Crossposted at Jezebel.

Meg R. noticed something funny at Woman Within, a website that sells clothing sizes 12w to 44w.  All of the models were very thin, thus not representative of the intended customer base at all.  But, even odder, they were all swimming in clothes that (by today’s standards) were far too large for them.  So the website featured thin models selling plus-size clothes (not, in itself, that surprising), but didn’t scale down the clothes to fit them!  We might imagine that using thin women would make customers, even if they aren’t thin, like the clothes (because we all internalize thin preference), but modeling poorly fitting clothes, as Meg said, wasn’t doing the product any favors!  We’re both baffled by the logic.

Some examples:

NEW! (July ’10): Liz R. sent in another example. This ad is for clothing sized 16-24 but with a very thin model:

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.

Mexican Independence Day May 5th commemorates the Battle of Pueblo in which Mexico defeated the French…  how better to celebrate than to animate offensive stereotypes and make fun of Spanish!

Maya sent us a link to publicity for a clothing swap schedule for May 5th called “Swappo de Mayo,” of course:

And Maddy B. sent us a screen shot from buycostumes.com.  This image was featured on the front page in mid-April:

See also our post featuring “celebrations” of Martin Luther King Day.

(Thanks to Ramona, Jess, Ryan, Kristen, CS, and Jorge for the correction on the significance of the date!)

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UPDATE: Several Readers who corrected my mistake have stated that it was offensive.  I’m really sorry.

Gwen and I have a policy of owning our mistakes.  I don’t know everything, even things that I really should know.  One of the best things about this blog, for me as an author, is that I learn all the time.  I don’t resent being corrected, I am grateful.

I apologize that my ignorance was offensive. My hope is that, by leaving the post up, with my ignorance laid bare, I am modeling the kind of humility that allows people to learn new ideas and accept correction from others.

Cross-posted at Ms. magazine.

Full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn.  One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex.  Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations.  How severe is job segregation by sex?  A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more.  (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.)  Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time.  The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.”  Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time.  It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s.  It has changed little since then.

The lines above and below the white line show that sex segregation correlates with education level.  People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs.  This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

Via Family Inequality.

Peggy R. sent in this great vintage ad for Cessna private planes.  Placed in 1941, it suggests that all families should have private planes after the war:

I spoke with my friend and Cessna expert, Stephen Wilson.  He explained that the G.I. Bill, which reimbursed veterans for educational expenses, applied to flying lessons.  Veterans, then, could be reimbursed for learning to fly and Cessna was trying to encourage all veterans and their families to take to the skies.

NEWS:

Lisa was quoted in an Associated Press article that, much to her chagrin, rather uncritically celebrated the recent rash of untouched photos released by celebrities.  You can read it here and compare it to her unfiltered thoughts about it at her own post.

We added a new example of an assignment drawing on Sociological Images that instructors can use.  This one asks students to think critically about the whole project and is, thus, very interesting.  See #7 of our Sample Assignments.

This is your monthly reminder!  You can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook where we update with a featured post every day.  We are, by the way, having lots of fun watching reactions to our posts on Facebook.  Thanks to all of you who have friended us and contribute to the conversations and the “like”!

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Apr. ’10):

Neat, Cute, Ew, and Cool

In a comments thread a Reader, ckilgore, linked to her grandma’s cabinet fridge from the ’50s.  We added it, along with another example of an ad, to our vintage ad for the same.

We added a picture of pair-bonded female albatrosses to our (adorable) post on gay animals.

Tom M. sent in a billboard for Penthouse features a very suggestive… eye.  We added it to our post featuring ads with not-at-all-subtle visual sexual innuendo (NSFW).

I added an image of the Korean peninsula at night, linked in a comments thread by Brendon, to our post comparing the a map of the lights of the world at night and population density.

Race-Related Updates

We added a representation of “users” from WordPress that represented people as coming in different skin colors to our post featuring default avatars.

Jessica S. and Lucia M.M. sent in links to companies selling pretend teepees.  We added it to our post on American Indian-themed toys for kids.

Skada sent in another example in which white people are just people but black people are b-l-a-c-k, this time on Netflix.

Gender-Related Updates

We added lollipops, identical deodorants, and disposable cameras to our post on pointlessly gendered products.  We also added a new “girl talk” version of Jenga to our post on gendered versions of classic board games.  The first two were found by Sunlight Snow and the latter by Kathe H.

We also added a “drama queen” sign for girls to our post on babies’ and kids’ items that reinforce the “girls as spoiled divas” stereotype.  Thanks to Coley for sending it in!

Alex N. sent in a Fruit Loops commercial that genders doctors and nurses (in the direction that you would expect) and we added it to a post on that topic.

We updated our post on scrapbooking sticker sets of words about boys and girls with wall decals for boys and girls. In case you didn’t know, boys like hip-hop derived terms, while girls like any and all abbreviations.

Lizz Q. sent us another example of an anatomical illustration that featured a man facing straight forward and a woman posing rather sexily.  We added it to our burgeoning collection.

We added another great example of hygiene products being marketed to men by arguing that it enhances, instead of detracts from, their manliness.  In this one, sent in by Lucia M.-M., truly manly body wash is contrasted with sissy manly body wash.

Sofia R. sent us another example of Twix commercials that depict men as immature idiots.

We added a third example of shirts being sold in “unisex” and “women’s,” sent in by Mindy J.

Dmitriy T.M., Beth W., Abby D., and Jillian Y. sent in links to a video game called RapeLay.  We added it to a previous post on rape-themed video games (TRIGGER WARNING).

How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:

From the OECD Factblog.

Jose Marichal, who blogs at Thick Culture, forwarded us this compilation of Bob Barker’s infantilizing and harassing behavior on The Price is Right during the 1970s.  It’s pretty stunning:

I’d like to say that men don’t call women “girls” these days… but I’m watching Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution.

Source: FourFour via The Daily Dish.  More examples of calling women girls, both vintage and contemporary.

Breastfeeding is widely believed to carry significant health advantages for infants and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) would like to see all mothers breastfeed their children for at least 12 months, with no supplemental food for the first six.

Breastfeeding, however, is a big job.  Even if a newborn takes to breastfeeding without any problems (some mothers struggle mightily with less-than-cooperative infants), mothers must feed their children around the clock (they now recommend every two hours, 24-hours a day for newborns).  If it takes a half hour to settle the baby down and fill it up, you’ve got an hour and a half before the next feeding time.

Mothers who have the privilege to stay home with their babies — for three, six, or even twelve months — then, are going to find it much easier to follow the AAP guidelines.  For mothers who return to work, those who work in flexible positions that award some degree of autonomy and respect will also be more likely to continue breastfeeding.   In other words, a lawyer with a private office and a work schedule under her own control can stop several times a day and express milk to bring home to her child; in contrast, a woman working the cash register at McDonald’s with a boss hovering over her doesn’t have the same autonomy or privacy and may be forced to give up breastfeeding.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that breastfeeding rates are higher among more educated women and White and Asian women.  Both of these variables tend to correlate with class privilege:

There are some interesting things, however, that don’t correlate with this class thesis.  First Hispanic women are more likely to breastfeed than White women and people with less than a high school education are more likely to breastfeed, especially at six and 12 months, than people with a high school education.

I can think of some reasons why… I’ll let you discuss it in the comments.

Borrowed from Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality Blog.  For more data on rates of breastfeeding, including U.S. state comparisons and changes in rates over time, see here.