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.