When I first came to the Soc 30A class, I didn't think I had really ever been a victim of sexism. To me, sexism was the "women belong in the kitchen" way of thinking, not a subtle and hidden tool of the hegemonic regime.
The rhetoric is that females are equal to men, that we are past the era of sexism. While we are moving past the "women belong in the kitchen" style of sexism, the idea that sexism is completely eradicated is a lie propagated to keep you from noticing and thinking. Sexism is rampant in our society. Here's several brief examples.
Girls do not naturally like pink. We are programmed to. Walk down a toy isle and it's obvious that toys are another tool to segregate and treat our two genders differently. Girls' toys are pink and "pretty," they encourage us to play house and raise a baby(doll). A 2005 MIT study found that "girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturance, and domestic skill, whereas boys’ toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous." From a young age girls are taught to associate the color pink with things that are meant for them.
Check out these articles:
Nerf's new line of "girl-specific" toys
Girls' legos now have breasts
Toys R Us finally stops gender-specific marketing
I played with a lot of nerf guns and legos as a kid. I don't recall wanting my gun to be pink, or my lego people to look less blocky and more fashionable. I enjoyed them without caring if they were meant for boys or girls. So why does it matter what color your toys are? In the article about Toys R Us, Megan Perryman notes that the application of a gender binary to toys is "extremely limiting as it strongly shapes their ideas about who they are and who they can go on to become."
Remember Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" comment? There was public outrage over the comment, and yet we allow routine work-place harassment far worse than this to go unnoticed. The other day I heard a coworker say that one man "hits on everyone" like it was to be expected and accepted. When it comes to work, women have to be careful with how they dress - too feminine and they won't be seen as competent, too androgynous and they will be seen as "going against their sex." The objectification of women in the workplace is a serious issue. Men aren't taught that their lives and reputations can be ruined if they dress the wrong way, or that they should get used to being sexualized and mentally undressed by others, so why are women told this?
Just look at Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately we seem to hear more in the media about her gender and the affect it has on her work than we hear about the actual work she does. Will menopause make her too unstable to be president? Is she too emotional? Oh, and don't forget that she has cankles and wears pantsuits. Hillary Clinton is a prime example of how society still doesn't treat men and women equally. I don't recall hearing anything about McCain or Obama's cankles.
And these gendered double standards begin at a young age. Ever been to a kids' soccer game and noticed that boys are encouraged to "tough it out" when they are hurt, while girls are told "it's okay to cry?" Why can't girls be tough? A lot of us would argue that we experience a good deal of pain on a monthly basis, and childbirth has been scientifically shown to be super high up on the scale of pain. So why tell boys to be tough but not girls when it comes to a skinned knee? This mindset of women as delicate continues on throughout life - just think about how few women are in the armed forces compared to men, and how women are not allowed to be in direct combat.
Or maybe you've watched a movie recently that featured a woman feeling the pressure of her "biological clock" and the need to have children - i.e. The Switch, The Back-Up Plan, the adoptive mom in Juno, What to Expect When You're Expecting... the list goes on. Society seems to think that women are desperate to have kids. Some of us are, and some of us aren't - it is a personal preference, not a biological urge.
Finally, look at wages (above) and employment. Even though in the past thirty years women have accounted for over 30% of doctorates in social and behavioral sciences and 20% in the life science, at top research institutions, only 15.4% of full professors in social and behavioral sciences are women, with an even lower 14.8% in the life sciences. Did you know that there was a recent lawsuit against the UC system for gender discrimination in faculty hiring and promotions?
Men and women aren't equal. They should be, but in our society, they aren't treated as such. We need to speak up for change. It's time for sexism to end.
P.S. - In the spirit of Halloween, here's one more.
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