Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Boy Toys/Girl Toys

About two weeks ago I wrote about the highest and lowest paying college degrees and noted that the degrees with the greatest financial value are in fields dominated by men. Today I found this amusing comic that offers an, albeit oversimplified, explanation. Gender socialization plays such a massive role in the stratification of our society it is hard to imagine why anyone would argue that nature is responsible for these differences. Here is a series of very clear examples of nurture clearly overpowering nature.


Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Apple's iPad Commercials are Sexist



Are Apple's iPad commercials sexist? Yes.
Not really sure why the title had to be posed as a question. And I would strongly disagree that "it may seem kind of a small thing to freak out over." This is just another of hundreds of thousands of ways in which gender stereotypes are reinforced to the point that they seem to be just the natural order of things.

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Continued Ghettoization of Women's Labor

This list of the worst paying college degrees from the Huffington Post is making its way around the web. I enjoyed reading the list of highest paying college degrees a few weeks ago as well.

I suppose nothing is terribly surprising on those lists but it is sad to see that the value of work generally done by women has not changed at all. We can intellectualize about how raising future generations of engineers is just as important as engineering itself but we passively accept that teachers and social workers make significantly less money than almost any other profession (for which they were formally educated). Seriously, look at both of those lists and it will be clear that men's work is more valued than women's work. And it is clear that the Huffington Post realizes that low paying jobs are women's work and high paying jobs are men's work based on the images they chose to accompany the text. In the article about the highest paying degrees only one out of fourteen of the people pictured appeared to be women. In the article about the lowest paying degrees six out of the eleven people pictured appeared to be women. This is no accident.


What I wonder about these articles is whether they will deter the next generation of college students from choosing social service related majors. If we are to discourage young people from going into social service professions, who is going to do that work (will it even matter with all of the social service cuts)? Moreover, who can afford to do that work? Who can afford to take out over $80,000 in student loans (seriously I know this person) to get an MSW only to find the best paying jobs in that field are in the $40,000s and that is if you can find work at all.

I don't have to be an accountant to know that that investment will never pay off.
And that is depressing because I am in that same situation only my major wasn't directly on that list.