Tag Archives: gender

Cell phones are not an impediment to public social interaction

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Recent research from a sociologist analyzing video footage of public spaces shows cell phones don’t limit public interaction:

Between 2008 and 2010, his team accrued enough footage to begin a comparison with the P.P.S. films — together the two collections totaled more than 38 hours. “Films were sampled at 15-second intervals for a total of 9,173 observation periods,” he writes in his article, which reads like a study in scholarly masochism. Hampton and a team of 11 graduate and undergraduate students from Penn spent a total of 2,000 hours looking at the films, coding the individuals they observed for four characteristics: sex, group size, “loitering” and phone use…

First off, mobile-phone use, which Hampton defined to include texting and using apps, was much lower than he expected. On the steps of the Met, only 3 percent of adults captured in all the samples were on their phones. It was highest at the northwest corner of Bryant Park, where the figure was 10 percent. More important, according to Hampton, was the fact that mobile-phone users tended to be alone, not in groups. People on the phone were not ignoring lunch partners or interrupting strolls with their lovers; rather, phone use seemed to be a way to pass the time while waiting to meet up with someone, or unwinding during a solo lunch break. Of course, there’s still the psychic toll, which we all know, of feeling tethered to your phone — even while relaxing at the park. But that’s a personal cost. From what Hampton could tell, the phones weren’t nearly as hard on our relationships as many suspect…

According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has, if anything, improved since the ‘70s. The P.P.S. films showed that in 1979 about 32 percent of those visited the steps of the Met were alone; in 2010, only 24 percent were alone in the same spot. When I mentioned these results to Sherry Turkle, she said that Hampton could be right about these specific public spaces, but that technology may still have corrosive effects in the home: what it does to families at the dinner table, or in the den. Rich Ling, a mobile-phone researcher in Denmark, also noted the limitations of Hampton’s sample. “He was capturing the middle of the business day,” said Ling, who generally admires Hampton’s work. For businesspeople, “there might be a quick check, do I have an email or a text message, then get on with life.” Fourteen-year-olds might be an entirely different story…

In fact, this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston’s Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. “The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles,” Hampton writes. Men seem to be “taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine.”

Perhaps there is such a reaction to people using phones in public because (1) they are a new technology and people still aren’t used to them – smartphones are only less than a decade old and/or (2) phones are less noticeable or personally intrusive in wide open settings like the steps of the Met but very noticeable in more confined settings where conversations can be heard.

I think there is also a lot sociologists could build on here with Hampton’s methodology. Video may seem archaic when you can utilize big data but it can still provide unique insights into social behavior. While the coding of the video was rather simple (they looked at four categories: “sex, group size, “loitering” and phone use”), it took a lot of time to go through the video and compare it to Whyte’s earlier film. This comparative element is also quite useful: we can then compare patterns over time. All together, think how much video footage is collected in public these days and how it might lend itself to research…

Infographic: “Gender Inequality in [Hollywood] Film”

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Check out this infographic from the New York Film Academy on gender inequality in American films. A few of the facts involved:

-“Women purchase half of the movie tickets sold in the U.S.” but “28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes as opposed to 7.0% of men” in the top 500 films from 2007 to 20012 and the “average ratio of male actors to females is 2.25:1” in these same films.

-The number of men and women working behind the scene in major roles of the top 250 films of 2012 is pretty unequal: women are 9% of directors, 15% of writers, 17% of executive producers, 25% of producers, 20% of editors, and 2% of cinematographers.

-“Forbes 2013 list of the top ten highest paid actresses made a collective $181 million versus $465 million made by the top ten male actors” and “In 2013 the highest paid female actor, Angelina Jolie, made $33 million, roughly the same amount as the two lowest-ranked men. Furthermore, age appears to be a dominant factor in an actress’s monetary success compared to men.”

So much for progressive Hollywood? The infographic also suggests the depth of the inequality goes beyond just star actors and actresses; it applies to numerous important roles and how characters are regularly portrayed.

Another aspect of this is to think about using infographics for social activism. In one big graphic, this group has presented a lot of data regarding gender in American films. Is it more effective to present the data in (1) a splashy way – infographics are hot these days and (2) to overwhelm people with data?

Replacing the “master” in master bedroom

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The term master bedroom is falling out of favor in the Washington D.C. area:

A survey of 10 major Washington, D.C.-area homebuilders found that six no longer use the term “master” in their floor plans to describe the largest bedroom in the house. They have replaced it with “owner’s suite” or “owner’s bedroom” or, in one case, “mastre bedroom.”

Why? In large part for exactly the reason you would think: “Master” has connotation problems, in gender (it skews toward male) and race (the slave-master).

Enter the owner’s suite…

Winchester, Pulte Homes, NV Homes and Ryan Homes (both under the NVR Inc. umbrella), Van Metre Cos. and D.R. Horton Inc. have all replaced “master” in their floor plans, some more recently than others…

Over time, “master” will be filtered out entirely, he said. The change is “just working through the industry, and finally, bingo, we got it.”

Randy Creaser, owner of D.C.’s Creaser/O’Brien Architects PC, said he ditched “master” in the early 1990s in his home designs. He vaguely recalled a few lawsuits brought against builders over the phrase. Pulte spokeswoman Valerie Dolenga said Pulte made the shift maybe three or four years ago.

How long will it take to get through the entire industry? This clearly hasn’t reached HGTV yet…

Analyzing gendered uptalk on Jeopardy!

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As part of a household that regularly watches Jeopardy! via the magic of DVR, I was intrigued to read about this sociological study of uptalk on the show:

Linneman’s study involves issues deeper than how game show contestants talk—specifically, the implications uptalk has for gender identities. According to his article, “The primary sociological controversy surrounding uptalk concerns the fact that women use uptalk more often than men do, and some interpret this as a signal of uncertainty and subordination.”Linneman found that both gender and uncertainty played a role: “On average, women used uptalk nearly twice as often as men. However, if men responded incorrectly, their intonation betrayed their uncertainty: their use of uptalk shot up dramatically.”

The use of uptalk is not merely an academic concern, as Linneman discovered with one of his results.

“One of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show…The more successful a man is on the show, uptalk decreases. The opposite is true for women…I think that says something really interesting about the relationship between success and gender in our society, and other research has found this too: successful women in a variety of ways get penalized.”

Uptalk’s sometimes-negative connotations bring up the subject of how women speak, a provocative issue.

While this isn’t an earthshaking finding, two things are very interesting here:

1. It is a reminder that language usage and speech patterns reflect larger social forces. While individuals may have unique ways of expressing themselves, language and expression is also learned behavior influenced by others.

2. Selecting Jeopardy! as the research case for this particular phenomenon is clever. While uptalk is related to perceptions of a lack of confidence, the contestants on the show should not have as much reason for nervousness as others might have about being on TV. In order to make it on air, they have to be smart enough to pass a qualifying test and then they have to pass an in-person audition. In other words, the contestants, males and female, are bright people. Granted, being in front of a camera is a different matter but these contestants aren’t caught completely unaware nor should they be fully perplexed by the questions they are trying to answer.

Female characters in recent movies and TV shows still marginalized

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A new study shows female characters in recent movies and TV shows still play very different roles than men:

The study, lead by sociologist Stacy L. Smith, analyzed 11,927 speaking roles on prime-time television programs aired in spring 2012, children’s TV shows aired in 2011 and family films (rated G, PG, or PG-13) released between 2006 and 2011. Smith’s team looked at female characters’ occupations, attire, body size and whether they spoke or not.

The team’s data showed that on prime-time television, 44.3 percent of females were gainfully employed — compared with 54.5 percent of males. Women across the board were more likely to be shown wearing sexy attire or exposing some skin, and body size trends were apparent: “Across both prime time and family films, teenaged females are the most likely to be depicted thin,” Smith wrote in the study’s executive summary. The ratio of men to women in STEM fields was 14.25 to 1 in family films and 5.4 to 1 on prime time TV. Perhaps most telling are the percentages of speaking female characters in each media form: only 28.3 percent of characters in family films, 30.8 percent of characters in children’s shows, and 38.9 percent of characters on prime time television were women.

In a summary of the study’s findings, the researchers reported that they found a lack of aspirational female role models in all three media categories, and cited five main observations: female characters are sidelined, women are stereotyped and sexualized, a clear employment imbalance exists, women on TV come up against a glass ceiling, and there are not enough female characters working in STEM fields.

This reminds me of the video Killing Us Softly 4: similar images of women are spread throughout advertising and other areas. Television and movies don’t exactly depict reality but we can still ask what values they are portraying. It is not just about entertainment; sure, people want to escape from the real world from time to time but any sort of media is creating and working with values an ideas. Of course, the real values portrayed by television and movies may be consumerism (for example, in the latest Bond film) and making money.

The first laptop met with distaste because it was associated with the gendered job of secretary

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The “first recognizable laptop” created in 1982 ran into some problems such as its hefty price tag and its association with typing and who did the typing in many offices:

But Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring (makers of the Treo), was there in 1982 and he told a different story at the Computer History Museum a few years ago during a panel on the laptop. For him, the problems were not exclusively in the harder domains of currency and form factor. No, sociological and psychological reasons made the GRiD Compass hard to sell to businessmen…

This is an amazing fact. We had this product. It was designed for business executives. And the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles, we had for selling the product was the fact — believe it or not — that it had a keyboard. I was in sales and marketing. I saw this first-hand. At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you’d put this thing in their office and they’d say, “Get that out of here.” It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it…

The second reason they were uncomfortable with it is that none of them knew how to type. And it wasn’t like they said, “Oh, I’ll have to learn how to type.” They were very afraid — I saw this first-hand — they were very afraid of appearing inept. Like, “You give me this thing, and I’m gonna push the wrong keys. I’m gonna fail.”

In Hawkins telling at least, there was no way around these obstacles. “We couldn’t solve this problem. It took a generational change, for the next younger group who had been exposed to terminals and computers to grow up,” he continued. “That was an amazing technology adoption problem you would have never thought about.”

This is a great example of underlying sociological issues that might not be considered fully when making and marketing a new product. On one hand, this was an exciting new technology but on the other hand, existing social factors made it difficult for businessmen to grab the opportunity this technology represented. Ideas about gender and who was supposed to be a typist, viewed as a lower status position, influenced technology adaptation.

Also, this story could lead into the history of secretaries and typists. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the field of secretaries started turning away from men to women. Like other gendered occupations with a majority of women, secretary became a lower status position with relatively lower pay.

Could Condoleezza Rice run for president…as a single women?

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After her speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, some suggested Condoleezza Rice could make good presidential material. Some factors might not be in her favor: she is a woman (we have elected a black president but not a woman) and she has an interesting background that includes being a professor, provost, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State (not exactly a traditional path to the White House). However, I wondered about another factor: could a single person become President?

While more Americans are living alone and marriage might be pursued by some people more than others, Americans seem to prefer national leaders who are married and have families. Many might ask: how could a single president understand the plight of families? If the single candidate didn’t have children, what would they know about raising children?

Since at least the late 1930s, Gallup has asked about what kind of president Americans would be willing to vote for. A few of the results:

The results are based on a June 7-10 Gallup poll, updating a question Gallup first asked in 1937 in reference to a female, Jewish, or Catholic candidate and has asked periodically since then, with additional candidate characteristics added to the list. The question has taken on added relevance in recent years as a more diverse group of candidates has run for president. This year, Mitt Romney is poised to become the first Mormon to win a major-party presidential nomination. However, Americans’ willingness to vote for a Mormon has changed little in 45 years.

Notwithstanding the Mormon trend, Gallup’s history on this question shows growing acceptance for all other types of candidates over time. That includes atheists, whose acceptability as candidates surpassed 50% for the first time last summer but have typically ranked at the bottom of the list whenever the question has been asked.

In 1937, less than half of Americans said they would vote for a Jewish or female presidential candidate; now 90% or more would. The same applies to voting for a black candidate compared with 1958. Over time, Americans’ acceptance of blacks and women as candidates has increased the most…

Americans of all political party affiliations are nearly unanimous in saying they would vote for a black, female, Catholic, Hispanic, or Jewish president. Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say they would vote for a presidential candidate who is gay, Muslim, or an atheist. Republicans, in turn, are more likely to say they would vote for a Mormon.

As far as this page suggests, Gallup has not asked about whether candidates should be married or have a family.

It would be interesting to see this play out…

Saudi Arabia’s women-only city within a city

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Saudi Arabia is doing something unusual by creating women-only portions of big cities.

How will this all-female city work?
The inaugural one in Hofuf is essentially a female-only industrial zone that’s expected to employ about 5,000 Saudi women in the textile, pharmaceutical, and food-processing industries. Women will run the companies and factories. “I’m sure that women can demonstrate their efficiency in many aspects and clarify the industries that best suit their interests, nature, and ability,” says Saleh al-Rasheed, deputy director general of the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (Modon), which is in charge of the project. The women will live in adjacent neighborhoods.

Who came up with the idea?
A group of Saudi businesswomen, according to the business newspaper Al Eqtisadiah. But Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy embraced the concept as a way to lower female unemployment while staying “consistent with the privacy of women according to Islamic guidelines and regulations,” Modon said in a statement. The government had little choice, says Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic. “Restrictions on women’s lives and productivity there are so extreme — Saudi women need a male guardian’s permission to travel, seek employment, or marry — that the country is in effect letting a potentially huge sector of the productive economy sit idle.” About 60 percent of college graduates in the country are women, and 78 percent of them are unemployed, according to recent surveys; only 15 percent of the Saudi workforce is female…

Will this city work as intended?
Some women who work in these new cities “will no doubt distinguish themselves, but they will still be laboring in segregation,” says The Atlantic‘s Goodyear. If the goal is unleashing the female workforce, “a segregated city will never be as productive or creative as one where the free exchange of ideas among diverse converging people is allowed.” Actually, I think “Hofuf will be exceedingly productive,” says Zoe Williams at Britain’s The Guardian. For one thing, “as an industrial town with no men in it, it will presumably contain none of those mini-impediments to productivity known as ‘children.'” In a few years, these Saudi women will be South Korea to their male counterparts’ North. These cities will either fail or they’ll succeed in further segregating women from the public sphere, says Homa Khaleeli at The Guardian. Maybe women should “flock to them, close the doors, and refuse to leave until the kingdom’s rulers understand just what it is like to live without women.”

Is this a step forward for women?
That’s a tough question, says The Guardian‘s Williams. It’s not really “a move forward in women’s liberation, not unless you think apartheid was a good system for black people because they got their own swimming pools,” but at the same time, we can’t know yet that “Ladytown won’t boost women in unintended ways.” As I suspect the Saudis will soon learn, “when you educate people, refuse to let them work, and then suddenly unleash them, en masse, into economic productivity,” that’s a recipe for change. Look, in this kingdom, this is the only opportunity for women “to have an income, be financially independent,” at least for now, Saudi radio host Samar Fatany tells ABC News. Putting women to work feels inevitable, even in Saudi Arabia, says Doug Barry at Jezebel. And “everyone should have the right to fall into the daily grind, because only then can all people truly appreciate how awesome it will be when robots do all our work for us.”

“Ladytown” sounds like it could be an odd title for a film…

It would be interesting to hear how these new developments will look and be experienced differently. In other words, does a city planned for women look and feel different than a city designed for men or both genders? For example, do women desire more parks?

The descriptions of operations in Hofuf make it sound like many of the jobs will be low-trust, relatively low-wage jobs in fields like textiles and food processing. Are there plans for more white collar positions or will these remain concentrated in the “male sections” of the city?

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged”

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A New York Times article looks at how marriage affects inequality. Here are some of the interesting tidbits:

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent…

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly consigns children to “diverging destinies.”

I’ve tackled this before (see here) but this is still interesting: marriage can have powerful economic effects.

The normative implications of such findings are interesting to consider. Should we pursue pro-marriage policies in the face of record number of adult Americans living alone? If we don’t want to have the government promoting such things, how do you close this gap working with other social levers?

This reminds me of the recent discussion-provoking cover story from The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”  Marriage was not the primary focus of the story though it certainly plays a role in what both men and women can accomplish. Also, it is tied to a factor not discussed in the story: as Slaughter suggests, the women may be limited by the system but the interest couples have in both working might also be related to a desire to have two incomes. Indeed, having a certain standard of living in certain metropolitan areas generally requires two incomes unless one partner is in a lucrative job. Being married increases the purchasing power of a family which is no small feat.

 

Race and gender divides in the creative class

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Another excerpt from Richard Florida’s new book suggests there are race and gender divides in the creative class:

A number of commentators have argued that women are better suited to the kinds of work demanded by the knowledge economy. Indeed, it is true that women make up the slight majority of the creative class, accounting for 52 percent of its members. It’s also true that a greater fraction of employed women hold creative class jobs (37.1 percent) than employed men (32.6 percent).

But Mellander and I found that creative class men earn about 40 percent more than creative class women—$82,009 versus $48,077—a gap of nearly $35,000. Some of this can be explained by differences in work experience, skills, education, and longer work hours. But even when we control for these factors, creative class men still outearn creative class women by a substantial $23,700—nearly 50 percent of the average salary for creative class women…

Race is the source of substantial divides within the creative class. More than eight in ten (80.9 percent) of creative class jobs are held by whites, who make up just 74 percent of the nation’s population. The rest are more or less evenly split among the three remaining racial groups—African Americans (6.8 percent), Hispanics (6.2 percent), and Asians (6.1 percent).

There is an interesting racial division of labor, so to speak, within the three great socioeconomic classes. Asian-Americans are by far the most heavily represented in creative class work. Nearly one-half (47 percent) of them work in creative class jobs, compared to roughly one-third (34 percent) of whites, 24 percent of African-Americans, and 18 percent of Hispanics.

Do I have to buy/read the book to get Florida’s solutions to this issue?