Masculinity in the binary

HW: Please read Adolescent Masculinity, Homophobia, and Violence Random School Shootings, 1982-2001.  It is a qualitative study in American Behavioral Scientist about who randomly shoots up schools and why.  Students can access it here.  Publicly it is also available here.  DUE in 3 days.


Before we begin, please answer the following questions.  Answer each quickly with the first words that come to mind.  Please don't worry about foul language, just write the words that come to mind:

Question 1: What are three words that describe what it means to be a man?

Question 2:  What are three words that describe someone who is not a real man?

How are males at risk because of masculinity norms?

Use the chart of gendered values below to assess each of the three areas that males are at-risk.

Males and school

In school, boys are 30% more likely to flunk, 250% more likely to be suspended and 300% more likely to be diagnosed with learning and emotional disabilities.

Males are less likely than females to go to college and to earn a bachelor's degree (women earned 57% of B.A.'s in 2012), a master's degree or a PhD.

What is your hypothesis about why this is so?  How can these be related to the binary?

Males and health risks

Young men are much more likely to die from accidental death than women:  Males 20-24 are 3 times more likely to to die as a result of accidents, 4 times more likely to die from suicide and 6 times more likely to be murdered than women.  (Ferris and Stein pg 256)

What is your hypothesis about why this is so?  How can these be related to the binary?

"...in the United States, where men have higher rates of life-threatening health conditions than women — including uncontrolled high blood pressure and heart disease — changing eating habits may be important for their health."
Why is this so?

Researchers Sandra Nakagawa and Chloe Hart conducted a study examining how gender identity influences eating habits.  

Hypothesize why this might be.

That study explained here in Contexts.

Males and violence

40% of teenage girls 14-17yrs say they know someone their age who has been hit or beaten by a boyfriend.

1 of 5 college females will experience some form of dating violence from their male partner.

1 in 3 High School students have been or will be in an abusive relationship.

These stats come from the Zacariah Foundation which is a local organization that will confidentially help individuals deal with sexual and domestic abuse.

What is your hypothesis about why this is so?  How can these be related to the binary?


Males and work
Some jobs are genderized and males are limited by the sexist socialization messages about gender. 

It is ironic, but misogyny actually hurts males.  Below is evidence about how gender inequality is limiting the jobs that males will do and the feminizing whole industries.  Males don't want to take jobs that they label as feminine.  Because of this, males are passing on some of the fastest-growing industries, like home healthcare.

• Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women (2017)
• Job Listings That Are Too ‘Feminine’ for Men (2017)
• Contexts, The Pushes and Pulls of Gendered Occupations (2018)

In Gender & Society, Latonya Trotter finds that it’s not just exclusion from men’s professions, but the inclusionary policies of women’s professions that maintain distinctly gendered fields.

•  Here is an article in Harvard Business Review written by Janette Dill, an assistant professor in the sociology department at The University of Akron in Ohio:

The Entry-Level Health Care Jobs Men Are (and Are Not) Taking (2017)

This all signals that men, and particularly white men who are able to gain additional training, may be defining some health care occupations as more technical and masculine, preserving the conventional understandings of masculinity within the health care sector. Unfortunately, this also means that women and minority men may continue to be clustered in lower-paying direct-care occupations, where the “dirty work” remains stigmatized as “women’s work.”

And supporting professor Dill's work is this research about gendered language in job postings.

This shows both the ratio of
males to females and gendered language
for the fastest growing jobs.

One example of the gendered language in job ads.

Washington Center for Equitable Growth provides this fact sheet (2017) about occupational segregation.

The genderization of jobs includes some of the following examples (Ferris and Stein 2018, 269-71):

Many jobs still highly genderized: nurses, early education (97%), dental hygenists, secretaries (94%), paralegals, housekeepers are highly female while pilots, carpenters, mechanics (98%), and firefighters (94%) are highly male.

Besides applicants self-selecting jobs based on gender, employers also select based on gender.  This research (2019) documented in Contexts shows that employers hire applicants by gender, based on their perception of what the gender of the job should be.

How Gender is Socialized?

What does CJ Pascoe's research reveal about Masculinity?

In a 2007 ethnography called "Dude You're a Fag", sociologist CJ Pascoe studied high school peer groups and how they sanction gender norms.  Excerpt is here.

Here is an essay in Contexts that Pascoe wrote about her research.

And, here is CJ Pascoe's micro lecture on bullying and masculinity.

How does the construction of gender get transmitted by agents of socialization?

All of the agents of socialization help to construct gender.  Look for the claim and evidence supporting each of these agents.  How does each agent contribute to the socialization of gender?  What evidence does sociology provide that agents of socialization influence individuals' self concepts about gender?

Family:

This article from Newsweek explains the research by neuroscientist Lise Eliot that shows parents begin treating the infant differently even before birth! Ex. pink and blue. nursery, gender reveal parties, etc...
Parents talk differently to babies from the moment they are born based on sex.
Other studies conclude that family socializes children into gender by:

Six month-olds treated differently:

• boys are given independence and encouraged to be active
• girls are coddled and ecouraged to be dependent and passive
• by thirteen months, each gender acts differently.

Also differences in toys; boys=action figures, weapons; girls=jewelry, dolls.  

Peers 

Girls and boys learn what it means to be a man or woman from friends.
See the book from Patricia and Peter Adler on preadolescent peer pressure.

This research by Patricia and Peter Adler published in Sociology of Education shows that values for popularity develop as early as fourth grade;

• boys: athletics, coolness and toughness, grades=lower popularity.
• girls: family background, physical appearance (esp. clothing and makeup) and ability to attract popular boys, grades=higher popularity.          

School 

This research in the journal of Sociology of Education shows how high school begins to shape students' interest in majoring in STEM fields in college.

From the National Academy of Sciences this study shows that teacher anxiety about math affects their students.

This research from Gender and Society shows that high school teachers' attitudes about females and math affect how teachers grade and teach female students.

This article from the NY Times shows that gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture.

From the Society Pages, this post shows the latent lessons (hidden curriculum) that schools teach.  In this case, it starts as young as 8 years old.   (See the image below)

Here is a post from the Society Pages that shows Barbie helps to reinforce lessons learned from teachers, and around the world girls show higher scores in STEM if the level of inequality in the society is less.

For more info, see Ferris and Stein pgs. 247-251

Agents of Socialization and Gender

Reminder for HW:  C J Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.

From yesterday:  
1.  Recall the concept of social construction of reality.  What is it? How does it apply to gender?

2.  Any questions from yesterday?  Are you able to answeer the questions on page 2 of your packet?



Individual Reflection:  Look at the handout called "Socialization of Gender Roles."

Part 1:  Take a moment to think about where you have heard the various phrases on your handout.
Student Discussion:  Where have you heard these?

Part 2: Think about what traits those phrases emphasize for men or women respectively.
Student Discussion:  What are the messages that these agents have taught you?


What are the boxes of the binary?

These are some of the traditional traits that dominant (white, heterosexual, male) US culture has pushed for each gender.  Note that these are traditional in the sense that society has generally promoted them, even if they do not apply to you.  To be clear, I am not saying that men and women should be these ways, I am saying that society has traditionally socialized men and women to be these ways.  Furthermore, on average, categorically, men and women are in deed different but not at the exclusivity of each other.  Males and females both have testosterone and estrogen.  They can both be all of these traits.

Examples of data/evidence for the binary.

• Gendered Products; See this post about products that are pointlessly gendered thus reifying the idea of traditional gender traits.  
• Gendered Halloween costumes.

For small groups:  Data scavenger hunt!  In small groups, see how many words you can find that are completely gendered.  Make a list.

One example of how socialization shapes Americans is how they perceive their professors.  Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com here at his site, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. The interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here. Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.  

Gender: A taken-for-granted example of socialization

HW:  CJ Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.
      
As you enter, please answer this question in as many ways as you can (brainstorm):
 
Individual Student Reflection - Besides being different physically, how would your life be different if you were born a different sex?




What is gender and why is it confusing? 

Often times, gender is confused and misunderstood because we are limited by our language.  We use the terms "male" and "female" to refer to sex and gender.  Then to add to the confusion, oftentimes sexuality is genderized.  Many people use the term "gay" or other pejoratives to mean that someone or something is not masculine.  So all three of these terms are confused with each other.  But, sex, sexuality and gender are different terms that technically refer to different aspects of who we are as individuals.   Professionals like doctors, psychologists, sociologists, social workers and others who study people have written and researched about the differences of these terms extensively.  Sex is the biology that someone is born with.  Most often, a person's sex is assigned based on their reproductive parts.  People are also born with an aptitude for a sexuality.  As they get older, the sexuality becomes sexual attraction such as heterosexual or homosexual attraction.  These are part of our biological makeup, our nature. Most researchers have concluded that these can't be changed.  "Gender" however, is not biological.  It is a social construction that we learn from an early age and we often take it for granted.  In sum:

• Sex is the biology individuals are born with and often assigned at birth.
• Sexuality is the biological aptitude an individual is born with for attraction.
• Gender is how an individual reacts to these two.  This is not biological but instead a social construct.  Gender can be an inner identity/feeling or an outward expression.

One example of how our language uses male to refer to both sex and gender is gender reveal parties - do they really revealing a child's gender?  Will the child be masculine?  How do we know?  Another example of the confusion is a shirt for sale on Amazon that shows the mixing of the concepts:

What does it mean that gender is a social construction?

Sex and Sexuality are determined by our nature, but gender is a social construction.   Think about how you answered that question at the top of this post.  Most of the ways your life would have been different are examples of society treating people differently based on their sex (and sexuality).  This constructs a certain way of being.  So, for example, if I am a heterosexual male, how should I act?  What colors should I like?  What clothes should I wear?  How should I talk?   What sports should I play?  Is it okay for me to cry?  To be rough?  To like violence?   To be sensitive?  And so on... These are all our gender and they are all learned reactions.

"Nature has no edges.  It is not binary."

What is a binary and how does it contribute to the confusion?

Humans tend to be dualistic in their understanding of the world (and thus, their language).  So much of our understanding is oversimplified into dualism: light and dark, wet and dry, tall and short, etc...  But the reality is that there is so much in between these concepts.  The same is true in terms of "gender".  Our culture pushes people to the edges of the continuum above.  This creates a duality for sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.  This duality is often referred to as a "gender" binary.

A socially constructed binary

Our culture boxes people into two very narrow, opposite ways of being.  It doesn't allow for any expression of sex, sexuality, or gender along the continuum.

However, in actuality, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity are all fluid on a continuum:

Evidence for the continuum

• Sex - Scientific American explains the continuum here.  And they provide a useful graphic here or here.
• Sex - One example of the spectrum of sex is the IAAF's 2018 proposal of new rules that would exclude some female runners from competing in women's Olympic events.  Guardian article here.
• Gender - The Gender Spectrum website also provides resources and an explanation.
• Here is a terrific program about gender from National Geographic called The Gender Revolution.  It has an in-depth explanation of transgender as well as some of the latest science about sex and gender.
• Here is a Guardian article about shattering the myth of the gendered brain.
• For more info, this is a great blog from Dr. Zevallos, an Australian sociologist from a Latin-Australian background.
• Some cultures have acknowledged a non-binary gender for centuries such as India's Hijra and two-spirit people from American Indians.

What is the evidence for gender changing over time?

Because gender is a social construct, it can be examined with a sociological imagination to show that it is different depending on where or when you examine it.

Checkout this post, called "The Manly Origins of Cheerleading" that shows how gender is a construct and because of that, our perception of gender changes over time.





And from the Smithonian, checkout this article about pink becoming genderized.

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

A third example of the changing social construct is heels for men.  

For more information:

Scene On Radio did an excellent 10-part series podcast is about gender from the 
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University distributed by PRX. The series attempts to answer:  What’s up with this male-dominated world? How did we get sexism, patriarchy, misogyny in the first place? How can we get better at seeing it, and what can we do about it? Co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee explore those questions and more.

This is an excellent podcast about the social construction of gender:
This 2018 episode of Hidden Brain explains how the differences between men and women are created by society.  For more info. see Ferris and Stein pgs 243-247