I happened upon a list of figures that display lots of information about who majors in science and engineering (S&E), all available at the NSF page on Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. All are for institutions in the U.S. only, as far as I can tell.

Here we see the number of bachelor’s degrees in S&E and non-S&E fields, by sex:

Percent of S&E and non-S&E bachelor’s degrees earned by racial minorities:

Number of doctoral degrees earned by sex:

Percent of female workers in selected occupations in 2007:

Percent of S&E Ph.D.-holding employees at 4-year colleges and universities that are women:

Notice that while women are pretty well represented among “full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty,” they make up barely 15% of “full-time full professors with children,” “married full-time full professors,” and “full-time full professors at research institutions.” Some of this may be a matter of time, in that because being promoted to full professor takes years, an increase in the number of women getting Ph.D.s in a particular field will take a while to show up as a similar increase in number of women as professors in that field, everything else being equal.

But everything else isn’t equal. Women, even highly-educated ones, still do the majority of childcare and housework, and are more likely than men to consider how potential jobs could conflict with future family responsibilities when they are deciding what type of career to choose. So the lower proportion of female full professors at research institutions is likely a combination of some old-school unfriendliness to women in some departments, but also of women opting out of those positions–that is, deciding that the time and energy required to get tenure in a science/engineering department at a research school would conflict too much with family life, so they pursue other career options (for instance, women make up a higher proportion of faculty at community colleges, which are often perceived as being easier to get tenure at, since you don’t necessarily have to do lots of publishing–though anyone who has ever taught 5 courses a semester may question the assumption that it takes less time and work to teach than to publish).

And of course some women try to combine a tenure-track job with their family responsibilities and find it difficult, and either leave academia voluntarily or are turned down for tenure because they have not published enough or are not see as adequately involved and committed. Because of inequalities in the family, men are less likely to face those situations, though certainly some do.

I wish the report had a graph for non-S&E faculty, although it might just depress me.

UPDATE: Commenter Sarah says,

Check out the report “Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes” by Yu Xie and Kimberlee A. Shauman.  They find no evidence to support the hypothesis that women are under-represented at the tenure level due to a lag between getting PhDs and acquiring tenure track positions.  In the life sciences, women have been getting PhDs at the same rate as men for many years now, but inequality persists at the tenure-track level.  Xie and Shauman find that a variety of  social factors are responsible for actively hindering women at the highest levels of academia.

When considering which media text I wanted to analyze based on its ideology, I immediately thought about the unsettling yet intriguing relationship between the main characters in one of my favorite TV shows of all time: Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. About a year ago, I began watching the show when a friend bought the entire series on DVD. Despite the fact that I absolutely loved almost every episode, the story arc of these two main characters as co-workers and a couple reinforces tired gender roles.

The below clip is a climactic scene where Mulder and Scully argue about Scully leaving the X-Files in the 1998 film “The X-Files: Fight the Future.” I think this scene exemplifies their basic relationship, and is a good example of what I would like to analyze.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/esJNnh-d2E0[/youtube]

What I like about Scully is that she is intelligent, scientific, and witty. She joins up with Mulder to be the counterpart to his obsessive interest in the paranormal. Since Scully is the fact-spouting hard ass of the two, one might think the character is breaking stereotypes. Unfortunately, she is only obscuring them.

Scully plays a traditional mother figure to Mulder more so than his love interest. She continually questions her work in the FBI duo, but she stays because Mulder needs her. In her, he has found someone who tries to understand his work, someone to care for him, and someone to love him unconditionally. The few times that she has an interest in other men is when she is trying to get over Mulder or get back at him.

Throughout the series, the fact that Mulder is a “typical bachelor” is driven home. He’s quirky and boyish. He never cooks, he’s obsessed with baseball and porn, he can’t keep house, and he usually just sleeps on his couch. Scully is seemingly unconcerned by all this. She laughs it off when he flirts with other women, she rolls her eyes at his housekeeping, and she is always there whenever Mulder decides he needs her.

The video above is an example of a sort of backwards rationale. Yes Mulder is thanking Scully for being there for him, but he’s also pleading with her to continue to deprive her own happiness. Though the scene directly references her giving up her own interests to be with him, it also romanticizes the concept of a woman selflessly caring for her man. The scene resonates with his emotional “thank you” and begs the viewer and Scully to come to his rescue. It reinforces the idea that in order for a woman to be perfect for a man, she must be willing to do anything for him at all costs and should never as for anything in return. If he so much as thanks her for years of servitude, then he’s the knight in shining armor. Read it as: The perfect women are level-headed and enjoy cleaning up the messes that their boy-in-a-man’s-body significant others create without any appreciation.

I think the X-Files is a good example of a show that manages to skirt the issue of gender roles by throwing a few curve balls. In reality though, it’s just more of the same.

————————–

Sarah Mick is a student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  She is currently double majoring in graphic design and media studies.  She enjoys playing music, writing, and consuming media of various sorts in her spare time.  I found her post here, where students in a Principles of Media Studies class are posting their insights.  Special thanks to the instructor, Michael Newman, for facilitating the blog and allowing all of us to enjoy it!

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

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:

Last month Lisa posted about some interesting, if subtle, differences in a Spanish- and English-language pamphlet for pregnant women at Kaiser.  Siobhan O’Connor at GOOD put up her own blog post about the pamphlets and called Kaiser to see what was up.  A representative, Socorro Serrano, visited our site and replied in the comments.  Check out her reply, now in the post, here.  Thanks for chiming in, Socorro!

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NEW FEATURE!  FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Sometimes we get nostalgic for our old posts.  So, each month we’re going to resurrect a post from one year ago.  (In July we turn two-years-old and we’ll start resurrected two!)

From March 2008:  The marketers behind the Brazilian yogurt ads in this post counted on their viewers being disgusted by, gasp, fat women!  But some of us thought the women looked great.  What do you think?

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS:

We added another Postsecret postcard to our post on confessions of true feelings about interracial sex.  Also in race and sex:  We updated our post on Resident Evil 5 again, this time adding an image of an African woman from the game attired in a sexualized animal-print outfit.

Nearly a year ago we argued that a promo poster for Gossip Girl represented the “pornification” of everyday life.  The stars are on the new cover of Rolling Stone and, well, we still think it’s pretty porny.  Speaking of: Breck C. sent us another image of things shaped like boobs, which we added to our extensive boobs post.

We published a post about a Dutch bus-stop bench that is a also a scale and publicly displays your weight when you sit on it.  We went back and added images of a design for a toilet seat that does the same thing. 

We added images of a man’s electric back hair shaver and a Nads commercial about a woman whose life was transformed when she was able to wax away her beard to this post about our growing disgust with body hair, even on men.  Also in hygiene: Kim D. sent us in another vintage Lysol douche ad, which we added to a post with several others.

Bri a sent in four ads to add to one of our posts discussing how people of color are included in ads aimed primarily at white people.  See the whole series starting here or check out the newly enriched post that discusses how people of color are used to represent “spice,” “flavor,” and, literally, “color.”

Bri also sent us an awesome Ralph Lauren ad that romanticizes colonialism, we added it to a previous fashion spread that did the same.  Relatedly, to our post about using third world people in fashion ads, we added a set of images advertising Suit Supply, sent in by Geerte S.

Matt W. sent us a map that overlaid concentrations of rural poverty with rates of religious adherents, and we added it to our post about religion and geography.

We added a floral-print hammer to this post about gendering products.  Speaking of gendering products: We added another strip from the Sheldon Comics “Make-up But for Dudes” series and an SNL sketch about make-up for men to this post.

We added an advertisement for Cessna’s fleet of private jets to this post in which private air travel is linked with ideal fatherhood.

Our post on what “organic” means now has a link to the Cornucopia Institute’s photo gallery, which has lots of photos from large containment livestock facilities that sell to Horizon and other companies.

We, of course, had a new ad for our post on sexualizing food, this time a Three Olives vodka ad about your “O Face” sent in by Tiffany L.  We also added more images of how the green “female” M&M is sexualized (sent in my Kristi) to this post.  Also related to food: We added a link to the mock commercial for Powerthirst 2 to our original post about this hilarious send-up of energy drinks and masculinity.

Finally, to our post about various companies trivializing women’s power, we added print ads for Nuvaring (“Let Freedom Ring”) and Spanx’s new “power panties.”   We also added another image of women sexually dominating men to our post on the theme.  It’s a doozy, too.

Hans Rosling illustrates the increasing urbanization of the world from 1963 to 2004:

Found at GapMinder.

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.

Yes, it’s another table from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. He’s had some great stuff up lately. Here we have changes in compensation (per employee) between 1992 and 2007 for various industries, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data:

I do question some of these classifications–for instance, is “performing arts, spectator sports, museums, and related activities” really a coherent category? Nonetheless, it provides a relatively consistent measurement of compensation, which is useful for comparing change over time.

I wandered over to the BLS website and ended up on their Occupational Injuries and Illnesses page. There I discovered this in the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2007:

Along with the graph, we learn,

Workplace homicides involving police officers and supervisors of retail sales workers both saw substantial increases in 2007.

Police officers makes sense. But retail supervisors? Huh. I wonder what the actual numbers are.

From the same report we get the number and rate of fatalities by industry:

The extraction industries (mining, forestry, farming, fishing, hunting) are noticeable outliers here, with significantly higher fatality rates (though not overall numbers) than any other industries.

So there’s some totally unconnected information about the labor force for you.

(Found here, via Thick Culture.)

Sloshspot via Flowing Data.

UPDATE: Just FYI, lots of people have identified inaccuracies in this map in the comments.

Kelly Zen-Tie Tsai asks Obama to include the even-less-visible minorities (by which she doesn’t mean the purple, blue, and green):

Via Stuff White People Do, where there is also a nice discussion.