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.

Chloe Angyal (from Feministing) sent me a link to an interesting, if disheartening, segment of her from GRITtv with Laura Flanders about women’s willingness to suffer as they try to meet beauty ideals. Seems that if you want to discourage women women from using tanning beds, don’t warn them about skin cancer. Just tell them it’ll make them ugly. For instance:

The women in the study were more concerned about avoiding ugliness than about avoiding potentially deadly cancer.

UPDATE: Be sure and check out the comments to the video over at YouTube. Really fascinating: lots of comments about Angyal’s appearance and statements like, “chole looks like a feminist, very ugly.” For an interesting discussion of the “feminists are ugly” reaction, read this post at Yes Means Yes.

Thanks to Raluca-Elena, I am now disturbed to discover that the makers of heelarious, fake high heels for infant girls, are now selling teethers in the shape of a credit card with the name “Ima Spender.” Get it?

Let’s train those girls to consume above their means before they even get their first teeth!

Okay okay, infants aren’t going to get the joke. But why is it so funny to encourage infant girls to grow up to be shallow, gold digging, divas?  Or is this me stereotyping the high-fashion-conscious?

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.

Neha M. sent us this fun little video that looks at women in beer commercials. Enjoy!