Noam sent in this 10 minute film, “What’s a Girl Doing Here?”, by Diana Diroy. It includes a set of interviews with female cab drivers in New York. They’re a rare breed. According to the description by Narratively:
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.Loud flashes of yellow are all around you in New York—46,000 taxi sedans, vans and SUVs streaking the streets. Yet, only about 170 of them are driven by women, a percentage even lower than the national average.
Comments 14
Веселин Жилов — September 23, 2012
One of the women said it herself: the job looks gruelling, not very prestigous, and it's doesn't seem safe. When the employers suggested to one of the women in the story that mabye she doesn't have enough experience to drive during the night, it was just an attempt to protect her, because women being protected more than men is actually the norm in our society.
Diane Moffatt — September 23, 2012
I'm a female bus driver and I work nights too here in NZ. I found this film resonated.
X — September 23, 2012
Read Melissa Plaut's book
Anders — September 25, 2012
In response to Yrro Simyarin (I could't pick one comment to respond to):
The problem isn't that keeping women out of certain fields to "protect" them is patronizing, since that's often not the thought process behind these things at all.
Much more often, when the workers of a field are predominantly men, the effort to keep women out of these jobs is to
1) reduce the competition for these jobs (fear losing their jobs to more-qualified women) or
2) prevent the field from being perceived as feminized and thus reduce how much society values these jobs and how well they will pay (think about what happened to being a secretary, elementary school teacher, etc.)
This discrimination is then passed off under the guise of being to "protect" women, an excuse that might be more palatable to some, while achieving the same result.
A prime example of these attitudes is the effort to get women into and then back out of the workforce in the U.S. during and immediately following WWII.
During World War II the shortage of workers allowed an opening for women in "men's fields" and all of the old thinking about "protecting" women had to be temporarily abandoned for the U.S. to continue to function. In that crisis, it became apparent that keeping women out of these fields really had nothing to do with their actual abilities, just with the availability of jobs.
Once the war had ended, however and the men came home to take up their old positions, Rosie the Riveter disappeared and women were forced back out of the workplace.
The problem goes much deeper than just being patronizing to women.