Sociological Images

How does the U.S. compare to other developed countries on measures of social justice? According to the New York Times, not very well.  The visual below compares countries’ poverty rates, poverty prevention measures, income inequality, spending on pre-primary education, and citizen health.  The “overall” rating is on the far left and the U.S. ranks 27th out of 31.

Via Feministing.  See also how the U.S. ranks on measures of equality and prosperity (33 out of 33, for what it’s worth). Thanks to Dolores R. for the link!

Australian sparkling wine manufacturer Yellowglen has been running the Bubbly Girls campaign for about a decade in Australia. The brand’s self-proclaimed goal of the campaign is:

Yellowglen celebrates women everywhere.  We’re proud to be part of the celebration, and as such have asked three women who are living their dreams to be the Yellowglen Bubbly Girls.  Who are they?  They’re bright, beautiful girls who epitomise everything that we love about Australian women.

The marketing campaign actively employs a conflation of femininity and aspirational fantasy. The three women in the video were allegedly chosen because of “…the real life achievements of women and the female spirit.”

No evidence is given of any actual life achievements (i.e., experiences, career developments or highlights). Rather, the featured women talk about their dreams and desires to be famous by way of acting, music, or by spending their life travelling the world. No evidence is provided that they have even pursued these goals yet, let alone achieved anything worthy of note in these pursuits.

The rest of the campaign consists of the women modelling and drinking sparkling wine, sometimes making appearances at “fashionable” events such as the Melbourne Cup (a national Australian event worthy of it’s own post) as part of larger fashion-oriented campaign.

Thus, the campaign appears to re-enforce several patriarchal notions of femininity:

• The genderization of “‘fun”: femininity, fashion, friends, social attention (and bubbles!).
• Success is defined by fantasy; lofty and rather unattainable ambitions for careers based on appearances and social attention.
• Celebration is “a day in the spotlight,” of pamper and attention; not the acknowledgement of tangible outcomes.

Has anyone seen a male-oriented campaign that ‘celebrates’ men in a similar fashion? I’m genuinely curious.

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Nick Green studies Arts (Communications) at Monash University and Economics at University of New England, Australia, with particular interest in social economics. He performs in Heartbreak Club (a group that creates semi-satirical songs about male narcissism), writes about wine and loosely related topics at the Journal of Sparkling Shiraz, and is employed by an Australian media company.

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Nicola R. sent in an image of the ad that is on the back cover of the September 2011 issue of Desktop, an Australian magazine aimed at graphic designers. The ad, for Olympus cameras and their art filters, presents four identical images of a woman with different effects applied. The tagline, in small print under the photos, is “Never get bored of how your girlfriend looks again”:

As Nicola says, the message here is that woman are eternally on display to an objectifying male gaze, “not just in public but often also in our personal lives,” and can never stop manipulating their physical appearance lest they risk losing their male partner’s interest.

In Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are, Rob Walker discusses one of the central dilemmas facing marketers: they are trying to get large numbers of people to buy the same thing, while convincing them that doing so in no way makes them conformists. How do you “keep it real” (a phrase repeated ad nauseam by the marketers Walker interviewed) and appear authentic and non-conformist while trying to get as many people as possible to buy the same product?

One solution is to frame buying your product not as a boring act of conformity, but instead as a way of expressing your own unique personal identity. Buying a product you’ve seen advertised doesn’t detract from your authenticity, it enhances it — even if you’re buying a mass-produced product that thousands or even millions of other people purchased identical copies of.

Bec G. sent in this an ad from Jeanswest Australia that illustrates this, asserting that their jeans are “as unique as you”:

Of course, as Bec pointed out, the models they chose to represent how unique Jeanswest customers are are all pretty uniformly thin, even the pregnant woman.

Sarah F. sent in another example. The Australian website for the sandwich chain Subway asks customers whether their preferred sandwich is unique:

I filled out the quiz, creating the only thing I ever get if I eat at Subway: a standard veggie sandwich, no tomatoes. I was then asked to give this amazing item its very own name, to be saved for posterity on the Subway website (if they approve the name): “You’ve just created a Sub that is a reflection of you, so let’s give it a name. Feel free to be creative, after all this is YOUR creation!”

Then it was time for the big reveal. The webpage reinforced the message that designing my very own personalized sandwich from their relatively limited stock list of ingredients is an important expression of my inner being:

I was so nervous! What if my sandwich wasn’t special? Was the honey oat bread too mainstream a choice? Oh, why didn’t I go with the chipotle sauce?!

But it all turned out ok!

In Australia, at least, I now know that my Subway sandwich choice separates me from the masses. What a relief!

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

I have criticized sloppy statistical work by some international feminist organizations, so I’m glad to have a chance to point out a useful new report and website.

The Progress of the World’s Women is from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The full-blown site has an executive summary, a long report, and a statistics index page with a download of the complete spreadsheet. I selected a few of the interesting graphics.

Skewed sex ratios (which I’ve written about here and here) are in the news, with the publication of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. The report shows some of the countries with the most skewed sex ratios, reflecting the practice of parents aborting female fetuses (Vietnam and Taiwan should  be in there, too). With the exception of Korea, they’ve all gotten more skewed since the 1990s, when ultrasounds became more widely available, allowing parents to find out the sex of the fetus early in the pregnancy.

The most egregious inequality between women of the world is probably in maternal mortality. This chart shows, for example, that the chance of a woman dying during pregnancy or birth is about 100- 39-times higher in Africa than Europe. The chart also shows how many of those deaths are from unsafe abortions.

Finally, I made this one myself, showing women as a percentage of parliament in most of the world’s rich countries (the spreadsheet has the whole list). The USA, with 90 women out of 535 members of Congress, comes in at 17%.

The report focuses on law and justice issues, including rape and violence against women, as well as reparations, property rights, and judicial reform. They boil down their conclusions to: “Ten proven approaches to make justice systems work for women“:

1. Support women’s legal organizations

2. Support one-stop shops and specialized services to reduce attrition in the justice chain [that refers to rape cases, for example, not making their way from charge to conviction -pnc]

3. Implement gender-sensitive law reform

4. Use quotas to boost the number of women legislators

5. Put women on the front line of law enforcement

6. Train judges and monitor decisions

7. Increase women’s access to courts and truth commissions in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

8. Implement gender-responsive reparations programmes

9. Invest in women’s access to justice

10. Put gender equality at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals

Does American prosperity translate into long retirements?  Not compared to other developed countries in the world.  Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries.  The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.

Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy.  The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.

Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:

Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:

On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.

The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):

The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):

Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.