This is great, for the girls who were educated in your school district/state. I wasn’t. As I said, Home Ec was considered to be a sophomore science class for the girls in one state, but not another. And girls weren’t allowed to take shop in one state, but they were in another. Your experiences weren’t universal. Neither were mine.
I love the movie “Grease”, but I’ve always thought that it really took me out of the setting when the high school principal, vice principal, and auto shop teacher were all women. There MIGHT have been a female vice principal, but back in those days women Were Not allowed to be the head of any organization. A female vice principal would have been Vice Principal or Dean of Girls, and there would be a Vice Principal or Dean of Boys. If there was one vice principal, it was almost certainly a man filling that job. The female staff in schools were either teachers or clerks, and almost never anything higher. And of course no teenage boy would have admitted that ANY woman could teach him ANYTHING about cars.
This is the only way that sexism will survive in the 21st century. In stories so outrageous they sound made up. But very shortly, these old coots (and they are individuals, a fact constantly missed in discussions like this) will retire, or die off, and a thread like this will feel like a strange anachronism like worrying about “those women drivers”.
About those checks in restaurants - while I have certainly had the experience of the waitstaff defaulting to the man pays the bill, I have to say that my usual experience is the check being placed on the table between the parties… I have to wonder at the difference between my experience and those of others. It’s not like my location, northwest Indiana, is a bastion of enlightenment, it’s pretty conservative in a lot of ways. Most curious.
I’m an overbearing socially aggressive male, living in the second most egalitarian country in the world (Norway is number one as it turns out), I play baseball and watch porn, and even I think women are culturally oppressed. I see evidence of it all around me all the time. A few recent examples:
A friend of mine is a construction engineer whos job it is to inspect structures before and after blasting. Every time this engineer shows up at a new site eybrows are raised and people are perplexed. Because she’s a cute strawberry blond girl.
At a festival two weeks ago I was hosting a baseball batting cage, encouraging people to try a few swings. One girls tried and did well, but her friend didn’t want to try. So I said “Well at least we know who the brave one of you two is”. No reaction. Then I realised that things like bravery, skill, strength and fortitude are attributes only encouraged in males. We don’t train our females to be brave and assertive.
Everytime my girlfriend brings food with her to her job her co-workers are cooing about it, because I cooked it for her. Now she can’t cook, but if she couldm and did, and I brought it to work, nobody would react.
There is a norm and it is male, white and heterosexual. And cultural oppression doesn’t start or end at school. A friend of mine got upset when she went to pick up her daughter at daycare, her daughter and the other girls where helping set the tables for dinner while they boys where playing. Sure a “tomboy” is OK to certain extents, and kind of “sexy”. But how about a boy in pink clothes playing with dolls, is that acceptable? If not, why?
And every study that shows that boys in classes get about 70% of the teachers attention, even though the teachers think they divide it equally? Or men getting paid more for doing the same job as a woman?
I see all these injustices in Sweden, the second most egalitarian country in the world, are you seriously going to claim that a culturally traditionalist country like the US has achieved gender equality?
I’m 32…my calculus teacher in high school started every day of class with three jokes, all anti-women (what do you say to a woman with two black eyes, that sort of thing). I worked for the B in that class
Other than that, and men talking over me, there aren’t very many things I can really point to. My weightlifting teacher was really cool with the girls in his class, and so were my drafting teacher and shop teachers. In fact, my shop teacher took me aside one day and told me that I had an eye for mechanical drafting and I really should persue it. My male teachers have been encouraging – and so have my female ones.
As far as work is concerned, I have been picking up jobs as a legal secretary, and medical secretary, and those fields seem to have become selectively segregated. I don’t think I’ve met more than one man as a secretary. But, as I’ve also heard, secretaries are beginning to be a dying breed, and I wonder if the reason is that they are seen as old-fashioned in that segregated respect.
Secretarial work is often called “administrative assistant” or “office manager”. More males are functioning in administrative assistant and office manager positions, but it’s still a female-dominated title.
Except sometimes those old coots are twenty. I used to judge high school speech - and I’d see the same thing in Discussion or Informative Speaking (male dominated speech categories) - from judges who were younger than I was - in their 20s. “A cute girl like you needs to be more moderate.” Any of the public address categories had a some of that - and not surprisingly - a lot of Debate coaches doing the judging.
There’s a new book out, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Her thesis is that those differences between the genders that we assume are inborn (girls liking dolls and being more sociable; boys liking trucks and being more competitive) are actually the result of how we treat infants based on their gender. Here’s a short Newsweek article on it.
I’ve felt slighted before because of my sex (and race) at school and the workplace, but for me it’s more often that sexism raises its ugly head in the social arena.
A guy, who tried to date me, told me it was hard being around me because I looked him in the eye when I spoke to him. And I’d ask him informed questions and actually listen to his answers, instead just vacanting nodding my head and saying “oh, that’s nice” at the expected moments. This habit apparently made him uneasy because it meant he couldn’t BS his way through conversations; he couldn’t count on me being some dumb, easily impressed chick. It bothered him that I wasn’t falling out of my chair in awe just because he had PhD after his name; I treated him like an equal instead of a lord. He didn’t know what to do with a woman who didn’t need him to solve the most simplest of problems for her. He seriously considered it “wrong” for men to cook and women to do things like take out of the trash, and he lectured me when I told him I sometimes liked to go out by myself at night. And when I had the audacity to not change my personal appearance to accomodate his preferences (which he expressed in the form of a command…apparently asking things nicely is something only girly men do), he was truly perplexed. It was like he couldn’t understand why a woman (I mean, a girl, my bad) wouldn’t obey a man. I tried to explain it to him in very basic terms and he refused to get it.
Now I won’t even have him as my Facebook friend. He makes my blood pressure shoot up to dangerous levels. Oh yeah, he’s only 36.
It’s not as black and white as “men make more than women.” Female-dominated careers tend to be paid less than equivalent male-dominated careers. Average salaries for men overall tend to be higher as a result. Are women “pushed” into these careers, or do they choose them because they offer more flexibility in dealing with personal life? Not sure. Women lose seniority and/or have to choose less competitive careers because they are expected to be the primary caregiver for children and elderly parents. It may not be preventable, but a function of biology in many cases. My husband could take parental leave instead of me, but he can’t breastfeed, so it’s not as useful as if I take the leave, and the hit to my career, if there is one.
If you control for these things, then the differential tends to go away, but… all these factors do exist for women, but not for men, or not as much. Just wanted to throw that in there, to complicate the discussion a bit.
This reminded me that the most pervasive sexism I’ve seen at the office is mostly about parenting. When a man takes time off to pick his kids up at daycare, or catch a soccer game, everyone goes on and on about what a wonderful parent he is. When a woman does the same, there’s always someone grumbling about how she needs to take this job more seriously.
Outside the office, I’d also say that there’s still a pretty common attitude that a father watching his own kids by himself is “babysitting”. When a woman does it, it’s her job, when a man does it, it’s a favor. :rolleyes:
And this reminded me that the most overt sexism I’ve seen in the office is that women who were hired as admins had a hell of a time getting promoted, no matter how good they were, while men who were hired as admins were routinely promoted at the end of their qualifying year, no matter how much they sucked. I wish I could remember who it was that originally said “the problem for women in the workplace isn’t the glass ceiling, it’s the sticky floor.”
A guy once told me I was intimidating because my vocabulary was broader.
Some of the most sexist people I’ve met were my age. The culture of young men is so hyper-masculine: they can’t do anything perceived as “gay” or weak. Ever seen a group of youngish guys at the movies? They sit with a seat between them!
As someone who is neck deep in a female-dominated profession (libraries), this is actually readily explained. Women like being librarians. No one pushed them into it, it is always something they decide to do (although usually after realizing that nice History or English degree they have is useless).
But once they’re in the profession, they quickly lose all interest in advancement. Women just don’t go for the managerial positions that pay more. While this is considered a problem among those in the profession, there’s quite a large contingent of people (mostly women, because 75-90% of librarians are women) who have decided you just can’t change the way people are.
It kind of amazes me that people are so quick to dismiss the “women aren’t as interested in high-paying jobs as men” explanation for the “wage gap”.
I imagine that’s a function of performing the bulk of child-rearing and housework, and not wanting any more stress that could be to the detriment of their kids.
I’m also neck-deep in a female dominated profession (teaching) that has a disproportionate number of men in the upper echelons of administration. I don’t think you can just write it off with “women aren’t interested in advancement.” In order to advance, you have to get another Masters degree while still working your day job, which takes time out from family. Then, you have to get tenure again, and put in many extra hours. If, despite the fact that you are working too, as a woman you still are responsible for the bulk of the housework and child care, it’s really hard to then also take on the additional commitments it would take to become an assistant principal, and eventually principal. All the women I know in those positions either are not married/have no kids, or have grown kids. The men? Not true of them at all.
While that may be true for teaching, that’s not how it works in the library world. There are no separate tracks for regular old librarians and administrators. If you want to be an administrator, the only qualification beyond being a librarian is applying for the job. And women, by and large, don’t put their name for consideration for the top spots.
And even my (female) library school professors can’t offer up any more explanation than “women just don’t want to deal with admin stuff.”
The same principle still applies. A woman with kids and chores at home doesn’t want extra stress at her job. Even if all she has to do is apply, like you say: it’s more to worry about, and most women just don’t want the added hassle.
I get really tired of seeing the same pattern in these threads. A few, mostly younger men, saying, “I’ve never seen this happen, therefore, I doubt it exists.”
