gender: education

Cross-posted at Ms. magazine.

Full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn.  One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex.  Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations.  How severe is job segregation by sex?  A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more.  (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.)  Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time.  The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.”  Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time.  It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s.  It has changed little since then.

The lines above and below the white line show that sex segregation correlates with education level.  People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs.  This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

Via Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Ajax was searching for majors on College Board, a website aimed at helping people get into and through college.  She wanted to search for colleges with women’s studies majors and when she typed “women” into the keyword field, the search function returned two majors: women’s studies and fashion design.

This would make perfect sense if the search function returned only women’s studies since it has “women” in the name and all.  But fashion design?  It suggests that somehow fashion design has been marked as a major-for- or about-women, but no other major has.

What about, say, history?  Nope, no women in that.
Psychology?  Well, there is a Psych of Women class.  But, otherwise no.
Economics?  Don’t make me laugh!
Queer Studies? Afro-Am? Wait? Women are gay!? And black!?
Politics?  Oh honey, don’t worry your pretty little head about it!
Literature?  Oh yeah!  We forgot literature!   Let’s slap a “women” tag on that one and call it a day.

UPDATE: Brenden L. went to the website and typed in men. Guess what he got?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

My friend Larry Harnisch at The Daily Mirror found this gem, published in the Los Angeles Mirror News on March 21 1960:

A clearer photo:

That’s right: this woman’s body was so distracting to male students that it required intervention by school officials or campus discipline would break down. And the intervention wasn’t to tell men to grow up and stop ogling their female classmates, of course, but to ask her to make herself less visible.

I’m sure the muu-muu fixed everything, though.

The next year she competed in a  beauty contest sponsored by the Young Democrats.

Stan S. sent us a recent research report by Economist Kent Gilbreath.  He presents data illustrating gender differences in the starting salaries of college graduates with different majors, as well as data on the way in which gender differences have changed between 1998 and 2008.  The findings are in the direction you might expect, but with quite a bit of variation!

First, Gilbreath summarizes the data.  Of all of the majors he surveyed, males have higher starting salaries 63% of the time; women have higher starting salaries in the remaining 37%:

Here are the details by major; net differences (far right column), when positive, reflect how much more money men are making than woman and, when negative, reflect how much more money women are making than men (the variation is quite amazing!):

And here’s the data for the sciences, though the format is off:

Gilbreath then looks at change in the gender difference between 1998 and 2008.  Again, a summary shows that, in 58% of the cases, men’s advantage over women is growing and, in the remaining 42%, women’s advantage is growing:

The details show which majors have shown a better growth rate for men or women.  A positive average annual growth rate (far right column) is a gain for men over women and a negative one is a gain for women over men.

This is great data because it shows that, overall, men receive higher starting salaries than women, and their advantage is growing, but the advantage that accrues to men is not even.  It depends, very much, on what their major is.

Anyone see any interesting trends or have any stories from the field?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Emily L. sent in a link to the t-shirt below.  It was made by students at Houston’s Memorial High (go, Mustangs!) for the yearly football game against their rival, Stratford.  It nicely reveals how sex and domination are conflated in American society.  On the shirt, “beating” Stratford at football is conflated with “fucking” them.  As the text says: “F’n Spartans Up Since 1962”:

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it should be really troubling to us all that “fuck” has the double meaning that it does.

More conflations of sex and power here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Borrowed from Jezebel.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Mary M. of Cooking with the Junior League sent me a link to amalah.com, where you will find images from a 1962 textbook titled When You Marry (you can find the full text of the 1953 edition without photos here, and Larry found a full pdf of the 1962 edition here):

The book covers many aspects of dating and marriage and provides some fascinating insights into gender roles and social assumptions of the time. Here are some useful facts about social classes and families that you might like to know:

Working class people go to work sooner? Wow. Weird. But at least they have fewer troubles than the middle class. There are so many irritations you have to face when you aren’t poor, but at least you “weather” them well.

I may use this as an example of pointless graphs:

Here we have a list of some factors that are favorable, unfavorable, or unimportant for marital success; I’ve circled some of the more noteworthy items in red:

Text I highlighted:

[favorable]

Happiness of parents’ marriage —both (Not true for Negro couples)

[unfavorable]

Combinations where man feels inferior and woman does not

Prone to argue points–wife

Determination to get own way–wife

Wife’s cultural background higher than husband’s

Residence in the city during childhood

So you’re sure to have marital problems if the wife won’t give in on things and instead keeps being all argumentative and wanting her own way. I’m not sure what defines a cultural background as “higher” than others, but we see here the same pattern as we do with social class (which I presume is related to cultural background): it’s ok for men to “marry down,” but women aren’t supposed to.

The textbook provides a pretty grim depiction of sex for a newly-married couple:

I found this little gem in on a page from the section on how ideals of marital life often don’t fit with reality:

It’s so widespread to think of marketing and advertising as manipulative today (even among those who like at least some ads or don’t see a real problem with them) that it’s striking to see such a sincerely  positive portrayal of it as a helpful, even “kind” industry.

It is noteworthy that the textbook, used during the height of the “Leave it to Beaver” “traditional” family era, depicts the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker family form as a recent creation, as wives became “expensive luxuries”:

This section describing which women should work doesn’t seem to speak highly of women overall, since just a “few” of us have “special talents and skills.” However, it does make the point (in #5) that “a woman is not unemployed because she is not paid for her work,” an effort to bring attention to the value of women’s unpaid labor (in this instance, community/volunteer work):

And then there is a helpful discussion of eugenics and good breeding :

There’s a lot to ponder there. I think it’s fascinating the way that it illustrates some of our stereotypes about the 1950s/60s (women are supposed to be mothers, sex outside of marriage is bad, etc.) but contradicts others (the male-breadwinner family isn’t a long-standing “traditional” family but rather one they can clearly trace to the recent past, and which even then seemed like it might not last).

UDPATE: Larry looked through the pdf version of the whole book and found this nice cartoon:

In the U.S. today, men enroll in college at a lower rate and drop out at a higher rate. In 2005, there were 57 women on campus for every 43 men.

This is such a significant problem, that college admissions officers are letting in a larger percentage of male applicants, even sometimes admitting less qualified men over more qualified women.

But this isn’t just a gender story.

A USA Today story offered this data from the ACE Center for Policy and Analysis:

Looking at the very bottom line of the table (and just at 2003/2004), you can see that the gender gap is largest among lower income students.  Men make up 40% of undergraduates 18-24 when you consider low-income students only, and 49% when you look at upper income students.

The gender gap also correlates with race.  Asian students show the smallest gender gap, whites the next smallest, with Hispanics and blacks trailing.

You might notice that the correlation of the gender gap with race mirrors the class correlation.  That is, income and wealth data for racial categories follows the same pattern with Asians out earning whites (categorically speaking) and whites out earning Hispanics and blacks.  So there may be an interesting exacerbation effect here.

The gender gaps for each racial/ethnic group, however, decreases as the students’ families get richer.  And, among the upper income groups, the racial difference shrinks to only three percentage points (from 11 among low- and middle-income kids).

So, it’s not just about race, it’s not just about class, and it’s not just about gender.  Then, what is it about being poor, black or Hispanic, andmale that results in low male enrollment in college and a higher drop out rate?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Texas Board of Education is currently holding hearings about textbook standards and changes they want publishers to make for their texts to be adopted. Texas and California have great influence over what textbooks contain since they are such enormous markets; while the standards are only specific to each of them, very similar (or identical) versions of the texts are then sold to other states as well.

Here is a clip of standards advisor Don McLeroy explaining that textbooks should recognize the fact that women and racial minorities got more liberties because the majority gave it to them (from TPM):

Technically, he is exactly right: it did take a majority of votes in Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, and the majority then (and now) was White (men). But to say that the majority did it “for the minority” erases an awful lot of struggle and organizing on the part of disadvantaged groups, as well as the foot-dragging and opposition so many members of the majority engaged in to try to prevent such changes. Before men “passed it for the women,” both women and men worked for decades to get women the vote, often being harassed and even jailed as a result. But to hear him describe it, you’d think the majority just happily passed these types of bills, with maybe just a tiny bit of prodding from minorities.

Here’s a clip of Barbara Cargill explaining that we need to take “negative” elements of American history out of textbooks and focus more on “American exceptionalism”:

Her opposition to the idea that the U.S. ever used “propaganda” is somewhat undermined by her blatant effort to rewrite history texts to be what, if it happened in another nation, we’d call propaganda.