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Raiding Sociological Images is a pastime of mine as SI manages to succinctly highlight important issues in our society. One issue is gender inequality and how prevalent it remains in our society. The neat graph, along with some of their interpretation:
“First, notice that women with more education (the lighter bars in each age bracket) do worse compared to men than women with less education. That is, the gender inequity is worse in the upper classes than it is in the lower classes. Why? Well, people tend to marry other with similar class and education backgrounds. Accordingly, women with more education may be married to men with higher earning potential than women with less education. Those women are more able to make work-related choices that don’t foreground economics, since their income is less central to the financial health of the couple. They are also more likely to take substantial amounts of time out of the workforce when they have kids (working class women can’t afford to do so as easily), and we know that doing so makes a real dent in career advancement. So, perhaps ironically, women who are “richer” educationally may marry economically richer men who then allow them to deprioritize their careers.”
Gender is a feature of society that is becoming the focus of more and more research and experimentation. One idea that fascinates me is the idea of psychological priming for gender and gender related activities and careers. I’m working my way through Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, but this article caught my eye from Jonah Lehrer and dovetails nicely with what I am currently reading.
“One last point: I think the power of seeing a female calculus professor is magnified by the absence of similar figures in mass culture. In a 2002 study led by the psychologist Paul Davies, two groups of male and female undergrads were shown three minutes of television commercials. Students in the first group were shown a variety of “gender stereotyping” ads, such as a woman gleefully touting the benefits of a skin product, or a “slender female” talking about the deliciousness of diet soda. (All of the ads were real.) Students in the second group, in contrast, were shown a mix of gender-neutral ads, such as a pitch for an insurance company and a commercial about cell-phones. Then, the women were quizzed about their interest in pursuing a career in math or science.
Once again, the results were depressingly clear: Women exposed to the gender stereotyping ads were far less interested in anything quantitative. Instead, they were more than twice as likely to choose careers in the verbal and service industry, such as retail, sales and communication.
The pattern was reversed, however, in the women who saw neutral ads. They were actually more interested in pursuing quantitative careers. All it took was the absence of a blatant stereotype to increase their interest in math. While I don’t expect television commercials to get better anytime soon – pop culture is full of persistent tropes – it turns out that we’ve got a fix for the negative effects of these stereotypes. The cure is female math teachers.”
I recently finished a course in the sociology of the family. One of the dominant themes of the course was the gendered assumptions our society is based on. Like the Matrix, until you are shown what it is, you really do not understand it. One of the conditions of the paper was that I had to use a pop culture piece to illustrate how heteronormativity works in our culture. I chose the cartoon ‘Family Guy’ because it is a very offensive show and I was sure I would find heteronormative gold when I analyzed a couple of episodes. Sadly, I was correct…
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