S6 Gender representations and communication

Question 1

Gender

Answer 1

The range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity, including biological sex of course, but also sex-based social structures and gender identities.

Question 2

Gender VS biological sex, John MONEY 1955

Answer 2

• Gender is not the same as biological sex.
• We owe to psychologist and sexologist John Money the fundamental distinction he introduced in 1955 between biological sex and gender as a socially-constructed role
• Money’s definition of gender did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced it.

Question 3

Concept of gender since the 70s

Answer 3

• Used to define “a person’s self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual’s gender presentation.”
• Gender is essentially a social and symbolic construction.

Question 4

Identification with masculinity and femininity

Answer 4

• Process that started by the time we were born, and has ever since been framed and enforced by the social beliefs and values of a particular society at a specific time.
• Gender is neither innate, nor fixed, and much less universal.
• The values and beliefs of the society we live in today appear quite different from what they were half a century ago.
• Femininity and masculinity do not have the same meaning in every part of the world.
• Some cultures recognize specific genders that can be considered distinct from male and female.

Question 5

Hijras of South-East Asia

Answer 5

• Trans women who have a recorded history in the Indian subcontinent from antiquity onwards, as suggested by the Kama Sutra period (rom 200 BCE to 200 CE).
• Hijras are officially recognized by governments of India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh as third gender, and are protected as per the law despite strong social ostracism. - Organized communities that sustained themselves over generations by “adopting” boys who are in dire poverty, or who are rejected by their family of origin.
• “Hijra” < Urdu word derived from the Semitic Arab root “hjr” in its sense of “leaving one’s tribe.”
• In general hijras are born with typically male physiology, and only a few are born with intersex variations.
• This corroborates the view – most famously articulated by sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Eptein – that gender differences are mostly mindsets reflected through behavior.
• Gender differences are largely created and kept in place by social, rather than biological, forces, and therefore are susceptible to change.

Question 6

Notions change

Answer 6

Under the influence of commercial interests, advertising, and other cultural forces – popular images of the so-called “perfect body” have changed over time, and how perceptions of this same “perfect body” vary greatly from one culture to another.

Question 7

We seek to communicate our gendered identities as part of who we are

Answer 7

• Our expression of gender identity not only communicates who we think we are, but also constructs a sense of who we want to be
• We learn what masculinity and femininity mean in our culture, and we negotiate how we communicate our gender identity to others.

Question 8

Constructing gender through communication

Answer 8

Gender culture is created through the process of human communication: interactions we have with people during our childhood teaches us what corresponds to our gender

Question 9

Family communication: interactions with the mother

Answer 9

Right from the beginning, a baby will identify with the first person who took care of him, generally his mother.
- This, in turn, accounts for the fact that the process of identification in the relationship between mother and daughter (therefore of the same sex) appears easier that the one between mother and son.
- To develop his gender identity a boy will have to differentiate from his mother.

Question 10

Interactions among children

Answer 10

• Emphasizes the process of gender identification
• No gender difference in the games before the age of 2, more blatant shortly thereafter.
• “boy games”: competitive team sports focusing on achievement, power, and self-assertion
• “girl games”: more personal relationships (fewer number of participants), cooperation, sensitivity, and attention.
• Children who do not “respect” gender codes and roles corresponding to their sex generally have to suffer mocking remarks from class-and playmates.

Question 11

“Gender role”

Answer 11

• The set of “socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.”
• Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of femininity and masculinity.
• There are exceptions and variations (“trans-gender” or “genderqueer”) and some systems of classification may allow for more than two possible gender types.
• The term “gender role” was first coined by John Money in 1955, during the course of his study of intersex individuals, to describe the manners in which these individuals expressed their status as a male or female in a situation where no clear biological assignment existed.

Question 12

Variations and debate

Answer 12

• Gendered expectations may vary among cultures
• Other characteristics may be common through a range of cultures
• Debate: to what extent gender roles and variations are biologically determined, and to what extent they are socially constructed?

Question 13

Appropriate behavior according to gender vary across time

Answer 13

Raewyn Connell (Australian sociologist): “There are cultures where it has been normal, not exceptional, for men to have homosexual relations. There have been periods in ‘Western’ history when the modern convention that men suppress displays of emotion did not apply at all, when men were demonstrative about their feeling for their friends.”

Question 14

Impact of trad gender roles on society representation and practices

Answer 14

• Ex: patterns of behavior seen from men and women in old movies
• Lasting and indelible impact, most typical views of men/women up until the mid-20th:
• Men = responsible for taking care of the family financially, responsibility for guiding the family. Men did not do household duties or childcare, and felt the need to be strong and refrained from showing too much emotion or sharing too many personal feelings, especially with those outside of the family.
• Women: expected to be in charge of running the household (mothers did the laundry, cooked the meals, cleaned the rooms, and took care of the children (wealthier families sometimes hired a nanny and childcare became more widely used in the later 20th century). Women were seen as more emotional than men, more likely and more encouraged to open up about their feelings.

Question 15

American sociologist Talcott Parsons, 1950s

Answer 15

• Contrasted two extreme positions on gender roles as an effort to compare a strictly traditional view of gender roles (from an industrial-age American perspective) with a more liberal view.
• Model A describes total separation of male and female roles
• Model B describes the complete dissolution of gender roles, the actual behavior of individuals being usually somewhere between these poles.

Question 16

Hpw gender roles are passed on through generations?

Answer 16

• Childhood = crucial phase of this learning process.
• From the age of three, children are able to start becoming aware of the differences between girls and boys based on the actions of the parents and the nature of their environment.
• As the children grow a few years, they start learning what behavior is appropriate and expected.
• Children are encouraged to serve different roles in their interactions with the outside world.
• The children’s behavior is reinforced when the parents praise or reward them for their actions – or, on the contrary, when they punish them or challenge them to change, if it’s considered inappropriate

Question 17

From gender roles to stereotypes

Answer 17

• For generations: people survived by remaining within prescribed roles, adapting to the pattern of thought, belief and behavior of their cultural group and subgroups.
• Inequalities remain as life choices and decisions are made by both men and women based on outdated patterns of gender socialization.

Question 18

Socialization into sex roles

Answer 18

• Process by which sexes assume different personality characteristics, preferences, and skills.
• This process implies that cultural views of the “proper” attitudes and behaviors for each sex are communicated through the messages of parents, partners, teachers, friends, and of course the media.
• The messages become internalized as appropriate sex-role behavior and continue to be reinforced.
• In turn, these patterns of behavior provide the foundation for stereotyped sex-role behavior.
• Ex: traditional sex-role stereotypes place women in restricted roles of surrogates daughters, wives, lovers, or mothers. Women are often judged by sex-role traits such as attractiveness, social skills, and “knowing their place” rather than ability, talent, and potential; they are also often accused of capitalizing on their sex rather than their abilities.

Question 19

Gender stereotypes

Answer 19

• Beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of men and women, boys and girls.
• Gender stereotypes are extremely common in society. One reason: it is easier on the brain to stereotype. It has limited perceptual and memory systems, so it categorizes information into fewer and simpler units which allows for more efficient information processing.

Question 20

“Self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Answer 20

• Individuals tend to observe and recall aspects of an individual’s behavior that are consistent with the stereotype and reject evidence that contradicts the stereotype.
• The issue is further complicated by the fact that stereotyped individuals often subscribe to the stereotypes about themselves.

Question 21

1992 studies tested gender stereotypes and labeling within young children

Answer 21

1. How children identified the differences between gender labels of boys and girls
2. Looked at both gender labeling and stereotyping in the relationship of mother and child.
   Both showed that gender stereotyping and labeling are acquired at a very young age, and that social interactions and associations play a large role in how genders are identified.

Question 22

1st study

Answer 22

• 23 children between the ages of 2 and 7 underwent a series of gender labeling and gender stereotyping tests consisting of showing the children either pictures of males and females or objects (hammer or broom) then identifying or labeling those to a certain gender.
• The results: children under 3 years could make gender-stereotypic associations.

Question 23

2nd study

Answer 23

• Labeling and stereotyping in the relationship of mother and child: same results as the first study with regards to labeling and stereotyping.
• The mothers’ positive reactions and responses to the use of gender specific toys played a role in how children identified them.
• The study established that the mothers of the children who passed the “gender labeling test” held more traditional family values.

Question 24

Another study of gender stereotype

Answer 24

• Parents’ stereotypes interact with the sex of their child to directly influence the parents’ beliefs about the child’s abilities;
• In turn, parents’ beliefs about their child directly influence their child’s self-perceptions, and both the parents’ stereotypes and the child’s self-perceptions influence the child’s performance.
• Ex: social scientists have pointed to the fact that lower performance by women in mathematics owe to the implicit belief in gender stereotype that women perform worse than men in this discipline.
• Note: “stereotype threat” – that is, the situational predicament in which people are, or feel themselves to be, at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group – does not apply only to women, but to other groups as well, and often looms large on patterns of counter-performance and social exclusion among their members.

Question 25

Gender relations as power relations

Answer 25

• Many societies: history of depriving women of the right to advance, to be active and contributing members of their communities.
• This deprivation has not targeted women only; (US: people of color have also been excluded from many opportunities).
• Feminist scholars Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” Equal rights are not special rights.

Question 26

Women and political representation

Answer 26

• Up until the late 20th-century in most Western cultures, the prevailing gender role of women has been one of general subordination.
• Throughout the world today, a majority of women still do not enjoy full freedom and protection under the law.
• We are often inclined to make the subjugation of Muslim women the epitome of “patriarchal culture,” we might want to remember that even in Western democracies, women were not granted the right to vote until fairly recently.

Question 27

Women in the workforce

Answer 27

• U.S. today, about 57% of all women 16 years and over are in the workforce, compared to 69% of all men.
• These estimates do not account for the vast majority of women working either unpaid, or with no regular stipend.
• Increase in the number of women in the paid workforce has wide-ranging effects.
• Possibility of bringing new skills and styles to the workplace, great deal of speculation about whether or not women and men work in the same ways, and if they differ, then how.

Question 28

Stereotypes and biases of both men and women

Answer 28

• Interfere with the more basic issues of types and levels of positions women hold in organizations, their level of compensation, and the quality of their work life.
• US Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 and presence of affirmative action, an aggressive move has been made toward empowering women and minorities to progress and to become leaders.
• And although these measures and policies have opened doors for women and people of color, there still remains an invisible barrier that is referred to as the “glass ceiling.”

Question 29

Sexual discrimination

Answer 29

• Women still earn significantly less than men and hold less important positions;
• Even when they do hold similar positions they still earn less than men (“gender pay gap”).
• Women are facing on the workplace many barriers both visible and “invisible,” as well as different forms of discrimination.
• Outright discrimination in pay, hiring, or promotions continues to be a significant feature of working life.

Question 30

Sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Answer 30

• Sex typing and job placement: women and men are still often typecast and stereotyped in their counseling and placement into careers as well as in their development of career aspirations.
• Women are still placed in low-prestige and low-pay positions: “at every level of experience and education women are concentrated in lower level occupations and at lower ranks within occupations.”
• Little fit or logic between women’s careers and their attributes – and this holds true worldwide.
• Culture over time establishes guidelines and individuals act according to those norms. And in turn, behaviors based on these norms form patterns of what is normal, natural, and acceptable sex-typed work.

Question 31

From gender roles to compensation gap

Answer 31

• Historically, the household = the force that perpetuates gender differentiation from generation to generation.
• The skills, characteristics, and roles they supported centered on authority, and compensated employment for men with domestic work and child education as the role of women.
• However, employment outside the traditional role has been an add-on for generations of women in poor and working-class families, minority women, and immigrant women.
• “Hidden working mothers”: significant portion of employees in all national economies.
• 1980s: women with children under 6 years of age were actually the fastest-growing segment of the workforce.
• Statement: women are just not ready to make the same sacrifices for their careers as men. Such comments actually reshuffle the blame for career obstacles back to women, rather than examine individual and organization stereotypes.

Question 32

Stats

Answer 32

• US today: women are almost half of the workforce (46.8%).
• They are the equal, if not main, breadwinner in four out of ten families.
• They receive more college and graduate degrees than men.
• Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men.
• In 2015, female full-time workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent.
• According to research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, if change continues at the same slow pace as it has done for the past fifty years, it will take until 2059 for women to finally reach pay parity.
• Communications scholar Elizabeth Lance Toth: “in a forty-year career, a woman will lose $1 million on gender alone.

Question 33

Statistics

Answer 33

• Women, earn less than men in virtually every single occupation. Irrespective of the level of qualification, jobs predominantly done by women pay less on average than jobs predominantly done by men (middle-skill occupations, workers in jobs mainly performed by women earn only 66 percent of workers in jobs mainly performed by men).
• Institute for Women’s Policy Research: the poverty rate for working women would be cut in half if women were paid the same as comparable men.
• Women have made tremendous strides during the last few decades by moving into jobs and occupations previously done almost exclusively by men, yet during the last decade there has been very little further progress in the gender integration of work.
• In some industries and occupations, no progress in forty years: (highway, street, and bridge construction)
• Persistent occupational segregation = primary contributor to the lack of significant progress in closing the wage gap (made worse for older, Black or Hispanic women)

Question 34

Women in nontraditional positions

Answer 34

• Women in the U.S. now hold 51.5% of management, professional and related positions: seems a good number but they remain confined mostly to the middle and lower ranks of management, and the senior levels are almost exclusively a male domain.
• “Standard & Poor’s 500” stock market index: the percentage of female CEOs has recently dropped to just 4%
• 1986: only one women held the rank of CEO.
• Paula England: it would be a little less than 500 years (until the year 2466) “before women reach equality with men in the executive suite”
• Rise of female entrepreneurs founding they own companies but the majority of female-own businesses are actually small businesses with low revenues.

Question 35

Gender, communication, and medias

Answer 35

• Gender comm (GC) = form of intercultural comm.
• 2 assumptions from comm theory:

1. Comm is epistemic: communication is the medium by which we come to know things, in a world in which truth is socially constructed through language and other symbol systems.
2. Comm is axiological: value-laden. Language is subjective, no language is neutral. Therefore, all communication makes claims and takes stances. Indeed, any use of communication exhibits an attitude, and an attitude implies an act, and all human actions have moral consequences. Hence, communication entails moral responsibility.

Question 36

Laurie Arliss

Answer 36

“Communication is thought to be, at once, the process by which we learn to be male or female, and the product of our attempts to behave sex-appropriately.”
=> Gender is both an influence on and a product of communication.

Question 37

Males and females are taught different linguistic practices

Answer 37

• Communicative behaviors that are acceptable for boys may be considered completely inappropriate for girls.
• Research on women and language: women experience linguistic discrimination in two ways: in the way they are taught to use language, and in the way general language usage treats them.
  Ex: women reflect their role in the social order by adopting linguistic practices (tag questions, qualifiers, and fillers to soften their messages).
• Traditionally, women were identified by their association with men, and we know that occupational titles indicated which jobs were “for men” and which were “for women.”
• While much of this has changed today, our society retains a tendency to imply that maleness, after all, is the standard for normalcy: a female physician may still be referred to as a “woman doctor,” and while a female committee chair may be called the “chair” or the “chairperson,” a male in that role will more likely be called “chairman.”
• What we are taught about gender, then, is reflected in our language usage.

Question 38

Cultural concepts of gender

Answer 38

• Religious, mythic, philosophic, and scientific discourses teach us about society’s values and rules related to gender.
• Ex: Western mythson the active male and the supporting female, Plato defined women as “lesser men,” Aristotle described women as “a deformity, a misbegotten male,” St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God should not have created women, or that craniologists of the nineteenth century argued that women’s smaller heads justified their subordinate position in society (thus initiating all the “pretty little head” rhetoric about women), or that Freud believed women had “little sense of justice,” and so on.
• All these privileged discourses create a web of meaning, a socially constructed worldview that historically has excluded or made secondary the experience of certain groups of people.

Question 39

Control of cultural concepts today

Answer 39

• Mass-mediated messages offer the most contemporary, powerful, technologically and rhetorically sophisticated strategies for shaping cultural reality.
• The beauty, diet, and advertising industries are the most obvious and best-researched examples of contemporary, self-conscious myth-makers who control cultural concepts – and acceptable images – of what it takes and means to be male or female, masculine or feminine

Question 40

Gender communication as intercultural communication

Answer 40

• Worldview, language, and nonverbal communication (use of space and/or time) are identified as constituents of intercultural communication
• Occurrences of differences at these points suggest we are dealing with intercultural communication.
• Differences in worldview, language usage, and proxemics between the genders are three points of difference which suggest that gender communication is a form of intercultural communication.

Question 41

Female worldview significantly different from male worldview

Answer 41

• Carol Gilligan argues that “female identity revolves around interconnectedness and relationship,” while male identity “stresses separation and independence.”
• Ancient goddess religions & contemporary practices of them, scholars note that in goddess mythology the goddess is the world (instead of a mythology which places god above or apart from the world).
• Goddess metaphysics creates a worldview in which the earth and nature are respected, not dominated.

Question 42

Language

Answer 42

Deborah Tannen: “communication between men and,women can be like cross cultural communication, prey to a clash of conversational styles.”
- Differences in the way men and women generally look at the world. Women see talk as the essence of a relationship while men use talk to exert control, preserve independence, and enhance status.
- The ways in which concepts of social relationships (and their accompanying communication patterns) differ between genders are parallel to gender differences in worldview.

Question 43

You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (U.S. American linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen)

Answer 43

• She coined the term “Genderlect” to describe the ways in which conversations of men and women are not right and wrong, superior and inferior, but just – and fundamentally – different.
• Tannen’s theory is about how men and women communicate differently, and what we can do to bridge the gap between the two communication styles
• Tannen: men and women seek different things from conversations:
• Women: language of conversation is primarily a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships (“language of rapport”).
• Men: talk = means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order.
• This leads to conversations at cross-purposes, since both parties may miss the other’s “meta-messages,” at the risk of misunderstandings.

Question 44

Men and women both perceive the other gender as the more talkative, and they are both accurate.

Answer 44

• Men speak more in public settings about public topics-even where they know less about a subject than a female interlocutor), because they use conversation to establish status.
• Women dominate private conversation within and about relationships. They will talk more about feelings, relationships and people, and will include more emotional elements in their talk and will encourage others to do the same. Ex: they will use emphasized intensifiers such as “so” and “such”
• Women often listen more because they have been socialized to be accommodating
• Men tend to “tell” others, taking an authoritative or expert stance that puts them above others and discourages interruption.
  =>These patterns, which begin in childhood, mean for instance that men are far more likely to interrupt another speaker, while women are more likely to finish each other’s sentences.

Question 45

Nonverbal behavior

Answer 45

• Demonstrates differences between men and women. Gender communication is a form of intercultural communication.
• Communication scholar Julia Wood: “space is a primary means by which a culture designates who is important, who has privilege.”
• Differences in the amount of space given to and taken by women and men reflect societal gender roles.
• Women are less likely than men to have their own private space within the family home.
• In the workplace, employees in the traditionally female role (secretary, generally) have a smaller space than the employee in the traditionally male role (executive).
• Responses to invasion of space also differ: while men may respond aggressively, women tend to yield space rather than challenge the intruder.

Question 46

Problems in the educational system

Answer 46

Lack of female role models, the curricular content misrepresenting white men as standard and rendering women invisible, and even the biased communication in the classroom, in which women – students or faculty – are often taken less seriously than their male counterparts.

Question 47

Conclusion

Answer 47

• By learning not to assume that men and women are the same, we can become more sensitive to the fact that men and women’s values and goals may differ, and generally their verbal and nonverbal language will vary as well.
• Awareness of societal preconceptions and stereotypes which portray the other sex as “different” or “opposite” can help us avoid such stereotypes.
• The task in improving intercultural communication is awareness and respect rather than evaluation.