Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

p 71 - "A study in South Korea found that people facing employment instability suffered health effects as large as the effects of smoking."

p 71 - "job insecurity can lead to adverse health effects for both temporary AND permanent employees."

p 68 - "Another source of insecurity and stress even for full-time employees comes from feeling constantly under the gun. People feel that they are always being assessed and evaluated, and if they even temporarily don't perform as well as expected, they will be dismissed. There is less forgiveness in work cultures and not much patience with, or tolerance for, the invariable natural fluctuations in job performance."

p 67 - "Varying, uncertain work schedules and work hours - and wages - wreak havoc on people's lives."

p 51 - "We know that stress affects these individual choices to eat too much, not exercise, take drugs, and abuse alcohol and smoke. We further know that the workplace is an important, if not one of the most important, causes of stress."

p 51 - "Individuals respond to stress, as many examples in this book illustrate, by self-medicating with drugs or alcohol to numb the psychological pain of an unhealthy workplace. People compensate for the psychological depletion of energy from a stressful work environment by overeating."

p 38 - "Differential exposure to harmful workplace environments, largely affected by people's level of education (and to a much, much smaller extent by race and gender), account for somewhere between 10 and 38% of the (growing) inequality in life spans."

p 32 - "Privileging economic costs over human well-being shouldn't occur as thoughtlessly as it now does, and costs certainly should not be the sole criterion used in assessing whether wellness programs worked or did not."

Then why do companies use these practices?

p 3 - "toxic management practices and unhealthy workplaces do NOT improve organizational profitability or performance."

p 235 - "gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, "gender difference is the product of gender inequality, and not the other way around.""

p 231 - "Children's views about gender differences reach "peak rigidity" between five and seven years of age." These are the "cootie years," after all ;D

(continued) "…cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label ("Good morning, Blues and Reds"). At the end of three weeks... children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children."'

p 228 - "preeschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they'd been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The color groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories."

p 228 - "Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group."

p 222 - "children take note of who is playing with what: when researchers doctored a commercial for a Playmobil Airport Set to show girls, as well as boys, playing with the toy... children shown this altered commercial were nearly twice as likely to think that the toy was for girls as well as boys, compared to children who saw the commercial in its traditional, boys-only form."

220 - "Diane Turner-Bowker examined how males and females were described in the 41 Caldecott winners and runners-up from 1984 to 1994. One gender was most commonly described as... beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak, and scared in the stories; the other gender as big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave, and proud... And we all know which type of person we'd rather have with us on an adventure."

p 218 - "When developmental psychologists unobtrusively watch what goes on in preschool classrooms, they find that children receive distinctly cooler responses from peers when they play in gender-inappropriate ways... this peer feedback seems to influence children's behavior, making it more stereotypical... they are particularly effective in bringing cross-gender behavior to an end."

p 217 - "children were shown a video of men and women playing a game, with the men performing one kind of ritual and the women another. Girls copied the women's ritual, and boys the men's, but only after they had confirmed for themselves that this is what women (or men) IN GENERAL did, and not just one particular woman or man." Conclusion: a gender-nonconforming parent is seen as an exception.

Excellent analogy with left- and right-handedness on 209-210.

p 209 - "color-coding for boys and girls once quite openly served the purpose of helping young children learn gender distinctions."

p 205 - "Does a six-month-old girl look longer at a pink doll than a blue truck because that's how she's wired or because she's seen more pink and more dolls in her short life... and less blue and fewer trucks?"

p 203 - "Cross-gender behavior is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term "tomboy" there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the "sissy.""

p 201 - "As psychologists Nancy Weitzman and her colleagues suggested over 20 years ago, "expressed attitudes may be easier to change than deeply entrenched, nonconscious forms of behavior.""

p 198 - "Mothers were... asked to estimate the steepness of the slope their crawling 11-month-old could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came to testing themselves on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys - both in crawling ability and crawling attempts."

p 197 - "babies just three to four months of age prefer to look at female, rather than male, faces... they tested a small group of daddy-reared babies and found that THIS rare breed of baby preferred male faces."