Search results for day care

Like a lot of moms, I faced the Barbie dilemma when my daughter was younger. Ultimately I  figured a little bit of Barbie would sate her appetite (and stop the nagging) without doing too much harm. Like a vaccination, or homeopathic inoculation against the Big Bad. I told myself my daughter didn’t use her dolls for fashion play anyway: her Barbie “funeral,” for instance, was a tour de force of childhood imagination. I told myself I only got her “good” Barbies: ethnic Barbies, Wonder Woman Barbie, Cleopatra Barbie. Now that she’s 10 and long ago gave the dolls away (or “mummified” them and buried them in the back yard in a “time capsule”), I can’t say whether they’ll have any latent impact on her body image or self-perception. It would seem ludicrous, at any rate, to try to pinpoint the impact of one toy.

But now, according to a study published this week,  it turns out that playing with Barbie, even career Barbie, may indeed limit girls’ perception of their own future choices. Psychologists randomly assigned girls ages 4-7 to play with one of three dolls. Two were Barbies: a fashion Barbie (in a dress and high heels); and a “career” Barbie with a doctor’s coat and stethoscope. (NOTE: I just pulled these images from the web: I don’t know which actual Barbies they used.)

The third, “control” doll was a Mrs. Potato Head, who,  although she comes with fashion accessories such as a purse and shoes, doesn’t have Barbie’s sexualized (and totally unrealistic) curves.

So, after just a few minutes of play, the girls were asked if they could do any of 10 occupations when they grew up. They were also asked if boys could do those jobs. Half of the careers, according to the authors, were male-dominated and half were female dominated. The results:

Girls who played with Barbie thought they could do fewer jobs than boys could do. But girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head reported nearly the same number of possible careers for themselves and for boys.

More to the point:

There was no difference in results between girls who played with a Barbie wearing a dress and the career-focused, doctor version of the doll.

Obviously, the study is not definitive. Obviously, one doll isn’t going to make the critical difference in a young woman’s life blah blah blah. Still, it’s interesting that it doesn’t matter whether the girls played with fashion Barbie or doctor Barbie, the doll had the same effect and in only a few minutes.

That reminded me of a study in which college women enrolled in an advanced calculus class were asked to watch a series of four, 30-second TV commercials. The first group watched four netural ads. The second group watched two neutral ads and two depicting stereotypes about women  (a girl enraptured by acne medicine; a woman drooling over a brownie mix). Afterward they completed a survey and—bing!—the group who’d seen the stereo- typed ads expressed less interest in math- and science-related careers than classmates who had watched only the neutral ones. Let me repeat: the effect was demonstrable after watching two ads.

And guess who performed better on a math test, coeds who took it after being asked to try on a bathing suit or those who had been asked to try on a sweater? (Hint: the latter group; interestingly, male students showed no such disparity.)

Now think about the culture girls are exposed to over and over and over and over and over, whether in toys or movies or tv or music videos, in which regardless of what else you are—smart, athletic, kind, even feminist, even old—you must be “hot.” Perhaps, then, the issue is not “well, one doll can’t have that much of an impact,” so much as “if playing with one doll for a few minutes has that much impact what is the effect of the tsunami of sexualization that girls confront every day, year after year?”

Peggy Orenstein is the author of four books, including The New York Times best-seller Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.  You can follow her at her blog, where this post originally appeared, on facebook, and on twitter.

Yesterday the Pew Research Center released data on the news coverage of Typhoon Haiyan — a disaster that has killed at least 4,000 people — and the bungled Obamacare website roll-out.  Comparing 20 hours of news coverage over four major U.S. channels, they found dramatic differences.  The data below shows the hours and minutes spent on each topic at each channel (red = Obamacare, yellow = the typhoon).

First, the two partisan channels (Fox News and MSNBC) gave more time to Obamacare than the typhoon.  On MSNBC, there was four times as much coverage of Obamacare.  On Fox, there as a stunning 80 times as much coverage.  Al Jazeera America and CNN spent significantly more time on the typhoon, likely reflecting their more global focus and less of an ideological mission.

The channels also differed in how much time they spent on facts/reporting versus opinion/commentary.  Check it out:

While most all of us sometimes lazily refer to “the media” as if it’s a homogeneous thing, it’s important to remember that our perceptions of reality are strongly shaped by which media we consume.

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.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. Though many think of it mostly as a last long weekend for recreation and shopping before the symbolic end of summer, the federal holiday, officially established in 1894, celebrates the contributions of labor.

Here are some SocImages posts on a range of issues related to workers, from the history of the labor movement, to current workplace conditions, to the impacts of the changing economy on workers’ pay:

The Social Construction of Work

• The surprisingly racist reason we don’t tip flight attendants
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• The unsung heroes of the crash landing in San Francisco
• Why do firefighters take such risky jobs?
• McDonald’s delusional blame-the-victim budget
• Devaluing hospitality workers
• Domestic  behavior as both gendered and raced: Who does what for airlines?
• Child labor and the social construction of childhood (pictured)
• Child labor, 1908-1912
• Women are 49% of the workforce, but we still think work is for men

Work in Popular Culture

• Children’s books and segregation in the workplace
• Hurricane Sandy and high fashion: Portraying a class hierarchy
• Whimsical branding obscures Apple’s troubled supply chain
• The “working family” discourse and the invisibility of individuals
• The DJ in American culture: Resonant but misunderstood
• Whiteness and tokenism on the runway
• Forbes’ photostock faux paus (what do women workers look like?)

Unemployment, Underemployment, and the “Class War”

• The “Precariat”: The new working class
• When classes collide: Workers and guests at high end hotels
• Who benefits from government programs?
• Food stamps, public policy, and the working poor
• Can the minimum wage cover average housing costs?
• Discrimination against the long-term unemployed
• Jon Stewart on class warfare
• Mike Rowe defends blue-collar manual labor

Unions and Unionization

• What have unions ever done for us?
• Footage of strikes and protests
• “Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?”
• Target’s anti-union video for new employees
• Unemployment and support for unions
• César Chávez and the fight for farmworkers’ rights
• Hiring non-union workers to staff picket lines
• “A woman’s place is in her union!”

Economic Change, Globalization, and the Great Recession

• Prison labor and taxpayer dollars
• The austerity agenda and public employment
• How many PhDs are professors?
• Professors join the “precariat”
• The exploitation of worker productivity
• What kinds of jobs are we gaining in the slow recovery?
• Historical look at changes in types of work
• Two American families trapped in a changing economy

Gender and Work

• Most women would rather divorce than be a housewife
• Before the stewardess, the “steward”: When flight attendants were men
• Star Trek is scaring the ladies: Why women don’t major in computer science
• The dual career academic couple
• Why “breadwinner moms” don’t portend a coming matriarchy
• Single mother, meet jobless man
• Gender, work, and family time
• First-time mothers and access to paid work leave
• The role of employer selection in gendered job segregation

The U.S. in International Perspective

• The U.S. is las in paid vacation and holidays
• International comparison of workplace leave policies
• Vacation in international perspective

Just for Fun

• Who is the highest paid employee of your state?
• Secrets of the Internet Adult Film Database
• Two-thirds of college students think they’re going to change the world

Bonus!

• Advice for new college grads from two sociologists

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Six years ago today we posted our very first images: a re-touched magazine cover featuring Faith Hill and two almost identical Skyy Vodka ads that appeared in Maxim and Cosmo (hint: it’s in the nipples).

While people often congratulate Gwen and I for coming up with the idea for the blog, we never actually intended the public to read it.  We initially started the site as a place for the two of us to share images that we used in teaching.  The rest is history.

Thanks to everyone who has visited over the last six years!  Almost 5,000 posts later, you’ve changed our lives and careers in unexpected and delightful ways!

Here are some highlights from the year! All deserving exclamation points!

• Gwen got tenure!
• We got a home page (thanks Jon Smadja)!
• We reached 12,000 Twitter and 25,000 Facebook followers!
• We added 8 new Pinterest Boards!
• One post was “liked” by over 30,000 readers!
• Shankar Vedantam started tweeting us!
• We learned that otters LOVE us!
• We made new relationships with Alternet, PolicyMic, and Pacific Standard!
• We got an email from fashion designer Paul Frank!
• We took an exercise class from Richard Simmons!
• We added two more Image Guides!
• We were quoted at CNN, NPR, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Business Insider, USA Today, and Slate, among others, and were featured at the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Alternet!

Here’s to you and here’s to another great year!

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.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The U.S. Census Bureau has released its new report on childcare, written by Lynda Laughlin. This provides a good followup treatment for the hyperventilation induced by fear of fathers taking over (or being relegated to) childcare.

First, the trend that fits my story of stalled gender progress. Among married fathers with employed wives, how many are providing the “primary care” for their children? That is, among the various childcare arrangements the children are in while their mother is at work, how many are in their fathers’ care more than in any other arrangement? Answer:  10%, which is virtually unchanged from a quarter-century ago:

Not a lot of change for a quarter century in which we’re told everything has changed.

However, in fairness to the change-is-happening community, here is the trend for the percentage of fathers who say they are providing ANY care to their children while their mothers were at work.

I don’t give this much weight since it might reflect greater sensitivity to the importance of saying fathers provide care, but there you have it: it’s higher, and it shows some increases up until the early 1990s, which is when gender equality in general stalled on many indicators. Since the mid-1990s: Nothing.

Please note these figures don’t show the total contribution of fathers, but only reflects those married with children, whose wives are employed.

One interesting source of father care is mothers’ shiftwork. As Harriet Presser reported two decades ago, the 24/7 economy stimulates some task sharing among couples. In the current report, Laughlin writes:

Preschoolers whose mothers worked nights or evenings were more likely to have their father as a child care provider than those with mothers who worked a day shift (42 percent and 23 percent, respectively)

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Generally speaking, gender equality in the U.S. and other Western countries has involved women moving into men’s spheres.  We have not seen an equivalent migration of men into women’s spheres.  Accordingly, while women have integrated many male occupations (they are now, for example, 50% or more of law and medical students), many female-dominated ones remain heavily female.

This is perhaps nowhere more true than in early childhood education.  In a story about male childcare workers at Organizations, Occupations and Work, Lata Murti reports that only 5% of child care workers and 3% of pre-school teachers are male.  Numbers are also low in other Western countries.  In Germany, the average is 3.5% (and this includes all employees of child care centers, including custodians).

So, Spiegel Online reports, Germany has decided to try to do something about it.  Aiming to increase the percentage of men in child care to 20%, the government is spending 13 million Euros on a “More Men in Early Childhood Education and Care” program.

The state isn’t doing this, though, solely out of a passion for gender equality or a soft place in their heart for men holding babies.  They’re doing it because Germany has promised that there will be a spot in a day care center for all children when they turn one year old.  To fulfill this promise, they need more day care workers badly; recruiting men means that that other half of the population might fill out the profession.

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.

We’ve enjoyed documenting the recent trend of sexifying toys, including Dora the Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, Holly Hobbie, Lisa Frank, Trolls, Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, and Candy Land, and Lego (you can see them all together on our Sexy Toy Make-Overs Pinterest board).

Let’s start with Barbie because given how she’s the quintessential sexy toy, I think it’s surprising that she’s been made over.  I found evidence for the Barbie make-over at Feminist Philosophers.  They put up the image below showing how Barbie’s torso was changed in the 2000s to one that was slimmer and with a more arched back:
Cynical Idealism posted about the Care Bear make-over.  The toys have been made both thinner, more flirty, and less androgynous.

Care Bears Then:
Care Bears Now:

I learned about the Polly Pocket make-over at Feminist Fatale.  Whereas in the 1980s, Polly Pocket looked kind of like an infant and came with various accessories, today’s Polly Pocket is decidedly more Barbie-like.

1980s Polly Pocket:

Today’s Polly Pocket:

(source: Mattel)

So, there you have it! Three more sexy toy make-overs.

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.

It’s that time of year when we savage the world with our unbridled consumerism. If it’s not a Black Friday stampede at Target, it’s a news story of a shopper who camped out in front of a Best Buy for over a week to score some discounted gadgets. Everywhere you turn consumers are whipped into a frenzy, children’s eyes are glazed over as they think of what gifts they’ll open, and romantic partners are stressed over what they will give their loved one to demonstrate the depths of their love.

When consumerism is exaggerated, as it is this time of year, it’s easier to see the cultural scripts and rituals that surround it. These cultural scripts tell us:

1. How to feel when we come into a lot of money or even just get a good deal
2. How to act when we receive a gift
3. And how to impute love from inanimate objects.

1. The Rapturous Consumer Windfall

Next to presentations of sex and bad karaoke there is arguably no other scenario played out on television ad nauseam more than the consumer windfall. Turn on your TV right now, and find an advertisement or game show and you will almost certainly see someone falling to their knees, eyes full of tears, as they praise the gods of capitalism for blessing them.  Bob Barker (er, Drew Carey) play the role of Benny Hinn in this consumer revival smashing their open palms on the foreheads of game show contestants as they exclaim, “The. Price. Is. RIGHT!” (Watch at 0:51):*

Television advertising is a wellspring for this type of consumer exaltation. The best example of this consumer rapture is the @ChristmasChamp campaign from Target. Watch the video below and you tell me; is this woman having a consumer-gasm or what?**

Maybe it’s just me, but this ritualized consumer rapture gives me the heebie geebies.

2. The “Show Us What You Got” Photo

Leaning on the arm of your parent’s love, seat slightly sauced, your aunt turns to you and says lovingly, “oh show me what Santa brought you!” After you halfheartedly motion to the pile of loot on the floor she puts her glass down, grabs the family Polaroid and says, “Let’s take a photo to send to [fill in name of absentee relative].”

If we were to flip through your family photo albums I bet we’d find page after page of people cheesing with their unwrapped gifts held head level. This obligatory photo is the classic post gift exchange cultural script. Somehow a gift is only properly received when there is a photo to document it.

From my point of view, it is strange that we take photos of the things we receive during holidays which are tangible and will be around well after the event. But many of us don’t take photos of the moments with our loved ones that won’t linger and fill up our closets.

3. The Hand Dance of Love

Does he love you? Does your hand show it? The holiday season is a time when many will pop the question and boy do advertisers know it. While the issues surrounding jewelry ads are well documented on this site, I’d like to talk about the hand dance women are socialized to do after their love has been verified by an appropriately large shiny rock. After a woman says “yes,” she walks around with one arm sticking out like a zombie for the next few months doing the hand dance. This cultural script dictates that women flaunt their recently acquired diamond ring and then all women in their surround give their requisite “Oh, that is GORGEOUS!” There is a sad sizing up that goes on here, where women are shamed or praised for the size of ring bestowed upon them.

In Conclusion

Most of these cultural scripts and rituals go unnoticed or at the very least unquestioned. These acts are the mechanisms through which we objectify the social world and alienate ourselves from our loved ones. So this year why not participate in Buy Nothing Day and double down on some quality time with your loved ones.

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* We should acknowledge that sometimes the people who are receiving these windfalls are desperate and totally deserving. I don’t want to shame or cast dispersions on anyone in this situation, but these are exceptions to the rule.

** Forgive me for sexualizing this, but I mean come on, that’s an apt description. While we are at it, this ad is chock full of sociology. We have an “empowered woman” who uses her power to consume; it’s the classic redirection of feminist energies into consumer. This woman, who appears to be the epitome of the middle class, white, privileged consumer, is flexing her muscles, exerting her power, and being aggressive enough to make Betty Friedan blush… ’cept she is using her power to purchase consumer goods from a capitalist system that creates and maintains her oppression. Maybe it’s just me, but I think feminist scholars would have a (justified) objection if I called this “champ” a feminist. I dunno.

Nathan Palmer is a faculty member at Georgia Southern University, editor-in-chief of SociologyInFocus.com, and the founder of SociologySource.com.

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.