The Construction of Gender lecture outline

1
The Construction of Genderlecture outline

• - Is gender a biological fact or a social
  construct?
• - Categories masculine and feminine - and
• beyond
• - Examples from film and advertising

2
Biology

• Self identity consists of biological facts
• Body
• Genes
• Hormones
• and social construct
• Life experience
• Culture

3
Social Construct?

• Semiotic approach
•  
•  

4
WHO (world health org.)

• Gender refers to the socially constructed roles,
  behaviour, activities and attributes that a
  particular society considers appropriate for men
  and women.
• The distinct roles and behaviour may give rise to
  gender inequalities, i.e. differences between men
  and women that systematically favour one group.
  In turn, such inequalities can lead to inequities
  between men and women in both health status and
  access to health care.

5
The gender gap education

• Educated girls have many more choicesin
  marriage, in childbearing, in work, in life.
• They can seize more economic opportunities.
• They do more to shape their society's political,
  social, economic and environmental progress.
• http//www.paris21.org/betterworld/gender.htm

6
The gap

• Girls' enrolments have increased faster than
  boys'. In such countries as Armenia, Mongolia,
  South Africa, Sri Lanka and Venezuela, their
  school enrolment rates even exceed those of boys.
  
• At global level, the gender gap in primary and
  secondary enrolment is narrowing.
• But gender gaps are still wider among the poor

7
Gender pay gap
8
Indexes

• Gender-based inequality is a phenomenon that
  affects the majority of the worlds cultures,
  religions, nations and income groups.
• There are differences in the way gender
  disparities manifest themselves and how they have
  evolved over time.
• Indexes measure gender gap in order to address
  inequalities (eg. the Global Gender Gap Index,
  introduced by the World Economic Forum 2006),
• Benchmarking and tracking global gender-based
  inequalities on economic, political, education-
  and health-based criteria.

9
Global Gender Gap Basic concepts

• focuses on measuring gaps rather than levels
• captures gaps in outcome variables rather than
  gaps in means or input variables
• ranks countries according to gender equality
  rather than womens empowerment.

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Four main categories

• economic participation and opportunity
• educational attainment
• political empowerment
• health and survival.
• To look up individual countries on the index go
  to
• http//www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/index2007.pdf

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Index Rank 2007

• Top 10 Global Gender Gap Index Rank 2007
  Country Sweden NorwayFinlandIcelandN.
  ZealandPhilippinesGermanyDenmarkIrelandSpain
  

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Gender Variance

• REPRODUCTION and MARRIAGE
• Due to the Women's Movement of the Seventies,
  it's common today for many women to choose not to
  get married or to not have children. However, in
  some geographical areas and within some
  traditionally conservative cultural groups,
  making these choices is clearly going against
  gender norms and thus gender variant.

13
Gender Variance

• Working in stereotypically gendered occupations
• Men who are nurses or flight attendants, and
  women who are construction workers or police
  officers.
• Grooming Men with long hair or earrings, and
  women with short hair, facial hair or tattoos.
• Mannerisms Feminine mannerisms in men (such as
  high-pitched voices) or masculine mannerisms in
  women (like aggressive attitudes).

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Gender Variance

• Sexuality gay, lesbian and bisexual people also
  are gender variant, because they are defying
  cultural gender norms for their sexualities by
  having same-gender sexual relationships.
• Due to trans-ignorance, transgendered people are
  commonly misperceived to be gay or lesbian
  because of their appearance, which is often that
  of a masculine woman or a feminine man--the
  cultural archetype of lesbians and gay men.

15
Gender Variance

• Identity transgender includes both part-time
  (crossdressing) and full-time (gender transition)
  cross-gender identity shifts.
• For transsexuals who transition from one sex to
  another, the degree to which the individual can
  "pass" in the other sex (appear as a
  non-transsexual person) can determine the degree
  of gender-based discrimination and harassment the
  individual is likely to receive.

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Homosexuality

• Essentialism vs constructionism debates
• In the 1980s there much interest in the
  biological determinants of sexual orientation
• By the early 1990s the debate had grown tiresome.
  
• From a feminist perspective sexual science relied
  upon male chauvinist constructions of
  biologically essential female inferiority.
• (Similar critiques of biological essentialism
  have been waged around issues of race and a long
  history of scientific "proof" of the inferiority
  of non-European races.)

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The gay gene

• Yet biology soon came back to haunt us. The gay
  twin studies, the "gay hypothalamus," and the
  "gay gene" study of the early 1990s were
  front-page news.

18
Advertising the same product to different genders

• Shape
• Colour
• Text
• image

19
Stereotyping in advertisments

• Voice-overs represent the programme-maker's
  interpretations of what is seen these are the
  voices of 'authority'.
• Most voices are male (figures of up to 94 have
  been reported).
• There have been more female voice-overs in recent
  years but mainly for food, household products and
  feminine care products.

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Action and adventure

• Masculine attributes
• Rationality
• Efficiency
• Competition
• Individualism
• Ruthlessness

21
Looks and motherhood

• Feminine attributes
• Emotionality
• Prudence
• Co-operation
• A communal sense
• Compliance

22
Icon Barbie

• Barbie says a lot about the world. I can't think
  of any other icon that is more widely distributed
  or so accepted as an image of femininity. Barbie
  is a defining force for both women and men, for
  the culture in general. We have chosen this
  image, voted for it with our dollars, promoted it
  unconsciously or consciously. When archeologists
  dig into the ruins of our world they will find
  the Venus DiMilo of the 20th century Barbie.
  (detritus.net/projects/barbie/barblist.htm)

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TV

• Men tend to be shown as more dominant, more
  violent and more powerful than women.
• Men on TV are more likely to disparage women than
  vice versa.
• They drive, drink and smoke more, do athletic
  things, and make more plans.
• They are found more in the world of things than
  in relationships.
• Women on TV tend to be younger than the men,
  typically under 30.

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Identity

• Gender identity begins in toddlerhood
  (identifying self as a girl or boy) with gender
  roles being assigned to tasks early in the
  preschool years
• (Durkin, 1998).

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Body image

• A child's body image develops as the result of
  many influences
• A newborn begins immediately to explore what her
  body feels like and can do. This process
  continues her whole life.
• A child's body image is influenced by how people
  around her react to her body and how she looks.
• A pre-adolescent becomes increasingly aware of
  what society's standards are for the "ideal
  body."

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Research on childrens gender perceptions

• In a 1997 study designed to study how children
  described the roles of cartoon characters,
  children (ages four to nine) "perceived most
  cartoon characters in stereotypical ways
• boys were violent and active
• and girls were domestic, interested in boys, and
  concerned with appearances" (Thompson, 1997).

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Research

• In another study, three weeks of Saturday morning
  toy commercials were analyzed. Results found
  that
• 50 of the commercials aimed at girls spoke about
  physical attractiveness, while none of the
  commercials aimed at boys referenced appearance.

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results

• Boys acted aggressively in 50 of the commercials
  aimed at them, while none of the girls behaved
  aggressively.
• With regard to work roles, no boys had unpaid
  labor roles, and girls were mainly shown in
  traditional female jobs or roles of unpaid labor
  (Sobieraj, 1996).
• Identification with television stars (for girls
  and boys), and models (girls) or athletes (boys),
  positively correlated with body dissatisfaction
  (Hofschire Greenberg, 2002).

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Sources

• Durkin, K. and Nugent, B. (1998, March).
  Kindergarten children's gender-role expectations
  for television actors. Sex Roles A Journal of
  Research, 38, 387- 403.
• Hofschire, L. J., and Greenberg, B. S. (2002).
  Media's impact on adolescents' body
  dissatisfaction. In J. D. Brown, J. R. Steele,
  and K. Walsh-Childers (Eds.) Sexual Teens, Sexual
  Media. NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
• Sobieraj, S. (1996). Beauty and the beast toy
  commercials and the social construction of
  gender. American Sociological Association,
  Sociological Abstracts, 044.
• Thompson, T. and Zerbinos, E. (1997). Television
  cartoons Do children notice it's a boy's world?
  Sex Roles A Journal of Research, 37, 415-433.