To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with experimental trials, that the interventions work

Scholars who are also members of marginalized groups disproportionately take up this kind of engaged scholarship, often without commensurate credit from university administrators or colleagues (Ellison and Eatmen 2008; Park 1996; Stanley 2006; Taylor and Raeburn 1995; Turner et al 2008; Villalpando and Bernal 2002).

The title of her essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies” was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted.

I’ve actively participated in a revisionist sort of annotation that is part redaction/part revision in that I have gone through digital copies of some children’s books and in cases where it didn’t matter if the main character was male, I would actively use book editing software to make all the lead characters female for the sake of reading to girls. Often I’ve done this while reading out loud, but around the 1st/2nd grade level when children begin to read for themselves, physical annotations/revisions are required.

A radar station is of course less simple than a weather vane. To be sure, the construction of a high-frequency apparatus requires the interlocking of various processes of technical-industrial production. And certainly a sawmill in a secluded valley of the Black Forest is a primitive means compared with the hydroelectric plant on the Rhine River.

This result is consistent with analysis by the data science team at Quora, a site where users ask and answer questions. That team found that women use uncertain words and phrases more often than men do, even when they are just as confident.