Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

p 128 - “human children have a powerful drive to self-socialize into gender roles. That is, even in the absence of any encouragement by parents, they are attracted to things and behaviors associated with their sex.”

p 127 - "As Burton argued, "while hormones are the same" throughout these different species, there is "no universal pattern" to how the different tasks of the society, including infant care, are divided."

p 119 - "such historical shifts - including the movement away from male dominance in teaching and secretarial work - don't lend themselves especially well to explanations in terms of hormones and genes."

p 115 - "In this carefully designed study, no gender differences in eye gaze were found in newborns although, interestingly, they did find gender differences in eye gaze in a follow-up three to four months later. This, they point out, suggests the possibility "that the gender-typed behavior pattern is not innate but, instead, learned in early infancy.""

p 106 - "as the neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier pointed out more than two decades ago, the very starting point of the theory - the idea that the fetal male's higher level of testosterone brings about a more cramped left hemisphere - was inconsistent with a large postmortem study of fetal brains. More recently, a neuroimaging study of 74 newborns also found no evidence of a relatively smaller left hemisphere in males."

p 100 - "Baron-Cohen asks "why, in over 100 years of the existence of the Fields Medal, maths' [equivalent of the] Nobel Prize, have none of the winners ever been a woman?" Over the course of the article, he circles around an answer... because women don't have the same testosterone-saturated in utero environment."

p 95 - "Several researchers have suggested that the continual drip, drip, drip of gender stereotypes will, over time, really add up."

p 93 - "Put simply, the same career entails greater sacrifices for her than for him."

(continued) "Behind every great academic man there is a woman, but behind every great academic woman is an unpeeled potato and a child who needs some attention."

(continued) - "Faculty fathers, by contrast, but in only 32 unpaid work hours a week. This substantially lighter load not only enables them to put in an extra five hours a week at work, but to also enjoy a spare TWO HOURS A DAY to spend doing - well, who knows - while faculty mothers continue to launder, cook, test spelling, wash grubby faces, and read bedtime stories." (continued)

p 92-93 - "Female faculty with children report working 51 hours a week at their jobs and another 51 hours a week doing housework and child care - truly the second shift. That's a 102-hour work week, accounting for more than 14 hours per day. Add to this 8 hours for sleeping, 1 for eating and basic hygiene, and by my calculations that leaves these women the grand total of 26 minutes a day for themselves." (continued)

p 89 - "As Gloria Steinem recently reminded a journalist, "The idea of having it all never meant doing it all. Men are parents, too, and actually women will never be equal outside the home until men are equal inside the home.""

p 87 - "Stimuli in the environment - whether it is a baby, a success at work, or a touching and moving segment on Oprah - can trigger hormonal changes."

p 87 - ""It's your choice" was code for "it's your problem.""

(continued) - "Their husbands, who also had demanding careers, were often described by their wives as being "supportive" and giving their wives a "choice." But none provided a REAL choice to their wives by offering to adapt their own careers to family demands."

p 86 - "sociologist Pamela Stone's detailed interview study of 54 such women... reveals a fascinating and complex picture, and one in which gender inequality at home (alongside all-or-nothing workplaces) was a major factor in most interviewees' decisions to trade in the very successful careers that they loved." (continued)

p 85 - "In one couple, he was a college professor and she was a physician, and in the other couple she was the college professor and he the physician. But in both cases, "both the husband and wife claimed the man's job was less flexible.""

p 84-85 - "While there are entire chapters - books, even - devoted to the issues of being a working mother, rare indeed is it to come across even a paragraph in a child-rearing manual that addresses that conflicts of time and responsibility that arise from being a working father."

p 83 - "One study even found that only these [subconscious, rather than declared, attitudes] were correlated with women's career goals."

p 81 - "It's hard not to be a little cynical when Gray argues that it is in deference to his male ... status that when he helps with the dishes it should fall to "others [to] bring the plates over, put things away, and clean tabletops." As he explains, "[h]aving to ask your partner each time whether this food should be kept, and remembering where she wants things to be put away, can be a bit exhausting for a man."

(continued) - "After that - when she starts to earn more than him - something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does."

(continued) - "When one person earns more than the other then he (most likely) enjoys greater bargaining power at the trade union negotiations that, for some, become their marriage. Certainly, in line with this unromantic logic, as a woman's financial contribution approaches that of her husband's, her housework decreases. It doesn't actually become EQUITABLE, you understand. Just less unequal. (continued)

p 80 - "In families with children in which both spouses work full-time, women do about twice as much child care and housework as men - the notorious "second shift" described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her classic book of that name. You might think that, even if this isn't quite fair, it's nonetheless rational." (continued)

p 79 - "When I say "head of the household," you immediately know to which spouse I refer (and it's not "Mrs. John Smith"). That his was the final word was enshrined in law until surprisingly recently."

p 79 - "The "separate spheres" of men and women - his public, hers private - were seen as complementary and equal, but in an Animal Farm-ish some-spheres-are-more-equal-than-others sort of way."

continued - "without any expectation that she should not have to deal with this kind of treatment at work ("that's just how men are")." -- THAT'S JUST HOW MEN ARE. If anyone wants to know how stereotypes develop, MAYBE LOOK AT THAT. This is a way to depersonalize and deal with an ATTACK. Ugh.

p 74-75 - "One surgery resident described the experience of discovering in the restrooms an explicit cartoon of herself, bent over, and her mento engaged in sexual intercourse. Another resident had added an arrow and the comment that he wished he could be in the latter's position... She filed no complaint but looked to herself to adapt to the hostile environment ("I might as well just get over it")" (continued)

p 72 - "It's not hard to see that - whatever your moral take on strip joints and lap-dancing clubs - using them as corporate entertainment serves to exclude women."

p 69 - "Those on the top rungs were not unconsciously seeing women as slightly less qualified for better roles. They were CONSCIOUSLY deciding, without giving women a chance to decide for themselves, that these more generously remunerated (and, ironically, possibly more-flexible) jobs were for men." (Caps used for italics in original.)

p 65 - "As one comprehensive review of the literature concluded, "Women earn less than men, and no matter how extensively regressions control for market characteristics, working conditions, individual characteristics, children, housework time, and observed productivity, an unexplained gender pay gap remains for all but the most inexperienced of workers.""