Tidbits from the world on gender inequality

Sometimes being a woman sucks. And I’m not talking about biology. I’m talking about sociology.

I’m talking about having to include in my thinking about what clothes to wear my willingness to endure catcalling and street harassment because of someone else’s decision to “comment” on my appearance. I’m talking about grown-ass people telling me that they feel sorry for me because I’m 30 and single, even when I don’t feel sorry for myself (and while simultaneously congratulating my 30 and single male friends for successfully remaining “unchained”). I’m talking about my sister having to file for disability leave when her “disability” is having become a mother.

Like I said, sometimes being a woman sucks. In that vein, I’ve run across a whole bunch of engaging, informative, depressing, and refreshing gender-related stuff as of late that I thought I’d share. Check it:

The female body
The female body is constantly under attack. We’re supposed to be young and skinny (aka scrawny) but also perky and curvaceous. It’s exhausting (whether you’re trying to abide or trying to resist). But, there are some folks trying to fight back.

• The folks over at My Body Gallery have created a user generated space where women can send in images of what real women – themselves – look like. The site is not without problematic elements, however. (I, for example, see little reason to categorize my body shape as an apple, pear, banana, or hourglass or to list my height, weight, and clothing sizes. Plus, they unfortunately have an advertising problem. All the ads I've seen are for things like Victoria's Secret and shapewear. Boo!) But I appreciate the site owners’ intention. It will be interesting to see how the site grows or is used over time.
• A friend recently created the website Evolve the Aesthetic (ETA) with the intention of engaging women in the reclamation of their own beauty and encouraging the capacity of women to define for themselves the concept of beauty. The project's objective is to shift cultural ideals of beauty increasingly towards how women really look in their amazingly diverse manifestations of beauty. I expect that exciting, innovative stuff will be coming out of ETA, so keep your eyes on it.
• Ovens, an illustrator (who authors the webcomic Effort Comics) offered this gem of a tutorial on how to draw boobs and ladybits in general. Based on the representations of women we see everywhere – be it comics, advertising, video games, etc. – a whole world of folks could benefit from her instruction.
• I watched this hard-hitting documentary last week called "America the Beautiful." It originally came out in 2007, but does a really heart-wrenching job at asking the question “Is America obsessed with beauty?” And it begs a response to “Who benefits when young girls and women feel ugly?” You can watch the movie in its entirety on Hulu (with an account), through this Love Isn’t Enough blog post (where you just have to enter your birth date), or right here.  

Health care
Women’s health care has been all over the news as of late. Here’s a few things to ponder:

• Did you see Stephen Colbert's response to the Department of Health and Human Services's new policy that insurance companies must cover women’s birth control and preventative health care services (HPV vaccines, STI testing, etc.) without a co-pay? The Colbert Nation-provided tag reads: “Free birth control will wipe out the American race and instantly turn daughters into wanton harlots with insatiable sexual appetites.” I laughed. A lot.
  

  The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
  Women's Health-Nazi Plan
  www.colbertnation.com
  Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

  (And if are looking for an additional reason to laugh, Colbert also offered a hysterical response to Summer’s Eve’s ridiculous (and racist) new ad campaign.) 



Click to embiggen.
(Yes, I know that is not a
real word, but I like it.)

• There has also been word that women's health care costs are expensive. (Shocking, right?!) Looking at just the services that would be provided under the new legislation, here’s what we’ve got.  This fabulous info graph is courtesy of the folks at Good. What gets me about all this political arguing is that men’s health care (to the best of my knowledge) is covered by insurance companies by default while women’s health care has always been an “add on,” considered non-essential. 51% of the population has non-essential health needs. Awesome.

Economics and educational attainment

• Some utterly depressed pay gap statistics were recently reported by the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce in their report “The College Payoff: Education, Opportunity, Lifetime Earnings” (pdf).  Here’s one of the key charts of findings.

  

  Click to embiggen.

  And in case you’re worried that you misread the notes in red (or they're just too small to read), here’s what they say:  “Women have to have a Ph.D. to make as much as men with a B.A.” and “Men with some college but no degree earn about the same as women with a Bachelor’s degree.”  That makes me feel GREAT as I work to finish my Master’s. But, as you can guess, women aren’t the only one’s losing out. People of color, too, aren’t earning as much as their white peers. The study introduction summarizes things pretty well, saying:  “The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work full-time, full-year earn 25 percent less than men, even at similar education levels. At all levels of educational attainment, African Americans and Latinos earn less than Whites.”

Writing about race (aka – How’s that thesis going?)

image courtesy of Racialicious

I write about race. A lot. (Especially in the past few weeks and during the many upcoming months as I try to finish my thesis.) In conjunction, I think about race, I read about race, and I talk about race. A lot. And I can get overwhelmed by the amount of social, cultural, and personal resistance I feel in response to the anti-racist philosophies and ideologies I write about and try to practice. (And if I had a dollar for every time someone assumed that they know what I believe about race and rambled on to say all sorts of racist stuff… Whew! I would have my student loans paid off!)

Today I had a happy (and yet sad) moment reading the blog post "The People You Meet When You Write About Race" by Crommunist. He offers examples of language folks use when talking (or not talking) about race. Each example pinpoints a perspective that can present a real challenge to honest, productive anti-racist dialogue and work. Here are a few of the personalities/responses those who write or speak about race encounter:

Mr. History
“Black people were enslaved like a million years ago. They’ve had enough time to get their act together, but they’re still whining about their problems. I don’t want to hear about transgenerational wealth gaps and discriminatory hiring practices! Their problem is that they’re lazy! Case closed!”

Ms. Kumbayah
“We need to recognize that everyone is just the exact same on the inside. Why do we bother using labels like ‘black’ and ‘white’ anyway? Even though the way society treats people falls along racial lines to the detriment of some and benefit of others, we should ignore that! Aren’t we all just members of the human race?”

Mr. Hear No Evil
“It’s people like you that are the real racists! Most people don’t think twice about someone else’s race! Talking about race is what makes racism happen, not entrenched ideas that won’t change unless they’re discussed!”

Reading the entire list is definitely worthwhile. And it’s not all melancholy-inducing. Crommunist includes one personality that is a gift to anyone working to address issues of racism (and a gift to society). It reads:

Mr./Ms. Has Been Listening
“This topic made me really uncomfortable when I first started talking about it, but I’m glad I did. I’m not sure if I ‘get’ everything, but my thinking has definitely changed. Here are some reasonable objections and questions that I have, and I hope we can talk about them without offending each other.”

What was sad about reading the post is that I have met and spoken with people who align themselves with nearly all of the ideologies presented. In the process of pursuing racial justice, knowing that the diversity of ‘nah’s is so broad can be really overwhelming. On the flip side, what made me smile about reading the post was that I was reminded that I belong to a larger community of like-minded thinkers. And our experiences of resistance are not isolated. And having knowledge of that shared experience offers support and strength as we move forward.

Maps as provocateurs of social discourse (aka - Maps are AWESOME!)

It’s been buzzing around the internet the last little while, but have you seen the work of Bill Rankin?  He’s a historian and cartographer, and the curator/developer/mastermind behind Radical Cartography.

He does all sorts of map-making that intentionally pushes the boundaries of how folks think about maps as information organizers, transmitters, and social tools.  For example, his 2005 map called "Suicide" shows the difference in rates of suicide by white men and white women geographically in the U.S. (you might be surprised), and his 2006 map "U.S. Economic Empire" shows the percent of nations' GDP that was exported to the U.S. in 2003.

But what seems to have gained the most attention recently are his 2009 "Chicago Boundaries" maps, one which maps race/ethnicity in the city limits and the other which maps income in the same area.  Here's what he says:

“Any city-dweller knows that most neighborhoods don't have stark boundaries. Yet on maps, neighborhoods are almost always drawn as perfectly bounded areas, miniature territorial states of ethnicity or class. This is especially true for Chicago, where the delimitation of Chicago's official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology. And maps showing perfectly homogeneous neighborhoods are still published today, in both popular and academic contexts alike.

My alternative is to use dot mapping to show three kinds of urban transitions. First, there are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries — such as between Lawndale and the Little Village, or Austin and Oak Park — and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world. But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.”

Long and short, he used city-block level data from the 2000 U.S. Census (rather than 'neighborhood' data) to map race/ethnicity (using the categories stipulated in the Census).  Every color-coded dot represents 25 people.  A pink dot represents 25 White people.  A blue dot reps 25 Black people.  Asians are shown in green, Hispanics (again, the language of the Census) are in orange, and "Others" are in gray.  The result:  whatever people might suggest to the contrary, segregation very much continues to exist in Chicago my friends.  (In case you had any doubt.) 

But the visual is stunning – both for showing levels of racial integration (or its lack) and population density.

Running with Rankin's idea, Eric Fischer used the same technique to map over 100 U.S. cities.  (And he just posted up the results less than a month ago.)  The results are amazing to look at, in addition to being amazingly informative.  Plus, being on Flickr, the images have numerous tags to help readers identify neighborhoods, landmarks, and so forth.  And, as readers look through, some are also commenting on the many ways history impacts population divisions -- such as the effects of redlining in Detroit and the geographic boundary of the Pima Maricopa Indian Reservation just east of Phoenix.

Go check it out.  It’ll give you something to think about.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love maps?!

UPDATE (November 2010):  It recently came to my attention that Bill Rankin is the downstairs housemate of my good friend and old roomie Sarita.  Imagine that.  Small world, eh?! - November 2010

UPDATE (July 29, 2011):  Bill Rankin recently posted a short (5 minute) video explaining his map of Chicago.  It's super interesting and totally worth watching.  Here it is:

Wordle-ing my thesis...

I'm feeling stressed today.

In my procrastination efforts I wandered over to Wordle. (Have you been there? It's fun.) On the Wordle home page it explains that:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle is the brain child of Jonathan Feinberg, a software engineer at IBM Research, and I can't figure out how old the site/software is. But, I've been seeing these 'word clouds' reappearing throughout different venues of my life lately -- blog signatures, school event advertisements, wedding invitations -- and I realized by accident that they were all being created here.

So, I thought I'd give it a whirl myself and see what came of it. I inserted the text from the most current four page summary of my thesis work. Then I limited the word-count to 50 (rather than the standard 150), removed all author names, and changed my colors to black and white (my research is about ideologies of race after all). And after a bit of fiddlin', voilà!

In all reality, I'm finding it helpful to have this visual tool. It's helping me see the language I am using most frequently and how those words correlate with themes and my areas of interest. I was surprised, for example, that 'social' is my most frequently used word. I would have thought it might have been 'race,' or 'white,' or 'privilege,' but it's helpful for me to see how really these are all relational terms in a social world. I could go on, but you get the point. What a helpful (and intellectually and aesthetically pleasing) software.

And now back to work...