gender

FiveThirtyEight has up an interesting article about the proportion of Republicans in the U.S. Congress who are women, as well as comparisons to conservative parties in several other countries. The U.S. data (note that, contrary to the usual color-coding, in these tables red = left and blue = right, and an * indicates it is the party in power):

Now, one obvious explanation for this data would be that there aren’t that many women in the Republican party compared to the Democratic party, so there are accordingly fewer women in Congress (anyone have data on the gender breakdown by party, as opposed to voting in particular elections?). Or maybe they just can’t get elected. Another would be that parties on the right often encourage gender roles that are more “traditional,” with the idea that public life (particularly politics) is more appropriate for men, while women focus more on the private sphere of home life and extensions of it (say, education).

There may very well be some truth there, but that’s not the whole story. For one thing, the U.S. lags behind many other nations in terms of the percent of female legislators (a pattern that holds in the U.S. whether Republicans or Democrats control Congress, though the % changes somewhat):

The FiveThirtyEight post also compares parties in Sweden, Japan, Germany, and the U.S. in terms of the representation of women in left- and right-leaning parties, based on data for the parties holding seats in the legislative bodies in each country.  In Sweden a center/right coalition is currently in power, while in Germany a left-leaning and right-leaning party have formed a coalition. A party on the left recently took power from a party on the left in Japan. A comparison of the four countries, broken down by political orientation:

Of course, parties on the right and left in each nation have different platforms, policy emphases, bases of support, and gender ideologies, so they aren’t directly comparable. But the “proportion” column above compares left and right parties within each country; it reflects the % of right party legislators that is female compared to the % in more left-leaning parties. That is, if the parties on the political right had the same % of female legislators as parties on the political left in that country, the proportion would be 100.0%. The lower the proportion, the lower the % of female legislators on the right compared to their representation on the left.

As we see, there are clear differences by political orientation in all countries, but there is an enormous range. The U.S. stands out with a particularly low proportion, indicating the largest gap between right and left parties.

Of course, the other story here is that both the U.S. and Japan stand out with extremely low percentages of legislators who are women in either party, with Germany doing better but still lagging compared to the proportion of women in the population. On the other hand, both left and right parties in Sweden seem to be capable of recruiting women who run for national office and win.

Lisa recently posted about a woman who was denied health insurance due to having a C-section in the past; the health care plan would cover her only if she agreed to be sterilized. Mackenzie I.-T. sent in this clip from Anderson Cooper 360 about a woman who was dropped by her insurance company after she was raped, due to her doctors putting her on antibiotics antiretrovirals to try to prevent any possible infection with HIV and her need for therapy:

Embedded video from CNN Video

Classy.

Cate M. emailed us about the promo for the movie “The Killer Inside Me,” saying,

The level of violence is at NSFW levels and quite possibly one of the most ‘trigger warning’ vids I’ve ever seen used to promote a non-horror film.

We get a lot of submissions about sexualized violence toward women, so I thought, “well, ok, we’ll see.” And then I watched it, and at 1:15 in had to pause because I was already horrified. Here’s the whole 5:42 promo. It’s Not At All Safe for Work, and you won’t want to watch it if scenes of sexualized brutality toward women would be a trigger for you. And also, I guess, Spoiler Alert, if that’s your main concern.

UPDATE: The promo keeps being taken down; here’s a link that works for now, but I don’t know for how long.

Clearly, Casey Affleck’s character is a sadistic asshole (the cigar on the guy’s hand), but in the promo, at least, the graphic, sexualized violence is reserved for women…who also appear to like it, at least for a while. Jessica Alba gives in to him, and apparently starts a relationship with him, after he pulls her pants down and whips her. Perhaps that’s because she’s a prostitute; of course she’d like a dominant man who plays rough, right?

The thing is, you could make this movie and tell the same story without actually showing all the violence in such a graphic way. Movies imply things all the time. It’s a choice to show this type of violence toward women as a form of entertainment…and to show the women liking it.

See our posts on increases in violence toward women on primetime TV, sexualized violence on TV crime procedurals, and the movie “DeadGirl.”

Kay, a student at a University in Munich, sent along an invitation for a Corps Isaria fraternity, or or “Burschenschafts,” party. The cover for the invitation reads “Isarias Gute Kinderstube” which, she explains, “translates literally to good nursery and means something like being well raised, knowing how to behave.”

When you open the invitation you see a naked woman, covered only by a teddy bear, alongside baby-related items (a Snuffalufagus, a rocking Zebra, and a crib) and party-related items (a disco ball, a stag’s head, and high heeled shoes):

Kay explains that the copy, “Das Corps Isaria gibt sich die Ehre und laedt zur eskaloesesten Pyjamaparty der Stadt” translates into something like “The Corps Isaria is honored to host the most risque sleepover in town.”

The invitation is another example of the infantilization of women. Or, as Kay put it, a “mixture of the male gaze and child porn fetishism.”

For more infantilization of women, see here, here, here, here, and here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Parents Television Council just released their new data comparing the incidence of violence against women and girls by CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX during prime time sweeps in 2004 and 2009 (report here).  They found a 120% increase in depictions of violence against women and girls amidst a steady rate of overall frequency of violence.

They write:

Cumulatively, across all study periods and all networks, the most frequent type of violence was beating (29%), followed by credible threats of violence (18%), shooting (11%), rape (8%), stabbing (6%), and torture (2%).  Violence against women resulted in death 19% of the time.

Violence towards women or the graphic consequences of violence tends overwhelmingly to be depicted (92%) rather than implied (5%) or described (3%).

So those’re the numbers, how about some examples of the normalization of violence against women: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, and forty-three.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Farrah F. sent us a link to an article on the website for Forward, a newspaper aimed at the American Jewish community. The article looks at the gender gap in pay at Jewish community organizations. According to the article,

…a Forward survey of 75 major American Jewish communal organizations found that fewer than one in six are run by women, and those women are paid 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders.

Incomes of leaders of the organizations they surveyed (data is from 2008 unless otherwise specified, and women are highlighted in blue):

The Forward’s survey was drawn from the most recent public records or, if that information wasn’t available, from the organization itself. The median salary for men was $287,702, while the median for women was $175,211, amounting to a ratio of 61 cents to one dollar.

More from the article:

Women comprise about 75% of those employed by federations, advocacy and social service organizations, and religious and educational institutions, but occupy only 14.3% of the top positions. Of the 11 female leaders identified in this survey, three are in interim roles.

In another article, Forward discusses family leave policies at Jewish organizations, finding that relatively few offer paid leave:

UPDATE: A few people have asked why I chose to post about these particular organizations. The short answer is: because that’s what I had. My interest here wasn’t in the religious aspect, but in the gender disparities in volunteer/community organizations; I suspect these same trends occur in a lot of similar organizations, not just Jewish ones. I wish I had info on a more general set, but I so far haven’t been able to find a study like this one, but for a wider array of organizations. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to post it.

Victoria S. observed that, when 20-year-old Morgan Harrington went missing, the Nancy Grace show didn’ t do a story about missing Morgan Harrington, they did a story about the missing “co-ed beauty”:

As Victoria said, if any of us go missing, let’s hope we’re lucky enough to be beautiful with lots of photos of us posing with our pretty girlfriends and glamour shots in our sunglasses.

See a previous post arguing that missing children that get a lot of media coverage tend to be blond and attractive.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Yvonne Liu, at the Applied Research Center, told us about their report, Race and Recession, which includes a lot of useful information about the disparate effects of the economic crisis for different groups of Americans.

While an overall unemployment rate of just under 10% is bad regardless, that statistics hides the fact that Latinos and African Americans are experiencing even higher levels (note: the government agencies that the information comes from didn’t provide breakdowns for Asians or Native Americans, so the report was unable to show comparisons for those groups):

In a comment, thoughtcounts Z points out,

My immediate reaction…: the worst points (highest unemployment) on the “White” curve are generally around or below the best points (lowest unemployment) on the “Black” curve.

Unemployment rates for those aged 20-24:

This figure indicates what % of each racial group falls into each occupational category (the median indicates that half fall above and half fall below that level):

Median earnings for each occupational category (again, the figures represent the % of each race that have jobs in that category):

So as we see, Whites are disproportionately employed in management and professional occupations, while relatively few are employed in the service industry, whereas both African Americans and Latinos are significantly more likely to be employed in services.  And while there’s a big gap between the % of Whites and Blacks in management/professional occupations, I was somewhat surprised that it wasn’t larger than it is.

Earnings broken down by both race and gender:

Assets by race:

See also: images of the downturn, job loss by region, unemployment by education level, another map of job loss by region, the dilemma of the duplex, not everyone knows there’s a recession, Detroit’s decline, job losses, gender and recession, and tips to the rich on how to be discreet during a recession.