It’s worth noting people attach less value to a resume if a woman’s name is attached.
This kind of study shows it goes much, much deeper than simply “women get pregnant”, and show that yes, interviewers will be more critical towards women just because they’re women, possibly even unconsciously so.
What I’m saying is that women’s groups like to point out fundamental pillars of social norms and say that we should change our entire thinking about it without even mentioning that there are insanely large groups of other people who run into the exact same problem. While I’d love to be idealistic and promise absolute equality and upward mobility to everyone based on the work they put in, that is obviously never going to be the case. It goes back to the original question. At a certain point, this son of a coal miner or inner city teen has to say to themselves “The world isn’t going to do this for me. I need to go put some work in and try and make this happen myself.”
They face the exact same culture pressure to become just another statistic, just another kid who never leaves the town he was born in, just another gang member. While we’d like to see society change and hope for a brighter tomorrow, it just feels that at a certain point you should just work harder and go longer than everyone else to get where you want to be in life.
I see blaming the glass ceiling for lack of promotion or complaining of all the professors who tell you to not do STEM because “you’ll never get in” or “its a boys club” to be really weak. Maybe it’s not the entire patriarchy plotting against your dreams. Maybe you should look at individual flaws before you blame institutions for everything wrong in your life. Yes, there are problems and inequalities, but, except for a very very privileged few, life fucks everyone over without prejudice. We’re all having to fight against systems that have been in place for decades. What do you want us to do about it? To change it would mean to make sweeping changes in the fabric of our culture to rid everyone of the thought that women are naturally known as caregivers and men are the hard workers. When you see a dude out there digging a ditch or picking up garbage, I don’t think there’s a woman sitting there thinking “Why isn’t a woman doing that work? Why aren’t there equal numbers of women and men both digging ditches?” They want everything to be behind them for upward mobility and for the work force to varied and diverse…except when they don’t want to…You want a diverse list of CEOs. but you care about a diverse list of ditch diggers (if that makes sense at all).
(I didn’t mean this to sound really bitter, it’s just something that’s been sitting on my mind for a while. I’m not bitter towards anyone, but I just hear a lot of preaching in school about this.)
I think this is a really good thought that needs to be further explored.
Look at page 3 of the full text of the article. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.full.pdf+html
The table at the top shows that female faculty rated the identical female applicant in a similar way to the male faculty. How can it be male to female sexism if the women did the exact same thing as the men within the study?
Edit: Sometimes they were even meaner to the woman applicant than the male faculty were in the study.
In situations like this people tend to talk about their own groups, whether that’s a group they belong to or just the facet of the issue that is most familiar to them. More to the point, they’re right. There’s a glass ceiling here. Income inequality is also a major issue (and they’re not totally unrelated) and it’s affecting social mobility. Changing the subject this way seems counterproductive to me.
That’s still true for everybody. This is a matter of hard work getting rewarded.
People have specific proposals intended to address some of these problems. It sounds like you’re saying that’s unfair because not every problem can be solved at once, and also a bad idea because fixing everything is just too much work. So your solution is that instead of addressing systemic problems, people should just stop complaining and accept things. Does that really sound like a reasonable attitude to you? It doesn’t to me. It works fine if all you want is for people to stop making complaints that bother you personally, but it doesn’t solve anything.
I’m pretty sure I never said it was “male to female sexism” - just trying to counter the idea that “if they grill you at a job interview, the problem is with you”, or the “the reason you didn’t get this job is because you suck”. This is a society thing, where people have been taught that women should be treated as lesser as a matter of course. It’s like with non-white children who see white as the “preferred” color - guess what, they doesn’t mean racism doesn’t sexist, it means it’s super bad and gets ingrained into its victims heads.
The fact that women, PoC, and especially women of color don’t get jobs is because of ingrained racism and sexism in our society. See for example a black woman who suddenly gets loads of job offers she wasn’t getting before as soon as she pretends to be white.
The first step of solving this problem is being aware of it - it’s been show that people who are aware that this shit happens are less likely to do it themselves.
Again, I ask the Farin’s question. Isn’t that basic tribalism, though? I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of true equality for everyone and have perfect upward mobility, we’ll just keep moving the goal post and get into more and more minute and tiny details of inequality. I never said to just throw our hands up, but you do have to be realistic about the problem rather than just trying to wave a wand and suddenly everyone in America’s mind is changed about the structure of gender norms. I don’t want to sound as a sexist apologist or something, but long standing cultural pressures aren’t something that changes with a law or two.
I think there are two very different issues here. The first is when individuals attribute their individual lack of success to wide-spread discrimination. When a particular individual does this, especially persistently, it is annoying. For one thing, they are often oblivious to others of similar demographics that have been successful, and they seem more invested in wallowing than in change.
I will say I’ve known as many white men that fit in this category as anything else: they assume every woman and minority with a better job than them got it through affirmative action, and they take the existence of those people as proof that there is no point in trying to better themselves. But women and minorities also do this: it’s a human thing to make excuses.
Then you have people who are commenting on society-wide trends, as a way to start to change them. They aren’t being bitter or justifying their personal failures. I don’t think this group has anything to do with the other. When the second group is characterized as being like the first, I really see it as an attempt to shut the conversation down: it’s suggesting that any discussion of social problems are trying to cover up personal weakness. They aren’t the same.
At least in part, yes.
I don’t think this will ever be perfect either, but so what? There’s a lot of room between perfect and where things are now. If we’re spending huge amounts of resources to try to get a 0.5% improvement, we can discuss the possibility that we’re at a point of diminishing returns.
No, they’re not. You need a sustained effort on a lot of fronts, which is what people are trying to do.
This reminded me - Whites believe anti-white bias is greater than anti-black bias, and 11% of white people gave the level of anti-white bias as “10/10”.
While I don’t know of any similar studies for the men/women divide, I would highly suspect the same issue there.
I just randomly found a great paragraph about this that says everything I’m trying to say in a much better way.
Women are capable of taking care of themselves. Girls (and boys for that matter), not so much. You’re talking about choices that, by and large, are made at the college level or even earlier. What does an 18-year-old know about life choices?
edit: doublepost.
I’m not sure that has all that much to do with your original point. I don’t feel informed enough to comment on why men and women make different career choices. We can argue about how much stereotypes contribute to those choices, and I don’t know how much of a factor they are. NOW could be over-emphasizing them. That doesn’t have much to do with “taking responsibility for yourself,” as I see it.
You know what would be a different approach to the problem? Make the common women-dominated professions well-compensated. I will hazard a guess that one of the reasons men don’t choose to be nurses, housekeepers, teachers, and secretaries is that they are poorly paid for the skill, effort and hours involved, plus you are often treated with little respect. Why would anyone want such a job if they could be well-paid and not treated like a menial at a different (male dominated) job.
No cite, but an embittered friend of mine told me she read a study of Soviet Russia, which came to the conclusion that when male-dominated professions such as engineering and medicine were forcibly opened to women, the result was that those professions became lower paid and less prestigious. Imagine.
I think the bigger problem with Manda’s “society-wide” commentators is that most of these sustained efforts are easily dismissable. There are a number of thought-stops with them, they:
Make people re-evaluate themselves. A lost of people never want to look inward, even though they should.
Make people feel like they are out of control. I have experience with this one: I had an employee that was consistently late (both for the shift and returning from lunch) and consistently put out poor work. I was prevented from firing this employee for two reasons: The employee was black. The employee was a woman. I had a document trail longer than my arm, but, HR wouldn’t let the termination go through. This gives people a general dis-satisfaction for “the numbers,” like “Not enough CEOs are women!”
Most of the behaviors are considered harmless until a line is crossed. Like men going “That girl is HOT!” that’s fine (to me), even for a manager who hires a hot woman. It’s only crossing the line when that turns into harassment or some form of preferential treatment. But ALL of this thinking is considered “bad”. I think that a moderated approach (Off the cuff, probably bad example: “Thinking a girl is hot. Inviting her to dinner/drinks/date a single time is fine. Don’t speak your thoughts, act on your thoughts, or harass them to go out with you.”) would be best. Teach people a line that can’t be crossed which can be accepted.
Most women have their own definition of a “line”. Some women love being constantly flirted with. Some women detest it with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Most women are somewhere between those two extremes. A man used to one type may not be immediately amenable to the other type. Or a man might be oblivious to the “signals” given off to go away. The interpersonal dynamic is very, very situation-, circumstance-, and presence-oriented.
Most of the statistics that people use can be argued about until the universe cools to death. What, for instance, does the statistic “Women are severely under-represented in CEO-ships mean?” Some say it means that women are automatically excluded from high power positions. Others say it’s just that women are more prone to baby-making. Still others say that CEO-ships haven’t been moving towards women simply because they haven’t spent 200 years infiltrating the Good Ol’ Boys networks.
I know there is a problem, here, but it’s hard to find a path that will completely demolish sexism. I think you have to start from moderation and talk about why thinking and speaking/acting need to be controlled differently, how to do so, and what to watch for. But, you can’t just globally condemn men for liking tits in their beer commercial and tell them that they are horrible people - especially when they can look around and find women that like it, too.
The OP did mention some other issues I didn’t address- for example, yes, there are some people out there who blame all their personal failures on things like discrimination and don’t take much responsibility for what they’re doing. I’m not sure what you can say about that- there will always be people like that. That’s why broader statistics can tell us more than individual anecdotes, and if you can see there are big gaps in pay and respect for women and for racial minorities, then it’s likely there is a problem that goes beyond individual people having weak resumes.
But that’s the thing. The oft-touted “27 cents less on the dollar” than men number is based on raw median income between men and women. Adjusted for career, experience, hours worked, etc. etc. that comes down to around 4 cents, IIRC. That can be chalked up to women’s supposedly inferior negotiating skills but is otherwise unexplained. That’s when the NOW paragraph I posted comes in. They blame the inequality on societal “steering” which is where I ask the question, “At what point do you draw the line between oppressive cultural steering and taking responsibility for your own success and your own salary?”
At what point do people admit that offering a woman a starting salary 88% of the salary you’d offer an otherwise identical man is really fucked up, and a visible sign of a society in serious need of adjusting? At what point do you draw the line between personal responsibility, and an oppressive, unfair culture that can be shown and proven?
In other words you disagree with NOW’s position. That seems like a very limited way to address a big question.
Yes it is, but that does not mean it is ‘right’ nor does it mean it is the best for humanity, just the best for the local circle of humanity at the time.
Over time it will shift, but to old saying holds, do you want to pay a little now (and let them in) or pay a lot latter (and be excluded next).