Carolyn Steel answer this question with a long range view (and lots of fascinating information), and points out the problems in our supply chain, in this TED video:

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.

Trivial Pursuit reinforces the idea that men and women are on opposite sides:

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.

Ricardo G. of Bifurcaciones sent in this ad from a catalog sent to homes in the U.K. by the company Hillier (via):

“Coordinating accessories available.” How thrilling. It reminds me of this post about how housecleaning is depicted as a joyful activity for women.

After being inundated with complaints, the company apologized, claiming it was a joke but they recognize it was inappropriate and should not have gone out.

While this does illustrate the gendering of housework, I think there’s another angle worth thinking about here. A number of the complaints weren’t just about it implying housework is women’s responsibility, but also that it is unromantic and therefore offensive to pose as a potential gift. I’m really interested in the idea of what makes an appropriate gifts, and that gifts between spouses should always be “romantic.” Romantic gifts are often things that have little intrinsic value; their value comes from the emotional and social implications attached to them.

Jewelry, flowers, lingerie–none of these are really helpful items, and they don’t make the recipients’ daily lives easier. A clothesline might, in fact, be a gift that would improve the lives of people who have to hang their clothing to dry. In my family,  both men and women highly value gifts perceived as practical and useful, rather than simply sentimental or romantic. One year my mom and uncle got my grandma an air compressor because she would find it very useful on the ranch; she was thrilled. Once I paid to have my mom’s dog spayed and vaccinated because she’d been too busy to have it done. Men in my family regularly get leather work gloves and tools, and they never seem disappointed.

I think there may be a class element here. In Making Ends Meet, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein discuss how low-income women often partially rely on the contributions of boyfriends to buy the things they need each month. The women complained, however, that boyfriends often bought unnecessary things they thought the women would like, but that did not really improve their lives, such as a stereo or purse. The women often referred to these gifts as a waste of money, something that was already in short supply. They much preferred to receive gifts that they found useful.

So not to defend a clothesline as a suggested present to women–even my mom got mad when my stepdad gave her a mop for either Mother’s Day or their anniversary–but the construction of “unromantic” gifts as inherently offensive is fascinating, and assumes that everyone believes money should be spent on non-essential items in order to display emotional attachment.

OKCupid, an online matchmaking site, offers data on gender and perceived attractiveness that I might use in my spring deviance course (via boing). The figures might help me make a Durkheimian society of (hot) saints point about the relative nature of beauty and a Goffman point on stigma affecting social interaction, while providing another illustration of the taken-for-grantedness of heteronormativity.

In any case, the first figure shows that male OKCupid ratings of female OKCupid users follows something like a normal distribution, with mean=2.5 on a 0-to-5 scale from “least attractive” to “most attractive.” Also, women rated as more attractive tend to get more messages. At first, I thought I saw evidence of positive deviance here, since women rated as most attractive get fewer messages than those rated somewhat below them — the 4.5s garner more attention than the 5.0s. But, as I’ll show below with the next chart, that would probably be an incorrect interpretation — confounding the “persons” in the dashed lines with the “messages” in the solid lines.

The next figure shows that female OKCupid users tend to rate most male OKCupid users as well below “medium” in attractiveness. According to OKCupid, “women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable.”

Hmm. The latter point isn’t wrong, I guess, but it shouldn’t obscure the bigger point that more attractive men still get more messages than less attractive men. Again, note that persons (OKCupid members) are the units of analysis for the dashed lines and messages (messages sent by OKCupid members) are the units for the solid lines. On first scan, I read the graph as suggesting that the top “attractiveness quintile” was getting fewer messages than the bottom attractiveness quintile — that uglier men were actually doing better than more attractive men — but that’s not the case at all. Instead, it just means that in the land of the hideous, the somewhat-less-than-loathsome man is king.

If almost everybody is rated as unattractive, most of the messages will go to those rated as unattractive. Nevertheless, the rate of messages-per-person still rises monotonically with attractiveness. As the “message multiplier” chart below shows, the most attractive men get about 11 times the messages of the least attractive men — and the most attractive women get about 25 times the messages of the least attractive women.

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Chris Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.  His writing appears in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, and Law & Society Review and in media such as the New York Times, The Economist, and NPR.  With Jeff Manza, he wrote Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

These days the talk is about adult-olescence, or the seeming extention of adolescence well into ones twenties.  But the idea that children should have a childhood at all is actually pretty recent.  Before industrialization, when families tended to work their own land, children got to work as soon as they were able.  Being apprentices to their parents was the difference between life and death.

Industrialization brought a whole new kind of work: wage work that occurred outside the home.  At that time, it made perfect sense that kids would work, as they’d be working on the farm all along.  Only later did we decide that working outside the home was different than working at it and that, perhaps, children working outside of the home needed protection.  The first federal law regulating child labor was passed in 1938.

Below are some amazing photographs of child laborers from The History Place (thanks to Missives From Marx for pointing me to them).

The Spinning Factory:

Newsies:

Miners:

Factory Workers:

Seafood Workers:

Fruit Pickers:

Misc.:

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.

Josh W. emailed to let us know that he was recently browing the website Toys to Grow On and was surprised when he noticed that girls were used to model a number of toys that we’d normally see with boys:

The degree to which toys are gendered really struck me when I realized how surprising these images are–that a girl dressed up as an FBI agent, or using tools, was something to be excited about because it’s so unusual.

Interestingly, I looked through the rest of the site and didn’t find an equivalent effort to show boys playing with stereotypically feminine toys. In fact, boys were quite underrepresented on the site–there are many more girls than boys. If I had to just hazard a guess, I’d think this has something to do with the fact that we tend to imagine gender equality as a world in which women have access to the same things men have–jobs, equivalent pay, and so on. We worry that girls are being harmed if they’re told girls aren’t good at math, never see images of women as doctors, and so on. Most people are less likely to think boys are being treated unfairly by not seeing images of boys playing with dolls or an Easy Bake oven, so the absence of those types of images don’t get as much criticism or attention.

UPDATE: Commenter Alyssa nicely summarizes why see this difference:

Unfortunately, we don’t see boys as being treated as unfairly when they don’t get to do “girl things” because girl things are considered inferior. It seems natural to people that girls and women want to do boy/men things because we see these activities as worth while. But a boy or man doing girl/women things is seen as somehow deviant because they are seen as wasting their time doing something useless.
But the truth is things that are usually labeled as feminine, are worthwhile. Boys certainly are disadvantaged when they are discouraged to learn how to take care of themselves. They are disadvantaged when they are discouraged learn empathy and social skills. Our view of all things feminine are inferior hurts both boys and girls.

Nora H. sent in this excellent example of how advertisers gender chores. The ad goes through how generations and generations of women have done laundry.

For more examples, see these: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,.

See also our posts about how funny it is when men do housework: one, two, here, and three.

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.

NEWS:

During November we divvied up the massive gender tag into 18 sub-categories to make it easier to search for specific types of gender posts.  For example, you can now browse all of our posts about masculinity by going to the “gender: masculinity” tag.  We hope this makes it easier to navigate the site.

In other words, we worked our asses off for you over Thanksgiving break, so go browse a gender tag right now!

And, your monthly reminder: we’re on Facebook and Twitter, if that floats your boat.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Last November we posted an analysis of the negative reactions to female body builders’ bodies.  It reveals the entitlement that many feel to be aesthetically pleased by women’s appearance.

And in November ’07 we featured an Orangina ad that Gwen says is “possibly the weirdest freakiest ad I have ever seen in my 34 years on this planet.” As reader Gis said in the comments:

AH! AH! AH! AH! WHAT?!?!  AH!  I can’t unsee this!

So, yeah, uh, check that out.  You might want to watch it in high quality on a full screen.  I’m just sayin’.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Nov ’09):

Remember that 1981 ad for Legos that everyone LOVED?  I found three more examples of vintage ads that seem rather devoid of gender differentiation.

Just last month we added material to our post on racial and ethnic themed college parties.  This month, we get to do it again.  This time courtesy of a University of Delaware party at which white people dressed up as Mexicans (triggering and NSFW).

We added another example to our collection of vintage illustrations of the argument that black people are closely related to apes and monkeys.

Erin M. sent us an example of a sex toy for men being described as “shameful.” We added it to our post discussing how the use of sex toys by women and the use of sex toys by men are evaluated very differently (NSFW).

Tim McC. sent in a link to a Volvo concept car aimed specifically at women.  We added it to our post on the Dodge La Femme.  It’s really interesting to compare how cars were marketed to women in the 1950s and today.

Kristyn G. sent in another commercial where the idea that women are liberated by choice is used to market a product.  This time, it’s an Indian cable company marketing itself by comparing itself to non-arranged marriage.

Jackie S. sent us a link to a satirical Onion news report illustrating how feminists might protest PETA.  We added it an old post with an image of a PETA protest.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us another example of services being marketed as “wife” or “husband” services.

Jessica S. sent us a comedic skit for the Shii, a girls’ version of the Wii.  We added it to our post on otherwise-gender-neutral-games gendered female.

We added a fourth commercial, this one for Target, to our post featuring commercials that depict women as just plain insane.

We added another vintage ad featuring the word “gay” as it used to be used.

Do you feel you have a truly special relationship with your cleaning products? If so, check out the Lysol commercial we added to our post about Sarah Haskins’s “Target: Women” segment on household cleaners marketed as women’s special, special friend.

We added another example of U.S.-based advertising that removes people of color when moved overseas.  This time the product is the movie Couples Retreat.

We added a 1987 ad for Contra to one of our collections of sexism in the technology world.

Last month we posted about the Ralph Lauren ad featuring a woman photoshopped to be incredibly thin. We updated the post with a video about the model in the ad, who has now been fired for not fitting into some clothing.