Why do men “want the hassle”? Maybe because they don’t have as many obligations outside the workplace, even though they may also be married and have kids. Is this is “cultural oppression”? Or what is it? Do you really think that women just don’t want to make more money or have more responsibility and status at their jobs? That doesn’t really make sense.
Sure it does. Why do women do most of the housework? Because our culture expects it, encourages it, exacts it.
Our culture trains women to take on more child-rearing and housework than men do. Ergo, they feel more stress and exhibit less desire to advance in the workplace:“…a study in February by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Harvard University argued that women who did MBAs benefited less from the experience than many men, largely because of the effect on their careers of career breaks or time out to raise a family. [snip] Women, it argued, simply often had different priorities in life and were not prepared to make the sacrifices and give the pound of flesh needed to make it to the boardroom.”
If one woman was making that decision, that’s an individual choice. When an entire generation does, that’s a reflection of our society.
In your own words, don’t you wonder why so many women made the same decision to value the same priority, and “can’t change”?
And I get really tired of a bunch of women going on ad nauseum about how today is just like the 50s and women routinely get told to shut up all the time.
It’s not like that in every school/job/whatever
AND
Sexism is practically a thing of the past, especially when you limit it to instiutional sexism. The same with racism and prejudice against gay people.
Excluded middle? I don’t think anyone is saying it’s “just like the 50s.” In fact, I’m positive no one is saying that, except for people misrepresenting the argument of those who disagree with them. We are saying that sexism hasn’t been entirely eliminated. It still exists. I’m not sure if I’d use the words “culturally oppressed” to describe the situation, since it’s certainly not as dire as it was when my mother was in the workforce, but it’s still an issue.
I’m not sure I’d go that far… I see plenty of racism, sexism, and homophobia playing out all the time. It’s not officially sanctioned by the institution where it’s happening (the public school), but people, even very young ones, still hold those attitudes dearly, and must be getting them from someplace.
This is why this thread should have stayed in IMHO: lots of anecdotes, little facts.
I agree.
CITE?
You want me to provide a cite that institutional sexism/racism/homophobia was more common 30 years ago (going by the OP’s specified time frame) than today? For real? :rolleyes:
I think I just got whiplash.
[A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted," said Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.
Women also tend to drop out of scientific fields – especially math and physical sciences – at higher rates than do men, particularly as they advance, because of their need for greater flexibility and the demands of parenting and caregiving, said co-author Wendy M. Williams, Cornell professor of human development.
“These are choices that all women, but almost no men, are forced to make,” she said.](http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March09/women.mathscience.sl.html)
There’s also an interesting study I’ve heard about from Claude Steele (Social Psychology Professor at Stanford University), who investigated how stereotypes (i.e. cultural pressure) can shape the intellectual identities and performance of women (and African-Americans).
College students were asked to perform a standardised math test, and were told that it would measure cognitive differences between the genders. The results showed women performed significantly worse than men.
However, when Steele gave a separate group of students the same test but stressed that it was not a measure of intelligence, the scores of the students were virtually identical. The achievement gap had largely been closed. According to Steele, the disparity in test scores was caused by an effect that he calls “stereotype threat”.
A further study (different researchers) extended this idea to entrepreneurship, which suggested that stereotype threat can depress women’s entrepreneurial intentions, and boost men’s intentions.
(A similar setup suggested an ‘innate intellectual ability’ stereotype for African-American students as well).
This is Great Debates. The forum in which we make assertions, and then provide evidence for them. It is not unreasonable to ask you to provide evidence backing up your claims.
I think defining ‘practically a thing of the past’ might help. It’s a bit broad.
Can you provide a link to such a study? One that’s less than, say, ten years old?
I think feminist movements are just as much part of society as any other and have been just as much affected by the massive swing to right that started with Reagan and never really went away. They don’t all agree with each other - in fact like most agit-groups they often spend more effort fighting each other over trivia than about their perceived common enemy.
Their outlook is essentially a conservative one that what is traditional to men and business is superior to what is traditional to women and the home. So in some respects they have been positively anti-women. They are more concerned about abortion so that women can devote themselves full-time to ‘work’ like men than they have been about child-care, more concerned about getting women out of ‘the home’ than men into it, and especially picked up some nasty traditional views about sexual women giving themselves for men to use than asserting their freedom to be sexual as equals with men.
In that respect they have often been reactionary by giving the impression that sexual relations are a one-way power trip by and for men and even if women think different that is because they are stupid enough to be indoctrinated by the Patriarchy. Underneath a lot of the rhetoric is the same arrogance that often mars liberal causes (and comes straight from a certain kind of man) - We know what’s right for you and if you disagree that’s because you are a silly little thing who doesn’t understand the real world
‘Equality’ always means women moving into traditional men’s roles without question whether those roles are so much better, without question whether they are so desirable for men, without question whether women have anything to offer men of equal value in their own right. One reason men have had those roles is because women wanted to raise children. Women mostly still want to do that but because they’ve been simply put into an economic system that largely ignored them, they are now faced with having to adapt themselves to suit as well as trying to live a broader life than being mere economic units.
The system has not changed to suit women, it has not changed to expect men to play a greater part in home life (though that has happened to some extent) so that women can do more. The ideal would have been that as women swell the workforce, so by rule of supply and demand, the work demand on men should have fallen. Instead work and expense have increased to make full-time for both pretty much obligatory.
‘Equality’ for me always meant the other way round: reducing the working week, men expected to play an equal part in the home with women, and all the little personal freedoms of dress and polite treatment that women have traditionally taken for granted extended to men too. The question should not be why there are so few women in the boardroom; it should be that if women do not want to be there should men be encouraged to be? In other words, does the whole corporate establishment really serve the people or is it a demi-god that the people have to serve and sacrifice most of their life to? Somebody elsewhere was talking about corporations as individuals. The kind of individual they seem most like are ancient gods - and not particularly benign ones either!
So I think the whole effort was subverted to remove the really radical changes that Women’s Liberation threatened to the corporate structure and instead changed to the women to fit. Those women too extreme to fit were highlighted in their Lesbian communes (like this: My sexual revolution | Women | The Guardian ) to discredit the rest, because that is simply not a viable way to tun a civilisation of two equal sexes and nearly all women want nothing to do with it. They might as well have called for them to enter a nunnery.
It also shows something that is often overlooked in remarks about Feminazis, that most of the extremists are actually terrified of men they have built up into ludicrously dominant rapist figures stalking the land (and women) while at the same time showing every sign of envy that these fantasies are free to do as they like while poor little women are not. Then again, the truth about real Nazism and Fascism was far more absolute terror of ‘International Conspiracies’ - just like ‘The Patriarchy’ - than it was of all the swaggering militarism to try and convince themselves.
We need a New Feminism, one that would liberate men from traditional roles instead of forcing women into them. Traditional Socialism stopped with the Working Man at the factory gate. If anything the Communist countries and still a lot of Socialists have been even more impatient of personal life and commitments than Capitalists. “The personal life is dead” declares the terrifying Pasha in Dr.Zhivago. The neo-feminism that we need is not ‘socialism’ of that sort, it is valuing the personal life first and making the economic system accountable to it. Women may not be able to do a lot individually about maternity and paternity leave but they can do a lot (or more likely girls can) to change males simply according to whether they call the boy who washes up and talks to them ‘gay’ and run after the one with time for them only to fetch his beer and come to bed - or not.
I’ve also seen mention of a 2000 study conducted by the American Association of University Women revealed that teachers tend to focus more attention on boys, directing more encouragement to them, while girls are often overlooked in class. Their website is not loading though, so I haven’t been able to read the summary of their research.
I think that’s all true. So it comes down to different expectations and choices, but not an attempt to pay women less out of some oppressive nature overall as a society.
The other thing is that most women don’t judge themselves on their occupational achievements as much as men do, so they often aren’t doing whatever they can to make advancements happen.
This is from a textbook about child development published in 2006 (in-text citations in the link):
“Boys dominate the classroom in another sense: they get more personal attention from teachers and receive more direct instruction than girls do. They also receive more praise for correct answers. Boys also tend to dominate classroom resources such as computers, and to be more involved with technology from kindergarten through high school. [Snip for more “boys dominating technology” stuff] Even when girls and boys work together at the computer, boys tend to interrupt the girls and question their competence, despite the fact that girls perform as well as boys in technology-enhanced assignments and in computer programming.”
On preview: Yay! I’m glad Girl from Mars beat me to it. 
Who said that we don’t judge ourselves on our career successes? I know that’s certainly not true for me.
As to your second point, it could well be that women feel they are not in a position to make the advancements happen.
I’m currently 8 months pregnant, and will be taking maternity leave (I get 12 weeks paid leave) to care for the child when it arrives. In the meantime, recent mergers at work mean there is the potential to get involved in really interesting projects in Asia - which I won’t be able to apply for since I won’t be at work. Now, **Boy from Mars **could opt to stay home instead, but is not entitled to any paid leave at all. So I take the hit on my career to benefit the family, while other men in my team (who have had babies in the past month) are able to apply for these roles.
It sucks, and while I accept that it is mostly a factor of biology, society does not make it easy for the sort of equality which would benefit my family, as Jerseyman said - for it to be as acceptable for men to be primary caregivers.
Here are some cites particularly regarding the gender gap in physics.
http://physics.uwstout.edu/Staff/mccullough/physicseduc.htm#Presentations
I’m also a librarian, and about the same age as you. I’ve never heard anyone offer this explanation. What I’ve heard again and again from other female librarians is that there’s hardly any point in a woman going for a library administrator job. Even the most qualified women will be passed over if there’s a merely halfway decent male candidate. I couldn’t say whether that’s really true, but the perception is definitely there.