Key Concepts and Terms for WOM 101

1. Key Concepts and Terms for WOM 101 WOM 101

2. Institutions definitions • social organizations • Established patterns of behavior • Organized around particular purposes. • They function through social norms and established rules and/or laws. • Family structures • Marriage • Economics and the workplace • Government and criminal justice system • Religion • Education • Science • Health and medicine • Mass media • The military • Sports

3. Major functions of institutions • Assign various roles to women and men and are also places of employment where people perform gendered work. • Institutions distribute resources and extend privileges differently to different groups • Interconnected and work to support and maintain one another (marriage, for example) • Institutions produce messages that shape our understanding of gender. Ideas and values or sets of beliefs (ideologies) provide the rationale for injustice • Examples (see previous slide)

4. The Personal Is Political and 2nd wave feminism • Second wave mantra • Emerged out of CR groups • What it means: Individual experiences of women’s lives should always be viewed through a larger institutional, political, and social lens • Examples of personal issues that are political?

5. Sociological Imagination • Summary: Sociological imagination is a sociological term coined by American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959 describing the ability to connect seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces to the most basic incidents of an individual's life. • What is the structure of a particular society and how does it differ from other varieties of social order? • Where does this society stand in human history and what are its essential features? • What varieties of women and men live in this society and in this period, and what is happening to them?

6. Sociological Imagination • The sociological imagination is a way of looking at our personal experiences in relation to what is going on in the broader social arena. • Personal troubles → public issues • The intersection of personal biography and social structure. • Private experiences are rooted in social conditions.

7. Patriarchy Definitions (from Allan Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy • “Patriarchy does not refer to any man or collection of men, but to a kind of society in which men and women participate.” • male-dominated • male-identified • male-centered. • Control and oppression of women

8. Patriarchy and Male Dominance • Positions of authority—political, economic, religious, legal, educational, military, domestic—are generally reserved for men: • Heads of state • Corporate CEO’s • Religious leaders • School principals • Members of legislature • Senior law partners • Tenured professors: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/opir/abstract/faculty_gender_2005.html • Generals and admirals • “heads of household”

9. Percentage of Workers in Top Jobs from Linda Tischler’s article, “Where Are the Women?”, 2004 Percentage of Workers in Top Jobs • Lawyers (partner)* 84.4% men and 15.6% women • Corporate officers in the Fortune 500** 84.3% men and 15.7% women • CEO’s in the Fortune 500: 10/500 (2%) 2006 • Top-earning doctors*** 93.4% 6.6% • Sources: *National Directory of Legal Employers, NALP 2000, and 2000 Catalyst Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners; **2002 Catalyst; ***Medical Economics: cardiology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic surgery are top-earning specialties. Percentages of women in those fields calculated from data on doctors (by gender and specialty), from American Medical Association.

10. Patriarchy and Male Dominance • Notion of male superiority • Distinguishing between positions and people who occupy them • Male dominance does not mean that all men or powerful • Examples • It also does not mean that no women are powerful or in powerful positions • Examples

11. Patriarchy and Male-Identification • Cultural ideas about what is considered good, desirable, preferable or normal are associated with how we think about men and masculinity • Traditional ideas about career and work week (assumption of female home maker) and “unencumbered workers” structure

12. Patriarchy and Male-Identification • Cultural description of masculinity and ideal man that become synonymous with cultural values: • Control, strength, competitiveness, toughness, coolness under pressure, logic, forcefulness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, control over emotion, invulnerability • Associated with the work valued most in patriarchal societies: business, politics, law, athletics, law, and medicine

13. Patriarchy and Male-Identification • Devalued qualities • Cooperation, mutuality, equality, sharing, compassion, caring, vulnerability, readiness to negotiate/compromise, emotional expressiveness, intuitive and nonlinear ways of thinking • Career compensation: teaching, social services work, childcare, nursing • Women’s value as objects of male sexual desire or lip service to motherhood, versions of what constitutes “power”

14. Patriarchy and Male Centeredness • Focus of attention is primarily on men and what they do—e.g. athletics, politics. Examples: • Films Winning the Oscar for Best Picture: 4 of 40 tell feature a female protagonist, two are musicals • Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: # by women in top 100= 4 • Senate #s 16/100

15. Gender system • Gender shapes our experiences in ways we aren’t conscious of • Gender roles are formed and absorbed through the process of gender role socialization • Our experience of multiple institutions and cultural norms teach us about gender • Gender is acted out in individual and social patterns • Patriarchal culture and society operates according to established patterns of gendered behavior: • Norms/behaviors • Division of labor • Policies • Sexual scripts

16. Gender system • Social Constructivism vs. Essentialism • essentialism: • biological determinism • social construction

17. Intersectionality/interlocking oppressions • Intersectionality or multiple/interlocking oppressions or confluence of identities: the ways multiple forms of oppression and identity interact to create someone’s experience of and access to social influence and individual and institutional power

18. Privilege and Oppression • Internationally, Americans as a whole are grossly overprivileged: • The richest 2% of the world’s population owns more than half of the world household wealth • To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world, just $61,000 in assets is needed • Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live in less than $2 a day • The richest three people in the world—Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Carlos Slim Helu, have more money than the poorest 48 nations combined.

19. Privilege and OppressionIntroduction • North America has only 6% of the world’s adult population yet accounts for 34% of household wealth (Kostigen, Marketwatch) • privilege: benefits and power from institutional inequalities; individuals and groups may be privileged without realizing, recognizing, or even wanting it. • “unearned advantage available to members of a social category [race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religious identity, marital status, age, ability] while being denied systematically to others” Mcintosh, cited in Johnson • Mcintosh, Kimmel, Frye, Wise, Langston, Pharr readings upcoming

20. Key Concepts Women’s Studies-- • studies the roles of women in various institutions • studies the influence of institutions on women's status, experiences, lives • looks at the historical and current impact of feminism, feminist thought, and feminist activism on women's lives • examines women's contributions to academics, politics, social change, science, culture • seeks to understand debates and controversies about women's social, historical, political roles, status, experience