Archive: Jun 2010

Rose saw the ad below in a free UK parenting magazine.  She thought it was a great example of how an ad sometimes pays “lip service to being inclusive and PC, while [including] numerous elements [that] make it obvious that it isn’t what they really intend.”

So, yes, the ad specifies that the event is for “mums, dads and carers” and it’s nice that they went that far to include them.  But the event is clearly for mothers or women carers and their girl children (and, more specifically, the transfer of feminine training from mother to daughter).  The color of the ad, the feminine shoes with bows, the title (“Mummy Mornings”), and the feminized activities (including “beauty sessions” and the chance to be “spoilt”) are all elements that mark this as for-girls-only.

Is it better to include dads as an afterthought?  Or should we just acknowledge that we’re organizing parent/child activities around mothers (and in this case, daughters)?

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.

These Chilean ads for menstrual pain medication, sent in by Mia A., turn women into symbols of violent aggression: fighters, literally, but also men of color.  They simultaneously affirm, then, the association of violence with both masculinity and non-white skin and the de-association of women with those characteristics.  The message is that men of color are appropriately violent, while women are not.

(source)

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.

Dimitriy T.M. let us know about the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey website, which has lots of fascinating information. The ATUS data for 2009 was just released but they don’t have charts available yet, so I’m presenting data from 2008 here.

This shows daily time spent in various activities for women who are married and have children under 6 living in the home, by their employment status:

They didn’t provide a similar breakdown for married men, oddly.

Hours spent daily on household chores, by sex (but not broken down by employment status):

The difference in hours spent on household activities is interesting, but since it’s not broken down by employment, and women are less likely to be employed full-time than men, it doesn’t really tell us to what degree this is women doing a “second shift” vs. household management as their primary activity, so that’s sort of annoying.

Volunteer activity by sex and age (notice that the columns represent the average daily % of the population who volunteered, not the number of hours they spent volunteering, and the data is an average for 2004-2008):

This isn’t surprising, given that social scientists have generally found that women do more volunteer work, more regularly, than men (again, I’d like to see this broken down by employment status).

It’s also interesting that men and women who volunteer tend to do different types of activities. As this graph shows, it mimics the indoor/outdoor household chores pattern we see in family life. Women are more likely to do food preparation, while men are more likely to do maintenance. Also, men seem somewhat more likely to have leadership positions or to attend skills-building activities, while women do organizational stuff:

For both men and women, volunteering is most common for those with school-aged children in the household, indicating that a lot of volunteering is probably for child-centered organizations such as sports teams and PTA meetings:

I was somewhat surprised by the relationship between volunteering and educational level. The percent of people who volunteer goes up with more education, but the hours spent volunteering per day goes down:

Though the daily difference isn’t huge (just a half hour less for those with a 4-year college degree and those with less than a high school degree), over the course of a month or year it would certainly add up.

If you go through the raw data files, I’m sure there are all types of interesting relationships that give more detailed information about sex, employment status, and time usage. A fun way to waste time if you ever need a procrastination tool.

A Pew Research Center report on the changing demographics of American motherhood (discovered thanks to a tip by Michael Kimmel) shows that there has been a significant rise in childbearing among women at the later end of their childbearing years.

Not quite twice as many U.S. women over 35 gave birth in 2008 compared to 1990 (while we see the opposite trend for teen births):

The share of all births that were to women over 35 also increased from 9% to 14%:

A look at the birth rates across women from 15 to 44 shows that fewer women between 15 and 29 are giving birth, but the numbers are up for all women 30 and over.

The data broken down by race also suggests that it is white and Asian women who are driving this trend:

For more from this report, see our post on race trends in motherhood.

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.

This 1957 ad for an Exercycle tells young and old women and men exactly what they should be concerned about:

So old women are supposed want to be young, young women want to be slender, young men want to be strong, and old men want to be active.  I think it’s pretty much the same today.

Vintage Ads.

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.

Jessica B. sent in an excellent example of the way that symbols evolve.  Language is just a set of symbols.  The squiggles and lines that make up “cat” don’t look anything like a cat, but English speakers will know what it refers to.

And language, of course, evolves and sometimes that evolution has odd and unintended consequences.  Consider all those companies, like Object Management Group, whose acronym, out of nowhere, had a new, blasphemous meaning.

Jessica’s example involves the new word, “lol,” which just happens to also be a symbol for drowning:

(source)

She writes:

This is a great example of the social construction of language and thus, the social construction of our reality. We, as a society, have agreed that “lol” has a meaning separate from itself and the overall accepted meaning of this symbol is laughter, as opposed to the original intended meaning of a person drowning. While this is a simplistic and comical example, it clarifies the results of differences between intended meaning and interpreted meaning, as well as indicating the importance of social construction of language and society as a whole.

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.

Talking Points Memo has an article about a new advertising campaign from Spirit Airlines (as of this morning the images are still available on their homepage, though I presume — hope — they’ll be taken down soon). In order to highlight their fares to coastal locations no affected by the oil spill, they created an ad campaign titled “Best Protection”:

Get it? BP? Oh, funny.

The ads show bikini-clad women sunning themselves on the beach and carry the tagline “check out the oil on our beaches.” Two examples:

Honestly, I’m just stunned. Seriously, how do these things get made? Who comes up with this, and how is it that nowhere along the line from the idea to actually putting the images up on the website does someone in authority say, “Um, I think this is a really bad idea.”

Classy, Spirit Air. Classy.

Marc Sobel sent in this IBM memo from 1951 that announces a “temporary modification” of corporate policy to allow married women to work at the company:

This is the type of thing that often turns out to be a hoax so I spent some time searching, but I can’t find any evidence that it isn’t authentic.

Also see: reasons not to hire women and if you don’t fire women, men have to be bums.