gender: work

I live in Los Angeles where saying that you don’t like movies is tantamount to claiming atheism in a church. But I don’t like movies, generally speaking. In contrast, I quite like TV. Does this seem weird?

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media offers a clue as to why I might lean towards television.  The Institute did a content analysis of 11,927 speaking characters in “family films” (G, PG, and PG-13) and prime-time and children’s TV shows (see it here).  They looked at the presence of female and male characters and the jobs those characters were doing.  In almost every instance, women had greater visibility, and better jobs, on prime-time TV than they did in either movies or children’s shows.

Presence

Women are, for example, 39% of characters on prime time, but only 31% of characters on kids’ shows and only 28% in movies.  Casts are twice as likely to be gender-balanced on prime time (45-55% female), compared to movies.   Half of the casts of family films are 75% or more male, compared to only 20% of the casts on TV shows and 39% of children’s shows.

Occupations

Almost half of all American workers are female, but they hold only 20% of the jobs on the big screen and 25% of the jobs on children’s shows. Again, here prime-time does somewhat better: 34% of the jobs on evening TV are held by women.

The next two tables reveal how men and women are distributed among different kinds of occupations in films and on prime time.  Men are over-represented in almost all cases, but the disproportion in movies is almost always significantly worse than it is on TV.

If you’re one of the people that contributed to Star Trek Into Darkness‘ $70.6 million opening weekend this week, this data might not be surprising.  I didn’t count, but I suspect it falls into the 50% of films that has a cast that is at least 75% male.  It certainly didn’t pass the Bechdel Test; the two female speaking characters, if I remember correctly, never spoke to one another at all, and so they couldn’t have spoken to each other about something other than a man (that’s the test).   (Oh wait, I think one of the twins with tails in bed with Kirk said “hey” when he leapt out to go do something important, so that’s three women with speaking roles).

So, like in lots and lots of films, women in Star Trek were woefully under-represented except as love interests for the two protagonists (Uhura in this movie and Carol, it was foreshadowed, in the next).  I’m used to it, so it doesn’t really stir me up, but that doesn’t mean I have to like movies.  I’ll stick to TV, thank you very much. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Hollywood.

Cross-posted at BlogHer, Pacific Standard, and The Huffington Post.

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.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

One of our Pinterest boards collects images that reveal that men are the “neutral” sex in contemporary Western cultures. This means that (1)  the image that pops up in our minds when we say “person” or “human” or “worker” is usually implicitly male, (2) non-sexed representations of people are usually assumed to be male (e.g., cartoon animals appear female to us unless we slap on eyelashes and lipstick), (3) items for sale often get marketed as either “item” or “women’s item” (e.g., “deodorant” and “women’s deodorant”), and (4) men and male bodies get to stand in for humanity (e.g., in scientific research).

Instances of this phenomenon have been a fun series on the blog; we featured another one just this past weekend, on how (not) to write obituaries.  Then today SocImages Contributor Philip Cohen sent along another great example that we couldn’t resist sharing. The graphic below, released by Bloomberg Business Week, is meant to help us understand who is in and out of the labor force.  While 3% of Americans want to work but can’t find a job, large proportions are also permanently or temporarily out of work on purpose: they’re retired, in college, in the military, disabled, or a stay-at-home parent.

For our purposes in this post, what’s interesting is the way they illustrate the categories.  See what you see:

In all cases but one, the stick figured is either non-sexed and therefore implicitly male (e.g., the newspaper reader and the disabled) or explicitly male (the business-suited full-time employees, the mustachioed retiree).  The one exception, of course, is for the stay-at-home parent.  Suddenly the stick figure is a female.  We see this all over.  As soon as parenting or housework is involved, all those neutral/male stick figures sprout skirts.

Now, to be fair, 97% of stay-at-home parents are female, but so is 50% of the American workforce. You wouldn’t guess so, however, by this graphic.  Also, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t have to be like this.

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.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The Pew Research Center put out a report this month titled, “Modern Parenthood: Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family,” written by Kim Parker and Wendy Wang. It analyzes trends in time use among men and women in families, showing the big changes since the 1960s, and adds Pew’s own survey data on attitudes and perceptions. Lots of interesting information.

But what jumped out at me was that the stall in progress did not feature much in Pew’s narrative. I really noticed that when the Joy Cardin show featured the report on Wisconsin Public Radio, and Cardin’s intro was this:

Family gender roles are converging, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. Father’s have more than doubled the time they spend on housework. More moms are paid to work outside the home (audio here).

Those facts are true, but old news — older than the new news, which is that nothing much has happened since the early 1990s.  Here are the trends, in Pew’s nice graphics. See if you can find the stall point in each figure.

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The last one, parents’ child care time, is the only one that shows continued real progress, albeit slower, in the last decade.

I favor three explanations for this gender stall:

• Work-family policy that encourages specialization in domestic or labor force roles, as described by Stephanie Coontz here.
• Cultural trends toward “egalitarian essentialism,” which “blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles” (e.g., intensive parenting mania), as described by David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman here.
• Weaker government enforcement of anti-discrimination law, as described in the new book Documenting Desegregation, by Don Tomaskovic-Devey and Kevin Stainback.

These explanations do not exclude others.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Todd Schoepflin, @CreateSociology, thought we should remark on the photo Forbes used to illustrate their story on Yahoo’s new no-work-from-home policy.  What do you think?  Totally realistic right?

Also, that hand is photoshop disaster worthy.

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.

John Millward, a self-described “ideas detective,” has done something intriguing.  He cracked the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD) and used a sample of 10,000 porn stars to tell a story about porn.  Here are some of his findings.

Demographics

The average female porn star, he discovered, was 5’5″ and weighed 117 pounds.  She doesn’t have a double-D bra size; she’s a 34B.  And she’s not blonde:

She’s also not disproportionately white.  Millward found that the racial breakdown among porn actresses somewhat matched U.S. population demographics:

    Race                             % of actresses                     % of the population

• White                            70.5                                       78.1
• Black                              14.0                                       13.1
• Latina                              9.3                                       16.7
• Asian                               5.2                                         5.0
• American Indian        no data                                        1.2

Career

The average woman begins her career at 22.  This has been unchanged for the last 40 years.  The average age for men was 29 in the ’70s, but it’s dropped to 24.  Careers were longer in the ’70s.  Men quite after 12 years, women after nine.  Today men quit, on average, after four years and women after three.

Interestingly, success for male porn stars is much more concentrated than for female.  There are fewer of them (70% of all porn stars are women) and they’re less interchanged.  Millward reports that 96 of the most prolific porn stars of all time — measured by number of films — are men.  Women, on average, do fewer films each.  Just over half (53%) do three or more.

Content

The IAFD records all of the sex acts that actors do on film.  Accordingly to Millward’s analysis, this is what actresses do:

And here are the roles they play:

Wives in porn, by the way, are not typically having sex with their husbands.

For more data porn, visit Millward’s site.

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.

Following up on our recent posts on representations of “person”, I discovered a set of stick figures from around the world, collected by Steve Portigal.  He has some observations on variations.  From a gender perspective, however, they all look more or less like this one from Bali, Indonesia:

What is interesting for our purposes, though, is this Chinese language example from Bangkok, Thailand:

Do you see it?  In case you doubted it, the fact that the fourth panel includes a stick figure in a skirt (1) proves that the non-skirted stick figures are implicitly men and, on an entirely different note, (2) reminds us that men do not take care of children.

Similarly, these two pictures of warning signs for moving sidewalks (snapped in the Dublin airport) feature “neutral” stick figures, unless a child is involved:

We see the same phenomenon in commercial airplanes, where “flight attendants” still tend to be pictured in skirts.

Prof. Shaun Huston sent in these photos from United Airlines. Everyone’s in pants… except the person changing a diaper:

Amanda C. sent in another example from a hotel in Sydney. When the stick figures are housekeepers, suddenly they sprout skirts!

Sophie pointed out that in Holland, bike traffic lights only include images of what most people would recognize as a “men’s” bike, with the bar across the top, thereby managing to gender the traffic signals without including any figures of people at all (images found here and here):

For what it’s worth, here’s a counter-example from Malmö, Sweden:

Emanuelle, who took the photo and submitted it, says it’s the only time she can remember that she’s seen a silhouette figure like this with a kid where the figure isn’t clearly marked as female.  We’ve a fun collection of traffic lights featuring female stick figures.

We’d love to collect more examples!

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.

In this charming minute-and-a-half, Walter Cronkite demos the home office of 2001, as envisioned in 1967.  Amazingly, reality seems to have far outpaced their imagination!

I love the first line, by the way: “This is where a man might spend most of his time in the home of the 21st century.”  Apparently professional futurists in 1967 couldn’t imagine women working!

Via Cyborgology.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Originally cross-posted at Ms.

Larry H., Shayna A.-S., and Laura F. sent in a recently released study, “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” that shows compelling evidence for unconscious gender bias among faculty, specifically in some natural and biological science fields. The researchers asked a national sample of 127 biology, physics, and chemistry professors to evaluate the application materials of an undergrad science student who applied for a lab manager position, a job they saw as a gateway to other opportunities. Everyone was given the same materials (excerpts here), but half the applicants were given the first name Jennifer and half were called John. The participants were told the student would be given feedback based on their evaluations.

The results are sobering. There was a significant difference in the average competence, hireability, and mentoring ratings by gender. Professors who thought they were evaluating a female applicant saw a less qualified candidate than professors who were evaluating the identical application materials but thought it was from a man:

So not only was there a gap in perceived competence and fit for the position, but professors were less willing to engage in the type of mentoring that can help students gain both skills and confidence in their abilities — which can be especially important for under-represented groups.

And despite what you might expect, female professors were just as likely to do this as male professors were. Just thinking an applicant was female seems to have touched off an unconscious bias that led them to see female candidates negatively and to be less willing to spend time mentoring them. Professors’ age, tenure status, and discipline didn’t make a difference, either.

The professors were also asked to recommend a starting salary. Again, there was a significant difference. The average suggested beginning salary for the male candidate was $30,238, while for the female student it was $26,507:

The authors point out that these findings are especially noteworthy because, unlike many studies of gender bias that use college students or people who have never had to make the type of hiring or mentoring decisions they’re being asked to engage in for the study, this sample was made up of scientists who are active in their fields, regularly working with students.

Interestingly, when asked how much they liked the candidate, those evaluating the female student gave a higher score than those assigned the male student. But this didn’t translate into seeing the female candidate as competent. The study authors argue that this is strong evidence for subtle gender bias. The professors didn’t express dislike or hostility toward a female candidate. In fact, they tended to actively like her. But as the researchers explained,

…despite expressing warmth toward emerging female scientists, faculty members of both genders appear to be affected by enduring cultural stereotypes about women’s lack of science competence that translate into biases in student evaluation and mentoring. (p. 4)

This study implies that women in the natural and biological sciences (and yes, surely other fields too) still face prejudices that can impact the opportunities they are given to work closely with professors to gain important experiences and skills, as well as limiting their access to jobs and starting them out at a lower salary. These factors can snowball over time, creating larger and larger gaps in career achievements and income as men capitalize on opportunities while women find it impossible to catch up.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.