gender

I may not have found the love of my life on OkCupid, but I did fall in love… with their data analysis!

Their latest super-fun post by Christan Rudder, sent along by Rob Walker, Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, looks at the lies people tell in their profiles.  They do this not by catching any given individual in a lie, but by comparing data on their users to data on the general U.S. population.  (It’s unclear what percentage of OkCupid users are American and they don’t specify if they are only looking at U.S. users, so I can’t verify that this is a fair comparison but… if they do restrict the analysis to Americans then…)  Since they have 1.51 million active users, we should expect that any distributions should more or less overlap.

But they don’t…

1.  Men lie about their height, reporting, on average, that they are about two inches taller than they are.  In the figure below, the solid purple line represents the U.S. population, the dashed line represents the reported height of OkCupid users:

2. Women lie about their height too.  Here’s the same figure for women (but with a dark purple implied best fit line; you can just ignore it):

3. People exaggerate their income, on average inflating it by about 20 percent (for this data, they controlled for regional differences in income).  The figure below, however, shows that the amount of exaggeration is related to age.  Both men (blue) and women (red) increasingly inflate their income up until around age 40.  After that, they just keep inflating it at about the same rate.

Rudder quips:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.

Oh and, yeah, there’s a reason why the men are lying (no word from Rudder on the women). Income is highly correlated with how many messages a man gets (red = fewer messages; green = more):

4. It also turns out that not all of the “recent pics” are actually recent. This is especially true for pictures rated “hot.” Rudder says that “hot” photos are more than twice as likely as “average” photos to be over three years old (12% and 5% respectively).

And the older a person is, the more likely they are to upload an older photo:

Fun!

Also from OkCupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, and older women want more sex.

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.

Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.

Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”).  Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.

In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message.  And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.

Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again.  But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.

And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”

So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign.  An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source).  What a nice thing to say, feminists think.

But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:

How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?

Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.

But I digress.

So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food?  Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat?  Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?

I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.

More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.

If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.

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.

Nia A. sent in a chart from an article in the Revista Española de Cardiología about gender in medical schools in Spain. Overall, the medical field is increasingly feminized. In 2008, 73% of new medical school graduates (licenciadas en medicina) were female (note that in Spain they use commas where we would use a decimal in a number in the U.S., so 73,04 = 73.04):

It’s a significant increase, but women also earned a significant majority of medical degrees by 1998, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Women also earned just over half (52%) of Ph.D.s in 2008 (tesis doctorales aprobadas).

When we look at faculty (docentes en la universidad, total), women are a distinct minority, making up only 20%. This varies quite a bit by position (I’m relying on Nia’s comments and Wikipedia to translate Spain’s academic ranks to the U.S. equivalent; please let me know if I’ve misunderstood a category):

• The percentage of women serving as teaching assistants (profesoras ayudantes) has gone down from 72% in 1998 to 50% in 2008 (the only area where the percentage of women decreased).
• Women make up 22% of lecturers (profesoras asociadas, who may or may not be tenured) and 9% of titulares de universidad (which I think are what we would call associate professors in the U.S.). They make up a sizable minority of contratadas doctoras, a tenured position similar to a professor (42%).
• Women made up a larger percentage of titulares de escuela universitaria (53%), a position at non-Ph.D. granting and technical colleges; however, this position was abolished in some academic restructuring in 2007. Those holding it keep their jobs, but no new hires will be made.
• However, women make up only a tiny portion (4%) of catedráticas de universidad (roughly the same as a full professor — received tenure and then met a number of other requirements for promotion). Only this group is eligible to become a rector (university president)

This pattern is widespread in universities (see our post on engineering and tech faculty), and likely due to a number of factors. There is always lag time between demographic changes in a field and changes in faculty, since unless a lot of new positions are created, potential faculty have to wait until current ones retire. All things being equal, we’d expect the % of women faculty to go up steadily over time as more female Ph.D. candidates apply for positions previously held by men. Of course, women have been earning the majority of medical degrees since before 1998, so there’s been sufficient time for gender changes in the field to affect the composition of faculty.

But all things aren’t equal in university hiring. Historically women have faced significant gender discrimination, and this continues to occur. However, a large body of evidence indicates that family/work conflicts play a huge role. Because women still, as a group, have primary responsibility for childcare, they are more likely than men to face difficulties balancing family time with work requirements, such that they are less likely to advance to tenure or promotions. They are more likely to opt out of more demanding positions — applying to be Dean, say, or accepting a position at a research-heavy university as opposed to a community college — but also find that they may be “mommy tracked” by hiring committees who assume they’ll be taking too much time out of the paid workforce to raise their kids (and often make these assumption whether or not the woman has or plans to have kids or stay home with them).

I also suspect that if the data were broken down into specialty, we’d see more women earning degrees or teaching in areas associated with women or the family (ob/gyns, for example) as opposed to more masculinized specialties, often perceived as very high-status, like neurosurgery (we see more women than men in pediatrics and ob/gyn in the U.S., for instance).

Will the percent of female med school faculty in Spain and elsewhere increase? Undoubtedly over time it will. But due to factors including those I just discussed, it’s also likely that the increase will lag significantly behind what we’d expect just based on the number of women earning medical degrees.

Jenny Knopinski snapped these photos of the new Safeway brand of baby care products, Mom to Mom.  The branding of the product as “for moms, by moms” is another great example of the way that mothers are held responsible for childcare, while fathers are simultaneously excluded from the sphere altogether.

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.

Joel S. sent in a link to an article by Gonzalo Frasca at Serious Game Source about a management simulation game the U.K. branch of Intel released back in 2004. It was called The Intel IT Manager Game: The Simulation of an IT Department and was a free promotional program:

The player had to hire IT employees, as well as manage a budget and buy computer equipment, the latter of which was either generic or Intel-branded.

When you started out you selected the sex of your IT manager:

But then, when you went to hire employees…they forgot to include an option to hire any women. You could get a guy with a green mohawk, though:

After a few days the game was taken down and Intel said they were making revisions; it re-launched a month later, this time with  female employee options, including this one, whose hair looks like alien antennae to me:

You can see the current version here.

Frasca argues that such oversights are more important than the lack of female avatars in some video games:

The Intel game is not merely an entertainment product: it is a piece of corporate advertising that simulated an IT workplace for an audience of real IT workers. Unlike what happens in the fantasy world of Fable, gender inequality is a very real problem for IT workers.

The post mentions the National Center for Women and Information Technology, so I went over and looked at some of their data. Gender of students who take the SAT and say they plan on choosing computer/IT majors:

If anything, it looks like the gender segregation of computer/IT occupations is increasing:

Broken down by gender and race/ethnicity:

Asian/Asian American women are actually overrepresented compared to their percentage of the U.S. population (all Asian Americans make up just about 5% of the entire U.S. population, obviously Asian American women make up less than that, though I don’t recall the exact proportion). All other racial/ethnic groups listed here are significantly underrepresented in computing jobs.

The percent of patents in various fields invented by women in the early ’80s and the early…’00s (?):

Frasca suggests that one reason for the Intel snafu might be a lack of women working on the project — if there were women, they might have noticed the lack of female employee options. That’s possible. It’s also likely that having more women in a workplace makes their male colleagues more aware, and thus a guy might think, “hey, maybe we should add some women employees to the game.”

This is totally anecdotal, I know, but forgive me. I have a number of female friends who work in computing jobs; almost all of them have generally found themselves to be the only, or one of just a few, women in their office. And with few exceptions, they say that the men they work with aren’t openly hostile or unfriendly. They don’t deviously exclude them from projects or social events or make lots of sexist remarks. But they forget they exist (for instance, inviting everyone else in the office to lunch where they talk about new project possibilities, and then seeming genuinely sorry later when they realize they left out the only woman in the office…but doing it again anyway).

And things like the Intel game reflect and reinforce the invisibility of women in such fields.

Edna Sednitzer, who blogs at Red Light Politics, sent us in two screencaps of what she came across during a recent search on Thesaurus.com. She searched the word “power” and this is one of the entries that came up, for “related adjectives” (some words I found notable highlighted in red):

Out of curiosity she then searched “weakness,” and here are the suggested adjectives:

At least according to this thesaurus, masculinity is powerful, capable, competent; femininity is weak and incompetent. There’s a sexual component as well — notice that power is associated with being virile, while weakness = lustless. Of course, we also associate men and masculinity with the active pursuit of sex, while women are supposed to be the objects of pursuit, not actively sexual.

Anyway, it’s a great example of how language is gendered in a way that privileges masculinity and men over femininity and women.

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

This two-minute clip from Toddlers and Tiara’s (a reality show about child beauty pageants), sent in by Dmitriy T.M., is a great example of how mothers teach their daughters that beauty hurts… and that pain is a price they should be willing to pay:

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.

Last week I posted photos of the Justin Bieber/Kim Kardashian photoshoot for Elle. I compared it to my earlier post on the sexualization of Jaden Smith. In both I argued that we accept the sexualization of boys at younger ages than girls, seeing it as adorable and proof that they are sufficiently heterosexual and masculine rather than that they are in danger of sexual exploitation.

Yesterday Rob W. sent in a photo that I think illustrates this point well:

Who is the adult woman wearing this shirt? That’s Karissa Shannon, who is dating Hugh Hefner.

Imagine, if you can, if this were an adult man associated in some way with a famous producer of pornography widely known for dating groups of much younger women, and that adult man’s shirt had this same message but about two teen/pre-teen girls (or, for that matter, imagine a famous gay man wearing this exact shirt).  And then imagine the concern and horror that would ensue, the apologies through the man’s agent, and so on.

A short google search did turn up a post (re-posted in several other places) calling the shirt inappropriate, but given that Shannon is referred to as “sloppy seconds” in it, I’m not sure how to take it (since “sloppy seconds” reaffirms a sexual double-standard itself). A lot of other sites, on the other hand, found it adorable and/or funny, and asked readers to weigh in on Team Justin vs. Team Jaden.