gender

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

Sociologist, segregate thyself? A little inside-sociology post.

A report from the research folks at the American Sociological Association (ASA) got me thinking about gender-segregated sociology. I added a few numbers from other sources to provide a quick look at three moments of gender segregation within the discipline.

People may (or may not) want to be sociologists, they may or may not be accepted to graduate schools, thrive there (with good mentoring or bad), freely choose specializations, complete PhDs, publish, get jobs, and so on.  As in most workplaces, gender segregation represents the cumulative intentions and actions of people in different institutional settings and social locations.

#1: Phds

Since the mid-1990s, according to data from the National Science Foundation, women have outnumbered men as new sociology PhDs, and a few years ago we approached two-thirds female. In the three years to 2009, however, the number of PhDs has dropped by a third, and women have accounted for two-thirds of that drop. I have no idea what’s going on with that.

For the time being, then, we’re close to 50/50 in gender balance for producing PhDs. But academic careers can be long, so all those years in the 1970s and 1980s when men outnumbered women by so much still affect  today’s discipline. Among members of the ASA today, women are 7 years younger than men, on average. Which means the men are in higher positions, on average, as well.

#2: Specialization

Choosing what area of sociology to study is a combination of personal interest and ambition, institutional setting and mentoring, and happenstance of various kinds. (This is separate from the question of how narrowly to specialize in one’s specialization, which has a big impact on the quantity of publication, since switching topics is risky and costs valuable time.) So it wouldn’t be accurate to describe this as simply a free choice. But, once someone is a member of the ASA, which is open to anyone, then the choice of identifying with a certain area of research is free (or, actually, costs a few dollars a year), through joining sections of the association.

The pattern of section belonging shows a striking level of gender segregation. On a scale of 1 to 100, I calculate the sections are segregated at a level of .28. (That is the same level of segregation I calculated in the gender distribution between major fields for PhDs, such as engineering and social sciences.) Put another way, the correlation between the percentage of women and percentage of men across the sections is a strong -.64. And by both measures the segregation has increased since 2005.

Joining a section means voting to increase the number of presentations in that area at the national conference, getting a newsletter, maybe an email list, being invited to a reception, and having the chance to serve on committees and run for office arranging all those things. At its best it’s a community of scholars interested in similar subjects. Anyway, the point is it’s not a restrictive club or job competition.

#3: Editorial boards

Finally, prestigious academic journals have one or more editors, often some associate editors, and then an editorial board. In sociology, this is mostly the people who are called upon to review articles more often. Because journal publication is a key hurdle for jobs and promotions, these sociologists serve as gatekeepers for the discipline. In return they get some prestige, the occasional reception, and they might be on the way to being an editor themselves someday. I didn’t do a systematic review here, but I looked at the two leading research journals — American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology, as well as two prestigious specialized journals — Sociological Methods and Research, and Gender and Society (which is run by its own association, Sociologists for Women in Society, whose membership includes both women and men).

(I included the editors, book review editor, consulting or associate editors, and editorial board members, but not managing editors. The number included ranged from 33 to 73.)

I’m not attributing motives, describing gender discrimination, or even making a judgment on all this. There are complicated reasons for each of these outcomes, and without more research I couldn’t say nature/nurture, structure/agency, system/lifeworld, etc.

But gender segregation never happens for no reason.

Update: Kim Weeden pointed me toward the complete list of section memberships by gender for 2010. So here is a a graph of the gender compositions expanded to include all 49 sections. Also, with that expanded data, I recalculated the segregation level, and it’s .25.

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.

In the contemporary Western world, naked and near-naked bodies are revealed everywhere.  But most of the bodies we see are those of models and actors, carefully cultivated, chosen, and digitally altered to look a particular way.  Except, artist Clarity Haynes notes, the “before” pictures in advertisements for diet plans and cosmetic surgeries.  She writes:

“Before” pictures pop up constantly on our computers and in magazines, as part of the daily landscape of imagery. These “before” pictures, meant to shock and scare, show bodies that are presented as needing urgent correction and control, through weight loss or plastic surgery.

In an effort to reclaim these “before” bodies, Haynes has lovingly painted a range of female bodies.  The Breast Portrait Project, she continues:

…is about finding dignity and beauty in the physical characteristics of the body that our popular culture often ridicules and heaps with shame, and in the process allowing the models who participate to feel pride in their particular selves — and by extension, the viewers of the work as well, regardless of their gender.

Visit Hayne’s gallery.  And, for more normalizing of normal bodies, see these selections of breasts,  bellies, and vulvas.

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.

Katrin and Danny sent in a heart-breaking video that highlights the damage that has sometimes been inflicted on children, with the guidance of researchers, because of adult concerns about behavior that deviates from socially-accepted gender norms. In this segment with Anderson Cooper, two siblings and their mother discuss the treatment their brother suffered, with the approval and encouragement of UCLA researchers, as a form of “anti-sissy” therapy:

It would be nice to be able to write this off as completely debunked practices of an earlier time, based on premises that would never recur today. But as the video makes clear, the publications that resulted from this study continued to be cited by those who argue that through therapy, gays and lesbians can be “cured.”

Here’s the second part of the story:

There will be a third installment tonight; I’ll update the post once the final segment is available online.

UPDATE: Here’s the third segment, about a boy who underwent anti-gay therapy in the ’90s:

UPDATE 2: Also, Danny was wonderful enough to type up transcripts of the first two videos! They’re after the jump.

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Yesterday, I was at the grocery store in the checkout line, when I saw a Disney book about how Tinkerbell and her fairy friends “Nature’s Little Helpers.”  Intended to interest small children in being environmentally conscious, the fairies, all female, help nature go about its daily tasks.  The connection to the nymphs of Greek mythology at once is evident.  Nymphs were essentially fairies that embodied parts of nature: water, trees, etc. They were almost always female, and often played the role of temptress to the male gods.  These Disney fairies play on the same idea; they tend to nature and are connected with nature because of their being female.

(source)

Why is this a problem?  First, the book connects women to nature on the basis of biology, the idea that women are naturally nurturing.  This suggests that only women can really take care of nature, because they are better suited for it than men.  Second, by linking women and nature, they suggest that being Green is ‘girly,’ when in fact being Green should be gender-neutral.

“Nature’s Little Helpers” ties women and nature together in harmful ways: it assumes that women are caretakers of nature because of an inherent nurturing ability and it feminizes the teaching of environmental studies, even interest in nature.  I have no doubt that Disney intended for this book to up its Green profile, but its message is as harmful as the Disney princess line. We should be teaching children about nature without gendering the process.

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Lisa Seyfried is recent graduate of the George Washington University Women’s Studies Master’s Program.  Her interest is in the intersection of women and the environment, and generally helping the world to become a more just and sustainable place.  She is also a blogger at Silence is Complicit.

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

On the heels of our post about race, ideas of beauty, and the controversy about Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog post at Psychology Today claiming Black women are “objectively” less attractive than women from other races, Lisa C. sent in the 9-minute trailer for the documentary Dark Girls. In it, African American women discuss their own experiences of bias toward dark-skinned women, both in pop culture broadly and from people in their own lives. It’s a stunning and heart-breaking illustration of the personal costs of beauty standards that define dark skin as inherently and automatically problematic:

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Melissa H.J., Lizzy F., Dmitriy T.M., Kari B., Kalani R., Lisa C., and Anna C. all sent us links about the recent blog post at Psychology Today that many of you have probably already heard about, since it caused quite the outcry. The article, by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, apparently went through multiple title revisions, starting out as “Black Women Are Ugly,” changing to “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”, and eventually becoming “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”, before being removed from the Psychology Today website altogether. However, as we know, nothing on the internet is ever really gone, and images of the original post are widely available. I’m using one from BuzzFeed.

Kanazawa apparently specializes in claiming that there are clear, definite, “objective” differences in attractiveness (and also intelligence, and also everything else important) between different races. Also, you can tell who is a criminal and who isn’t just by the way they look (an article illustrated with an image of O.J. Simpson) and, as an added bonus, “virtually all ‘stereotypes’ are empirically true”. We know this is objective because there are graph-y science things, with numbers:

To summarize his point: Women are more attractive than men. And when one of his Add Health interviewers measures a study participant’s attractiveness on a 5-point scale, this is “objective.”  Because they are researchers, and therefore anything they say is objective. And according to objective measurements, Black women aren’t attractive at all. In fact, they’re “far less attractive” than other groups of women. See?

It turns out White women are most attractive. Man! Who would have thought?

There are a lot of other gems, such as the fact that Black women, though objectively less attractive, bizarrely rate themselves subjectively more attractive. It’s like they don’t know they’re ugly!

I’m sick of this article and will leave it to you to click over and read the whole thing if you feel so inclined. Let’s just summarize some of the major issues, and then all move on with our lives:

First, he treats race like a real, biological, meaningful entity. But race is socially constructed; there is no clear biological dividing line that would allow us to put every person on the planet into racial categories, since societies differ in the racial categories they recognize and “race” doesn’t map along unique sets of genes — there is more genetic variation among members of a so-called race as there are between members of different races.

Aside from that, the idea of measuring beauty objectively, completely separated from all cultural influence, is problematic, especially when you start looking at differences by race/ethnicity. In The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, Deborah Rhode discusses how perceptions of attractiveness have varied over time and across cultures and discusses the global history of slavery, colonialism, and race-based systems of domination that make it impossible to separate out our perceptions of what is beautiful and sexually appealing from historical ideologies that insisted that non-White peoples were unattractive (unless in an exotic way, when that was useful, and also, the Irish were hideous despite being European). Joane Nagel’s book Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersection, Forbidden Frontiers is another good source on this topic.

It is simply impossible to separate out even scientists’ ratings of attractiveness from the cultural context, one in which supposedly “Caucasian” features and light skin are repeatedly held up as the ideal of attractiveness (so even famous non-White people often find themselves lightened in media images) while dark skinned people are constructed as unattractive or even scary.

Given that history, it’s not shocking that White women would be rated most attractive and Black women least. What’s shocking is that a scholar at the London School of Economics would think you could uncritically accept those rankings as proof of objective reality, rather than the outcome of constant, long-standing cultural messages about attractiveness that resulted from efforts to legitimize and justify social and political inequalities.

UPDATE: Reader JA provided a link to another post at Psychology Today in which researchers looked at the data Kanazawa used and question his analysis and results.

UPDATE 2: The comments section has largely devolved into a flame war with lots of insults flying around, so I’m closing comments since I won’t be around to moderate them for the next week. I will go in and clean out the comments threads when I get a chance.

Esther C., Erin R., and Scott P. sent in an interesting video, “Sexy Girls Have It Easy,” showing woman testing how her physical appearance affects whether she can get free things. She asks for a number of free things — ice cream, baked goods, a cab ride, carousel rides, and so on — while dressed in two ways to see if she is treated differently when she conforms more closely to standards of feminine beauty:

Documentary : Sexy Girls Have It Easy from Examples of Film & TV work on Vimeo.

It’s a non-scientific test, obviously, since she doesn’t ask the exact same people for free things dressed each way. Some commenters at Vimeo argue that she acts more confident and positive when she’s dressed up, and thus people are reacting to her attitude, not her appearance. Yet, even if this is true, we can’t necessarily separate our perceptions of someone’s confidence from their appearance, which may influence whether we interpret behavior as “confident” or as “pushy.”

Thoughts?