Tag Archives: chapter 10

*Insert Feminist Rant Here*

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Just wanted to make sure that everyone was up to date with their sexist-occupations list, since 2013. A few big ones were caught encouraging the “men>women” lie around the world, recently.

(Very recently.) Yesterday, the Women’s Media Center released a report that stomped on my Mass Media Communication Studies Degree.

“Sixty-five percent of U.S. political stories published during a three-month span in 2014 were written by men,” wrote a man for Poynter Institute.

“The report, which examined about 27,000 pieces of content produced at major news organizations during three months in 2014, shows that men produced the majority of coverage in nearly all cases. Three organizations — “PBS Newshour,” the Chicago Sun-Times and The Huffington Post — reached or surpassed gender parity.”

 

  • The New York Times: 32 percent female, 68 percent male
  • The Denver Post: 32 percent female, 68 percent male
  • USA Today: 33 percent female, 67 percent male
  • New York Post: 36 percent female, 64 percent male
  • The Washington Post: 39 percent female, 61 percent male
  • The Los Angeles Times: 40 percent female, 60 percent male
  • The Wall Street Journal: 40 percent female, 59 percent male
  • The San Jose Mercury News: 41 percent female, 59 percent male
  • The Chicago Sun-Times: 55 percent female, 45 percent male

Aside from my journalism passion being crushed, my soccer one also took a hard hit. Adding injury to insult, this Saturday marks the first match of the 2015 Women’s World Cup, and FIFA’s sexist decision to hold the entire tournament on artificial turf.

When Abby Wambach — the 2012 FIFA Women’s World Player of the Year — heard of this news, she noted, “The men would strike playing on artificial turf.”

 

Playing on turf is exponentially more dangerous than playing on real grass. And exponentially more expensive to upkeep. The Men’s 2014 World Cup got a $550Million Stadium built in a developing country (that ended up becoming a bus parking lot after the tournament ended) while women have to settle for turf in Canada.

Many famous female soccer players filed a lawsuit against FIFA, but later dropped the charges. 

The dozens of plaintiffs included U.S. Women’s National Team player Heather O’Reilly, who told NPR that the plan to use fake grass “is a blatant demonstration of FIFA not placing the women side by side with the men. You know, many men’s players refuse to play on artificial turf, actually, and the thought of it being played in the World Cup is almost laughable.”

How is it that oppression against women is still so evident and so prevalent? If professional athletes gave up their attempt to fight discrimination with their high profiles and the resources they have, what does that mean for us everyday women?

Gender Bias and Discrimination

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A former female software engineer is suing Twitter for allegedly using a secretive promotion process that favors men. She filed her class-action lawsuit one day after an ex-employee of Facebook alleged that bad behavior including sexual harassment and race discrimination occurred in the workplace.

Women are less likely to ask for and receive promotions. Huang, the ex Twitter employee is urging women employees to come forward if they were denied a promotion in the last 5 years.

What does this say about companies and treatment of their female employees in the workplace?

Gendered Driving

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Gender stereotypes affect all parts of our lives. This includes unconscious biases at work, and the Hidden Curriculum at school. It even affects how we drive and where we park.

This article from the online TIME magazine reports that a Chinese mall has separate, larger parking spaces for women. These parking spaces are pink, 30 cm bigger than normal spaces, and are “respectfully reserved for women” because of a local belief that women are bad at driving. The mall managers said that they wanted to “make it easier for their female customers” by giving them extra room.

Is this sexist? Some might argue that it is sexist towards men because it gives women privilege just because of their gender. Julia Wood (2013) might argue that it is sexist towards women, because it stereotypes and treats them like children, who are “less mature, less competent, less capable, than [male] adults (p. 236)”. These large, pink parking spaces reinforce the stereotype that women are bad drivers, and that women depend on male mall managers to “protect” them.

Is it oppressive? According to Frye (2000), we would have to look at the whole social system, culture and history of China to see if this situation is a part of system of oppressing women (p 12 – 13).

What do you think?

Be Pretty, But Don’t Wear those Slutty Heels to Work

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Recently, the prestigious Loyola Law School issued a memo to students including a statement about how female students should dress when clerking.

As is often the case with professional dress codes, women’s clothing choices were addressed, with no suggestions about what is appropriate for men.

This gets at the double bind faced by women in something as simple as choosing what to wear to work.  On the one hand, women are encouraged to look beautiful in their work appearance, as traditionally defined in our culture.  On the other hand, often women are judged for looking too “sexy.”

Ultimately women’s job performance should not be evaluated on their appearance.  It is an example of how “appearance counts” as a theme of femininity affects women in their professional lives in a significant way.

As Drexler argues here in a CNN editorial about the memo what should matter most is, “how women perform their jobs, and not which shoes they happened to choose that morning.”

Breaking Mount Everest’s Glass Ceiling

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Here is a fascinating discussion of women who have submitted Mount Everest over the years and the challenges they faced based upon social expectations for them as women in Eastern and Western cultures.  After one professional climber told National Geographic that she, like many working mothers, felt guilty at leaving her children behind, reader response was ferocious.  Readers responded to the article stating she had “pre-shot her children” and accusing her of having “cheap, self-serving arrogance.”   A Nepalese woman who holds the record for summiting Everest 6 times is working as a maid because in her culture, educating women is not seen as a priority and she can not read or write.

Some of the issues faced by Western women climbers is grounded in our historical view of women and sport.  From the article:

In the 19th century, when mountaineering was developing as a sport, the playing field was highly restricted. Victorian society largely believed that women could not endure robust physical activity. One prevalent theory blamed the uterus and the ovaries. These organs were thought to dictate everything about a woman, from puberty to menopause, including her athletic capabilities….

Naturally, mountaineering was out of the question. As physician Karl Gerson warned in 1898 in the German Journal of Physical Education, “Violent movements of the body can cause a shift in the position and a loosening of the uterus as well as a prolapse and bleeding, with resulting sterility, thus defeating a woman’s true purpose in life, i.e., the bringing forth of strong children.” A woman needed to stay home and go easy on the uterus. Future generations depended on it.

Gender discrimination in the workplace

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So although I am not a Nicki Minaj fan, I do think she makes a very good point in this short clip. Yes, our society has come a long way on their views of women in the work force. However, there is still a lot of discrimination out there. In chapter one of Gendered Lives, Julie Woods writes, “The fact that my sex makes me vulnerable to job discrimination, violence, and other injustices is not something I accept as unchangeable.” Nicki Minaj’s clip gives us a whole new perspective of this discrimination with a look at how women in the entertainment industry are discriminated against. One would think that celebrities don’t experience discrimination, but it is clear that this social construction of gender roles truly is unequal all over. When will our society start to see women as equals? Will our society ever see women as equals?

Paid leave lets dads build parenting foundation

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Kenya, the Philippines, Columbia, Saudia Arabia…  not necessarily countries you might associate with “progressive” views of gender.  Yet all these country’s governments provide paid paternity leave.

This article demonstrates how fathers and families benefit from paid paternity leave and how the US is one of the few countries around the world that doesn’t offer it typically.

How Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Is Building a Nursery By Her Office, and Dissing Working Moms

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In 2013, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo was the subject of much controversy after ordering all telecommuting workers to start working out of a Yahoo office.

Many decried how this affected working parents, especially working mothers.  Here’s an interesting opinion piece about Mayer’s decision and Mayer’s misguided criticism of feminism.