sexism

January is Cervical Health Awareness Month, making it the perfect time to post a follow-up to Part I which featured my concerns about potential unintended consequences of new Pap test guidelines (from ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). To recap, it is vital that we do not confuse a recommendation of less frequent Pap tests with the unchanged recommendation of annual pelvic/sexual health exams (see the National Cancer Institute for explanations of both).

So, let’s look back at a letter dated November 20, 2009, in which the President of ACOG clarified:

Cervical cancer screening should begin at age 21 years (regardless of sexual history). Screening before age 21 should be avoided because women less than 21 years old are at very low risk of cancer. Screening these women may lead to unnecessary and harmful evaluation and treatment.

Medically speaking, why should this recommendation disregard an individual woman’s sexual history? His letter continues on to state:

Cervical cytology screening is recommended every 2 years for women between the ages of 21 years and 29 years. Evidence shows that screening women every year has little benefit over screening every other year.

Doesn’t this depend on how many new sexual partners a woman has in a given year? Are the revised guidelines assuming monogamy (or at least long-term, serial monogamous relationships) which decrease odds of a woman contracting a new cancer-causing strain of HPV in less than a 2-year period? Where are the conclusive findings of large-scale sexual-behavior surveys to support this assumption?

ACOG’s November 2009 press release featured these quotes from Alan Waxman, M.D.:

Adolescents have most of their childbearing years ahead of them, so it’s important to avoid unnecessary procedures that negatively affect the cervix. Screening for cervical cancer in adolescents only serves to increase their anxiety and has led to overuse of follow-up procedures for something that usually resolves on its own.

I agree with GWP reader anniegirl1138 who commented on my previous post that over-treatment is no joke. However, we have not been presented with data that a Pap test — the test, itself, not over-treatment based on test findings — is directly linked to significant increases of any negative health outcome.

Cervical HPV infections can be detected by Pap tests: ACOG acknowledges that, “the rate of HPV infection is high among sexually active adolescents, but counters with, “the large majority of cervical dysplasias in adolescents resolve on their own without treatment.”

Why should that smaller group of girls and young women (whose pre-cancerous lesions do not resolve without treatment) miss the annual opportunity to receive an early diagnosis? Early-stages of cervical HPV infection can often be resolved with less-invasive treatment options.

More-invasive treatment options, such as the “excisional procedures for dysplasia” that have been linked to increased risk of premature births, are one of several medical treatments for cervical HPV.

And, what about the possibility that an increased risk of premature births may not be the paramount concern for every female patient? Not all women want to or can biologically become mothers. What if an individual female patient would rather seek medical treatment for a HPV infection that has resulted in cervical dysplasia so that she has greater peace of mind in knowing that she has reduced her risk of cervical cancer and reduced the likelihood of transmitting HPV to her sexual partner(s) and/or future babies?

Call me a feminist, but I still believe that knowledge is power and that every sexually-active girl and woman should be encouraged to consider the benefits of annual Pap tests. When Pap smear results show “abnormal” cellular changs, then healthcare practitioners should explain the potential for false-positives and discuss the pro’s and con’s of moving forward with different diagnostic and treatment options.  

ACOG acknowledges that, “HPV also causes genital and anal warts, as well as oral and anal cancer.” A Pap test may be a girl/woman’s first chance to learn of a cervical HPV infection, which can result in her having a colposcopy exam. This procedure helps a practitioner find HPV-infected cells not only on the cervix but also in other anogenital areas (the vaginal canal, the labia, the perineum). Beyond the cervix, a Pap test that is positive for HPV may be a wake-up call to get a thorough oral screening for serious oral cancers which have been linked to sexually transmitted HPV.

In addition, my research and others’ studies have found that STI diagnoses can lead to attitudinal and behavioral changes which can decrease risks of contracting other STIs, including HIV. For all of these reasons, a Pap test that leads to a diagnosis of a sexually transmitted cervical HPV infection can bring unintended positive consequences.

In light of the new Pap smear guidelines, I hope that U.S. girls and women who get less frequent Pap tests will more frequently ask their healthcare practitioners to educate them about cervical cancer, about the full range of STIs, and about FDA-approved vaccines against viruses that can be sexually transmitted (HPV and Hepatitis B).

For the medical facts about HPV and HPV vaccines, check out the book The HPV Vaccine Controversy by Shobha Krishnan, M.D., a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the National Cervical Cancer Coalition. 

The Bottom Line: a recommendation for less frequent Pap tests does not mean you should forgo your annual pelvic exam. In our busy lives, e-reminders can make the difference:  PromiseToMe.com allows you to schedule an annual email reminder. [Note for boys/men: make sure to get an annual sexual health exam, too!]

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?

This month The Man Files welcomes Sam Bullock writing his first guest post for Girl With Pen. In this personal account, Sam explains what happened when his Mormon religion collided with feminist politics.

My professor assured us there was no reason to fear The F-Word.

I was taking Intro to Ethics at a community college where we were assigned to read An Invitation to Feminist Ethics by Hilde Lindemann. It was my first experience with feminist theory.

The book is a basic overview about sexism, gender roles, homophobia, neo-liberal globalization, and stories about gas lighting and rape. Unlike other books, I couldn’t dismiss this one as “just another philosophy.” I couldn’t toss this book aside as I went about my daily life. It was consciousness-raising. Life-changing.

From reading this book I realized I wanted the freedom to choose what made me happy. I didn’t want to be constrained by psychological factors that may have been the product of early—and intense—gender socialization. And I knew that women deserved the same freedom.

Unfortunately, these feminist arguments clashed with my worldview: I was raised Mormon. For Mormons, gender roles are divinely instituted (for the most part) and homosexuality is always a moral evil.

In the Mormon Church, only men are allowed to have the priesthood. Women are effectively barred from positions of authority. No women bishops, no women apostles, no women prophets. Women can fill positions of leadership that are in line with traditional gender roles like young-women leaders, children’s group leaders, and relief society leaders (an exclusively female group).

I was told that priesthood, the power to act in God’s name, depends on individual worthiness. Every man can have it. The traditional Mormon rejoinder to any sort of criticism of this unjust stratification is that “women can bear children.” So … women can’t become priests because babies gestate inside of them? This argument is sheer nonsense.

The sexism of the Mormon Church became more and more apparent. In one discussion about parenthood, I dared to suggest that I was willing to be a stay-at-home dad. I was instantly assaulted by thoroughly archaic views about women. I was told that women were more virtuous than men and this virtue would be lost in the cut-throat business world. Working women were destroying the fabric of society (I actually heard this more than once). Needless to say, I was horrified.

At a different meeting, the discussion topic was female modesty and appearance. The bishop leading the group suggested that women needed to dress modestly because men couldn’t control themselves—or something to that effect. Really? Huh.

The bishop continued, saying that women should wear make-up because even an old barn could use a paint-job. The huge double standard leaped out at me. Male “barns” were not expected to paint themselves, so why should female “barns?”

As the sexism became crystal-clear, I attempted to reconcile my two conflicting worldviews. I tried to rationalize away the sexism, making arguments like, “the Church isn’t ready for gender-equality yet“ or “this sexist doctrine is not of God.” I looked for support online and found it at various feminist Mormon blogs including Feminist Mormon Housewives and The Exponent.

Enter California’s Proposition 8. Here, the second of the big offenders came into focus: homosexuality. In the Mormon Church, homosexuality is a sin. One can be an openly gay, but must remain celibate or enter a heterosexual marriage. Neither is a particularly happy option.

When Proposition 8 (opposing gay marriage) was on the California ballot, Mormon Church leadership endorsed it, and encouraged members to aid in its passing. This led to call centers, special meetings, and Photoshopped pictures of Book of Mormon prophets holding “Yes on Prop 8” signs. Most disturbing was the rhetoric. We were told that homosexuals were like drug-users. Homosexuals were destroying society. They were corrupting our children, our freedom of religion, and our schools. Homosexual-equality was Satan’s idea, an attempt to lure people down the path of destruction.

I am ashamed to admit that in high school I believed this nonsense. I distinctly remember telling a friend that I voted for Bush because he was against gay-marriage. I even wrote a letter to Bush celebrating his wise choice.

But fast-forward and feminism allowed me to see the Church rhetoric for what it was: homophobic, fear-mongering attempts to maintain a cultural hegemony. I still rationalized away the homophobia as yet another doctrine “not of God.” That is, until I read about Stuart Matis, a gay Mormon who committed suicide because of homophobic Mormon doctrine.

I could see the suffering so clearly. I could no longer rationalize away the Church homophobia. A crack had formed in the edifice of my beliefs. Mormons were not inspired by God to pass Prop 8. There was no Satan, no tempter out there trying to trick me into believing evil things. This was merely the ultimate fear-mongering device, a tool designed to silence dissent.

Into this small crack rushed my entire philosophical training, all of my religion classes, my ethics classes, and my critical thinking classes. I no longer saw any reason to believe that Joseph Smith saw God when he founded the Mormon Church. I no longer believed that Jesus was the son of God, or that God even existed at all. My beliefs were gone. I was an Atheist.

I guess the message of this story is that feminism is undeniably powerful. It can alter consciousness. It can foster equality. It can even dismantle an entire worldview. And I would say these changes are for the better.

Sam Bullock aspires to be an attorney with hip jazz-piano chops, and is a self-proclaimed feminist atheist.

It feels rare these days that I see anything on TV that makes me laugh, but I found myself struck by both the hilarity of this SNL segment as well as by the unexpected parable of thwarted, gendered communication it offers. Catapulting me back to the linguistics class I once audited in college, the skit relies on what seem like arch-stereotypes of male and female behavior: the boorish male producer who literally runs the show (filling in for the sensitive female talk show host) but who also literally can’t hear the words of the nervous, self-effacing audience members’ questions. Then, when the effeminate pony-tailed male production assistant, (encouraging the women with an understanding look and supportive pat on the back), “translates” man-to-man for the producer he can comprehend their words – only to offer a one-note prescriptive answer that serves his perspective (to flatly apologize with no notion why he offends), revealing that he lacks any ability to truly listen. When the women express puzzlement or refuse his inappropriate advice, he immediately resorts to defensiveness. He exhorts the women to speak up only to completely miss (and dismiss) their intent and then blame them for not taking his advice. He’s “tried” to help and it’s their fault if they don’t agree with him.

Interestingly, when the assistant steps in to channel the voice of the sensitive host, Dr. Danilla, spouting her affirmations about empowering women, it’s as if he “gender-passes” into a female role and then suddenly can’t be heard by the producer either, who returns to his state of selective deafness. As her proxy, his impassioned plea for women’s empowerment results in the same editing out that the producer gives the female audience members.

This skit had me laughing and cringing at the same time. The blustery, self-important producer who both realistically and metaphorically just can’t hear women’s voices seems an all-too-familiar stereotype, alongside the hand-wringing and apologetic linguistic patterns of the women who are trying, bravely, to improve their lives. When faced with the brick wall of the producer’s dismissal, the second woman’s impulse is to retract her question, retreat, and say she’ll deal with the issue herself, and the third, realizing what a fight is ahead, decides it’s not worth it. Somehow, this struck me as both a hilarious and a sobering parable of entrenched patriarchal patterns embedded within styles of communication. I’m curious what others think – is this over-reading a simple skit? Is this the product of an astute SNL writer jabbing at a producer’s power to silence? Where, exactly, does the joke lie?

st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Back in the 1970s, feminists took toy companies to task for their sexist marketing practices. They railed against the board game “Battleship” for depicting a father and son at play while an apron-clad mother and daughter washed dishes in the background. (One outraged mother even sent the cardboard game box to the editors of Ms. magazine to prove her point.) They questioned why pretend kitchens were fashioned out of pink plastic, when the majority of professional chefs were men. And they urged puzzle-makers to depict women piloting airplanes and fighting fires.

One of the youngest toy activists was a seven-year-old from New York City named Caroline Ranald. In 1972, the second-grader wrote a letter to the Lionel train company admonishing them for their boy-dominated ads. “Girls like trains too,” she explained. “I am a girl. I have seven locomotives. Your catalog only has boys. Don’t you like girls?” Caroline’s short letter made a big impression. Not only did the toy train makers feature girls in their subsequent catalogs, they also circulated a press release with endorsements touting the psychological and cognitive benefits of train play for girls.

Fast forward to 2009…and we have to ask: what happened to the gains feminists made in toyland? I literally did a double-take when I read that the Toy Association’s “Toy of the Year Awards” offer separate prize categories for “Best Boy Toy” and “Best Girl Toy.” Sure, they slot some contenders into gender-neutral categories like “Best Outdoor Toy” and “Best Educational Toy.” But they don’t even try to airbrush the fact that when it comes to selling toys, gender divisions—and gender stereotypes—still reign.

In case you’re wondering, the “Best Boy Toy” of 2009 went to the Bakugan Battle Brawlers Battle Pack Action Series. These intricately wrought orbs of plastic snap open into dragon- and vulcan-like shapes when they are hurled onto corresponding magnetized cards. Bakugan isn’t just a Manga-inspired action toy, it’s an entertainment brand, complete with a website, television show, and other paraphernalia. According to the Toy Association’s website, Bakugan beat out the Handy Manny 2-in-1 Transforming Tool Truck, the EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, and a few other trinkets for the top boy toy honors.

My own boys, ages 8 and 11, can’t seem to get enough Bakugan spheres, priced around ten dollars a pop. When I asked my younger son why he thinks girls aren’t into Bakugan, he replied that “they don’t like to fight and brawl the way boys do.” Maybe so, but when toy companies are so explicit about developing toys for gender-specific markets, we have to ask the proverbial chicken-and-egg question: do boys like Bakugan because it taps into some innate affinity for competitive, militaristic play—or because they are being socialized and culturally conditioned to prefer those forms of play?

For the record, the Best Girl Toy of 2009 was the Playmobil Horse Farm, a plastic play-set complete with stables, ponies, and equestrian figurines. (In 2007, the honor went to Hasbro’s FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony—which raises the question of why a horse-related toys have become so feminized in recent years.) Runner-ups for Best Girl Toy include a Pedicure Salon activity kit, a Talking Dollhouse, and Hannah Montana’s Malibu Beach House—toys based on stereotypes of beauty and domesticity so blatant they speak for themselves.

Although most elementary-school boys probably wouldn’t beg for a kiddie pedicure set, children display more variation and boundary-crossing in their play than the toy industry might care to admit.  Decades after the heyday of second-wave feminism, few parents would bat an eye at a girl playing with StarWars action figures or a boy weaving a potholder on a loom.  But for the purveyors of playthings, pink and blue don’t make purple; they make green.  Toy makers have a vested interested in selling to a gender-bifurcated market, because they can make double the money selling twice as many toys.

In the spirit of feminist toy activism, perhaps it’s time, once again, to argue the point. If there are any little boys out there who have a thing for horses, maybe they can e-mail the folks at Playmobil and set them straight.

It’s always a treat to get quoted in a mainstream newspaper article that takes a critical look at U.S. norms and values. Fellow GWP editor, Shira Tarrant, and I were recently interviewed about trends in female Halloween costumes:

Talking with this reporter reminded me of a campaign launched on my university’s campus a few years ago by the student club Feminism Is. They created posters with the slogan “We’re not a trick or a treat!” to raise awareness at California Lutheran University about the importance of the messages being sent by the hyper-sexual costumes that had become popular among U.S. female college students. With too many Americans still unclear about the relevance of sexism in our daily lives, it’s vital that we mentor and teens/young adults who create feminist events and collaborate with reporters who are willing to ask questions like — Is dressing up “like a slut” for Halloween “harmless fun” or “demeaning”?  Kudos to writer Rhiannon Potkey and other journalists who are fighting the good fight!

It seems like every other story in the past month had a science grrl at its core. Some were good, some not so much. I honestly couldn’t make up my mind on which story to write about, so I’ll write a little about all of them:

• Elinor Ostrom is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. The best part of her story? That her high school advisor told her that she couldn’t take trigonometry because she was a girl. It’s been quite some time, but if that advisor is still alive, I hope they give her a call to apologize. Otherwise, girls take note. My high school advisor was horrible my freshman year, so I switched. If you don’t feel supported, find someone else to talk to!
• Ostrom topped off what has been a banner year of women winning the Nobel. We had the first time two women won a Nobel together (in medicine). The advisor-former graduate student pairing makes my heart a flutter. Now that’s Sisterhood NOT Interrupted! In addition, Ada Yonath won in Chemistry.
• The motive for the murder of Annie Le is still to be revealed, but for me it doesn’t take much to see this crime as a possible crime against women in science. While I was still pondering the role that gender in the lab played in the crime, another woman was attacked in a lab. Sadly women in science history holds one huge dark chapter: In 1989 a man massacred 14 women as he “fought feminism” in Canada.
• In animation land, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is telling young girls to not dumb themselves down and embrace their geekdom. My husband took our six-year-old daughter to see this movie while I was out of town over the weekend. She’s certainly not dumbing herself down…yet…but my money is on the fact that she’ll remember that the main character’s dad dies rather than she should be herself.
• Considering the high participation of women in environmental science and public health, we could see more women winning Nobels if some new awards are added in the future.
• And while she does fall under science FICTION, I think that Octavia Butler deserves to close out this post. Her novels paint a bleak picture for our future, but the way to avoid most of it are also laid out in her novels. She uses science to craft her stories, even in her last unfinished story arc on vampires science is a huge character. And now the Huntington Library is where her papers will be stored (PDF link). I eagerly await a biography on this genius who was taken from us way too soon.

Girl With Pen’s newest Guest Blog comes to you from the awesome Therese Shechter, documentary filmmaker of I Was a Teenage Feminist and The American Virgin. Here, Therese susses out the sexism in the retro TV fave, thirtysomething.

Was thirtysomething anti-feminist propaganda?

There’s been a recent outpouring of hype now that thirtysomething‘s first season is finally out on DVD. If you missed it, the show was an hour-long drama following the lives of a baby boomer-clique living in late-1980s Philadelphia. The show was so popular it even spawned a pithy new suffix of its own. (Twentysomething, fortysomething . . . You get the picture.)

I loved the show because it reflected my own life at the time as a young single career gal surrounded by married and breeding friends. (This was pre-history before Sex and the City). But the mirror it held up to me was warped and disturbing in a way I just couldn’t put my finger on … until I read Susan Faludi’s critique of the show in her 1991 book Backlash:

In ‘thirtysomething,’ a complete pantheon of backlash women is on display–from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman. The show even takes a direct shot at the women’s movement: the most unsympathetic character is a feminist.

Bingo. Through interviews and production materials, Faludi created an astonishing portrait of a show filled with a weirdly aggressive sexist agenda. For example, scripts were specifically written to make wife-and-mom Hope fail at any outside work she ever tried. Repeatedly — and laden with guilt — Hope returned back to husband, home, and child. And lest this plotline seem accidental, it was the clear intention of writer Liberty Godshall (wife of co-creator Edward Zwick) to urge women to stay home while their children were very young:

I wanted to tell women don’t try it–unless, one, you really need to, or you really really want to. Because while the successes are there, the failures and the guilt are there too.

Ironically, Mel Harris, the actress playing Hope, was back at work 9 months after having her real-life baby, stating that she felt she was a “better mother and better person” because she worked. Female viewers told market researchers that they wanted Hope to get a “real” job. The creators disagreed. Faludi quotes co-creator Marshall Herskovitz in a men’s magazine interview about his distress over the women’s movement:

I think this is a terrible time to be a man, maybe the worst time in history … Men come into the world with certain biological imperatives. Manhood has simply been devalued in recent years and doesn’t carry much weight anymore.

Although everyone on the show was miserable some of the time (my friends and I called it “thirtysuffering”) the single women got the worst of it. Melissa wasn’t given any backstory at all until actress Melanie Mayron created a photography career for her character. She was described simply as “man-hungry.” Faludi quotes Mayron as saying:

I remember that message of just because you’re a single woman you must be miserable. That’s not like me or any of my friends.

Career gal Ellyn was also a bitter caricature whose character development was helped only somewhat by the lobbying of actress Polly Draper. She recalls her audition where producers described Ellyn as:

the kind of person who was so irritating you would walk out of the room whenever she walked in. And they wanted her to worship Hope and want to be exactly like her. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, can’t she be okay in her own right?’

Apparently not. She was single and career-oriented, so who could ever love her? In fact, writer Liberty Godshall had considered making her a drug abuser but settled for a simple bleeding ulcer and being dumped by her boyfriend.

Gary, the lone single guy had a decidedly different arc, happily running through women without a neuroses in the world. In season two, he meets the feminist character Susannah. Faludi describes her as:

a social activist who works full-time in a community service center in the city’s ghetto, tending to homeless men and battered wives. Despite her selfless work, the show manages to portray her as inhumanly cold, a rigid and snarling ideologue with no friends.

After Gary gets her pregnant, she’s determined to get an abortion,

But then, at the clinic, she hears the biological clock ringing. “I’ve always put things off,” she confesses to Gary, tearily. “I just can’t make assumptions about the future anymore.” He is triumphant, and she has the baby.

After almost 20 years, I’ll probably find the show lame, with its late-1980s fashions and weirdly sexist messages about how I should live my life. Sad to think I ate it up back then — even with its sour after-taste.

Postscript:
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood wrote a excellent piece about the several talented women that came out of thirtysomething (although none quite achieved the same level of success as the men) and noted that Zwick and Herskovitz went on to create the groundbreaking yet short-lived series My So-Called Life. I loved that show and especially Claire Danes in the starring role. But I remember wondering about the characterization of her mother: A totally unpleasant and uptight career woman who spent most of her time verbally castrating her nice-guy husband. Now it all makes sense.

About the Author:

Therese Shechter is a filmmaker, writer and activist whose documentary I Was A Teenage Feminist is probably screening in a women’s studies class near you. She’s currently making a documentary about society’s attitudes towards virginity and writes the blog The American Virgin on the same subject. Her production company Trixie Films is based in Brooklyn. You can find Therese’s work on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more Facebook.

Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, a sociologist at Ohio State University, set the world a buzz when word got out of her research on the wage gap over a twenty year span:

The good news for women is that during the time period studied, their average salary increased from 78 cents for every male dollar earned to 83 cents. But when Bobbitt-Zeher controlled for various factors, she found that the share of that gap attributable to selection of major had increased…When controlling for all available factors, [she] found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999, nearly twice as much of an impact as could be documented for the class that graduated 20 years earlier. (emphasis mine)

This wasn’t a shock to me as it was something that many of us who work to increase the number of women in science and engineering already suspected. So when Kate Harding from Salon Broadsheet emailed me for a response I wanted to make sure that people know that it’s not just as simple as English versus Chemistry.  “Harder,” male-dominated science and engineering fields, such as computer science, are paid more than female-dominated biological sciences, a “softer” science.

The real question that this wage gap research leads us to is whether or not the increase of women in a career leads to lower wages or not. In 2006, Paula England et al appear (I admit, I only read the abstract) to prove that there is no direct correlation between the increase in women entering a field and the lowering of that field’s wages. But a gendered wage gap is there. England showed it and now Bobbitt-Zeher shows it.

The AAUW also showed this wage gap difference based on major earned 2005 in their “Public Perceptions of the Pay Gap” report, but with a twist:

Ironically, the biggest wage gap is in science and engineering! But even with a 24% gap, women are still earning more than almost any other career field. *shaking head*

So what does this all mean?

There isn’t one reason for the wage gap. We can’t wave it away with one explanation (women’s choices) or correct it with one solution, even comparable work legislation.

For me there is an economic justice reason for women to look to science and engineering for a career. Wage gap or not, they will be earning more money. For women who have a gift for math and science and find joy in the work, go for it. But I would never say do it for the money.

Is it gender? Is it how much society respects the vocation? Is it unionization (teachers have smallest gap)?

Again, further research is needed. But whatever it is, women are getting the short end of the pay stick and all of these numbers are about the average man compared to the average woman. I can only imagine what the gap looks like for people of color!

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