COVID-19 and ensuing changes in mobility have altered employment relations for millions of people across the globe. Emerging evidence shows that women may be more severely affected by this change. The pandemic, however, may have an impact beyond the immediate restructuring of employment and shift gender-role attitudes within households as a result of changes in the division of household labor. We analyze a representative sample of respondents in the U.S., Germany, and Singapore and show that transitions to unemployment, reductions in working hours and transitions to working from home have been more frequent for women than for menalthough not to the same extent across the three countries. We also demonstrate that among couples who had been employed at the start of the pandemic, men express more egalitarian gender-role attitudes if they became unemployed but their partners remained employed, while women express more traditional attitudes if they became unemployed and their partners remained employed. These results indicate that gender-role attitudes might adapt to the lived realities. The long-term consequences will depend on how both men and women experience further shifts in their employment relations as economies recover.

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Existing literature focuses on economic competition as the primary causal factor in Southern lynching. Political drivers have been neglected, as findings on their effects have been inconclusive. We show that these consensus views arise from selection on a contingent outcome variable: whether mobs intent on lynching succeed. We constructed an inventory of averted lynching events in Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina-instances in which lynch mobs formed but were thwarted, primarily by law enforcement. We combined these with an inventory of lynching and analyzed them together to model the dynamics of mob formation, success, and intervention. We found that low Republican vote share is associated with a higher lethality rate for mobs. Lynching is better understood as embedded in a post-conflict political system, wherein all potential lynching events, passing through the prism of intervention, are split into successful and averted cases.

We study mentorship in scientific collaborations, where a junior scientist is supported by potentially multiple senior collaborators, without them necessarily having formal supervisory roles. We identify 3 million mentor–protégé pairs and survey a random sample, verifying that their relationship involved some form of mentorship. We find that mentorship quality predicts the scientific impact of the papers written by protégés post mentorship without their mentors. We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.

This article has been retracted. Please see the retraction notice for more detail: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20617-y

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans' daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cellphone movement data in 2019-2020, we use two indexes proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019) to measure mobility inequality between census tracts in the 25 largest U.S. cities. These measures capture the importance of hubs and neighborhood isolation in a network. In the earliest phases of the pandemic, neighborhood isolation rapidly increased, and the importance of downtown central business districts declined. Mobility hubs generally regained their importance, whereas neighborhood isolation remained elevated and increased again during the latter half of 2020. Linear regression models with city and week fixed effects find that new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with neighborhood isolation changes a week later. Additionally, places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020.

Collective violence when framed by its perpetrators as "citizen" justice is inherently a challenge to state legitimacy. To properly account for such violence, it is necessary to consider an opportunity structure incorporating the actions of both vigilantes and agents of the state. The motivation and lethality of lynch mobs in the South cannot be understood without considering how the state reacted to the legitimacy challenges posed by lynching. We trace the shifting orientation of state agents to lynching attempts between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events in three Southern states, we model geographic and temporal patterns in the determinants of mob formation, state intervention, and intervention success. Opponents of lynching often pled with mobs to "let the law take its course. " This article examines the course followed by the law itself, as state actors moved between encouraging, accommodating, and in many instances averting mob violence.

Asian Americans became targets of increasingly hostile behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. What motivated this? Fears of contagion arising from a behavioral immune system (BIS) may have motivated differential treatment towards Chinese-born US residents, especially early in the pandemic and among those vulnerable to COVID-19. On the other hand, rhetoric from right-wing media figures may have legitimated anti-Asian behavior. We explore these questions using a behavioral game with a representative sample of Americans at two points: in spring and fall 2020. Participants were partnered with a US- or Chinese-born US resident. The average American treated Chinese-born US residents worse compared to US-born residents in the spring but not the fall, when China was no longer a COVID-19 hotspot. But among Republicans, likely more receptive to right-wing rhetoric, unequal treatment was both stronger in the spring and persisted into the fall.