What does society create about gender?
HW: C J Pascoe Friend, you are a snout background information is here.
Take some time to think about where you heard the various phrases in the handout “Socialization of gender roles (click on the link and follow the instructions in PART I).
Here is the Google form for this tutorial.
Mark all the messages you’ve heard – even if the message wasn’t for you.
List all the categories of people you’ve heard of. Were they: parents, siblings, friends, peers, teachers, coaches, actors / actresses, just-so-stars, somewhere else?
3. List the messages that the phrases convey to men. For example, “Boys will be boys,” you could write, “There’s only one way to be a boy,” “You can’t replace boys,” or “Boys are good to be rude.”
4. List the messages that phrases convey to women.
This activity should reveal that even though people actually exist in the continuum (Lesson 1), our culture constantly promotes binary. We all hear these binary messages from all socialization agents. Messages start before you are born. So the idea of binary is very strong and we have been pushed to the ends of binary from birth.
Binary boxes
Before we move on, let me explain the biology of males and females. On average, men and women are really categorically different. On average, males are taller, have more muscle mass and more testosterone and less estrogen than females. However, none of them are distinctive to each other. Both men and women have testosterone and estrogen, both with muscle mass. Females can be tall and have a lot of muscle mass. Males may be short in stature and have low 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 male and females to be female. Society seems to have only one way to be masculine or feminine. Below are some of the traditional traits that the dominant U.S. culture has pushed for each gender. Note that they are traditional in the sense that the public usually advertises them, even if they don’t apply to you. To be clear, I’m not saying men and women should be In these ways, I say that society behaves traditionally socialized men and women must be in such ways.
5. Which of the traditional gender traits (above) is similar to your answers to numbers 3 and 4 earlier?
How do Americans describe what society values (and does not value) in each gender? What traits do men and women value most in society? What traits, according to society, should men and women not have?
You can click on the link above to explore their findings. Here is an example of their findings. Gold is for women and green for men.
Examples of binary data / evidence.
Please review each link below. See how the marketplace creates a binary connection between a man and a woman – especially in ways that are unnecessary. When you have finished watching each, answer the sixth question.
6. After reviewing the two links above (isn’t it funny?), Which product was the most pointless? What costume was the most funny?
Finally, the last evidence that society is pushing us into the binary element is the language of teacher feedback. This example shows how socialization shapes the way students in American colleges perceive their professors. Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has collected metadata from ratemyprofessor.com on his Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews website. In the interactive chart, you can explore the words used to describe teachers to men and women in approximately 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) in the box below to see how it is broken down by gender and discipline: The x-axis shows how many times your term is used per million text words (normalized by gender and field). ). You can also limit yourself to negative or positive reviews (based on your site’s numerical ratings). More information can be found here. Not all words are broken down by gender, but there are a surprising number of them. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender. For example, the word “funny” appears in the chart below. Note that orange is feminine and blue is masculine. For each subject (in the column on the left), it is ridiculous to mention more in the feedback from male teachers. Every topic!
When you try to search for words, or if the site is down click here to see my RateMyProfessor data analysis.
7. See how many words that are completely broken down by gender you can find. Make a list.
Go to Professor Schmidt’s website on gender language in teacher reviews. See how many words you can find that are broken down by gender. What are the words? List them at number 7.
8. Do you have questions about how society constructs a gender binary element?
