Unearned Advantage Research Articles

The Dietetics Profession Privilege Scale: Development, Psychometric Testing, and Application Among a Diverse Cohort of Dietetics Professionals

BackgroundPrivilege (defined as the unearned advantage or disadvantage experienced by social groups resulting from structural power differences) impacts efforts to create a diverse and inclusive dietetics profession. Yet, no current measures exist to assess and observe privilege, and the relative privilege among dietetics professionals (DPs) is unknown. ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale to measure DP privilege and to use that scale to assess privilege among a sample of DPs in the United States. DesignThe initial scale was developed by the research team and the psychometrics were assessed using a 3-phase cross-sectional study exploring construct, content and face validity, and test–retest reliability. Participants/settingA survey with content experts (n = 18), cognitive interviewees (n = 12), and a survey of DPs (n = 900) were conducted online and over Zoom during 2021. Statistical analysesExploratory factor analysis, 1-way analysis of variance, Cronbach’s α, and descriptive statistics were used to assess the final instrument and identify correlates of privilege. ResultsFindings indicate that the 29-item Dietetic Profession Privilege Scale has good validity and reliability across 6 domains (ie, treatment in training, identity alignment, resource access, cultural access, financial access, and physical access). The mean (SE) privilege score among the current sample of DPs was 45 (10.2) out of 58 points, with the greatest gaps between racial and ethnic groups, where White DPs (n = 540) had a mean (SE) score of 49.7 (0.33), followed by a mean score of 41.0 among Middle Eastern/North African DPs (n = 9); mean score of 40.0 for the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander–identifying DP; mean (SE) score of 39.8 (0.93) among DPs with 2 or more racial or ethnic identities, including White (n = 68); mean score of 35.7 among DPs with 2 or more marginalized racial or ethnic identities (n = 6); a mean (SE) score of 35.3 (1.07) among Black or African American DPs (n = 51); a mean (SE) score of 34.3 (0.93) among Asian DPs (n = 67); a mean (SE) score of 33.4 (0.91) among Latino, Hispanic, and Chicano DPs (n = 71); and a mean (SE) 29.4 (3.42) among American Indian and Alaskan Native DPs (P < .001 for all racial and ethnic groups in which n > 10; SE not indicated for groups when n < 10). DPs with dominant group identities were found to have statistically higher privilege scores than their peers with marginalized identities in several areas, including race, gender, sexual orientation, income, socioeconomic status, neurodivergence, and ableness, and scored higher on the privilege scale than their peers with marginalized identities. ConclusionsThe Dietetics Profession Privilege Scale is a valid and reliable scale that demonstrates the ability to distinguish differences in privilege between DPs in the interest of reducing bias and achieving inclusion, diversity, equity, and access with the profession.

Book Review: Undoing privilege: Unearned advantage and systemic injustice in an unequal world by Pease, B.

Book Review: <i>Undoing privilege: Unearned advantage and systemic injustice in an unequal world</i> by Pease, B.

Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage and Systematic Injustice in an Unequal World (Book Review)

Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage and Systematic Injustice in an Unequal World (Book Review)

Problematising the Problem

Employment inequality is recognised as a problem for deaf people. What is rarely understood is that what often lies behind that inequality is less a “deaf-centered” problem, but rather the issue of “hearing privilege”. Hearing privilege refers to the unearned advantage granted to hearing people on the basis of their hearing identity in a society characterised by ableism. Despite a proliferation of research on the employment disadvantage experienced by deaf people, hearing people continue to dominate in leadership positions in deaf community voluntary organisations. By drawing upon scholarship from Privilege Studies and social justice education, this article “problematises the problem” by discussing the importance of viewing deaf people’s experience of disadvantage through the prism of hearing privilege. The article offers insight into how privilege awareness workshops can be hugely influential in educating hearing people about their privilege and encouraging them to take responsibility for challenging their unearned advantage.

The coin model of privilege and critical allyship: implications for health

Health inequities are widespread and persistent, and the root causes are social, political and economic as opposed to exclusively behavioural or genetic. A barrier to transformative change is the tendency to frame these inequities as unfair consequences of social structures that result in disadvantage, without also considering how these same structures give unearned advantage, or privilege, to others. Eclipsing privilege in discussions of health equity is a crucial shortcoming, because how one frames the problem sets the range of possible solutions that will follow. If inequity is framed exclusively as a problem facing people who are disadvantaged, then responses will only ever target the needs of these groups without redressing the social structures causing disadvantages. Furthermore, responses will ignore the complicity of the corollary groups who receive unearned and unfair advantage from these same structures. In other words, we are missing the bigger picture. In this conceptualization of health inequity, we have limited the potential for disruptive action to end these enduring patterns.The goal of this article is to advance understanding and action on health inequities and the social determinants of health by introducing a framework for transformative change: the Coin Model of Privilege and Critical Allyship. First, I introduce the model, which explains how social structures produce both unearned advantage and disadvantage. The model embraces an intersectional approach to understand how systems of inequality, such as sexism, racism and ableism, interact with each other to produce complex patterns of privilege and oppression. Second, I describe principles for practicing critical allyship to guide the actions of people in positions of privilege for resisting the unjust structures that produce health inequities. The article is a call to action for all working in health to (1) recognize their positions of privilege, and (2) use this understanding to reorient their approach from saving unfortunate people to working in solidarity and collective action on systems of inequality.

Can schools fairly select their students?

Selection within the educational domain breeds a special kind of suspicion. Whether it is the absence of transparency in the selection procedure, the observable outcomes of the selection, or the criteria of selection itself, there is much to corroborate the suspicion many have that selection in practice is unfair. And certainly as it concerns primary and secondary education, the principle of educational equity requires that children not have their educational experiences or opportunities determined by their postcode, their ethnic status, first language, or family wealth. Indeed educational opportunities determined by unearned advantage or disadvantage offend against basic notions of fairness. But are public schools even permitted to select their students, and if so, how can selection procedures used by schools be best structured to achieve equitable ends? In this article we delineate, describe, and defend what we believe are the essential features of selection and also why we need to pay equal attention to both the outcomes and the processes leading to those outcomes. Provided the selection is motivated and guided by the right reasons, as well as appropriately monitored, we argue that selection can be equity promoting.

All PhDs are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Created Equal: On Academic Privilege

All PhDs are not Created Equal:On Academic Privilege Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Your early education at a prestigious private boarding school founded in the early 1890s with a 7 to 1 student to teacher ratio prepares you well for an undergraduate degree from a prestigious private college and a masters and a doctorate from a prestigious private university, which was established in the first part of the seventeenth century and has today a nearly 35 billion dollar endowment. Your early education at an average public high school built in early 1970s with a 22 to 1 student to teacher ratio prepares you well for an undergraduate degree from an average state college and a masters and a doctorate from an average state university, which was established as a normal school and has today a 96 million dollar endowment.1 One of these is a door to academic privilege. The other is not. For those who have travelled the educational path from secondary to doctoral education in the United States, the two doors look very different. For those who did not, they can appear the same. Seeing the difference between these doors is a major element in coming to an understanding of academic privilege, but so too is listening to accounts of the unearned advantages one door affords its beneficiaries and the disadvantages the other door bestows upon others. Many of these accounts have become part of the common folklore of higher education. Evidence of academic privilege is all around us—even if many cannot see it or do not want to see it. Unlike white privilege or male privilege, there are no high profile individuals or groups raising awareness of academic privilege. There is no NAACP fighting for the rights of the academically disadvantaged, and thereby rallying the underprivileged academics. There is no Colin Kapernick taking a knee in opposition to academic privilege, and thereby [End Page 393] raising nationwide attention to it.2 And there is no movement within higher education to eliminate the oppression of academic privilege. If anything, the special rights and advantages of academic privilege are the higher education "knapsack" that no one wants to talk about, "an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks."3 Not even those who have chronicled the various trials and travails of the "culture" and "PC" wars in higher education, which provided a platform for reinvigorated debates about privilege in America. The Reagan eighties were said to be the cauldron where animosity toward "political correctness" stewed for many years. This simmer reached best-seller status in 1987 with the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (Williams 2013, 11). This book "attacked the faculty for 'political correctness,'"4 and raised public awareness of and interest in the "culture wars" of the late 1980s to an unprecedented level and fever pitch by selling nearly half a million copies in hardback alone and becoming the number one best-selling work of non-fiction on the New York Times list for four months.5 I point to this period because it was one of the high points of public awareness of "political correctness" in the United States. Works like Bloom's were asking those within higher education to take a stand on the whether "dead white European males" would continue to dominate the higher education curriculum or whether the broadening of the canon was needed to bring about more awareness of diversity in our society and a less culturally homogeneous curriculum. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were two doors to higher education but not the ones mentioned above: one involved political correctness, diversity, and the recognition of male, white, and European privilege in the academy; and the other championed moral correctness, the classics, and Eurocentrism, which conveniently comprised a canon of primarily "dead white males." Amidst all of this commotion about political correctness and debate about "dead white males," a working paper was circulated in 1988 about the live ones and their privilege. It proved to be ground-breaking because of its frankness about the "unearned advantage" of its author, Peggy McIntosh. Entitled "White Privilege and...

Extending the Knapsack: Using the White Privilege Analysis to Examine Conferred Advantage and Disadvantage

This article describes a self-awareness activity that utilizes a directed reading on privilege and a small-group discussion format to examine unearned disadvantage and unearned advantage in one’s life. This exercise can help clinicians to better understand systemic and individual sources of power and privilege in society. Beginning with my previous work on white privilege, students can extend this analysis to other domains of privilege, including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and physical ability, to name a few. The primary goals of this reflective exercise are to help clinicians understand how clients’ lives are influenced by societal disadvantages and advantages, to encourage a new understanding of oneself, and to increase empathy towards clients.

Professional Privilege, Ethics and Pedagogy

In the social sciences, the iconic definition of privilege is that of unearned advantage. Consequently, professionals in the social services may devote less attention to the examination of their own professional privilege since it has been earned. This article addresses ethical concerns about the earned privilege that accrues to professionals in the caring fields and the potential effects on service users. This paper will focus particularly on some of the pedagogical dimensions. The inherent paradox in socializing students into professional roles, which enhance privilege, while attempting to reduce the power differentials with service users, requires attention by teachers. How one might lessen the hierarchy that is created between the helper and service user as a result of that privilege will be explored. The paper will detail professional privilege and both constructive and problematic impacts on the helping relationship. The ‘uneven’ advantage of being able to set the standards of health and morality are also discussed. In the process, ethical trespass may result. We will explore this concept and its implications. Because, privilege contributes to social stratification between helpers and recipients, the final segment offers one educational strategy that can be used to potentially lessen the ‘we–they’ duality.

Book Review: Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage in a Divided World

Book Review: Undoing Privilege: Unearned Advantage in a Divided World

Undoing privilege: unearned advantage in a divided world

For every group that is oppressed, another group is privileged. In Undoing Privilege, Bob Pease argues that privilege, as the other side of oppression, has received insufficient attention in both critical theories and in the practices of social change. As a result, dominant groups have been allowed to reinforce their dominance. Undoing Privilege explores the main sites of privilege, from Western dominance, class elitism, and white and patriarchal privilege to the less-examined sites of heterosexual and able-bodied privilege. Pease points out that while the vast majority of people may be oppressed on one level, many are also privileged on another. He also demonstrates how members of privileged groups can engage critically with their own dominant position, and explores the potential and limitations of them becoming allies against oppression and their own unearned privilege. This is an essential book for all who are concerned about developing theories and practices for a socially just world.

Disrupting Power and Privilege in Couples Therapy

Power disparities underlie many of the issues that couples bring for therapy. People in relationships are not equal; often one partner is systematically conferred unearned advantage and dominance. This article synthesizes results from three qualitative research studies to propose a social justice approach for clinical practice with couples. Interventions are suggested to keep issues of power and privilege a central focus while addressing the ordinary issues partners present for therapy.

Comparing Genes and Phenomenology in the Major Psychoses: Schizophrenia and Bipolar 1 Disorder

For the last several decades, diagnosis in psychiatry has been rule based, related to phenomenology and standardized. It has given psychiatry an unearned advantage in communicating about its illnesses, unearned because the molecular basis for this standardization has remained elusive. However, it has provided a language for successful communication about psychiatric syndromes and supported practical functions for which categorization is helpful; functions as disparate as insurance reimbursement and drug development have been enabled with this language. Moreover, this standardization has had additional practical advantages beyond communication and labeling, specifically in terms of public familiarity. Further, these standardized categories have been postulated without any real knowledge about the biological nature of the underlying brain disturbances or their mechanisms. Imagine categorizing diabetes by phenomenology before 1922 or infectious disease before the microscope and antibiotics. It is hard to intuit how one might successfully use nonspecific illness descriptors of phenomenology to sort affected individuals into homogeneous enough categories to discover molecular disease mechanisms, whether the diseases involve disorders of the pancreas, heart, or brain. In psychiatry, despite the practical importance of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) nomenclature, the diagnostic system remains a hypothesis of disease categories, awaiting a refinement of categorization based on mechanisms and molecules. Not that we should be persuaded to discard this current system, until another one, more biologically based, is in place. But, because this current system may not provide the final correct illness categories, it may be time to experiment with other systems, within research indications. In this context, scientists and clinicians alike have developed an informed skepticism, whose goal is to promote mechanism-oriented research into the major psychoses with the goal of defining the mechanistic basis of the brain diseases with cognitive and affective expression. There is consistent evidence that genes contribute to the etiology of psychosis. Recent findings from genetic studies provide evidence for an overlap in genetic susceptibility across the traditional psychosis categories. Candidate genes show strong associations with component symptom complexes, such as psychosis, that are not projected directly onto Kraepelinian disease entities. Genetic studies suggest that psychosis may be conceptualized as a clinical phenotype with specific genetic etiologies. Hypothetically genes or sets of genes, interacting with environmental factors, may predetermine vulnerability to psychosis. Depending on additional syndrome-specific genetic influence and environmental interactions, psychosis may coexist with other clinical phenotypes, eg, mood symptoms or cognitive dysfunction, composing categorical diagnoses. This conceptualization of psychosis is well illustrated by epidemiological and molecular genetic studies. In this chapter, we will review the phenomenology and genetics of psychosis, across different diagnoses. Other aspects of the psychosis overlap will be presented in other articles in this volume.

Taxing Privilege More Effectively: Replacing the Estate Tax with an Inheritance Tax

The repeal of the estate tax for one year only in 2010 creates vast uncertainty but also provides an opportunity to reconsider the taxation of million would include in income and pay a 15 percentage point surtax on gifts and bequests. This paper proposes replacing the estate tax with an inheritance tax. Heirs receiving lifetime inheritances greater than $2.3 would include in income and pay a 15 percentage point surtax on the excess. The proposal would also replace stepped-up basis with carryover basis for bequests. As under the estate tax, the fraction of heirs affected would be miniscule, falling from three to two in 1,000. The proposal has a number of advantages relative to the estate tax. It would reward donors who give more broadly. It would enhance efficiency and reduce compliance costs by curbing tax planning and the rules needed to contain it. Cross-national experience also suggests it would be administrable. Most importantly, the proposal would lower taxes on heirs receiving smaller inheritances and those with moderate incomes, making the tax system better attuned to unearned advantage and ability to pay. At an individual level, the distribution of tax burdens would change considerably: only 5 percent of the estate tax rate for an heir is accounted for by her inheritance tax rate, and vice versa, and each tax would raise 14 percent of revenue from heirs facing no tax burden under the other. The proposal is revenue-neutral relative to 2009 law. A lower exemption would raise more revenue and bring the tax rate on inherited income closer to the income tax rate on non-inherited income, which is about three times higher.

UNACKNOWLEDGED PRIVILEGE: SETTING THE STAGE FOR DISCRIMINATION IN ORGANIZATIONAL SETTINGS.

In most organizational settings, status hierarchies are based on individual merit and performance. However, in the same settings, non-merit based systems of privilege also exist whereby unearned advantages and benefits accrue to people with privilege. In the U.S., where the structure of most organizations is that of a meritocracy, privilege obviously has a negative connotation because it is counter to organizational values to allow one category of people to have an unearned or non-merit based advantage over another. Therefore people with privilege are unlikely to acknowledge their unearned and consequently unfair advantage. This research used two experimental laboratory studies to examine how privilege recognition or lack thereof influenced the attitudes and behavior of people with privilege. Results indicate that when people with privilege do not acknowledge that they have benefited from an unearned advantage, they are more likely to discriminate against those without privilege, they perceive their social system to be fairer, and they evaluate those without privilege more negatively. When people with privilege acknowledged their unearned advantage, they considered how situational circumstances hindered the performance of others without privilege, evaluated them less negatively, and engaged in less discriminatory behavior.