Sociological Images

In 2010 we wrote about how gender ideology inflects even the most “objective” of spheres.  In this case, we featured four examples of anatomical illustration, portrayals of human beings used to educate viewers about biology.  In each case, while the man faced forward with his weight evenly distributed on his two feet, the woman placed her hand on her hip, cocked a knee, or even turned slightly sideways.  In other words, he was posed in a masculine way and she in a feminine way.

When we see this kind of gendered posing in drawings that are ostensibly neutral, we are being told that our particular historically- and culturally-contingent version of masculinity and femininity is natural.

In this vein, Courtney S. sent in a Design by Hümans Size Chart.  The chart is supposed to help buyers decide what size to purchase, but the accompanying images do more than just illustrate how measurements are made; by torquing the female torso, they send a message about gender too:

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

A couple of years ago I posted a segment from the PBS series Faces of America focusing on the legal efforts by Syrian immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s to be officially recognized as White (and thus eligible for naturalized citizenship). It nicely illustrates the social construction of race and ethnicity, and the way  power struggles are embedded in the categories we recognize and who is assigned to each one.

In Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness, directors Jamil Khoury and Stephen Combs integrated scenes from Khoury’s play WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole and interviews with scholars from the Arab American and Polish American communities to “reflect upon contested and probationary categories of whiteness and the use of anti-Black racism as a ‘whitening’ dye.”

Thanks to Katrin for the link!

Cross-posted at Organizations, Occupations and Work.

Last week the Wall Street Journal printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time.  The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project , and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants.  The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted over 10 minutes in a single week selected by researchers.  That assistants, rather than the CEOs themselves, were keeping track of time use leads me to believe the reports are relatively accurate.  After all, the assistant probably does most of the scheduling of a CEOs day and CEOs are likely too busy to track data time or to agree to record their time use.

Here’s the break-down of the typical 55-hour work week for CEOs:

The hype about the findings is about the finding regarding time spent in meetings — 18 hours per week (see “Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting”).  I’m more interested in the task that occupies the greatest amount of a CEO’s time in a typical week—the 20 hours of “miscellaneous” activities.  The fine print indicates that the “miscellaneous” activities include time spent travelling, in personal activity including exercise or lunch with a spouse, or in short activities like quick, unscheduled phone calls.

The project website advertises that knowing how CEOs spend their time can tell a lot about management style and differences in cultures and performances.  Maybe it can, and here arearticles that tackle these issues.  I think it tells us something slightly different and far more basic than this: what constitutes “work” depends on who does it.  Would a study of low wage workers calculate as part of the work week “exercise”?  Do we count travel time to and from a job as “work” among mid-level managers?  The BLS American Time Use Surveys (Table 5, see footnote 2) do not include travel related to work in measures of work time. Why did the authors include as part of a CEO workday things like personal time and activities unrelated to work?

Without this personal time, a CEO’s average work week—35 hours—looks closer or shorter than other workers.   For example, among employed people who worked on an average weekday in 2010, the average weekly hours spent working at all jobs (excluding travel related to work), for workers with a H.S. diploma was 40.05 hours, for women who worked full-time, the average was 40.80 hours, for all full-time workers, the average weekly work hours was 41.95 hours (to calculate these weekly averages from the BLS, I assumed people worked 5 days a week which is typical for full-time workers, but may overestimate the work hours of those with a H.S. diploma).

Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate how we measure “work” or at least pay close attention to the ways we do so differently for workers at different levels of the hierarchy.  Now I’m headed to the gym for some exercise.  Should I all that “work”?  I’ll leave it to you to decide.

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Julie Kmec is an associate professor of sociology at Washington State University.  She has conducted research on organizations and work, in particular on issues of gender and race inequality at work, the glass ceiling, employment discrimination, and sex segregation.  She is part of a working group at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University investigating ways to redefine work.

In a wonderful example of the social construction of time, there was no Friday, December 30th, 2011 in Samoa (NPR).

The country decided to move from one side of the International Dateline to the other.  The move, accomplished by skipping forward 24 hours, will allow it to align its week with its largest trading partners: Australia, New Zealand, China and Tonga.  Many business leaders were thrilled at the switch.

Thanks to sociologist Dan Hirschman for the tip!  Also in the social construction of time: Social Construction, Deviance, and Daylight Savings.

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

In just 6 1/2 minutes, CGP Gray offers a humorous and info-packed account of Daylight Savings.  He tackles the historical rationale, the role of the equator, the contemporary debate, and the wildly wacky situations it causes today (far more wacky than you probably imagine). Enjoy:

Also from CGP Gray:

• What the Bleep is the United Kingdom?!
• The Economics of Royalty
• The Social Construction of the Continents

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

The blog Blue Abaya is an account of the experiences of a women who moved to Saudi Arabia from Finland.  One of her posts centers around the difference in the palette.  ”Pinkness,” she writes, “seems to be everywhere.”

The  prevalence of pink in Saudi Arabia is a great example of how the meaning of colors is different from culture to culture.  Pink simply does not have the same feminine association there that it does in the U.S.
In addition, she tells this story:

[M]y american friend… was in a shopping mall with her [one-and-a-half-year] old son. His hair is a little longer which is unusual in Saudi but many parents in the U.S. find cute.

A Saudi woman with a baby stroller stopped to talk to her asking, is this your daughter?  My friend said no it’s a boy.  So this Saudi lady dramatically threw her hands in the air looking toward the sky and began praying:  ”Oh Allah guide this woman to the straight path!” “Guide her to cut the sons hair!”  ”He looks like a girl, guide this poor woman!”

She told my friend she MUST cut his hair because he looked like a girl.

My friend was appalled at the woman’s behavior. Nevertheless she tried to be polite and said pointing to the woman’s baby dressed up in an all-pink outfit “What a beautiful girl you have mashallah.”

The woman replied:  ”It’s a boy.”

My friend asked why is he dressed up in PINK?

She replied: “Oh, I don’t believe in colors being gender specific.”

Ah, culture.

Copyright: Laura Alho.

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

The cartoon added below inspired me to revive this post from 2008.

Many believe that the U.S. is at the pinnacle of social and political evolution. One of the consequences of this belief is the tendency to define whatever holds in the U.S. as ideal and, insofar as other countries deviate from that, define them as problematic. For example, many believe that women in the U.S. are the most liberated in the world. Insofar as women in other societies live differently, they are assumed to be oppressed. Of course, women are oppressed elsewhere, but it is a mistake to assume that “they” are oppressed and “we” are liberated. This false binary makes invisible ways in which women elsewhere are not 100% subordinated and women here also suffer from gendered oppression.

(If you’re interested, I have a paper showing how Americans make these arguments called Defining Gendered Oppression in U.S. Newspapers: The Strategic Value of “Female Genital Mutilation.”)

I offer these thoughts are a preface to a postcard from PostSecret.  The person who sent in the postcard suggests that she’s not sure which is worse: the rigid and extreme standard of beauty in the U.S. and the way that women’s bodies are exposed to scrutiny or the idea of living underneath a burka that disallows certain freedoms, but frees you from evaluative eyes and the consequences of their negative appraisals.

Cartoonist Malcolm Evans drew a similarly compelling illustration of this point, sent along by David B.:

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