femininity

Sexy geek. Sexy nerd. Tina Fey.

Lately it’s been just fine that women are smart…as long as we’re also smoking hot.

In a recent article at WomeneNews, Danica McKeller revealed the name of her upcoming and third in a series of math books for girls – “Hot X: Algebra Exposed.” Oh my.

At the 2010 Chicago Women in Science symposium a speaker’s talk was about how women can use our womanly skills to get ahead in science. It wasn’t a talk about wearing short skirts, but rather embracing ones femininity and the apparent skills that go along with that like multi-tasking. One of my former students told me she was offended by part of that presentation. Another student told me she felt that if she emphasized her girlishness, she would be kicked out of her lab for not being serious or at least not taken seriously. Both agreed that there were some excellent points in the presentation as well.

On one hand, there is still a strong stereotype of who does science and math: a nerd. There are some people who believe that this stereotype is one reason why we don’t have more women in science, technology, engineering and math. Even if this is 10% of the reason, is the answer calendars of nude students? What about model engineers?

Back to McKeller’s book title. She’s making a career out of pinkifying math and making, like, math all girly with questions about text messages and shopping. So what does it mean that she’s making a sexual innuendo in the title of a book aimed at the algebra set? Nowadays, high schools expect kids to be taking algebra freshmen year, if not sooner. So that’s what, 14-15 years in age? Grown women with PhDs modeling is one thing, hell even college students stripping down for a calendar (which will haunt their Senate campaign one day) is a different discussion. They are adults. But should a math book for teens be sexualized? Aren’t their lives sexualized enough?

We have a lot of issues to tackle on this road to fairness and equity. Do we really need to add sex into the mix?

Recently, the Barbie.com website became a polling place where participants could vote on what the legendary doll’s next career move should be. Toymakers at Mattel offered five choices for its new “I Can Be” Barbie: architect, anchorwoman, computer engineer, environmentalist, and surgeon. Girls overwhelmingly favored the “News Anchor Barbie”—whose glamorous get-up (tulip skirt, pink velvet jacket, black camisole, high heels, and cordless microphone) draws more inspiration from American Idol than it does from Katie Couric’s nightly wardrobe. I didn’t see Surgeon Barbie’s proposed garb, but I’d bet that her lab coat lacked a certain glitz factor. Of the five career options, anchorwoman fits most snugly within the media-and-entertainment realm that saturates kids’ fantasy lives. Newscaster Barbie’s popularity among girls is hardly a shocker.

In a surprising twist, however, the computer engineer beat the anchorwoman in the popular vote. But it wasn’t because girls vouched for her. Rather, a vocal group of adult female computer engineers launched an online campaign to lure voters—parents included—to elect the leggy lady with the pink laptop. “Please help us in getting Barbie to get her Geek on!” they appealed. Their campaign worked.

Mattel did its best to glam-up Engineer Barbie’s attire, which includes “geek-chic glasses,” black leggings, a Bluetooth headset, and sporty yet sensible pink shoes. But while real-life girls love electronic gadgets, most don’t seem to aspire to high-tech careers themselves. Or, at least, they don’t take a shine to a doll that does.

In the end, Mattel decided to play to both constituencies, and announced plans to manufacture the top two winners in the coming months. But let’s take a step back for a minute. Does it really matter what career path Barbie takes? Do toys really influence girls’ future aspirations? Clearly, women engineering professionals think they can.  According to Ann Zimmerman of the Wall Street Journal (who reported in the April 9, 2010 issue): “Why grown women felt so strongly about having themselves represented by a doll—especially onethat feminists have always loathed—speaks volumes both about the power of the iconic Barbie doll and the current state of women who work in computer and information sciences. Their ranks have declined in the past two decades. In 2008, women received only 18% of computer science degrees, down from 37% in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.”

In the early 1970s, when role models for girls in male-dominated professions were sorely lacking, proponents of gender equality successfully lobbied toy makers and educational publishers to design products depicting diverse career options for girls. They strongly believed that early play experiences would make a difference in kids’ future aspirations.  So they worked actively to shape the material culture of childhood.

Back then, Barbie was so anathema to feminists that it would never have occurred to them to collaborate with Mattel. But times have changed. Over the past three decades, commercial toymakers have perfected their absorption and co-optation of liberal feminist ideals; Barbie’s latest career makeover is just one recent example. So today, many women’s groups are apt to adopt the strategy: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” We can interpret these Barbie dolls as “compromise formations” (to use an old grad-school phrase) because they represent an uneasy combination of traditionally feminine beauty standards with forward-thinking advocacy to enhance women’s economic and professional status.

With these Barbie dolls in our daughters’ playrooms, are we on solid footing, or shaky ground? Will the new Computer Engineer Barbie help reverse the decline of women in high-tech careers? We don’t know. But real surgeons—and I’d bet most computer programmers—don’t wear stilettos to the workplace. It’s too bad that Barbie dolls still have to.

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With the 6^th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?

Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.

Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”

Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of you priority list.

While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.

Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders – what a feminist concept!)

McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:

“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”

However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).

This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.

The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).

Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)

Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either – she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the website pinkstinks.co.uk: a “campaign and social enterprise that challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.” Founded by two “thirty-something” British twin sisters, pinkstinks aims to spark public discussion and influence the media to promote positive gender roles to girls worldwide. Website co-founder Abi Moore, a London-based documentary filmmaker and mother of two sons, grew disgusted by the vapid 24/7 media coverage of Paris Hilton and other celebrities while the achievements of brilliant female scientists and other talented women go virtually unrecognized. Determined to provide more substantive female role models for girls today, Abi teamed up with her sister Emma Moore—a publishing executive and parent of two girls—to start the online venture.

Their appealing website creatively challenges the “culture of pink” and its reductive, restrictive gender stereotyping. On one level, pink is just a color—and if you’re a mother struggling with whether to buy a rose-hued wardrobe for your princess-obsessed daughter, rest assured that a few pink shirts or dresses won’t keep your five-year-old out of the Ivy League down the road. On the other hand, though, “pink” is more than a color: it’s a ubiquitous cultural symbol for a set of prevailing values and messages about what it means to be feminine, for what girls are supposed to care about: beauty, appearance, domesticity, and (before you know it) heterosexual allure.

According to the website, for example, more than 60% of British girls aged 7 to 10 wear lipstick and / or perfume, while over 40% wear eye shadow or eyeliner. Among British girls aged 15-17, 73% say that when they feel bad about themselves, it’s related to their looks or their weight, rather than school work or other abilities. In contrast, pinkstinks motivates girls to develop more meaningful ambitions and privilege brains over beauty.

If you visit the website, be sure to click the box labeled “voices,” which links you to a video of two Swedish pre-teens who took on Toys-R-Us for its “very gendered and sexist Christmas Catalogue.” According to the young investigators, only 14 out of 54 pages of the catalogue portray boys and girls playing with the same toys. Their report is an inspiring example of children’s feminist activism on a global scale—and it may prompt your own kids to question, or at least be aware of, the hidden politics of pink. You can also purchase some alternative merchandise, including a bib or t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I’m no Princess.” Just think of how adorable your little one might look in that!  And by all means feel to comment with your thoughts below:  does pink stink?

There’s lots of cross-dressing buzz in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere.  Here’s a semi-biased sample for your consideration:

Oct. 17: CNN covers Morehouse College’s dress code which “cracks down on cross-dressing.”

Nov. 6: NYT article asks “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” and describes U.S. high schools whose dress codes range from enforcing ‘traditional’ norms to allowing for students to more freely express their sex, gender and sexuality through their appearance. Is this a case of those with social/political power being ‘out of touch’ with changing times?

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

Nov. 7: Sociologist Shari Dworkin’s post on the Sexuality & Society blog adds a more nuanced analysis of Morehouse’s policy and encourages a complex approach to understanding gender-based dress codes.

Nov. 18: My guest-post on the Sexuality & Society blog takes on some of the questions left unasked and unanswered in that Nov. 6 NYT article about high school dress codes and considers Dworkin’s arguments.

What are the overt and covert goals of school dress codes? Are these dress codes developed to ensure that students meet norms of professionalism, or do these serve as tools for schools to enforce heteronormativity and stigmatize transgenderism? Are schools citing safety concerns, warning parents about how to protect youth from harm, or do these intend to distract us from the ways in which dress codes serve to reinforce heterosexist norms? How well can we predict the unintended consequences of dress codes – both the more ‘traditional’ and more ‘progressive’ policies?

Today: I read a new NYT article online — in the Fashion & Style section — that asserts, “It’s All a Blur to Them” and goes on to describe today’s “urban” 20-somethings who,

are revising standard notions of gender-appropriate dressing, tweaking codes, upending conventions and making hash of ancient norms.

So, what are we to think? In early November, we read about a female high-school senior who was forbidden to wear a tux in her yearbook photo. A couple of weeks later, we read about the growing trend of unisex lines in the fashion world. Does this mix of media coverage reflect that the U.S. remains an ideologically conflicted patchwork of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ Americans? Or, if the generational-change argument holds true, then are we on our way to becoming a society that truly embraces ‘gender fluidity’?

Out of sheer luck of the calendar, this month’s Science Grrl falls on Veterans Day so I had to dedicate this month’s column to the Goddess of Science Grrl Veterans…Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper who has an entire conference named after her. Hopper entered the Navy under the WAVES program.

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Fellow GWPenner Lori mentioned Lise Eliot’s recent book Pink Brain, Blue Brain last month. In my reading of the book, I found Eliot’s balance between nature versus nurture commendable. Despite being a science grrl, I do find myself wanting nurture to win out since then it would be just darn easier to toss out the pink and blue crap.

I hate seeing toys that have no gender to them, like laptop computers, painted pink for girls and not-pink for boys. This country has a problem with the low number of students who want to study computer science, especially girls. I don’t think that having pink laptops will get girls to want to study computer science. But in my conversation with Eliot, she suggests that we hijack this pinkification of our girls world and give it to them, but be subversive too.

But how far do we allow it to go? The Discovery Channel is a great place to find science toys online, but even they separate out girls and boys toys. If you look at the toys offered, a very small number are stereotypical. I assume that they are buying into parents who will come to an online store and immediately look for the boys tab. But I think that the Discovery Channel would do a world of difference for girls in science if they simply had age segregation for their toys. Send a message to parents and gift-buyers that science is gender neutral.

We are shortchanging our girls by making all their things pink. It tells them that their things are different. Luckily the Discovery Channel gender-segregated toy store doesn’t house a pink microscope. So perhaps they are being subversive when a parent goes on and sees “Oh, a girl microscope!” and really it’s just a plain old microscope. I can’t only hope.

Pink Girl, Blue Girl is an excellent read and I believe if we followed Dr. Eliot’s recommendations as we raise our kids, we will see more girls in science.

My current favorite thing on the internet is the show Smart Girls at the Party, created by Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker, and Amy Miles.  This isn’t a new show—it’s been online since late 2008—but I’m just now finding out about it.  The show’s mission statement is to “celebrate extraordinary individuals who are changing the world by being themselves.”  And the people they celebrate are girls.

The eight episodes that make up the first season feature girls who dance, do yoga, and have rock bands, girls who write stories and garden, and girls who are sisters.  My favorite episode features Ruby, who is a feminist.

Ruby is adorably goofy.  She giggles, scratches her nose, draws a picture called “Make Your Mind Crazy,” and apparently can’t skateboard at all.  She enthusiastically explains feminism and sings a song she wrote—she is loaded with self-confidence and extraversion.  But she’s not the only kind of girl featured on the show.  Eleven-year-old Valentine is quiet and thoughtful as she explains her passion for community gardening.  Ten-year-old Kenaudra seems almost shy as she describes her praise dancing, but she leads the adult women in a dance.

It’s no surprise that this great idea has come from Amy Poehler, who is one of my favorite famous feminists.  In an interview with BUST magazine in 2006, she was talking about media representations of girls and women, and she said—among other fabulous things—“I’m over the weird, exhausted girl.  I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry.  I like bossy girls, I always have.  I like people filled with life.  I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.”  So she’s created a show that highlights girls who are filled with life.  You can see that Poehler and her co-hosts, Walker and Miles, work hard to create a comfortable atmosphere for the girls so that they can express all their incredible funkiness.

These are amazing girls, but not because they’re, for instance, award-winning dancers or published writers.  This is not a show that seeks out The Most Amazing Girls in some competitive way.  Instead, Poehler interviews ordinary girls and through the interviews lets the girls reveal their thoughts, interests, and talents.  As a viewer, you’re struck by how cool these girls are—but not in a way that makes them out of reach.  This is part of what makes the show special.  Watching it, I think, “I know girls like that!  They should be on the show!”  And I hope that girls who watch it might think, “I can do that!  That’s like me!”  It’s inviting rather than distancing.  It’s creating a sense of community and a sense of possibility, as well as validating girls for the ordinary things that make them special.

The show’s website has a casting call for season 2, so if you know a girl who is changing the world by being herself, encourage her to submit her information to Smart Girls at the Party.

I’m way excited to introduce GWP readers to a new regular blogger, Leslie Heywood. On a personal level, I’m thrilled to have Leslie on board because she was the one who first kicked my ass into gear when I expressed a desire during graduate school to write nonacademically. She made it ok. Better yet, she published me. (Leslie, with Jennifer Drake, edited one of the very first third wave feminist anthologies, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, and I will be forever grateful to her for encouraging me down the road I am currently on!) So please join me in a warm welcome to prolific author, scholar extraordinaire, athlete,, mother of two, Leslie Heywood! Leslie’s monthly column, Gender Specs, will bring you the latest on gender analysis in evolutionary psychology and other sciences. Here’s her debut post – enjoy, and let us know what you think. -Deborah

After years of working on third wave feminism and women in sport, I got very interested in, even passionate about evolutionary approaches to language, culture, the body, and gender. From a gender perspective, however, the field is sometimes not a pretty place. It still tends to be dominated by a core set of assumptions based in a particular kind of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). It’s enough to send a good feminist screaming in the other direction away from any kind of evolutionary perspective–and in fact it often does.

But there are things about an evolutionary perspective I find very compelling, just not those things associated with this particular brand of EP. So I was very excited when a Newsweek article came out that voiced some of my concerns. On June 20, 2009, senior editor Sharon Begley wrote a feature article, “Why Do We Rape, Kill, and Sleep Around?”, that articulates some of the main issues and problems inEP. Although is not representative of all work done in evolutionary studies, EP has nonetheless received a disproportionate share of media attention, perhaps because of the number of hoary gender chestnuts it claims to support “scientifically”.

While many insiders will point out that Begley misrepresents the field of behavioral ecology, and some less reactionary forms of evolutionary psychology (see evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson), she questions some of the biggies that still stand in some circles, including these:

1.that rape is an adaptive strategy, because it allows men to spread their genes around more (an adaptation is anything that contributes to the evolutionary baseline of survival and reproduction)

2. that men will abuse their stepchildren because their stepchildren don’t have their genes

3. and, my personal favorite—in terms of mate choice, women prefer older men with resources, men prefer young, fertile women with no brains. Or whose brains are irrelevant to their aim, which is reproducing their genes.

It all comes down to the question of gender difference. Are there innate gender differences based in biology? Is there a “mothering instinct”? Do fathers want less to do with their children than mothers? Are there “male brains” and “female brains”? Do men only want much younger women whose looks signal fertility, the much-cited waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7? Do women only want older men with resources? All of these assumptions make me shudder. All of these assumptions are contradicted by my experience, and though I might be an “outlier,” I think those who don’t fall smack in the middle of the Bell Curve are still important to the overall analysis about “men” and “women.”

I have never wanted an older man with resources: I wanted to make the money myself, and I prefer someone younger, and hot. I never wanted to “mother” in the sense of being the primary caretaker (although I did want children, and have them), vastly preferring the provider role, and think many men make just as effective primary caretakers as women. It’s a personality thing, and like everything else about gender, I think where a given individual falls on the spectrum occurs on a continuum between the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. Some women make better providers, some men make better caretakers, and if the statistical aggregate tends to clump around the stereotypes, does that make everyone on the spectrum who doesn’t clump there—a large amount of people overall—mere (in the language of statistics) outliers, “noise” that ignored by the data’s interpreters?

This is an important question, because according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a third of working women in the United States earn more money than their husbands, and that number is increasing: 32.4 percent in 2003, up from 23.7 percent in 1987. Given that families are more and more reliant on two incomes, and that women now have more education, this upward trend should continue. According to the most recent U.S. census data, young women are more likely than men to have graduated from high school and have a college-level education, especially at the level of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Men still get more PhDs, but the number of PhDs relative to the overall population is what a statistician would call “noise.” (In 2003, for instance, slightly more than 40,000 people in the U.S. earned a doctorate, far less than one percent of the population). But more than thirty percent of the population—women whom ostensibly chose men as life partners who make less than they do—is not statistically insignificant.

So what are some of the EP assumptions, more specifically, that I think are a problem given these statistics? These are the accounts that tend to explain all social phenomena through reference to particularly gendered aspects of physical morphology, the forms of living organisms. Perhaps the most widespread and influential is that expressed by Robert Trivers’ parental investment model (1972), which argues that there is a differential investment in parenting between sexes because of the relative reproductive investments or costs each sex makes or incurs. Human females, who face higher levels of parental investment because they have roughly 400 eggs/chances to ovulate/reproduce over the course of their lifetimes versus the virtually unlimited number of sperm and chances men have, incur much higher reproductive costs and are therefore much more “choosy” or “restrained” when making decisions about with whom they will mate. Stereotypes regarding female passivity and male activity, anyone?

Therefore, this theory claims, there is gender-differentiated mating behavior in terms of the kind of characteristics each sex seeks in long-term mates, which is where my hackles most rise. Given the asymmetry in parental investment of the two sexes, females prefer older men with economic resources for long-term mates, whereas men prefer younger women who exhibit the signs of maximum fertility and health, signs linked to things like youth, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, neotonous features such as big eyes and full lips. As evolutionary consumption researcher Gad Saad puts it, “two universal and robust findings are that men place a greater premium on youth and beauty whereas women place greater importance on social status and ability to acquire, retain, and share resources. The reason for this pervasive sex difference is that mating preferences cater to sex-specific evolutionary problems” (The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, 63).

Oh, those sex-specifics. They will get you into trouble every time. What do we do with gender difference if it leads us to this particular place? What different accounts of difference might we raise?

-Leslie Heywood

Image cred: Slate