If it makes you feel any better (it won’t), I heard much the same shit when I was in college and told folks I really, really, wanted to be a stay at home mother (I had one infant at the time, so I wasn’t just in fantasy land.)
“What? But you’re do smart!” (Right, 'cause we prefer that it’s the idiots raising our kids.)
“Don’t you want to make a difference in the world?” (Sure. One child at a time, right? Why can’t they be my kids I’m making a difference with?)
“But what if something happens to your husband? What will you do then?” (Then I’ll get a job with the handy degree I’m earning sitting next to your sorry ass all day.)
Seriously, I think it’s nothing at all to do with gender roles, careers and your aptitude. It’s because people like to tear other people down and make them doubt themselves.
Then again, the only times in my life I’ve gotten approval from others is when announcing that I want to be a teacher or a nurse, so maybe you’re right.
In all honesty, I think that it’s because by the time a woman gets to university-level, she’s had at least 12 years of prior education in which she was encouraged to be a nurse or a teacher. I believe that is changing - as was pointed out, girls are catching up and surpassing boys in some maths and sciences - but it may take some time yet for those girls to get to the university level. Certainly there have been plenty of exceptions over the years - boys who grow up to be cooks and girls who grow up to be engineers - but I think there’s probably still a bit of a gender/profession mindset going on.
But you see candy by the checkout line everywhere (in the US anyway). I thought it had more to do with impulse buying from all genders and shutting down whining children.
Out of curiosity, if Borders used the same general layout of magazines with a nice spectrum of boobies/sports/cars/science/woodworking/arts and crafts/weddings/fashion/how to suck dick to keep a man, but avoided using any references to gender in the little signs above the magazines, would you still be upset?
Depends what you mean by bias, I guess. I don’t think we’re talking about individual bias, but may I interest you in some systemic bias? The timeline for graduate and post-graduate education in the sciences has traditionally been intense and inflexible, and puts women in the position of weighing decisions about child-bearing and -rearing against academic achievement. Stanford’s recent and somewhat controversial “stop the clock” policy is an attempt to address the gender gap in the higher sciences. (In fairness I should point out that MIT went there first, but Stanford got more press, from where I sit, because it came on the heels of the Summers debacle.)
Let me make it clearer to you since it seems you’re having trouble here. The point the OP is making is that the magazines she wants are in a section clearly marked ‘Men’s Interests’ in large letters for all to see.
My point was that the science magazines should be under a ‘Science’ section marked with equally large letters.
No, actually they were over it. In the ‘Men’s Interests’ section. Which, because you seem not to get this, is the problem.
You’ll note that others did get it;
Systemic bias? That women can become pregnant and bear children while men can’t? That’s not systemic bias; it’s a biological fact of life. Universities and companies can (and should) do what they can to make it easier on women to not have to make an ‘either/or’ decision between having children and their studies/careers - but they’ll never completely balance things.
I think we’re saying the same thing, to some extent. The system is predisposed to favor those individuals who do not bear children during their graduate and post-doc years of research. Since you can’t change the biological fact that all people who bear children will be women, you need to tinker with the system if you want to minimize the impact of this factor.
In all honesty, I think there are fewer women in math and engineering for precisely the same reason that the art and homekeeping magazines tend to be in the women’s section–because women are more sensitive to the quality and aesthetics of life. I tried to major in computer science and quickly decided it was an aggressive, competitive, nasty, abusive, soul-sucking place to be, and I wasn’t gonna put up with four years of that crap for a crummy bachelor’s. So I switched to neuroscience, which was the same but less so. At least I got to play with frogs.
Nah, this was on another level from a few chocolate bars and chewing gum by the supermarket checkout. It was all the brightly-coloured, kitschy, ‘cute’ kinda candy (like a neon orange bag of fruit chews with a panda and Kanji on it) and they were on racks that snaked the whole of the queue barrier. The floor above was the Topman section, and there were no sweets to be seen to tempt the guys as they wait to pay for their faded denim and ironic t-shirts. The store’s customers are mostly teens or early twenty-somethings, so it’s unlikely that much of it is bought to hush kids up.
Either way, smug marketing or ‘retail psychology’ methods piss me off. Put me squarely with Bill Hicks on that one.
If I buy a magazine from the “SCIENCE” or “HISTORY” section, I’m a total geek. But if I buy a magazine from the “MEN’S INTEREST” section, I’m a manly man.
Eh, so what? The magazines have to go SOMEWHERE. It’s odd to me that they don’t put all the magazines in one section, or divide them into news and non-news, like store #1 does, but IME the stores seem to vary by the space they have to work with. (which also means this isn’t a chain-wide issue–sounds like it’s an issue with one or more stores but not all)
I’d guess they used sales patterns to determine what got put where, instead of deep-grained assholish chauvinism. Say you’re a store manager and have space to put only some of the magazines over by these topics that tend to have male buyers, and some of the magazines over in a section that tends to attract female buyers. What magazines do you put over there? Do you search your soul and decide you want to make a sociologically progressive statement that bucks age-old stereotypes about interests, aptitudes, and capabilities? Or do you go by what you know about marketing, customer preferences, and buying patterns? I’m guessing that, much as the trends may be evening out, there are still some observable gender differences in who buys what, and companies study this stuff.
This is an eye-rolly, slightly annoying thing to me, as in, “oh great, one more thing to enforce certain tired stereotypes I don’t particularly care for.” But it’s not a deep insult to my female mind.
Great Og! Have you two gone back in time about 40 years? I thought the whole “that’s no job for a pretty little thing” crap went out with the 60s! Now in my case, I was neither pretty nor little, so when I wanted to learn more science, I was encouraged because after all I was not going to get by on my looks… :dubious: :mad:
Considering the “Mens Interest” card at the top of the rack and the “Science” card on the shelf below, the question that I have is whether there were enough truly men’s interest magazines to fill a whole rack?
In other words, was this a single rack that had a mix of FHM, Guns and Ammo, Science and Civil War Reenactor, none of which categories could fill a full rack and which had to have something for a card on the top, or was it “Mens Interest” across several racks, which included all of those magazines, but could have been further subdivided?
What in the blue blazes is “controversial” about that?? Since “controversial” usually means someone doesn’t like something, what kind of freaking asshole would you have to be to object to that policy?
In the ‘Men’s Interests’ section. Which, because you seem not to get this, is the problem.
