Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Why Does Hollywood Still Suck at Gender Equality?

February 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Kathryn Bigelow at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival two weeks before winning an Oscar for Best Director for "The Hurt Locker" (PHOTO: ASPEN ROCK/SHUTTERSTOCK)

It’s 2010, and the room is tight with anticipation. Barbra Streisand, a titan for gender equality in her own right, gingerly opens the envelope. Her voice becomes assertive, “Well, the time has come.” That night Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards. Her acceptance speech was modest, the words poignant. The orchestra swelled with a bouncy version of “I Am Woman” as she exited, Oscar in hand. Bigelow’s win was a major milestone in Hollywood, where women historically—big surprise—have been shuttered into the second tier. Some ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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How Etsy Got Over Middle-School-Cafeteria Syndrome

February 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

http://youtu.be/w4LExVkv4Pw Kellan Elliot-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy, recently shared the anecdote below at a private seminar held by a leading venture capital firm for its portfolio companies. (For the un-initiated, Etsy is a wildly popular online craft marketplace with over 15 million users—80 percent female—and, until recently, a 4.5 percent-female engineering staff.) Etsy also had a substantial “boys versus girls” dynamic, where engineers (mostly male) sat on one side and the women on the other... It was a broken system that required changes on both sides of the house. Not a ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, The 101
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Nerd Rage: Gendered Tech During the Rise of Radio

January 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Girls in Chicago show off radio sets they've built (July 1924 Radio News magazine)

Radio is for boys only. No girls allowed. Or at least that was the message from so many young men at the dawn of the medium. There was a sense of betrayal by many young men in the early 1920s that radio was no longer their exclusive domain. Girls were rushing in and getting their cooties all over everything. The magazines of the early 1920s that had once catered to the "wireless amateur" as they were known began appealing to a broader base. No longer was the radio magazine implicitly sold as for men and boys by excluding women from its pages as so many did in the late 1910s. By 1922 women ... Read More

More like this: Time Machine
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Small Steps Toward Scientific Gender Equity

September 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Tom Jacobs last week cited current research showing that job applications attributed to female scientists were received less favorably by other scientists than those of applications they believed came from a man. The effect was true for both men and women. Right now I'm at the Third International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, and a factoid that arose in the first day's opening remarks offers some small hope for greater gender equality (at least in science). Looking over the participants and presenters of all three of these ocean-acidification gatherings—the first in Paris in ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The 101
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First They Came for the Bahá’í …

August 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

For a country trying to swim upstream against a torrent of international approbation, Iran makes some intriguing choices that burnish its reputation. Last month Angilee Shah explained how members of the Bahá’í faith are prohibited from higher education. Earlier this month, the Islamic Republic of Iran moved to ban women from taking degree-level courses in 77 areas. The restrictions on women’s education are not as overt as the one on the Bahá’í. For one, while promulgated from on high they are enacted at the country’s 36 government-run universities apparently on an ... Read More

More like this: Education, The 101
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Gender Wage Gap Skewed By Survey Flaws

February 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The wage gap between the sexes in America has been narrowing much faster than observers ever realized, although this revelation by a pair of University of Georgia researchers isn’t as good a tiding as it could be. Jeremy Reynolds and Jeffrey Wenger, who have stumbled upon a quirk in existing survey data that could also color how we measure all types of other sociological trends, say statisticians have been as much as 50 percent off in tracking the progress of women’s wages in the work force. “But that’s only because things were worse in the past than we had realized,” Reynolds ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
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Pop Charts Still Dominated by Men

December 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1997, Rolling Stone magazine famously celebrated the rise of the female pop star, boldly declaring that “Women are ruling the roost.” It took less than a decade for that dominance to decisively shift back to men. That’s the key finding of a newly published study, which concludes that “gender inequality continues to characterize the world of popular music.” A Canadian research team led by Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance reports male artists continue to dominate the Top 40 sales charts, and the gender gap is even wider in terms of airplay. Lafrance and his ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Media
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Law of the Jungle: Powerful Men Have More Children

August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Two generations after the beginning of the feminist revolution, men still dominate positions of power in the United States. Why are men still over-represented in corporate board rooms, halls of government, and other places where decisions are made? One reason might be that men are evolutionarily programmed to seek positions of high status, as a means of upping their reproductive output. In the podcast, Christopher von Rueden, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about his research into the connections between status and reproduction among the Tsimane, an ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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On ‘Jeopardy!’ Women Take Fewer Risks vs. Men

June 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The answer is: It’s a game show that provides surprising clues about sex, social rules and risk-taking. And the question is: What is Jeopardy!? Two Swedish researchers, writing in the journal Economics Letters, report an intriguing pattern of behavior by contestants on the popular quiz program. Women, it seems, take fewer risks when their Jeopardy! opponents are men. Gabriella Sjogren Lindquist and Jenny Save-Soderbergh of the Swedish Institute for Social Research looked at 206 episodes of Jeopardy!, focusing on those moments when one of the three contestants must decide how much to ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Findings
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Military Gender Roles Still Thorny Problem

April 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Gray skies covered the cluster of gray stone buildings and perfectly manicured fields at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. last Friday as a group of about 50 students — cadets and midshipmen from all the U.S. service academies, as well as some students from other universities — gathered inside the brightly lit main library for an earnest discussion on gender issues in the U.S. armed forces. Speakers at the two-day Gender Justice conference — hosted by the West Point Center for the Rule of Law — tackled a tight range of sober topics, and the Friday morning ... Read More

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