Monday, April 14, 2025

3.11Gender Inequality

 The boxes of the binary


Before going further, let me clarify about the biology of males and females.  On average, categorically, men and women are indeed different.  On average, males are taller, have more muscle mass and more testosterone and less estrogen than females.   However, none of these are at the exclusivity of each other.  Males and females both have testosterone and estrogen, they both have muscle mass.  Females can be tall and have a lot of muscle mass.  Males can be short and have little muscle mass.  People are complex and we all exist along a continuum.  

However, our society emphasizes the polar ends of the continuum.  Males are pushed to be only masculine and females are pushed to be feminine.  Society gives the appearance that there is only one way to be masculine or feminine.  Below are some of the traditional traits that dominant 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:


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PEW Research Center found similar gendered language in a 2017 study about gender expectations for men and women.  

Click through the follow up analysis (2018), and look for ways that gender is constructed.

How do Americans describe what society values (and doesn’t) in each gender? What traits does society value most in men and in women? What traits does society say men and women should not have?

Are any of these surprising? Are they different from the gender values in your own social network?

You can click on the link above to explore their findings.  Here is a sample of their findings.  Gold is for women and green is for men.




Examples of data/evidence for the binary.
Please look at each of the links below.  Look for how the marketplace creates the binary between male and female  - especially in ways that are unnecessary.  When you are finished looking at each, answer question six.
After reviewing the two links above (aren't those funny?), what product was the most pointlessly gendered?  What costume was the most ridiculously gendered?


Finally, one last bit of evidence that society pushes us to the binary is in the gendered language of teacher reviews.  This example shows how socialization shapes how American college students perceive their professors.  Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com 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.   For example, the word "funny" shows up in the chart below.  Notice that orange is female and blue is male.  For every single subject (in the column on the left) funny is mentioned more in reviews of male teachers.  Every single subject!  



After you have tried your own search for words, or if the website was not working, click here to see my analysis of the RateMyProfessor data.


How many words you can find that are completely gendered.  Make a list.
Go to professor Schmidt's website, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews.  
See how many words you can find that are genderized.  What are the words?  List them. 


How does society construct the gender binary?


The construction of gender and 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 infants differently from the moment they are born.   Parents talk differently to babies based on sex.  Experiments reveal this is true for strangers as well.  It can even be argued that parents treat babies differently before they are born!  For example, pink and blue, decorating the nursery, "gender" reveal parties, and choosing a name.

This research published in Developmental Psychology by Fausto-Sterling, et. al. shows, "measurable sex-related differences in how mothers handle and touch their infants from age 3 months to age 12 months."
Treating six month-olds 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.  
Click here to see a post from the Society Pages that examines how the  Barbie above helps to reinforce lessons learned from teachers.  The toy does not just show up in a little girl's toy box.  Toys come from family which is trying to do right by the kid based on messages in the media. 

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 (think about how this shows up in the ratemyprofessor reviews from the other lesson).
  • girls: family background, physical appearance (esp. clothing and makeup) and ability to attract popular boys, grades=higher popularity.          
School

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)


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

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.

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.

The Society Pages explain how cross-cultural studies provide evidence that the gendered expectations in STEM are a result of a social construction 

This 2007 study in Sociological Perspectives explains the  connection between core sports and homophobia finding that boys who participate in core sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer) are nearly 3 times more likely to express homophobic attitudes.  Conversely, females who participated in nonathletic extracurricular activities were half as likely to express those attitudes as individuals who did not participate in those activities.

Work
Sociologist Jill Yavorsky found that the polarization in gendered traits also shows up in hiring practices, especially when overlapped with social class, published in the Journal of Social Forces here


Which research about gender being constructed through the agents of socialization (family, peers, school) reinforcing gendered ideas is most interesting to you and why?


Non-binary Individuals

Besides cisgendered stereotypes, non-binary individuals face unique inequalities and obstacles.

According to an article from New England Journal of Medicine and available from the NIH

"As compared with the general public in other studies, gender-minority persons are more likely to live in poverty (29% vs. 12%), be unemployed (15% vs. 5%), be uninsured (14% vs. 11%), be the victim of intimate-partner violence (24% vs. 18%), have attempted suicide (40% vs. 4.6%), have experienced severe psychological stress in the past month (39% vs. 5%), and have HIV (1.4% vs. 0.3%). Thirty percent have been homeless at some time, and 9% report having been physically assaulted in the previous year because of their gender identity.  Gender-nonconforming persons are more likely than transgender persons to have experienced mistreatment in school (70% vs. 59%) or by the police (29% vs. 22%) and are less likely to be “out” in the workplace (33% vs. 44%) or with family (35% vs. 64%).

 

And the article points out that many non-binary people have received inadequate medical care or even have been refused medical care.  "These negative experiences may explain why in two studies, only 28% and 40% of gender-minority persons said that their health care provider was aware of their gender identity."

 

Inclusion and Nonbinary People

There are many ways of reinforcing the gender binary in everyday life and thus excluding non-binary individuals. Additionally, these binary practices reinforce the idea that males and females can only exist in exclusive poles rather than on a spectrum.  Some of the ways that these binary practices commonly show up are with pronouns, bathrooms and dress codes.  In all three cases, care should be taken to try to use neutral forms of each.  

·       Out and Equal provides resources and suggestions for each of these.

·       The NIH has a guide to inclusive language including saying "everyone" instead of "ladies and gentlemen" and another study from researchers at Princeton finds that using gender neutral terms at work creates less bias and more equality at the workplace.

·       Use the person's preferred pronoun and proper name as explained by Transequality.org.

 

For more info, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation has an FAQ available at their website.

 

Also, a guide to supporting the trans community is available from Transequality.org.

 

GenderSpectrum.org provides an extensive collection of resources including these: 





 

And the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center has a number of learning modules and resources including this Guide to Providing Care for Patients with Non-binary Gender Identities that highlights these best practices:




Concluding

To summarize, the agents of socialization play a pivotal role in helping each of develop a sense of self (remember the isolated kids, Genie and Danielle from the social structure unit?).  One of the ways that the groups influence us in thinking about gender.  And the influence is particularly strong because it happens from the time we are young (even before we are born) and then continues in a web of structure that perpetuates the construction of gender.  The web is a connection of parents, schools, peers, toys/marketers and media that all reinforce the gender binary.  

For More Info about Gender:


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