I'm hard pressed to consider 20-50 year old American women as having been culturally oppressed

I think you’re reading the article differently than me, which is fair enough since I’m also reading my own experiences into it! I don’t see the author claiming that women being “told to be polite and self-deprecating” as necessarily coming from misogynistic teachers who explicitly told them that. It can just as easily come from other women, and I believe it’s largely unconscious on the part of most men and women.

And you agree that women tend to work together in a different way than men, though I’m not willing to put it all down to nature - I think that the difference is reinforced and deepened throughout our education. But the problem is that the system is often based on the male model. Sure, girls do better in elementary school, where cooperative work is key. (I’m also fully in support of finding ways to make schools more boy-friendly.) But in an upper-level high school or university setting, women can try to have discussions, but they’re often drowned out by the man who plays devil’s advocate for the fun of it, and reinforced by the teacher who gives points to the person who talks the most (rather than contributing the most) and praises the men’s passion. (I’ve been a TA in university discussion groups and I also admit that the debate model is easier to work with - set up arbitrarily opposing sides, lean back in your chair and let them go at it.)

Which doesn’t mean that it’s not still heartily (again, if insidiously) encouraged by nurture, inasmuch as “nurture” includes “learning through socialization”.

We’ve certainly made huge strides in treating men and women as equals, but (and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before) I’ll believe that we’ve gotten there the first time I see a woman get through a political race without being called “shrill”.

Which leads to an interesting conundrum. As the education gap widens between women and men, and women become the more educated, and therefore more successful, gender, what happens to relationships? People, especially women, don’t want to “marry down” and therefore they seek out people at or above their socioeconomic status. Well, pretty soon there’s going to be some pretty fierce competition among women who don’t want to settle for some man who is beneath them. It’s been socially acceptable for a man to court a woman with lower education levels and less earning power, but this is not true if genders reverse. A career woman with a master’s degree doesn’t typically date the guy from the warehouse.

I’ve heard some analysis about how we’re seeing a preview of this among the black community. As the women rise to having careers and educations, they reject their suitors who dropped out of high school and end up as blue collar labor. Dating for a career minded and serious black woman consists of either chasing a very small number of her socioecnomic equals of her own race, or dating white guys.

I’m not sure what this will look like when it hits the majority, white, population, but it will require some serious re-consideration of gender and socioeconomic roles.

Enjoy,
Steven

The future is here.

My mother was never allowed to wear pants to school except during winter when they were allowed to wear pants under their skirts and took the pants of before homeroom. The female PE teacher at my HS told me that when she first started teaching she was not allowed to set foot outside the gym unless she changed into a skirt or dress. Ditto for her students.

When my mother got pregnant with my older brother at 16 (in 1971) she was expelled. No pregnancy school, no home tutoring, no attempt of any kind to let her further her education. Her prinipal actually told her that anymore school would be a pointless now and how lucky she was that the father (under great pressure from her father) agreed to marry her and she wasn’t being sent away. The same school had teachers bend over backwards to make sure her new husband stayed in school because it was soo important the he get an education. The marriage didn’t last (he was an abusive drunk).

Heh. I’m looking at that cartoon right now. I posted it on the wall above my screen so that I don’t spend 25 hours a day arguing with the internets.

I wouldn’t disagree that nature has some part in male and female styles of interaction, but I don’t think anyone can say it’s definitively *more *nature than nurture. And I’ve never really bought the “confrontation vs. cooperation” dichotomy - “winning” the argument vs. “can’t we all just get along?” - or at least, I don’t think it’s about that, as such. I think it’s more that - *very *generally speaking - men are more willing to consider themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to speak about something and are more confident in holding their ground, while women are more ready to consider that they may be wrong or may not have all the facts. And as others mentioned, the former attitude is far more effective in a debate setting than the latter.

Personally, in any interaction, I defer to whoever is objectively correct, or if there is no one correct answer, whoever has the most well-reasoned argument. I would never start spouting off about something unless I’m absolutely sure that I have my facts straight. If someone presents me with evidence or ideas counter to mine, I want to trust that they have done so in good faith and believing these things to be true, and unless what they’ve said is clearly horsepucky, I’ll table the discussion until I can investigate it to find out whether I’m wrong. If I’m guessing, estimating, theorizing, or speaking from personal experience, I will generally qualify my statements as such (as featured here). And I do seek consensus, primarily because I have this pesky naive faith that if my logic is solid, it will convince 100% of the people 100% of the time, and so if someone disagrees with me, it must be that they either don’t understand or there is a flaw in my logic. Hence the arguing with the internets.

I have encountered many people who do not adhere to these principles as strictly as I do, and the majority, though certainly not all, of them have been men. If such a person says “It is the case that X”, and I say, “But then how can you account for Y?”, they are likely to say, “Well, *I’ve *never heard of Y” or “Clearly, you must have a dubious source for your evidence of Y”, whereas if the roles were reversed, I would either say, “Y doesn’t refute X because…” or “Huh, well, if Y is true, then it must be that not X. I’ll have to look into that.”

The OP is covering a wide swath of society.

I’d say girls and women have overcome enormous inequalities in education, to the point that educators are concerned about boys being left behind in terms of college graduation rates now.

If you get beyond that, you’re looking at subcultural and regional differences that are going to be a big deal. There is no one statement that can be made.

I was educated primarily in the public primary and secondary schools of the middle class Maryland suburbs. There was never a time that girls weren’t allowed to take shop if they wished to, or to wear pants if they wished to in elementary, Jr High or High School. I took typing and child care in high school in the early 70’s and no one batted an eye.

My buddy in Texas went shopping for a car with his Chinese-American wife and his white parents. The salesman shook 3 (three) hands. She was so upset they refused to buy anything there. The next salesman said, “Yeah, we get a lot of business from their doing things like that.” I suspect it was both racism and sexism.

Well, woman in her mid-40’s speaking up here.

I think sexism against women has gotten better over time, but it’s not completely gone.

As an example: I wanted to take shop when I was in 7th grade. As, at the time, with my mother being seriously ill to the point of being incapacitated for better than a year and I was doing the menu planning, shopping lists, and most of the cooking for the family a home ec class seemed supremely stupid to me. I wanted shop because it was different. This was unprecedented. We had to go to the school board to get me permission to take shop class! It was still controversial at the time I did it. Funny though - within 10 years shop was required for all girls. And home ec for all boys. Actually, everyone had to take both, which was arguably much more fair and better preparation for the world than the prior circumstances. So there’s a case where sexism eased for both genders. Things have changed.

From later on in life - I earned a pilot’s license. Now, frequently, when encountering the general public in airports the average layperson nearly always assumed any male companion with me was the pilot and I was girlfriend/wife/hanger on. That’s sexism. On the other hand, actual aviation people from the receptionist at a terminal to the line personnel to other pilots seemed very non-biased towards whatever collection of people climbed out of an airplane without regard to age, gender, race, or whatever. Yes, there are exceptions, but I’m saying 90% of the time aviation people were unbiased in their behavior despite aviation still being 80% male in this day and age. The general public… not so much, still displaying bias that I believe is based largely on fictional stereotypes and ignorance. Oddly enough, I have encountered the “you can’t possibly be a pilot” meme more often from women than men, and occasionally outright hostility, as if they are threatened by my having a pilot’s license.

Car salesmen and real estate agents. Yes, I am lumping them together. I have most certainly encountered jerks who refused to look me in the eye, shake my hand, or answer my questions directly, including one who, when told point blank by my husband “You better answer here questions and speak with her, she’s the one with money” still would not speak to me. Again, though, this is improving. The last two times I purchased vehicles I got a definite sense the salepeople where eager to address the concerns of both members of the couple equally. No one batted an eyelash when I declared I wanted to look under the hood while the husband was the one concerned about colors and interior surfaces - the opposite of stereotype. I now have confidence this will be the ordinary experience going forward, though if an unreconstructed troglodyte male chauvinistic pig (who could be female) appears I wouldn’t be totally shocked, either. They are out there.

I currently work with a general contractor painting houses and doing various sorts of landscape maintenance and light repair work. My appearance as such does strike some people as unexpected and unusual. This, to me, is not entirely strange - men do have an advantage in brute physical strength in this line of work. I’m not sure the average woman of my age is physically capable of doing what I do - quite a few men my age aren’t, either. Some people are dubious about my ability to do the job, though I usually win them over by actually doing it, resolving their doubts. Some fellow laborers do regard me with hostility, possibly because they think I might have some unearned advantage (i.e. get lighter work due to less physical strength) or I’m taking a job away from a man (yes, I have heard that expressed explicitly). It is an area of work that is still very heavily male dominated and probably will continue to be so. I expect men who are nursery school and elementary school teachers face some of the same (although no one worries about me molesting ladders, cans of paint, or drywall, unlike teachers who do have to worry about accusations).

In some cases, the bias seems to be more towards being a minority in an area rather than female per se - black pilots, for example, also experience occasional episodes of bias. Some of this is outright bigotry, some of it is not meeting the expected image of something

I could give more examples, but this post is long enough. In sum, while sexism has definitely diminished it is by no means absent from society. I don’t think it is severe enough to cripple an ambitious girl/woman, but it is pervasive enough to affect their decisions about what they do with their lives, what careers they may consider, and to be an annoyance in life. Not every woman is an assertive, outspoken tomboy such as myself. The bias that still exists does exert a subtle influence on woman even if it is not the major determinant it used to be.

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

I’m 23 and I experienced more sexism as a high school debater than I ever have any other time in life. I’d regularly get ballots back that said things like, “Why would a pretty girl like you want to waste your time arguing about silly things like philosophy?” or “Your arguing wasn’t very ladylike, so I vote for the otherside” or “You are BEAUTIFUL, but he just looked more professional.”

Now that I’m a high school debate coach, I see the same things being said to my female students.

Why?

Which state do you live in?

California. I’m from Bakersfield and teach here and while I certainly see a great deal of the idiocy I mention here in town, I see it almost as much at invitationals in Los Angeles and Northern California (including Berkeley. Seriously, one of my kids got a ballot like that AT BERKELEY! :eek:)

Late 20’s, grew up in California.

I’ve experienced plenty of sexism. It’s subtle. People usually don’t go right out and say it. But it’s there and it affects things.

For example, I was a film major. Film is still a massively male field (and a quick look at the content of movies will confirm that.) In my classes, we’d have five women for twenty men. What was odd was that everyone kept trying to call me a documentary maker. Instantly, when I said I was a film major, they’d start talking about documentaries. Well, I hate documentaries. I think people should tell their own stories.

So I was pretty surprised when I walked in my documentary film production class and saw a room filled with women. In my mind, I can’t help but think women are being pigeonholed. We are somehow convinced that our own story isn’t what should be told, and that we should focus on telling other people’s stories.

The same for Peace Corps volunteers. Women outnumber men signifigantly in Peace Corps. Why? When a daughter walks up to her family and says “I want to backpack around the world,” they get told “Oh no you aren’t! Too dangerous!” When a man wants to, his family is much more likely to be supportive. So women who want to travel and live extensively in far-flung places are more likely to get support if they are part of an organization. Men get to just go out and do it.

I’m 25, and yes.

**We can’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. ** Like, ever. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” That phrase is a big honking neon sign surrounded by somersaulting flamingos that we have issues with cultural oppression!

Anyways:
[ul]
[li] There was the guy at work that insisted on calling me “baby”, “honey”, and “pumpkin.” Any information I tried to give this man, any contact with him whatsoever, was always interpreted as wrong, inaccurate or onerous. I later found out (a) I was his favorite Office Peon there, and (b) this guy had tried to put out a contract hit on his ex-wife.[/li][li] When I worked in the Admissions Office of my all-female alma mater, I heard one mother tell the counselor that she simply couldn’t let her daughter attend our school, because How else can she find a husband?[/li][li] More mechanics, computer repair-men, or male customer service reps than I can count. (It’s gotten to the point where I once hauled my car in, got an inflated estimate, and then called my father in front of the mechanic on speakerphone and asked for a ballpark figure. Then I told the Chauvinist Ass that his price was exorbitant, and left. This tactic wasn’t necessary mind you, but entirely satisfying.) [/li][li] At school, no, not so much. I remember one incident in 5th grade, but nothing soul-crushing. In terms of education in general, I had it pretty good. I did very well all through high school and was told by my parents to do whatever I wanted, be whatever I wanted to be, and they would foot the bill for whatever college I chose. My parents are not wealthy. [/li][/ul]

I went to an all-women’s college. I don’t have problems speaking up for myself anymore.

Anyways, this being Great Debates and all, how about some cites?

“Many girls in single sex schools reported higher self-esteem, more interest in nontraditional subjects like science and math, and were less likely to pursue stereotypical jobs and careers.” That’s on page 253. Rather a round-about way of saying traditional education coerces women in a certain direction.

This article claims that advertising objectifies and possibly contributes to violence against women. (page 318) Advertising in our culture is ubiquitous, and one of the best mirrors of our gendered attitudes.

I’m 32. I must admit that on the bright side it’s true that women get more opportunities sometimes – for example, when I was in college as a woman science major, as they were trying desperately to keep women in the major, the department admin bent over backwards to make sure we were happy (special dinners, that sort of thing). And in high school as well as grad school I never had any problems at all.

On the other hand, I did have at least one class in college where the women were – how did the OP put it – “ignored or treated dismissively when the teacher asked for answers.” It was a lab class, and my lab partner was male, and his life was very busy that semester and so a lot of times he’d come into lab and often have very little idea of what we were doing. For this reason, whenever we talked to the professor I would do most of the talking. The professor would never look at me while I was talking, ignored me as much as possible given that I was trying to directly interact with him, and would direct any of his questions and comments to my lab partner. I thought I was going crazy (was I imagining this?) until I talked to some other people and found they’d had similar experiences. (I’m not sure any of the guys noticed until it was pointed out to them. I don’t think my lab partner did, even though he was right there when all these incidents occurred, until I pointed it out.)

And let’s not even get into the way that the women professors in the department were, um, marginalized, which was much worse but didn’t occur to me until much, much later. (Indeed, I was complicit in this. I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, Professor X, she’s the crazy one.” Even though, now that I think about it, there were lots of male professors who were pretty obviously rather weirder.) I hear via a friend of mine who is now in the department there that it still happens. So, yeah, it’s there, and it can be fairly subtle.

In my experience, even if I am dining with a male who looks about 12, or I talk to the server ahead of time, the guy will be given the check. I used to occasionally take a very youthful looking 15 year old college friend out to eat, and the wait staff would invariably give him the check. The price of the meal for him was that he would have to ask the wait person to give me the check. I was in my mid twenties at the time, and looked old enough that some people mistook me for his mother.

Also despite the fact that he was short, and skinny, and looked younger than his years, I did not get catcalls etc. when I was with him. Alone, or with another female, I would.

Sexism is less than it was. I’m under 35, barely, but I know that I was not permitted to take automotive science in high school, and my friend who was male was kept from the cosmetology apprentice track. My sister is 28, and had a lot of trouble in her master’s program because she was “just going to get married anyway.” It’s less, but it’s there.