Gender Studies Major...what's it good for?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Huh. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked if I know any gender specialists who’d be interested in applying for a job a friend is trying desperately to fill.

In the field of international development, gender specialists are hired to analyze both how policies impact people differently based on gender, and how to give more voice to people whose voices aren’t heard.

To illuminate, based on my very narrow personal experience: I used to work on infrastructure development in Indonesia. Things like road development/maintenance and water and sanitation issues were among our key issues.

At first, I (like many of our engineers and economists, who tended to be older Indonesian or white males) didn’t see gender as relevant to infrastructure. Hey…a road is a road, right? What the hell does gender have to do with road construction? And, a water system is a water system. Don’t men and women benefit equally?

Well, let’s take a serious look at that question. In Indonesia, good roads can make the difference between having a successful microenterprise, or not even being able to start one at all. In order to have a tiny business, you need access to goods, which you get by traveling along the roads from your little village to a commercial center. That only works if the roads are regularly passable, not falling apart from poor maintenance. And guess where small micro-businesses put their stalls? Along roads that are in good enough condition to make regular travel along them worthwhile.

Statistically speaking, who are the people who mostly start micro-enterprises? WOMEN, of course.

So their take on the value of decent roads might be a little different than those of men, who as a group aren’t as entreprenuerial.

Now, let’s look at equality of educational opportunity. Sadly, Indonesia has different expectations about what’s okay for boys and girls to do. A lot of remote communities don’t have good schools available near home - but kids can travel a distance back and forth every day, if the roads are good enough, to a decent school. Without good roads, kids must board, because it’s not practical to make the journey on a daily basis over shitty roads. For better or worse, it’s typical in many Indonesian cultures to feel that it is okay for boys to go off to a boarding school in order to be educated, but girls need to stay home. So if the roads suck, boys get an education, girls don’t.

So suddenly those gender-neutral “why do we care about gender-specific issues, a road is a road is a road” matters aren’t so gender neutral after all. The value of good roads is different for males and females in Indonesia.

And as for water supply - guess which gender benefits more from having running water at home? The women, of course, because they are the ones who spend their lives walking up and down treacherous paths to collect heavy buckets of water every day so that they can have water at home. The mothers are the ones who take care of their little children who get rashes caused by poor health conditions that are the direct result of not having running water for hygiene purposes.

I could go on for pages with additional examples, as I have barely scratched the surface, but you get the idea. It is wrong to dismiss something like road development as obviously gender-neutral, just because you don’t have the training to see that that there are gender implications. The role of a gender specialist is to show that such dismisal is wrong, and could lead to policy decisions that aren’t as beneficial as they could be if dollars were spent more wisely.

Finally, it isn’t just about “ooh, let’s take it upon ourselves to do something for those poor village women, because we have figured out what they need.”

Nope. It’s about helping the women speak for themselves. Consider the representatives on a local government coucil who are charged with deciding whether to spend money on road maintenance or a new town hall or fixing the airport or raising civil servants’ salaries or building schools. Males and females might bring different perspectives to the table on what to prioritize. So it make sense to promote equal representation. That leads to questions of, “and how do we do that?”

Exploring issues like the ones I described above, and coming up with culturally sensitive strategies for ensuring that all voices are heard … that’s one thing you can do with a degree in gender studies.

22

The same jobs as with most other Liberal Arts degrees. General office work is common.

People overrate the importance of matching a major with a future career. The overwhelming majority of folk end up working at something unrelated to their degree.

Just being generally educated is a good thing.

23

This.

The purpose of college is not to make you eligible for a profession. I know that’s what many people view it as, but it’s not. The purpose of college is pure education; the fact that professions may seek college-educated people is an ancillary bonus.

24

This.

Also, historically liberal arts and “the humanities” have always been aimed at students who didn’t technically need money or a job but could do with broadening their horizons. The “uselessness” of the humanities in a work setting was seen as a plus to implicitly weed out the poor and the lower bourgeois classes. I should know : I’ve got a degree in History and am working on a further one. No *subject *matter I’ve worked on so far has been of any practical use whatsoever outside of boring previously perfectly happy party-goers with useless knowledge.

I however like to think the skills I’ve sharpened to tackle those prodigiously useless subjects are rare enough, all things considered. Teaching oneself to see through the bullshit, distortions and outright bald-faced lies of historians across the ages does wonders to teach people to see through contemporary bullshit, distortions and outright bald-faced lies for one thing :smiley:

25

I know this is true even for those with highly focused technical degrees. And I like to point out that if one graduates high school at 18 and spends four years earning an undergraduate degree, one’s working life might start at 22 years old. If one retires at 67 years old (not atypical), that’s a working life of 45 years. Few people can be doing the same thing over that period. Professions change, some even are made obsolete or created from scratch over that time. So one has to reinvent one’s self, perhaps multiple times over that period.

26

Writing long tirades on Twitter why men are trash. Living off Daddy’s money.

Serious time. Anecdotally, I know one womyn(;)) who took Gender studies in University. She found job with an NGO, which a couple of years later led to a Government job working with underprivileged rural women. Which led to a job in in the outreach office of a large telecom cooperation. Which led to her current job heading up the corporate social responsibility office for the whole region.
Reports directly to the board. Large office and staff. Big salary. Bonuses. Company car. Gets the damn corporate jet at times or flys first class.

If you are smart you can party your degree into a good job. But your degree is the first step. Not the last.

27

Ah, the curse of knowledge. That was the theme of our commencement speaker’s rant as we were granulating from our small liberal arts college. Great. You can all now see more clearly. Question is, “Do you really want to?”

Intentional? :smiley:

28

I think this attitude is as dangerous as “major in somethong practical”. Schools do many things, one of which is career prep. That’s why they have career services departments. And students need to be proactive about their future . . .Not just so they can support themselves, but so they can find meaningful work. That doesn’t just happen.

The person that throws themselves into intensive gender studies or whatever without any thought to what is coming after graduation is being foolish. That’s the person who enda up on the news complaining that the have a degree and no job.

29

No. A typo.Intended “parley” . :smiley:

30

For the most part, it’s a liberal arts degree - I’m expecting people with that major to come out being able to research, inspect, analyze, discuss, and dissect an issue and then communicate that information. It’s one of the degrees that teaches you how to learn - which is incredibly valuable (if you’ve ever been in an office with people who can’t do that.) College isn’t just supposed to be merely about picking up the tasks of
a trade, it’s supposed to be about preparing your mind for the future.

Cutting much of CairoCarol’s excellent post - I just heard a podcast on this yesterday. It’s a problem that Gender Studies majors may be more likely to solve.

31

chomps into green apple Semantics are more what you’d call guidelines than actual “rules”.

32

Might be really bad for one’s liver, though.

33

If you really want to challenge “the patriarchy”, then major in engineering. One of the ways that “the patriarchy” manifests itself is by men ending up in all of the high-paying jobs. Engineering is one of the higher-paying jobs, and it overwhelmingly skews male.

Or, if you really are interested in the sort of subjects covered in gender studies (no matter the reason, for getting a job or just for personal enrichment), then major in sociology. Not only does that cover the same issues, but it puts them into a larger context, and lets you see (for instance) how oppression of women is similar to and different from oppression of other minorities.

Gender studies as its own major exists solely for the purpose of ghettoizing women, isolating them off in their own community to keep them away from the “real” majors. And what’s especially insidious about it is that it’s done mostly by the very people it’s oppressing.

As for “majoring in liberal arts”, there are two different things one might be talking about with those words. On the one hand, there are majors in the liberal arts program: One might be majoring in history, for example, or English, or the above-mentioned sociology. Those can all be worthwhile and valuable. On the other hand, though, a lot of colleges have a major that, itself, is just called “liberal arts” (or sometimes “general studies”). Those are basically just extended high school, aren’t useful for anything, and are mostly populated by students who have dropped out of other more difficult programs (possibly including the specific liberal arts fields).

34

That’s covered in Bitter Cynicism, first year mandatory course :).
(more seriously though, I was quite amused by and then greatly enjoyed the fact that quite a few of our TAs and even chair teachers are regulars of the same anar/punk bar one of my mates tends bar, near the Père Lachaise. Great place to go for spirited socio-eco-political debate and/or random fistfights with passing skinheads)

35

(I guarantee you haven’t had your positions seriously questioned until a respectable anthropology professor calls your arguments “both epistemologically and historiographically arsefucked” before buying the next round)

36

s.

One, the gender studies majors I have known have not been looking to “stick it to the patriarchy”. And they haven’t been interested in engineering. They have often been interested in law school or a good B-school, jobs that pay at least as well as engineering, and often more.

Second, that’s not how college works. Probably 75% of the classes in a “gender studies” major are going to overlap with other courses in social science, and you’ll be in those classes with students from all sorts of majors. In fact, a lot of gender studies degrees are actually something like “Sociology: concentration, Gender Studies”. It means that within a sociology degree, you chose courses with a focus on gender issues (which are not always about women’s issues) and if you did a capstone/thesis type thing, it was in a gender studies topic. No one is getting “ghetto-ized” or shoved in a bubble.

37

I find it rather ironic that critical thinking seems to be missing in Liberal Students.

For example…the Male/Female Wage Gap.

If I was a business owner…and part of the Patriarchy…and wanted to minimize Payroll Expenses, wouldn’t I fire all my overpaid Male employees and hire all Women at a discount?
That kind of logic seems to escape liberals students today.

38

If there were all those women available to be hired, sure.

39

If I were a hiring manager, and part of the Dominant Group (of whatever sort), then it’s very much in my interests to hire people who are as like me as possible. That way, I can foster an atmosphere which encourages Dominant Group people to get hired. And when I’m going for my next job…

Anyway, all other things being equal, I’d like to work with people who are Like Me. All I need to do is tell the person who pays the wages that this was the best person, and totally worth it.

Doesn’t just work for gender

40

You guys still have tribes? The ones Mano Negra sang to in Tribus de Barcelona, people who dress distinctively and officially listen to specific music while quite often listening to Those Other Guys’ Music where nobody else will notice, or even going to concerts by Those Other Guys’ and not to look for a fight but, you know, to watch the concert.

In Spain they’ve mostly disappeared. Sometimes I look at a bunch of people passing by, one group listening to lolailo (think Kendji), another to rap, another to the top 40… and they all look like they went to the same prep school. It’s better than going to a concert wearing your only clean clothes (therefore, out of uniform with the rest of the public) and people refusing to talk to you, but it’s also visually boring.