gender

Flavia Dzodan, of Red Light Politics, sent in a link to the Global Media Monitoring Project’s new report, Who Makes the News? The document looks at the gender imbalance in news production, based on an analysis of 1,281 newspapers, TV, and radio stations in 108 countries on November 10, 2009.The results indicate that women are still under-represented as news subjects, and that stories about women often reinforce stereotypes (focusing on women in family roles, using women for “ordinary person” quotes rather than experts, emphasizing women in stories about criminal victimization, birth control, and so on but not economic policy or politics, etc.).

A note on the methodology:

The research covered 16,734 news items, 20769 news personnel (announcers, presenters and reporters), and 35,543 total news subjects, that is people interviewed in the news and those who the news is about.

Internet sources were analyzed separately.

Overall, the analysis shows that both local and international news show a world in which men are highly over-represented as subjects, though women are more likely to be represented as victims, to have their family status mentioned, or to be in newspaper photos:

Interestingly, those reporting the news are more gender balanced, indicating that having more women producing the news doesn’t lead to an automatic reduction in under-representation of women in the news:

The representation of women as news subjects differs widely by category of news, from 12% of subjects in stories about agriculture to 58% in stories about family relations or single parenting (and 69% in a category they called the “girl-child,” stories about cultural practices impinging on or harming specifically female children, as opposed to children in general):

I’ll put the rest after the jump since there are quite a few images.

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Jezebel recently posted this Australian PSA about the dangers of fast food:

It made me think of this British PSA from 1967 that addressed childhood obesity. Our ideas of what you should be eating may have changed in the past 40 years, but the tendency to rely on individualistic explanations and to blame moms for not providing children better food, as though the food they choose for their kids exists outside of any larger social context, seems to have quite the shelf life.

A secret on PostSecret today nicely captures how women’s magazines are relentlessly guy-centric:

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 the last day of Oktoberfest in Munich; this has meant a lot of slide shows of people drinking from giant beers steins on the wiesn.  I noticed that the slide show at Boston.com included a disproportionate number of images of young women in (often boob-poppin’) Dirndls.  Men were about as likely to be young as they were to be older, exhibiting interesting character, and more likely to be shown in functional roles.  Women, then, were included primarily as eye candy for a (presumably heterosexual and) male gaze.

Five photos of young girls in Dirndls, two photos of young men in Lederhosen, two photos of older men in Lederhosen, one mixed-sex picture of middle- and older-life characters (the only one that includes a picture of a woman who might be over 25), three photos of men at work, and two photos of women at work (including the only photo of a woman who is not dressed up to be conventionally attractive).

For a slide show without the objectification, see Time.

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UPDATE! Alan Taylor, the editor of the slide show at Boston.com, wrote in with some perspective:

Hi there, just a note from the editor of the blog post in question. First, I’m happy to see the discussion here, believe it or not subjects like this are often in mind when compiling my photo stories.

This seems like fair criticism, and I’m not being defensive. What I will offer is last year’s entry for comparison and contrast: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/oktoberfest_2009.html – not nearly as many “boob-poppin’” dirndls there.

As an editor I am limited by the photos available to me, and their quality. In this case, for example, there may have been a decent photograph of an older woman in a strong functional role, but maybe it was poorly lit or repetitive just not up to par, and was left out. I compile entries three times a week on varied subjects that endup being 30 to 40 photos total, starting with anywhere from 100 to 300 to begin with. The selection process is long, subjective, and can certainly be viewed as flawed from many points of view.

If you think the blog is intentionally objectifying, I invite you to look through my archives: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/09/ and judge for yourself. I can also be reached by email at ataylor@boston.com

Thanks for the discussion,
-Alan Taylor

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.

Dmitriy T.M. let us know that Matthew Yglesias posted an interesting graph that compares the actual distribution of wealth in the U.S. compared to what different groups estimate the distribution to be:

As Yglesias says, it’s striking not just that we underestimate how much wealth the top 20% control, but how little the poorest Americans do. Americans imagine the poor to have many, many more financial resources than they actually do.

V. sent in a delightful video by Levni Yilmaz illustrating how detailed social rules of behavior can be, how others can create consequences for us if we don’t conform, and how some people are targets of others almost no matter what they do. The people at the top of the hierarchy, remember, must maintain the hierarchy, lest they end up no better than anyone else.

See also our post featuring Yilmaz discussing how to sit on a bus.

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 Jezebel.

Alicia S. sent in an image of the poster for the movie Life as We Know It, featuring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. Heigl appears to be in her familiar role as responsible, career-oriented, but uptight and ultimately unfulfilled woman who falls for an irresponsible or immature guy. In the movie, the two main characters end up raising a child together after the death of the baby’s parents. The poster pretty much sums up the messages you’re going to get about gender:

Want more? Here’s the trailer:

So women are responsible — they can even get themselves dressed — and nurturing while men are childish boors. Alicia says,

While Heigl is presented as a warm, caring motherly figure, her male costar is likened to a baby: immature and irresponsible, just another child in the family. He reflects the stereotype represented in so many romantic comedies and Monday night sitcoms alike that men are messy, careless, and juvenile.

They’re repeatedly presented as messy, careless, and juvenile…and yet still ultimately get the mature, caring, nurturing, attractive woman.

These stereotypes are offensive to women and men. Women are supposed to settle — to fall in love with the equivalent of a child, and to find that endearing, as opposed to insulting or creepy. That means, of course, she’ll have to be primarily responsible for childcare and running the household, since you can’t trust an immature, careless person to do important things (think of every sitcom or commercial that shows a hapless man messing everything up when he’s left to care for the house on his own).

And men are depicted as ridiculous oafs. I’m always surprised that more men aren’t offended by this representation of manhood: men as incompetent pigs who treat women badly (setting up another date in front of his current one at the beginning of the trailer) who can barely take care of themselves, much less anyone else. Of course, the stereotype does have benefits from those men willing to draw on it: if you are incapable of taking care of children and doing housework without causing a major disaster, you’re relieved from those tasks, or your partner has to fight constantly to get you to do them. So while the gender stereotypes on display here are insulting to both men and women, they reinforce a gendered division of parenting labor that justifies putting the burden of that labor on women rather than men.

As you may have heard, this week the Republican Party released what they’ve termed a “Pledge to America,” a document that lists their agenda for the next legislative session. Erin Echols, a student at Kennesaw State U., took a look at it and was struck by the contents, particularly the images.

Of the 48 total pages of the document, 14 consist of images, either a single one or a collage of several. Of course, in a document of this sort, you’re going to have the required patriotic images — the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Capitol and other buildings in D.C. Nothing surprising there. But Erin points out that the cowboy seems to be a recurring theme.

It reminded me of a post by Macon D. over at Racialicious a while back about some ads by a Republican primary candidate for Agricultural  Commissioner in Alabama:

The hat, the horse, the rifle, the sweeping music that makes me think of old Western movies… it all evokes what Macon D. calls the “Independent (White) Cowboy Myth,” a version of rugged, stand-alone, honest manhood. Macon D. quotes Mel at BroadSnark:

In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Here’s the follow-up ad he made after losing:

And, for the record, I’m not arguing this presentation of Dale Peterson is necessarily fake; for all I know he dresses and acts like that all the time. People do; I’m related to some of them. I’m not saying Peterson is a fraud who really wears tuxes and has never been on a horse. That’s irrelevant. What I’m interested in is the power of a particular cowboy mythology, the one on display in Peterson’s ads.

As Macon D. points out, Ronald Reagan actively appropriated the cowboy persona, often wearing cowboy hats and jeans, sometimes alongside a horse (he had also played cowboys in a couple of movies). He openly identified with the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” an effort by groups in the western U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s to stop designation of federal lands as protected wilderness areas, push for more mining and livestock grazing rights on public land, and oppose some other environmental and land use regulations, depicted as impositions from distant elites.

Macon D. quotes Sarah Watts on the appeal of the White cowboy myth when Theodore Roosevelt first used it:

…he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

The cowboy myth, then, arose partly to allay deep anxieties about changes in American society. But the myth is just that — a myth, a romanticized notion largely unmoored from the realities of cowboys’ lives. Mel says,

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

This isn’t true just in the past. I know people who work as hired hands on ranches now. They love many aspects of the life. But most of them aren’t particularly well-paid; they don’t have retirement benefits or health insurance; they aren’t on a path to being able to buy their own ranch and be a self-reliant family farmer. Some become managers, with more responsibility and money, as in any occupation. But sometimes what initially seemed like a great deal — getting free housing as part of the job — turns out to have downsides, such as being expected to be available round-the-clock since you’re right there on the property, or fearing that if you piss off your employer and get fired, you’re out of a place to live immediately as well.

The examples I’ve given here have all been Republicans. Democrats use the cowboy mythology as well — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is well known for often appearing in a cowboy hat and nearly always wearing a bolo tie rather than a necktie. However, Republicans seem to appropriate the cowboy persona more often, or at least more successfully.

Anyway…back to Erin’s analysis of the “Pledge to America.” The other interesting feature of the images is their overwhelming Whiteness. Some examples of group photos:

Overall, the photos show a sea of Whiteness. As Erin says, whether it’s an unintentional oversight or a calculated choice, the resulting message is that America’s citizens, the hard-working, patriotic folks who matter and to whom the party is making pledges, are White. Given the current racialized tone of much of our political debate (especially regarding Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, a racialized group often conflated with “Arabs”), it’s a portrait of America that is likely to speak to, and soothe, the fears of some groups more than others.

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