Gender and Society

GENDER AND SOCIETY
"Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them."


--Margaret Mead
In addition to age, gender is one of the universal dimensions on which status differences are based. Unlike sex, which is a biological concept, gender is a social construct specifying the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are to follow. According to Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, gender is the "costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance" (p.238). As Alan Wolfe observed in "The Gender Question" (The New Republic, June 6:27-34), "of all the ways that one group has systematically mistreated another, none is more deeply rooted than the way men have subordinated women. All other discriminations pale by contrast." Lerner argues that the subordination of women preceded all other subordinations and that to rid ourselves of all of those other "isms"--racism, classism, ageism, etc.--it is sexism that must first be eradicated. For some specifics, see B. Deutsch's "The Male Privilege Checklist" and Nijole Benokraitis & Joe Feagin's "Overt/Subtle/Covert Sex Discrimination: An Overview."

Women have always had lower status than men, but the extent of the gap between the sexes varies across cultures and time (some arguing that it is inversely related to social evolution). In 1980, the United Nations summed up the burden of this inequality: Women, who comprise half the world's population, do two thirds of the world's work, earn one tenth of the world's income and own one hundredth of the world's property. In Leviticus, God told Moses that a man is worth 50 sheikels and a woman worth 30--approximately the contemporary salary differentials of the sexes in the United States. (Actually, according to one "Current Population Survey" of the US Census Bureau, American women in 1999 earned approximately 77% of what men made, in 2000, according to the Department of Labor, their median weekly earnings were 76% of the male median.) What might be the socio-cultural implications if men were to also be the child bearers? Follow the first human male pregnancy (well, not really) at www.malepregnancy.com.


And the significance of the stamps above? A recent U.S. Postal Service publication, "Women on Stamps", holds some interesting methodological possibilities. Putting a deceased individual's likeness on a stamp is one way by which political immortality is conferred. Of the hundreds of Americans so immortalized only a handful are women: 16, to be precise, through 1960; 19 through 1970; and 29 through 1980 (any connection between this 50% increase with the ERA movement of the seventies?). An enterprising student may wish to investigate and compare how this female proportion of immortalized citizens varies across countries and time.

Matters of gender are scattered throughout these pages, including gender differences in household duties, in in voting during the 1996 Presidential election, and in suicide rates cross-nationally. Take advantage of this site's search engine by first entering "gender" and next "sex" as the search words.

The State of the World Population 2000: Lives Together, Worlds Apart--Men and Women in a Time of Change from the United Nations Population Fund

GenderNet from the World Bank. Extensive international datasets


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HOW MUCH HAS CHANGED?
According to Gallup surveys, in 1946 Americans felt by a margin of 54% to 24% that women live more difficult lives than men. More than one-half century later that margin had increased to 57% to 17%, with most of that change owing to increasing agreement among men (from a 47%-27% margin in 1946 to 52%-19% in 1997).

In the 1930s, 26 of 48 states had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. (It was the midst of the Great Depression and there were not enough jobs to keep the men out of political mischief, so married women had to go.) Click here to see Belief that a woman's place is in the home by cohort and education, 1977-94


The National Women's History Project's "Living the Legacy: The Women's Rights Movement 1848-1998" and its links to resource sites

The Virtual Library on Labour and Business History has a sizable listing of women history journals

National Museum of Women's History, with featured exhibit: "Motherhood, social service and political reform: The political culture and imagery of American suffrage"

Women's History Workshop a collaborative effort of Massachusetts middle school through college teachers


Ken Middleton's American Women's History: A Research Guide

Women in American History--from Encyclopedia Britannica

Diotima: Materials on Women and Gender in the Ancient World includes bibliographical lists on such wide-ranging subjects as athletics, death, rape, ancient medicine, law, prostitution, and magic

ViVa: A Bibliography of Women's History in Historical and Women's Studies Journals

Library of Congress/American Memory's Selections from the National American Women Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921

Library of Congress/American Memory's "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920


UC Berkeley Library's Suffragists Oral History Project

Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar's Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775-2000 (SUNY Binghamton project posing questions and providing primary documents to answer them)

Suffragists Oral History Project (UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library)

Duke University's "Women's Studies (R)E-sources on the Web"

From Smith College, the Sophia Smith Collection, "an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history"

Phyllis Holman Weisband's (U. Wisconsin) Selected Women and Gender Resources"

Voice of the Shuttle: Gender Studies Page

University of Maryland (Baltimore County) Women's Studies Homepage: routinely updated links to gender- related websites and electronic forums

Washington Post series "Gender Roles in the '90s"

Internet Resources for Women's Legal and Public Policy Information




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HOW MUCH CHANGE NEEDS TO BE MADE
The 2006 International Women's Day brought alarming messages from Latin American delegates about the growing rate of "femicide" in their countries. In Guatemala, for instance, more than 2,300 women had been brutally murdered. Observed Indira Lakshmanan in the Boston Globe (March 30, 2006), "Housewives, teenagers, and college students have disappeared and later been found naked, disemboweled, sexually mutilated, beheaded, and dumped in abandoned lots." Similar stories have come from Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.

Prevalence Rates for Female Genital Mutilation, 2001
From Human Rights Watch, "We Want to Live as Humans: Repression of Women and Girls in Western Afghanistan" (Dec. 2002)

Yahoo's collection of Sexual Harassment sites
Rape
History of Rape

WHO's Violence Against Women with national-level statistics on percentage of women physically assaulted by an intimate partner
Men and Domestic Violence Index


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GETTING REALLY HISTORICAL (AND CROSS-CULTURAL)
Chris Witcombe's "Images of Women in Ancient Art: Issues of Interpretation and Identity"


Ken Middleton's American Women's History: A Research Guide

Women and Gender in Ancient Egypt (from University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum)

Universes in Collision: Men and Women in 19th-Century Japanese Prints (University of Virginia)


HERSTORY: RETHINKING HISTORY FROM FEMALES' PERSPECTIVES
National Women's Hall of Fame


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INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSES
EDUCATION
You've probably read the studies showing how as the proportion of women in an occupational/professional category increases average earnings go down. Well what happens when women become "winners" in that institution that legitimates claims to the best positions in the work world: higher education? According to Business Roundtable (June 2003), in 1999-2000, women received 133 bachelor's degrees for every 100 to men. A decade later, during the 2009-2010 school year, women are projected to receive 142 bachelor's degrees for every 100 for men. What will happen to the "value" of a college degree?

From the National Center for Education Statistics, "Gender Differences in Participation and Completion of Undergraduate Education and How They Have Changed Over Time" (2005)


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FAMILY
Gender inequalities in family times

The plight of mothers of young children: To work or not to work?




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MASS MEDIA
Gender biases and stereotypes are amply reinforced in the mass media. In newspapers, for instance, men received three-quarters of the front-page references and appeared in two-thirds of the front-page pictures in the mid-1990s. The United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women included in its Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action the observation how the "continued projection of negative and degrading images of women in media communications - electronic, print, visual and audio - must be changed. Print and electronic media in most countries do not provide a balanced picture of women's diverse lives and contributions to society in a changing world. In addition, violent and degrading or pornographic media products are also negatively affecting women and their participation in society." Mediascope's "Violence, Women and the Media" cites mounting evidence how "negative perceptions of women in entertainment can affect women in real life."

One way, of course, to counter such phenomena is giving women control over media messages. From the University of Maryland comes Women in Broadcasting History. For feminist perspectives on the news:


Feminist.com
Ms. Magazine
Global Women's Issues



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WORK
Joan Korenman's annotated links (University of Maryland-Baltimore County)

U.S. Department of Labor: Women's Bureau Home Page

International Labour Organization's Gender Web Site

From the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: Women Working, 1870-1930

Diane Elson and Caroline Wright's Gender Issues in Contemporary Industrialization: An Annotated Bibliography.

Global Women's Rights-- resources on the impact of globalization on women in the developing world

Bill Moyers' NOW's "Rich World, Poor Women" (Fall, 2003)

The Glass Ceiling Commission

University of Maryland's Women's Studies Database and Gender Issues: Women in the Workforce

WOW! Work of Women
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WOMEN IN THE MILITARY: EQUALITY TO KILL (AND TO BE KILLED)


Owing to labor shortages during World War II, all military branches were enlisting women by late 1942. Their entry into these and other supposedly traditional male spheres of life triggered considerable controversy. One church argued that the Women's Army Corps was "intended to break down the traditional American and Christian opposition to removing women from the home…by bringing back the pagan female goddess of de-sexed, lustful sterility."

In the NORC 1982 General Social Survey Americans were asked whether they think a woman should or should not be assigned as a soldier in hand-to-hand combat assuming she is trained to do it (variable FINDLND)?


PERCENT MEN AND WOMEN SAYING WOMEN SHOULD BE ASSIGNED TO COMBAT ROLES
BIRTH COHORT: pre-1910 1910-19 1920-29 1930-39 1949-49 1950 on TOTAL
FEMALE 17% 21% 34% 35% 43% 58% 38%
MALE 22% 15% 17% 34% 36% 36% 30%



In total, observe in the right-most column how women were 8 percentage points more likely than men to believe that women should be assigned to combat roles. This total, however, does not reflect some interesting generational dynamics at work. For men, the big divide is between those born before and after 1930--those roughly older or younger than 50 years of age in 1982, with the latter about twice as likely as their older counterparts to favor such assignment. For women, support consistently decreases with age. Their big generational breaks occur between those born before and after women first exercised their right to vote in 1920, and between those born before and after the Korean War. Finally, observe how the sexes most differ in attitude immediately after these generational divides: among those born in the 1920s and in the 1950s. (Not revealed in this table is how support within both sexes declined between those born in the 1950s and 1960s, with a 9 percentage point decline for women and 4 for men.)

Twelve years after this question was presented to the American public, in 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an order allowing women on combat ships and aircraft. Thirteen servicewomen died during the 1991 Gulf War, four from enemy fire, and 21 were wounded in action. In the 2003 Gulf War, women made up one in seven of the military personnel in Iraq.


POLITICS AND GLOBALIZATION OF GENDER

Institute for Women's Policy Research--"IWPR focuses on issues of poverty and welfare, employment and earnings, work and family issues, health and safety, and women's civic and political participation."

WomensNet/IGC

4th WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN site

Women in National Parliaments

Fall 1996 issue of Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies on Feminism and Globalization

UC Davis's Gender and Global Issues Program


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FEMINISM AND ITS BACKLASH
Among the questions asked in the NORC 1996 General Social Survey were the following:

Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not? Twelve percent of men and 29% of women responded "yes." Among women, there was no significant difference among age groups; interestingly, women in their fifties and seventy and older were most likely to identify themselves as feminists while those in their thirties and sixties were least likely to do so. Women with four or more years of college were about 40 percent more likely to think of themselves as feminists than those with less education. This relationship, however, varies by race: While increasing education is associated with increasing identification among white women, among African American women the greatest identification was among the least educated (40% of black women who did not graduate from high school considered themselves feminists, as opposed to 19% of white women; among women with four or more years of college, 38% of whites compared to 27% blacks thought of themselves as feminists).
We'd like your views on how the women's movement has affected certain groups. For each group I name, please tell me whether you thing the women's movement has improved their lives, made their lives worse, or had no effect on their lives: homemakers (variable HOMEMAKER), women with working class jobs (WRKCLASS), women with management or professional jobs (MANPROF), men (MEN), children (CHILDREN), your self (YOURSELF).
Below are responses to these questions broken down by sex:

HOMEMAKER WRKCLASS MANPROF MEN CHILDREN YOURSELF
M F M F M F M F M F M F
IMPROVED 43% 42% 79% 80% 85% 88% 32% 32% 41% 46% 28% 47%
NO EFFECT 37 34 14 15 9 8 41 32 23 25 66 49
MADE WORSE 20 24 7 5 6 4 27 36 36 29 6 4



Feminist Majority Foundation

Feminism and Women's Studies links from Carnegie Mellon's English Servers humanities texts online

Kirstin Switala's Feminist Theory Website (Virginia Tech)

Joan Korenman's Women's Studies/Women's Issues Resource Sites (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

Feminist resources from WWWomen.Com

Gender-Neutral Pronoun Frequently Asked Questions (John Williams)

The Backlash! Men's issues & fathers' rights


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ORGANIZING FOR CHANGE
Independent Women's Forum "to advance the American spirit of enterprise and self-reliance and to support the principles of political freedom, economic liberty, and personal responsibility among women." Site includes Weird Science and Docket Watches along with SheThinks magazine, which is "by and for college students who feel academically isolated and disenchanted with a feminist movement that seems bent on problems instead of solutions."

National Organization for Women (NOW) Home Page

4th WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN site and a follow up


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EXPECTATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
In the NORC 1996 General Social Survey Americans were asked "Think about girls growing up today: Do you think their chances for a happy family life will be better than yours, about the same, or worse than yours?" (variable HAPGIRLS) Their predictions were not that rosy: Only 20% thought their chances will be better while 36% thought that they will be worse.



PERCENT OF AMERICANS BELIEVING GIRLS' CHANCES FOR HAPPY FAMILY LIFE
WILL BE WORSE THAN ONE'S OWN, BY SEX, AGE, AND EDUCATION

MEN WOMEN
0-11
YEARS HS
GRAD SOME
POST
SECONDARY 4+ YRS
COLLEGE 0-11
YEARS HS
GRAD SOME
POST
SECONDARY 4+ YRS
COLLEGE TOTAL
18-35 62 25 25 19 46 30 38 26 31
36-45 46 28 38 31 37 40 31 24 33
46-64 39 27 39 38 33 36 43 34 37
65+ 44 47 71 58 54 45 48 46 56
TOTAL 46 30 37 33 44 38 38 29 36




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MEN'S STUDIES
XY: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Politics