gender

In Afghanistan, girls are not supposed to obtain an extensive education, be in public without a male chaperone, or work outside the home.  This is typically discussed as a burden for girls and women but, as an article in the New York Times sent in by Dmitriy T.M. explains, it can also be a burden on families.  Families with sons can send all of their children out in public with the boy as a chaperone.  This is useful for the whole family: the girls get more freedom and the parents can send their children on errands, to school, or on social visits without their supervision.  Since boys can also work outside the home, boys can be a source in extra income for a family.  Families with all girls, then, are not only pitied from a social perspective (because girls are devalued compared to boys), but from a practical perspective (because gendered rules make daily life more difficult).

One solution is to bend the rules.  Journalist Jenny Nordberg explains that some families without sons pick a girl-child to be a boy.  One day they cut her hair, change her name, and put her in boy clothes.  They then send her out into the world as a boy.  er mother explains:

People came into our home feeling pity for us that we don’t have a son… And the girls — we can’t send them outside. And if we changed Mehran to a boy we would get more space and freedom in society for her.  And we can send her outside for shopping and to help the father.

Her father concurs:

It’s a privilege for me, that she is in boys’ clothing… It’s a help for me, with the shopping. And she can go in and out of the house without a problem.

The practice isn’t new, but long-standing.

Nordberg is unsure how many families do this, but it is common enough that most people are unsurprised when a biological girl suddenly becomes a social boy before their very eyes.  Teachers have become accustomed to such sudden shifts.  Relatives, friends, and acquaintances accept and participate in the farce. There is even a name for this kind of child, “bacha posh,” which translates into “dressed up as a boy.”  Later, when the child reaches puberty, she typically becomes a girl again.  Meanwhile, the family might choose a younger sibling to take over her role.

One of the interesting things about this, from a sociological perspective, is how easy it turns out to be to break these extremely rigid gender rules.  If the family simply decided that their daughter should be able to go outside without supervision, get higher education, work outside the home, and interact as an equal with men, it would be a slap in the face of the gender regime.  By dressing her a boy, however, they are effectively nodding to the rules, even as they break them.  They are saying, “Yes, it is true that girls should not be able to do these thing,” but we need a boy in the household for social and practical reasons.  And, because other Afghanis understand, they are willing to look the other way.

These sorts of adaptations are often lost when we hear about the cultural rules in places we deem oppressive.  People in these narratives often seem unbelievably oppressed.  Often they are living under extreme conditions, but it’s important to also be exposed to the ways in which individuals find ways to wrest autonomy from rigid rules through ingenuity and creativity.  This wresting of autonomy, further, is often part and parcel of the culture, allowing for far more flexibility than outside observers are sometimes capable of seeing.

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.

Right?

Or, at least, we’re constantly told that men hate shopping.

Ben K. pointed us to a new Lee Jeans ad campaign revolving around a fictional “epidemic among the male population” called “shop phobia” (website):

These ads argue that men don’t shop or are even afraid of shopping.  They tell us what men are like.  Ben begs to differ, but feels the pressure to be the man they insist he is:

As a man in my mid-twenties who actually does enjoy clothes shopping from time to time, I am, nevertheless, totally complicit in propelling the stereotype that clothes shopping is for women and not men – a stereotype reinforced out by mass culture and my experiences growing up with two younger sisters and a dad who taught me well the ways to keep myself from “losing my manhood” when going shopping with my mom (bring a book, find the chairs near the dressing rooms).

Ben’s confession illustrates how cultural rules about behavior actually create that behavior, thereby making the behavior seem natural instead of rule-driven.  Men hate shopping, we learn, and so it appears they do.  (See also our post on the self-fulfilling stereotype.)

On a different note, Ben had a really interesting thought about what is so scary about shopping:

I wonder if it has to do with anything about men being seen as in positions of authority or that their work necessitates certain types of clothes (police officers, construction workers), and, so clothing becomes a matter, in the cultural mind, of pure function related entirely to the public work of men. Thus shopping for extra clothes is irrelevant, even dangerous… perhaps because any indication of leaving that world of authority, and public work is also an indication of loss of “manhood.”

See also: Women Love Shoes.

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 case you haven’t yet seen enough evidence that men are treated as the neutral category, and women as a sub-category, Arielle C. and Ellie B. sent in another example, found on Neatorama. Here we have two rulers that list some important scientists throughout history, helpfully separated into Rulers of Science and Great Women Rulers of Science:

The only full image I could find of them is small, but I do see Marie Curie listed on both rulers. I can’t make out any other women on the Rulers of Science, but the text is very small and blurry in the image.

The point here isn’t really about the rulers themselves. I’ll give the company credit for trying to create a product that highlights women’s contributions to scientific discovery, only one of which would apparently be considered important enough to get a mention if we didn’t get a whole ruler all to ourselves. What’s noteworthy is the cultural repetition, experienced over and over in myriad large and small ways, of the message that default humans are male unless specifically marked otherwise, and that women aren’t neutral humans.

Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.”   It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.

First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:

The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine.  Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.

What about for her?

Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels).  The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???)  can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.

Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy.   Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing.  In fact, men do have more leisure time than women.  So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.

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.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel passed along a fantastic and entertaining example of resistance.  In the video below, a Columbia University a cappella group sings Dr. Dre’s Bitches Ain’t Shit.  The appropriation of the song works on so many levels: the all heavily-white, all-female group, the sweet choral arrangement, the pastel prep fashion, the strategically placed tennis rackets. They use race, class, and gender contradictions to force us to see and hear the song in a new way. All serve to mock the original, taking the teeth out of the language at the same time that they expose it as grossly misogynistic. Awesome.

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.

Rachel sent in a link to a post about the recession by Tim Cavanaugh at Reason that led me to an interactive graphic at the Wall Street Journal that lets you track job loss by either sector or by race/ethnicity and sex from December 2007 to August 2010.

Here is the race/ethnicity and sex data for January 2008 (for reasons I cannot understand, Asians are not separated out by sex, and as usual, American Indians aren’t included):

And here’s the breakdown for January 2010:

Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t weighted by the number of total workers per category, so we don’t have any way to know how these raw numbers translate into percentages of workers losing their jobs.

By economic sector, for January ’08:

January ’10:

[On a nitpicky note, the sector graphs show job losses in negative numbers, which would work if it showed total change in # of jobs. But I think we’d be thrilled if we had -8… thousand job losses, as the graph is labeled. Just a small sloppy labeling issue.]

As the data show, and as we’ve discussed before, the economic recession has disproportionately affected men. But Cavanaugh cautions that it might be a little soon to declare men an at-risk species or lament the bad luck of being born male. Presumably, if men’s over-representation in construction, for instance, has meant they suffered more than women from the real estate bust, if you felt like it you could turn it around and argue that perhaps they disproportionately benefited from the boom that preceded it. Additionally the employment sectors are pretty broad; “retail” or “finance” will include some specific occupations that are fairly gender balanced, some that are dominated by men, and some dominated by women. And overall loss in retail jobs doesn’t tell us if the losses are spread equally across occupations within the sector.

Should we care about the suffering of men and their families in the recession? Of course. And to the degree that men are disproportionately represented in occupations that are prone to boom/bust cycles, we’re likely to continue to see greater volatility in their employment rates than women’s, sometimes to their advantage, sometimes not. But we might want to be a little careful and look at some more in-depth data before we declare, as some commentators seem to want to do, that women have basically escaped the recession. If nothing else, men and women aren’t islands; lots of us share household expenses, and a woman whose husband loses his job but keeps her own doesn’t exactly avoid any negative consequences of the recession.

Related posts: more comparisons of joblessness, race and recession, unemployment and education level, not everyone suffers during a recession, the gender employment gap,

Dr. Paul Baker, a linguist at the University of Lancaster, sent us some graphs from his analysis of use of gendered language over time in the U.K. His data consisted of “four sets of data from written British English from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006 (a million words each)” — a full discussion of the methodology will be available in the forthcoming article in Gender and Language.*

First, Dr. Baker looked at use of male and female pronouns (he/his/him vs. she/hers/her) over time:

Clearly male pronouns are still used more than female ones, but the gap is narrowing. Baker found that though part of the reason is that male pronouns are more likely to be used generically to refer to everyone than female pronouns are, the major reason is that men are discussed more than women.

Here are the data specifically for the four words “man,” “men,” “woman,” and “women”:

Notice that the use of the plurals — “men”and “women” — have converged, though we still see higher usage of the male singular than of “woman.”

And finally, Dr. Baker looked at the usage of four gendered titles:

A large decrease, obviously, especially in the use of “Mr.,” but all have tapered off since the 1930s with the exception of “Ms.,” which never did really catch on. Baker argues that while some of the decrease may be due to attempts to use less sexist language, it’s more likely because of more informalization of society in general — titles of address often seem stiff and overly formal today.

Of course, this analysis just tells us the frequency with which these terms are used, not what is actually being said about men and women, a topic he addresses in the full article. But he concludes that the trend is rather encouraging for those who want to see more equal gender representation in terms of language.

* Baker, P. (2010) ‘Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English.’ Gender and Language. Forthcoming.

Elizabeth C. sent along two advertisements for body slimming garments from DreamProductsCatalog, one for men and one for women.  Side-by-side, they reveal subtlety different expectations for male and female bodies:

Notice that the women’s garment is aimed solely at making her thinner and more fit appearing.  It “slims,” “eliminates unsightly bulges,” “lifts,” and makes her look “20 pounds thinner.”   Her sexy pose and come hither look emphasizes that her main job is to look good.  In contrast, the man looks confidently and calmly into the camera and, while his garment is also aimed at making him look more “slim” and “trim,” it is also supposed to make him “feel” better and look younger.  It improve his posture and offer back support, too.

The difference here is subtle, and I don’t mean to make too much of it, but it is nonetheless an illustration of the variety of uses to which men’s bodies are believed to be put (aesthetic, yes, but also functional and personal) and the one primary thing that women’s bodies are supposedly for (being looked at).

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.