gender: prejudice/discrimination

What makes top news today: a Southwest pilot’s homophobic, sexist, and vulgar commentary; it was kept quiet for some three months.  This happened on March 25th, 2011, broadcast accidentally over the air route traffic control frequency during the flight.  It’s now almost July.  The FAA, the pilot community and Southwest Airlines kept this under wraps for eighty-nine days.  Amazing.

Here’s the transcript of exactly what was said (trigger warning):

Southwest Pilot: “Well, I had Tucson to Indy all four weeks and, uh, Chicago crews…11 out of 12 …there’s 12 flight attendants, individual, never the same flight attendant twice.

“Eleven fucking over the top fucking, ass-fucking homosexuals and a granny.” (silence)

“Eleven. I mean, think of the odds of that. I thought I was in Chicago, which was party-land.”

“After that, it was just a continuous stream of gays and grannies and grandes…”

“Well I don’t give a fuck. I hate 100 percent of their asses.”

“So, six months, I went to the bar three times. In six months, three times.”

“Once with the granny and the fag, and I wish I hadn’t gone.”

“At the very end with two girls, one of them that was part do-able, but we ended up going to the bar and then to the crew at St. Louis, and all these two women wanted to do was, one wanted to berate her sister and the other wanted to bitch about her husband.”

“Literally, for three hours, me and the F.O. (First officer). When that was done, got back to my room, I’m like why the fuck did I stay up?”

ATC: “OK, whoever is, uh, transmitting, better watch what you’re saying.”

Southwest Pilot continues: “They’re still both (inaudible), you know what I mean? I still wouldn’t want anyone to know if I had banged them.”

“So, I mean it was a complete disaster for six months.”

“Now I’m back in Houston, which is easily where the ugliest bases. I mean it’s all these fucking old dudes and grannies and there’s like maybe a handful of cute chicks.”

In interview with Tom Costello on the NBC Today Show this morning, Aviation Analyst, John Cox defended the airline industry, saying the pilot’s comments are a throw-back to a different age in the cockpit: “It was more common in the past, but in today’s environment you see a lot more focus on the professionalism and you don’t hear these kinds of things very often anymore.”

Really?  Mr. Cox, you don’t hear these kinds of things often, anymore?  Spend one moment to Google “Southwest stuck mic”; you will find pilot aviation forums yucking it up already in defense of the pilot saying, “Well, at least he was honest!”

Is it any wonder only six percent of all commercial pilots are women?  The cockpit is not a place of equal opportunity.  Never was.  Isn’t today.  What’s more, there’s a cover-up.  Outside of what airlines now call a “flight deck”, the pilot fraternity defends itself saying, “yeah it used to be like that, we’re more professional now.”

Try to find the pilot’s name.  You can’t.  Southwest will not identify the pilot.  He was initially suspended without pay, but is now back in the cockpit under the good-‘ol-boy protection program and after involuntary “diversity” training.

Aviation market studies indicate women make up 26% of the prospective pilot population.  Only 7% of all pilots are female.  Unless serious action is taken, I doubt anything will change soon.

Audio:

More on the subject here: Sexism in Aviation, Then and Now.

Stephen Wilson is an aircraft salesperson, flight instructor, and former air safety investigator who takes interest in his profession from a sociological viewpoint.  He posts aviation and personal commentary on his blog, from where we borrowed this post.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court has announced that the female employees of  Walmart will not be allowed to bring a class action lawsuit against the company, arguing that it has not been shown that they are a class.  It would have been the largest employment discrimination suit in history.

It seems timely, then, to re-post our summary of some of the evidence against Walmart.  Women are, on average, paid less, are less likely to be salaried, and hold lower-ranked positions than men.  This is true even though there is less turnover among women, meaning that the average female employee has been working at Walmart significantly longer than the average male employee.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart suit. Wal-Mart is accused of egregious and systematic discrimination against the 1.5 million women who have worked there since 1998.  The case isn’t based on anecdotal accounts; instead, it’s backed up by reams of data.  Here is some of it.

Women in hourly and especially salaried jobs make less money than men:

Women are disproportionately in hourly jobs (instead of salaried jobs) in every district examined:

Women make less than men in every district examined:

Women dominate the lowest paying, lowest ranked jobs at Walmart, and are a smaller and smaller percentages of the workforce as you go up the pay/rank hierarchy (from right to left):

And this is true despite the fact that women have lower turnover and have, on average, been working at Walmart significantly longer:

Walmart isn’t fighting the data. They’re not claiming non-discrimination. Instead, they’re arguing that compensation should be restricted to the women directly named in the suit instead of the 1.5 million women who’ve worked there. In other words, they’re hoping that the judge will not grant “class action” status to the case. If he does, it will be the largest class action lawsuit in history.

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.

Sociologists use the term “androcentrism” to refer to a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity. According to the rules of androcentrism, men and women alike are rewarded, but only insofar as they are masculine (e.g., they play sports, drink whiskey, and are lawyers or surgeons w00t!). Meanwhile, men are punished for doing femininity and women… well, women are required to do femininity and simultaneously punished for it.

Illustrating this concept, much more concisely, is this altered photograph of James Franco in drag. Sent along by Stephanie V., the photo was originally for the cover of Candy, a “transversal style” fashion magazine.  I’m not sure who added the copy,* but I like it:

* So Caro Visi, where I found the image, credits Virus, but I can’t find it there.  I’m happy to properly credit if someone can point me in the right direction.

UPDATE: Sarah and John, in the comments thread, pointed out that the language is borrowed from a movie titled The Cement Garden.  Jennifer points out that Madonna used it, as well, in her song What it Feels Like For A Girl.

Clip from The Cement Garden:

More posts on androcentrism: “woman” as an insult, making it manly: how to sell a car, good god don’t let men wear make up or long hair, don’t forget to hug like a dude, saving men from their (feminine) selves, men must eschew femininity, not impressed with Buzz Lightyear commercial, dinosaurs can’t be for girls, and sissy men are so uncool.

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 month’s celebrity gossip included a scandal over a photo Serena Williams tweeted of herself that was quickly taken down.  The photo was of Williams in a bra and panties behind what appears to be a curtain; you can see her silhouette and some fuzzy details of what she is wearing.  It was timed to correlate with the release of the World Tennis Association’s Strong is Beautiful campaign, featuring Williams of course.

Williams took the photo down because of criticism.  A man had recently been arrested on charges of stalking her and the image, critics claimed, was exactly the kind of thing that triggered men to stalk her.  She shouldn’t encourage the creeps, said the blogosphere.  Sports columnist Greg Couch, for example, called her a hypocrite for daring to release such a photo and still wishing to avoid being stalked, and then went on to discuss her appearance and clothing choices at length.

Of course, selling one’s own sex appeal is more or less required for any female athlete who wants to reach the pinnacle of her career without being called a “dog” and a “dyke” at every turn.  So Williams isn’t breaking the rules, she’s playing the game.  And, yet, when she plays the game she gets, in return, not only stalkers, but criticism that suggests that, were she to be stalked again, she was asking for it.  This is an excellent example of the ugly truth about the patriarchal bargain.

A patriarchal bargain is a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.  Williams is making a patriarchal bargain, exchanging her sex appeal for the heightened degree of fame and greater earning power we give to women who play by these rules (e.g., Kim Kardashian).  Don’t be too quick to judge; nearly 100% of women do this to some degree.

But once women appear to have acquiesced to the idea that their bodies are public property, their bodies are treated as public property.  Others, then, feel that they have the right to comment on, evaluate, and even control their bodies.  Williams made her body public, the logic goes, therefore anything that happens to it is her fault.  This is why the bargain is patriarchal.  Williams will be excoriated for her unwillingness to defer to the male gaze if she refuses to trade on her sex appeal. But if she does make this trade, she’ll be the first against the wall if anything bad happens to her.

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.

Gregory S. sent in a video that highlights the way that social institutions, including the legal system, are often based on assumptions about gender that make it difficult for men and women who break gender norms. Five years ago, a couple in Nebraska got married and the husband chose to take the wife’s name. He wasn’t trying to make a feminist statement; he just didn’t want her son from a previous relationship to be the only member of the family to have a different last name, and the simplest solution was for the husband to change his instead.

This doesn’t appear to be a difficult change. They weren’t blending their last names to invent a new one; they weren’t even hyphenating both their names. This is exactly the type of change that the legal system allows when women get married and decide to take their husband’s name. But five years after their marriage, the state suddenly seems incapable of dealing with a reversal of the usual gender pattern in name changing.

[Ugh. You’ll have to watch it at KETV or YouTube because they’ve disabled the YouTube embedding. Sorry!]

What strikes me is that officials are pretty openly stating that the problem here is his gender. They admit that women who change their names after marriage are given an exception to the normal name-changing procedures. They don’t appear to dispute that this couple got married. Instead, they seem to be arguing that as a man, he doesn’t qualify for the spousal name-change loophole, and thus allowing him to take his wife’s name using that method was a “mistake.”

Yet it is a “mistake” only because he is a man. The system is set up to facilitate conforming to gender norms: there is (an apparently unofficial) loophole to make it easy for women, and only women, to assume their husbands’ names. That exception to procedure is now being denied, retroactively, to a couple whose use of it defies gender norms. And the fact that five years ago some government official apparently applied the name-change loophole in a gender-neutral manner and allowed Josh to change his name is seen as an incomprehensible error.

Men and women are told, in a myriad of daily ways, that being masculine is good and feminine bad. It sneaks into our daily language in ways that are so common that we fail to even see it anymore. For example, a recent New York Times article about Google’s effort to determine what makes managers successful featured a list, written by Google, of what makes a good boss.

I noticed that they added The New York Times added the phrase “Don’t be a sissy” to “Good Behavior” #4.  It reads “Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”   It’s the only Good Behavior that includes a derisive slur. And while I’m accustomed to seeing terms like “sissy” thrown around as insults, it occurred to me that the very next rule #5, “Be a good communicator and listen to your team,” could easily have been prefaced with “Don’t be a man.”

But being a “sissy” (that is, feminine) is something that we can all agree is bad, while being a man is good.  So, even when the rules suggest that men take on feminized traits, they’re unlikely to adorn the suggestion with a denigration of masculinity.

Via Teppo at OrgTheory.

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.

(source)

Many of you have probably seen the recent anti-Asian rant released by UCLA student Alexandra Wallace. In it, she says that “hordes” of Asians who are admitted to UCLA inappropriately bring their parents along and obnoxiously speak foreign languages in the library (“Oooooooh! Ching chong, ling long, ting tong!? Ooooooh!”). And she compares them to herself, the “polite, nice, American girl that my momma raised me to be.”

Okay so yes, this is what racism looks like. It’s also what sexism looks like. People who objected to Wallace’s video (as they should), often did so with sexist language, including these examples collected by Caroline Heldman for Ms. magazine:

• “I bet her grades match her cup size.”
• “i have big tits and gave the dean a blowjob to get into UCLA is all I hear.”
• “EXCUSE ME WHILE I WHIP MY DICK OUT AND JERK IT TO THOSE TITS.”

But the most interesting thing I’ve heard about Wallace’s video and the response came from What Tami Said.  Tami suggested that all the shock and outrage regarding Wallace’s racism was naive, at best, and delusional, at worst.  Expressing shock, she said, may be a way to spice up a headline.  Or, it might be reflective of a belief among some that this sort of racism doesn’t exist anymore.  Or, she speculates, expressing shock may be a way for people to distance themselves from people like Wallace, a way for them to advertise the notion that they aren’t racist.

Tami’s insight is that the language of shock deserves analysis in itself.  What does it mean that we’re expressing shock when events like this on college campuses are rather routine (e.g., see “Conquistabros and Navajos,” “Compton Cookouts,” and other race-mocking parties).

In any case, she doesn’t think it’s helpful:

I get that few understand “isms” like marginalized people… But, for God’s sake pay attention! You needn’t be victim to oppression to know it exists. I submit that if you are truly shocked in the face of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and other injustices, then you are as big a problem as the perpetrators of same. Because people who persist in being unaware of “isms” create an environment where ridiculous people like Amanda Wallace and, more importantly, people with far greater power and influence can conduct their bigotry unchallenged.

 

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 Adios Barbie.

Today I had the pleasure of reading a 1978 essay by Susan Sontag titled The Double Standard of Aging.  I was struck by how plainly and convincingly she described the role of attractiveness in men’s and women’s lives:

[For women, o]nly one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age.

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.  No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.

These words reminded me of an idea for a post submitted by Tom Hudson.  Tom was searching for faces to help him draw and was struck by the differences in the results for “woman face” and “man face”:

The wide variety of men’s faces, compared to the overwhelming homogeneity of the women’s faces, nicely illustrates Sontag’s point. Women’s faces are important and valorized for only one thing: girlish beauty. Men’s faces, on the other hand, are notable for being interesting, weird, wizened, humorous, and more.

On another note, the invisible but near total dominance of whiteness is worth acknowledging.

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.