"Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them."
In addition to age, gender is one of the universal dimensions on which status differences are based. Unlike sex, which is a biological concept, gender is a social construct specifying the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are to follow. According to Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, gender is the "costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance" (p.238). As Alan Wolfe observed in "The Gender Question" (The New Republic, June 6:27-34), "of all the ways that one group has systematically mistreated another, none is more deeply rooted than the way men have subordinated women. All other discriminations pale by contrast." Lerner argues that the subordination of women preceded all other subordinations and that to rid ourselves of all of those other "isms"--racism, classism, ageism, etc.--it is sexism that must first be eradicated. For some specifics, see B. Deutsch's "The Male Privilege Checklist" and Nijole Benokraitis & Joe Feagin's "Overt/Subtle/Covert Sex Discrimination: An Overview."
Women have always had lower status than men, but the extent of the gap between the sexes varies across cultures and time (some arguing that it is inversely related to social evolution). In 1980, the United Nations summed up the burden of this inequality: Women, who comprise half the world's population, do two thirds of the world's work, earn one tenth of the world's income and own one hundredth of the world's property. In Leviticus, God told Moses that a man is worth 50 sheikels and a woman worth 30--approximately the contemporary salary differentials of the sexes in the United States. (Actually, according to one "Current Population Survey" of the US Census Bureau, American women in 1999 earned approximately 77% of what men made, in 2000, according to the Department of Labor, their median weekly earnings were 76% of the male median.) What might be the socio-cultural implications if men were to also be the child bearers? Follow the first human male pregnancy (well, not really) at www.malepregnancy.com.
And the significance of the stamps above? A recent U.S. Postal Service publication, "Women on Stamps", holds some interesting methodological possibilities. Putting a deceased individual's likeness on a stamp is one way by which political immortality is conferred. Of the hundreds of Americans so immortalized only a handful are women: 16, to be precise, through 1960; 19 through 1970; and 29 through 1980 (any connection between this 50% increase with the ERA movement of the seventies?). An enterprising student may wish to investigate and compare how this female proportion of immortalized citizens varies across countries and time.
Matters of gender are scattered throughout these pages,
including gender differences in household duties,
in in voting during the 1996 Presidential election,
and in suicide rates cross-nationally. Take
advantage of this site's search engine by first
entering "gender" and next "sex" as the search words.
According to Gallup surveys, in 1946 Americans felt by a margin of 54% to 24% that women live more difficult lives than men. More than one-half century later that margin had increased to 57% to 17%, with most of that change owing to increasing agreement among men (from a 47%-27% margin in 1946 to 52%-19% in 1997).
In the 1930s, 26 of 48 states had laws prohibiting the employment of married
women. (It was the midst of the Great Depression and there were not enough jobs to keep the
men out of political mischief, so married women had to go.) Click here to see Belief that a woman's place is in the home by cohort and education,
1977-94
The 2006 International Women's Day brought alarming messages from Latin American delegates about the growing rate of "femicide" in their countries. In Guatemala, for instance, more than 2,300 women had been brutally murdered. Observed Indira Lakshmanan in the Boston Globe (March 30, 2006), "Housewives, teenagers, and college students have disappeared and later been found naked, disemboweled, sexually mutilated, beheaded, and dumped in abandoned lots." Similar stories have come from Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.
- National Women's Hall of Fame
Gender biases and stereotypes are amply reinforced in the mass media. In newspapers, for instance, men received three-quarters of
the front-page references and appeared in two-thirds of the front-page pictures in the mid-1990s.
The United Nations
Division for the Advancement of Women included in its
Beijing
Declaration and Platform for Action the observation how the "continued
projection of negative and degrading images of women in media communications -
electronic, print, visual and audio - must be changed. Print and electronic
media in most countries do not provide a balanced picture of women's diverse
lives and contributions to society in a changing world. In addition, violent and
degrading or pornographic media products are also negatively affecting women and
their participation in society." Mediascope's "Violence, Women and the
Media" cites mounting evidence how "negative perceptions of women in entertainment can affect women in real life."
One way, of course, to counter such phenomena is giving women control over media messages. From the University of Maryland comes Women in Broadcasting History. For feminist perspectives on the news:
Owing to labor shortages during World War II, all military branches were enlisting women by late 1942. Their entry into these and other supposedly traditional male spheres of life triggered considerable controversy. One church argued that the Women's Army Corps was "intended to break down the traditional American and Christian opposition to removing women from the home…by bringing back the pagan female goddess of de-sexed, lustful sterility."
In the NORC 1982 General Social Survey Americans were asked whether they think a woman should or should not be assigned as a soldier in hand-to-hand combat assuming she is trained to do it (variable FINDLND)?
| BIRTH COHORT: | pre-1910 | 1910-19 | 1920-29 | 1930-39 | 1949-49 | 1950 on | TOTAL |
| FEMALE | 17% | 21% | 34% | 35% | 43% | 58% | 38% |
| MALE | 22% | 15% | 17% | 34% | 36% | 36% | 30% |
In total, observe in the right-most column how women were 8 percentage points more likely than men to believe that women should be assigned to combat roles. This total, however, does not reflect some interesting generational dynamics at work. For men, the big divide is between those born before and after 1930--those roughly older or younger than 50 years of age in 1982, with the latter about twice as likely as their older counterparts to favor such assignment. For women, support consistently decreases with age. Their big generational breaks occur between those born before and after women first exercised their right to vote in 1920, and between those born before and after the Korean War. Finally, observe how the sexes most differ in attitude immediately after these generational divides: among those born in the 1920s and in the 1950s. (Not revealed in this table is how support within both sexes declined between those born in the 1950s and 1960s, with a 9 percentage point decline for women and 4 for men.)
Twelve years after this question was presented to the American public, in 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an order allowing women on combat ships and aircraft. Thirteen servicewomen died during the 1991 Gulf War, four from enemy fire, and 21 were wounded in action. In the 2003 Gulf War, women made up one in seven of the military personnel in Iraq.
Among the questions asked in the NORC 1996 General Social Survey were the following:
Below are responses to these questions broken down by sex:
| HOMEMAKER | WRKCLASS | MANPROF | MEN | CHILDREN | YOURSELF | |||||||
| M | F | M | F | M | F | M | F | M | F | M | F | |
| IMPROVED | 43% | 42% | 79% | 80% | 85% | 88% | 32% | 32% | 41% | 46% | 28% | 47% |
| NO EFFECT | 37 | 34 | 14 | 15 | 9 | 8 | 41 | 32 | 23 | 25 | 66 | 49 |
| MADE WORSE | 20 | 24 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 27 | 36 | 36 | 29 | 6 | 4 |
In the NORC 1996
General
Social Survey Americans were asked "Think about girls growing
up today: Do you think their chances for a happy family life will be better
than yours, about the same, or worse than yours?" (variable HAPGIRLS)
Their predictions were not that rosy: Only 20% thought their chances will
be better while 36% thought that they will be worse.
| MEN | WOMEN | ||||||||
| 0-11 YEARS |
HS GRAD |
SOME POST SECONDARY |
4+ YRS COLLEGE |
0-11 YEARS |
HS GRAD |
SOME POST SECONDARY |
4+ YRS COLLEGE |
TOTAL | |
| 18-35 | 62 | 25 | 25 | 19 | 46 | 30 | 38 | 26 | 31 |
| 36-45 | 46 | 28 | 38 | 31 | 37 | 40 | 31 | 24 | 33 |
| 46-64 | 39 | 27 | 39 | 38 | 33 | 36 | 43 | 34 | 37 |
| 65+ | 44 | 47 | 71 | 58 | 54 | 45 | 48 | 46 | 56 |
| TOTAL | 46 | 30 | 37 | 33 | 44 | 38 | 38 | 29 | 36 |
