gender

Via Colorlines I discovered an Applied Research Center report titled The Color of Food.  The report found that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were overrepresented in food service work:

The report also discovered a wage gap between White workers and non-White workers at every level of food production:

Race intersected with gender, such that women earned less than men of their same race for each group studied:

The authors go on to break down the data further by each part of the commodity food chain — production, processing, distribution and service — and by racial group.  For example, they show that the average wage of Latinos and Asians differs by ethnic background (always a good reminder that racial categories obscure variability):

Lots more at The Color of Food.

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 six-and-a-half minute video below, Feminist Frequency‘s Anita Sarkeesian makes the controversial argument that True Grit‘s Mattie Ross is not a feminist character.  Her argument revolves around an important distinction: the difference between admiring women for doing masculinity and admiring them.

Our instinct to see Ross as a feminist character comes from her performance of masculinity: she is aggressive, tough, and vengeful.  But is the valuing of masculinity feminist?  Some say no.  Instead, such detractors might argue, a true feminist perspective involves not just valorizing women who do masculinity, but coming to value femininity.  In fact, valuing masculinity over femininity might be part of the problem.  On this blog, we call this “androcentrism.”

Here’s how Sarkeesian makes the argument:

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.

Clayton W. sent us a political mailer that recently went out against Rose Ferlita, a candidate for mayor of Tampa, Florida. What makes her unfit for office? Among other things, she’s single:

Text from the other side:

(Via Think Progress.)

So, awful, right? She’s single, she has a “suspect commitment to family values,” which I think it isn’t a stretch to say means “she might be a lesbian,” she’s a bitch. Given our current political alignments, we might legitimately assume this mailer was created by a very far right, possibly religious-based group, presumably on the conservative side of the spectrum.

But the story turns out to be weirder than that. Ferlita is a Republican, though Tampa’s mayoral races are non-partisan. The mailer, as you can see in the return address, is from Less Government Now, a 527 political action group (that is, one that can take unlimited donations as long as they do not directly advocate voting for a specific candidate). And it’s tied to a man named Scott Maddox, a Democrat who ran (unsuccessfully) for office last year. In that race, he had a friend enter the campaign as a fake Tea Party candidate in hopes of splitting the Republican vote.

It appears that Less Government Now is pursuing a similar strategy here, sending out materials that attack candidates from the right by coming up with the types of arguments they imagine will resonate with very conservative voters and thus split their vote. It doesn’t seem clear whether the other candidate for mayor of Tampa, Bob Buckhorn, had any knowledge of the mailer, or if Less Government Now acted on its own (Buckhorn has denounced the mailer).

I gotta say, I thought this was repugnant when I first saw it and assumed the group who put it out might actually believe this kind of crap. But to encourage people to vote based on sexist, homophobic values that you presumably don’t even agree with, simply as a political ploy? That is some nasty, nasty business.

UPDATE: Suzie emailed us about her post on March 20th at Echidne of the Snakes (there’s no way to link directly to the post, sorry) questioning the origin of the mailer. The St. Petersburg Times Tampa Bay site reports that according to the post office, the permit number listed on the mailer is fake, and there’s no evidence it was actually mailed. Less Government Now denies all knowledge of it. It’s possible that this is a fake mailer created to discredit the Democratic candidate by making it look a Democrat-affiliated group sent out something sexist. The person who first made it public, claiming to have received it anonymously, has been involved in political consulting and has a history of criminal charges. This is all making my head spin.

Leslee Beldotti sent in this 7-minute video from The Escapist that discusses female characters in video games and how game developers could incorporate women as complex characters rather than stereotypes. Leslee points out that the video somewhat conflates sex with gender in the discussion of biological vs. social behaviors, but it highlights the outcomes of making video games through a gendered lens (sorry about the 30-second intro ad):

On this topic, also see Lisa’s recent post on boob inflation in video games.

Dr. Bethany Pope, Pris S., and Christine each sent in the trailer for the Disney film, opening today, called Mars Needs Moms.  It is impossible not to be sarcastic about this trailer.

What can I say.  The premise of the film is that only women can parent (and by “parent,” I mean feed and vacuum).  I’m sure all of the human women out there with children really appreciate this sentiment.  Dads, HUH!  …what are they good for!  Absolutely nothing! Or, at least, that is what nearly every corner of Western society is trying to tell us.  How convenient, given that raising kids is rewarded with, basically, absolutely nothing concrete. Thanks, thanks for nothing Disney.

Also, as far as the trailer goes, it appears that this movie focuses almost entirely on boys and men. I wonder if it even passes the Bechdel test.  Twist the knife, why don’t you.

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.

Data from the American Religious Identification Survey (collected in 2008) reveals some interesting things about the population of Americans that do not identify with organized religions: atheists, agnostics, and the “spiritual but not religious.”  Most of the non-religious grew up with religious parents.  Only 17% report that neither of their parents identified with a religion:

Being non-religious does not correlate with income or education:

Instead, it’s strongest correlation is with gender.  Women are more likely than men to believe in God, more likely to convert to a faith if raised as a non-believer, and less likely to leave a faith they are raised in.

Younger people are also more likely to be non-religious:

Americans with Irish ancestry make up a significant percentage of the non-religious. They account for about 12% of Americans, but about 1/3rd of all non-religious:

More details at American Nones.

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.

There is something so damn ironic about this pair of greeting cards photographed by Julie Becker from Lansing, Mich.   The cards, designed to congratulate new parents on the birth of their child, reveal a (perceived) desire to gender our infants from Day One. It is important to identify this child’s gender; it must be noted and color-coded that it is a “he” or a “she.” But the card company finds no irony in using exactly the same baby on each card:

In fact, gendering infants is a rather new phenomenon in Western history and not cross-culturally consistent. Some cultures, and in Western culture previously, the sex of children was considered rather irrelevant until puberty.

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.

As a number of readers emailed us to point out, yesterday was International Women’s Day, designed to highlight both women’s accomplishments and the persistence of gender inequality worldwide. Ben Buursma noticed an ad in an Indonesian newspaper celebrating International Women’s Day and marketing “Books to empower all women,” though it turns out what they empower women to do is “look into the minds of men” and “find, keep, and understand a man”:

Emma M. H. sent in a link to the the White House Council on Women and Girls report on the status and well-being of U.S. women on a variety of social indicators. Interestingly, while both men and women are waiting longer to get married, the gender gap in age at first marriage has remained relatively constant for decades:

Men are more likely to be either married and never-married, while women currently more likely than men to be divorced or widowed:

Over time, the percent of women who have never given birth has gone up, particularly for the 25-29 age group, though in the last decade there has been a slight downward trend for women aged 30-44:

One note about that graph: the report uses the phrase “had a child” and “childbearing,” so I think this data would include women who have adopted children but never given birth.

I was surprised to see that rates of Cesarean sections have gone up in the past decade:

Women are now outperforming men in terms of educational attainment, earning the majority of bachelor’s degrees, though notice the number of degrees in engineering/computer science earned by women hasn’t increased since 1998:

However, women still make less than men at each level of educational attainment:

The report has lots more data on family life, work, education, health, crime, and so on. I’ll post on other topics in the future.

Finally, Ben N., Kay C., Gregory S., and Dave Z. all sent in this video starring Daniel Craig that highlights global gender inequality (though unfortunately I can’t find any reference that provides sources for the statistics in the video, so take it for what it’s worth):