Social Inequality

It sometimes amazes me, when I realise the extent of social inequality within modern society.

Only sometimes.

Most of the time, I am oblivious, as it is just the norm.

I realise, that in a respectable higher education institution, I look around me in the lecture theatre and see hundreds of faces just like mine – feminine (or in some cases just female) faces. The hair – carefully but ‘casually’ attended to – the dress – not too fussy, with jut the right amount of style.

These are women. Women with the same wants, needs, insecurities, and apparently the same picture of society and its expectations – as myself.
Why did we choose to study English? Because we all love reading and love the idea of becoming writers and ‘influencing people’ one day? Why am I writing this blog?

Narcisim didn’t get us to where we are, in fact, the opposite did. I was perfectly capable at sciences at school. In fact, more than capable, I did better in my science exams than my english ones. Then why, of all the disciplines in higher education – did I choose the arts degree with the least security? Why did the hundreds of women around me do the same?

I walked into a lecture theatre at one point last year, and immediately knew I was in the wrong place. I looked around and saw faces, but not the faces I recognised. I do not recognise those on my course by their facial features, I can name but a few.

I knew I was in the wrong theatre because the class was full of men. What class was it? Business, Engineering, IT. Any of the above. All professions which are incredibly lucrative.

Now then.

We live in a democracy – this means we have choice. I cannot blame the engendered nature of each academic subject on social hegemony. Or can I.

Statistics show that girls, no matter how apt or able, feel excluded in a physics class. I would feel out of place sitting in that lecture theatre. I did feel out of place sitting in that lecture theatre.

However, this is not consigned to discipline. I sit in a lecture theatre of over two hundred students and ALL I repeat ALL of my lecturers are men. How do the statistics measure up in terms of probability, when the proportion of males studying undergraduate english is below 10%, and yet the proportion of the academic staff is above 80%? These do not add up.

And quite frankly, I sit in my lecture theatre, kicking myself that I did not question the status quo enough at the age of 17, to apply for an engineering degree. I would have been damn good at engineering. And I would have a job by now.

The woman is questioning the lecturer. She is of course confused. But not poor thank goodness.  Questioning the lecturer (Photo credit: State Library of Victoria Collections)

Related articles

• Sociological definition of social inequality (smsimango21.wordpress.com)
• Racial and Social Inequality in America (theradleyplace.wordpress.com)

He sometimes signs “thank you” after nursing.
I suspect he signs “please” when he means “cheese.”
Today he furiously signed “squirrel” toward a group of kids playing at the park. Upon closer examination, I see that it’s a group of girls. What?  Squirrel for girl makes perfect sense, but what does he know about gender? I don’t differentiate kids when pointing them out, talking to them, etc. As I’m pondering this complexity, I realize that these little ladies are addressing each other as girls, as in “c’mon girls, lets build up our stockade before the boys raid us!” And it wasn’t long before the boys did indeed raid them. Three cheers for early lessons in gender division! ¡Viva la guerra de sexos!

I say this as if I have some sort of aversion to getting drunk and behaving badly – I don’t, I do this all the time. My revulsion is at something once culturally significant being turned upside down and its insides squeezed out for commercial gain, to the point where it really does mean nothing to the ignorant souls donning their ‘pirate wench’ and ‘zombie cowboy’ outfits, other than another excuse (as if they needed one) for a night of debauch.

There’re two aspects that bother me, one being the Americanisation. When I was little (cue grumpy old woman), there was no such thing as ‘trick or treating’. Halloween/All Saints Eve/Samhain, whichever name you care to give it, religious slant or otherwise, was a pagan, Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest season and the commencement of the dark half. It is firmly rooted in Scottish heritage.

Guisers on the Isle of Uist [image: angusmcphee.blogspot.co.uk]

‘Guising’ would see you go round your neighbours with your wee pals in your wee witch or warlock costume, tell a joke, a ghost story, or sing a wee song, and get a sweetie or a few pence in return. The custom originates from the belief that dressing your children to blend in with the evil spirits abroad on the Eve of the Hallows would protect them, and it was considered prudent to give them small gifts to help ward off ill will from the souls of the dead.

Kiss front man Alice Cooper, who was disappointed with the Halloween celebrations growing up in the US [image: nndb.com]

The Americans in their true, naïve, culture-crushing style, have taken away any element of lore and replaced it with, well, that great American virtue – greed. As Alice Cooper, who now always celebrates the date in the UK, said of Halloween growing up in the States – “It was all about the candy”. This is the attitude that the global corporatisation of traditional events and holidays has succeeded in supplanting over here in the years since I grew up.

And it was turnips, not pumpkins…

Proper neep lanterns [image: blog.makezine.com]

The infamous harlotty Halloween costume which has now become the norm has also come to grate on me. That other renowned American virtue, vanity, comes to mind. It goes beyond vanity though. We all want to dress to look our best (I shall be doing so at a Halloween-themed cabaret night tomorrow), but Halloween outfits for women have transgressed into the downright degrading. A friend’s work colleague was apparently dressing this year as a ‘slutty skeleton’. A slutty skeleton. I could certainly see that being thrown as an insult at some of the sights you see on a Saturday night, but actually – a slutty skeleton. I have not words…

Oh yes, it really exists [image: thebroccolihut.com]

This has even less to do with Halloween than trick or treating, and is in fact part of a wider trend of sexism, pornification, and the division of genders that is happening across the board in the West, and which has been on my mind a lot over the last year but is so huge that I’m unsure where to even begin writing about it. I’ll leave that one at that for the moment…

The state of what Halloween is fast becoming is only one facet in the list of traditions and festivals that have been slaughtered by a market-driven culture. With Christmas marketing having begun before Halloween was even over this year, expect a follow-up rant soon…

The discussion has been very timely for us as Mollie is going through a pink phase at the moment. It is partly inspired by her love of ballet and the associated pink tutu imagery but also incorporates princesses and fairies. As much as it pains us, my wife and I are letting her get on with it. Mainly because we are hoping that it will just be a phase and we don’t want to stop her exploring it. We feel comfortable that it isn’t taking over – she has asked for a pink princess doll and a fire engine for Christmas – and we believe in equality. We want her to learn that she can, and should, have access to everything.

There has been a lot of discussion on twitter recently about the gender division in children’s books. This blog made me think about Mollie’s reading habits. Creating Mollie’s virtual library has been insightful in this respect. The picture books that she has enjoyed are, on the whole, gender neutral. There doesn’t seem to be much gender stereotyping or discrimination and the books are often full of lively, intelligent, strong characters of both sexes.

Sadly Im starting to notice this change. Peppa Pig is where the gender programming seemed to begin. Clearly it’s not something you can shield children from entirely. Instead, we have aimed to balance it out as much as possible and show Mollie as diverse a selection of characters and roles as possible. The Charlie and Lola books were the perfect Peppa Pig antidote.

Mollie is only 3 so the majority of her books are still picture books and therefore less gendered. However, she is learning to read and is beginning to pick up early reader books. The difference is really obvious. The fairies and princesses seem to have taken over this age range and I can see the gendering of the covers is starting to work. So Mollie will choose a flaky fairy book at the library and I will grab The Night Pirates to offset it. (If you haven’t come across The Night Pirates, I highly recommend it. Ninja girls for the 3-5 age range. It’s a beautiful book, with no pink!) In this way I’m trying to balance out the stereotypical images of little pink girls who need rescuing.

In the interest of fairness, I should say that I don’t always have to offset. I have found a lot of the ‘pink books’ she is picking up do have strong characters in them and don’t necessarily perpetuate the stereotypical role of girl as weaker/less. This has been an important thing for me to learn. Whilst I want to stay aware of what she is reading I also want to encourage her own choices. I don’t want to stop her reading pink princess books through the assumption that they will be bad. They are often very positive. This excellent blog from the children’s book publisher Nosy Crow, discusses this and explains the reasons for the gender skew in publishing. It highlights some very good points and has some great book recommendations.

Nosy Crow’s Kate has written a follow up to her previous post that gives a more personal perspective, describing her own experiences with gendered books. It makes me think that my wife and I are on the right track. That Mollie is on the right track.

So why was I worried about the pink phase and the princess books? Because gender inequality is everywhere and it provides negative role models for our children- boys and girls. But I’m a feminist. I want my daughter to be smart enough to know what she likes and wants for herself, to have access to everything and know that she should have access to everything. And that means that it’s my job to give her access to everything*. Even when that includes pink princesses and fairies.

I’m less worried now because I’ve realised that there are a lot of people out there who are creating positive images for our children. I’ve realised that the good stuff really is out there (please do recommend some in the comments box below) and that Mollie is smart enough to know what she likes and wants for herself. She won’t stand for any rubbish and she won’t be easily sucked in by all the sickly pink marketing. And she’ll always have The Night Pirates there to rescue her if she does.

*Disclaimer: ‘everything’ is a big word. Obviously I’m going to exclude the extremes. She won’t have access to a Barbie doll and she won’t have access to a toy tank. But you know, princess dolls and fire engines, they’re in.

Two sisters forced retailers to rethink the ‘pinkification’ of girls’ toys. Now they are turning their attention to makeup aimed at children

True colours ... Abi and Emma Moore and their children, from left, Gabriel, Rebecca, Ziggy and Jasmine. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Children can be comically fierce in their ideas of which toys are or aren’t appropriate: “It’s for babies!” or “It’s for girls!” they will insist. But when, on a recent visit to a toy shop, Emma Moore’s daughter announced that farm animals were for boys, Emma was disappointed.

“All the signage was blue and there was a boy playing there,” says Emma, 40, and the mother of two daughters.

Other parents might just roll their eyes and move on, but not Emma. “When I had a second girl, the onslaught of pink rubbish piling into my house, and all the slogans, ‘Daddy’s little princess’ and so on, became even more noticeable,” she says. She and her twin sister Abi, who has two boys, were so angry about the gender division of children’s toys promoted by retailers that they decided to act.

The result was Pinkstinks, a campaign they set up four years ago to raise awareness of what they say is damaging gender stereotyping of children, and which this week won a Mumsnet-sponsored award for promoting body confidence in children. The sisters say they are thrilled, partly because they thought they were too radical for Mumsnet, but also because the accolade coincides with the launch of Slap, their new campaign, which is aimed at challenging the increasing tendency to target makeup at little girls.

Emma and Abi grew up in south-east London, not far from where they live now, and although their mother was active in the women’s movement and their stepfather was a Labour parliamentary candidate, no one expected the sisters to become activists. When they started Pinkstinks, “It was really challenging within our own family as well as in the wider world,” says Emma, who jokes about mothers running away from her at the school gate, presumably because she makes them feel awkward.

“Some of the presents Mum had given my daughters, I was like, really? A pink, plastic Disney castle? Are you sure?” she says. Abi chips in: “Vast swathes of people have accepted all this stuff as normal, and when we started questioning it, we were questioning ourselves as well.”

Source: The Guardian Read more

The media has had such an influence on our thoughts that many people have complained about males that were rescued from the sinking cruiser first. Ever since the film titanic the line “women and children first” have been stuck within all our minds. But it seems as though there is no procedure that actually includes these rules.

A while ago, the societies gender split was so divided that many females were frowned upon if they decided to learn to swim etc, it was not part of their “duties”. So initially this “rule” wouldve been to divide the strong swimmers from the less confident ones.

However, nowadays, many of us have chances to learn to swim in school and lessons are widely available across the world. These are open to everyone, without being gender or intelligence specific.

So it appears that a more appropriate guideline for evacuation of cruisers would be “less able swimmers first”. People would possibly be less comfortable with this as their is no visible display of how good someone is at swimming and so it being open to deception.

I don’t think there could be anyway of fixing guidelines to these sorts of evacuation procedures, mainly because every situation is different and there should be no rules as to who has more reason to be saved.

Focus should be placed more on how to prevent these events from happening in future, and provide enough training to deal with everyone equally and effectively.

I would also like to say, my prayers go out to all who have been lost in this tragic accident and their families.

I ran across this the other day and shook my head. As an anthropologist, I have to answer back! You see, anthropologists (including archaeologists) are humans who are shaped by the culture in which they grow up. So from about 1880-1960, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists from the United States and western Europe happened to notice aspects of so-called “primitive” cultures that confirmed their belief that there has always been a clear and firm gender division of labor. They gathered all kinds of evidence that men “hunt” and do “public” work while women “gather” and do “family” work. (Later anthropologists found that this clear, easy divide was often made up by the anthropologists who somehow failed to see things like men doing lots and lots of gathering because hunts were so few and far between. And, my favorite, is a recent article by an archaeologist who examines body weight and determined that men (fathers and brothers) must have done most of the carrying of toddlers and small children on frequent, long walks.)

These happen to be the same years that homebirth midwives were being pushed out of their profession by medical doctors. Birth was moving more and more into hospitals until, after WWII, there were more hospital births than homebirths in the United States. (The UK and Canada had a slightly different, but similar, history.) Women were increasingly drugged during labor and the rates of cesarean section climbed through the 1900s (and SOARED at the end of the century). Birth was increasingly seen as “dangerous” and “risky.” Hiring medical specialists to intervene in the process was a sign of prosperity and progress.

So it is no wonder that archaeologists (mostly men!) of the time interpreted the fossil record in light of this insight that birth is “risky” for human women. Indeed, human pelves are significantly different in shape from those of our nearest relatives (other apes). This “story” about the trade-off between bipedalism (walking upright on two feet, which ultimately changes the shape of pelvic bones) and giving birth to our young has been the dominant story for a long time.

Luckily, some anthropologists who grew up with feminism have taken a second look at that fossil record.  I love reading the work of Dana Walrath, an anthropologist who studies the evolution of human pelves (the plural of pelvis — cool, eh?). She believes that it has been pure sexism in archaeology and medicine that created this “birth is dangerous because of bipedalism” story (though understandable, given our cultural history). The feminist story is that we human women are amazing creatures who are incredibly highly-evolved to give birth to our babies. She’s got the bones to prove it! Check out her articles such as
1. Walrath D. (2006) Gender, Genes, and the Evolution of Human Birth, in Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future. PL Geller and MK Stockett (eds.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2. Walrath D. (2003) Re-thinking pelvic typologies and the human birth mechanism. Current Anthropology 44(1):5-31.

Kim Elsesser, in a recent New York Times article, raised the question of why there should still be separate Oscars for male and female actors, and makes a compelling case for making the acting Oscars gender-neutral.  She pulls out all the punches, pointing out what an outcry there would be if the Oscars were racially segregated, claiming that the separate Oscar for Best Actress insults women by implicitly suggesting that they could not hold their own in a competition against men, and noting that even term “actress” has fallen out of favor.  I admit that the possibility of gender-neutral Oscars never really occurred to me before I read her article, but in retrospect it seems obvious.  It seems, in fact, almost impossible to disagree with her—there is scarcely any argument I could mobilize against hers that would not fundamentally contradict my own beliefs as a feminist.

Nonetheless, I still somehow feel compelled to try.  The reason, if I had to name one, is probably nothing more than my instinctive mistrust of anything that seems manifestly obvious.  I do not deny the validity of any of Elsesser’s claims.  The idea of gender-neutral Oscars is certainly something I could get behind—although, to be perfectly honest, I don’t have a terribly strong opinion on the matter either way.  Unlike other feminist issues, such as abortion, this one has no practical consequences for any real women other than movie stars, who make up a very small fraction of the population—it is more or less completely symbolic.  The question, then, is about the meaning of this symbol.  On the surface, as I have already acknowledged and as Elsesser argues so well, it would be an unqualified step in the right direction.  Everything is a mixed bag, though, and even the most seemingly positive changes always come with hidden dimensions of ambiguity, and it is these subterranean problems that I want to probe here.

The question of gender-neutral Oscars might not be all that important in itself, but it actually has enormously far-reaching implications that cut right to the heart of feminism.  The reason it is so important, even without any properly practical significance, has to do with the singular importance of movies in American culture.  Movies are, simply put, the closest thing our pluralistic and secularized society has to a national religion—they provide us with the stories that we use, for better or worse, to shape our lives.  The world of movies is much more than entertainment; it is a formative influence on the fundamental symbolic structure of our society.  And one of the most important elements of that symbolic order is, of course, gender—movies define for us what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.  The annual ritual of the Oscars is even more important: it consolidates the movies of the previous year into a coherent narrative and determines for posterity what stories were the ones that really mattered.

To cut right to the chase, it would not be a terrible stretch to say that the real question at stake, underlying the issue of gender-neutral Oscars, is the following: Should our binary conception of gender be preserved, or does it deserve to be done away with once and for all?  Don’t get me wrong here—I am no reactionary alarmist, and I don’t mean to suggest that integrating the Oscars would precipitate so drastic a change.  Because the world of movies is so instrumental in determining our society’s symbolic order, though, this integration would at the very least represent a significant step in that direction; and, for that reason, I think the question is worth considering.  Over the past twenty years or so it has been the trajectory of feminism as well as of society as a whole.  As Elsesser herself points out, the differences between men and women have recently been emphasized less and less in language and in institutions, and people have come more and more to see the gender binary as a societal artifice.  The abolition of gender-segretated Oscars would certainly be in keeping with this trend, and would represent a decisive step forward in its progress—and, to that extent, I have no objection to it.

What gives me pause, though, is the question of how far this dissolution of the binary of gender should, and will, extend.  Elsesser does acknowledge that gender-segregation is reasonable in sports competitions, citing the biological differences between men and women.  And these biological differences are not likely to change.  The males of the species will continue to be somewhat larger and have penises, and the females will continue to be somewhat smaller; and, more importantly, reproduction will probably still require one of each.  Is it our goal, then, that our conception of gender, and its expression in our society, should be restricted to only these purely biological distinctions?  Should we strive to think of ourselves and each other purely as equal, gender-neutral human subjects, and ignore as much as possible the fact that we remain enfleshed in sexed bodies?

In my mind, the answer to this question is clearly no: a complete eradication of the conceptual, societal binary of male and female is neither possible nor desirable, and not only because it would put feminists out of a job.  The whole point of culture, understood in the broadest possible sense, has always been to provide human beings with a framework for understanding, and living with, the natural facts of life.  One of the oldest human customs, for instance, is the burial of the dead, which is a way of reframing the naturally-determined inevitability of death in human terms, and thereby, as it were, domesticating it.  The socially-determined framework of the binary of gender is likewise a human reframing of the biological facts of human reproduction.  This binary has, of course, consistently been used as a pretext for the horrendous oppression of both women and those who did not fit easily into it, and it is the work of feminism to struggle against this oppression.  I feel, though, that taking our anger out on the binary itself and striving to abolish altogether is not the right answer; instead we should work to find newer and more flexible ways of conceiving it.