. In addition, men with less education than their wives are less likely to change their surnames. We argue that this is consistent with compensatory gender display theory. Men having less education in marriage may translate into having less earning power, which is gender nonnormative as men are culturally expected to be primary breadwinners in marriage.