Stereotypes We Know And Love
Thus Spake Zuska
Category archives for Stereotypes We Know And Love
The Gender Smog We Breathe: Comics Contribution
Posted by Zuska on April 21, 2009 I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot. In…
The Proper Way To Be A Woman In Science
Posted by Zuska on November 14, 2008 Though university administrators seem to be widely reviled among faculty members, one of the best jobs I ever had was in administration. Many wonderful opportunities came my way; possibly the most mind-stretching, exhilarating, and rewarding of these was the chance to spend four weeks attending the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, held…
PC vs Mac: Race and Gender in Advertising
Posted by Zuska on October 1, 2008 There was something that always bothered me about the Mac commercials purporting to show me how hip Mac computers are. It’s that I never really felt included in the world of those ads. Mac computers are personified by a uber-cool geek-chic attractive young white man. PCs, of course take on the flesh of a somewhat…
Women and Their Sexy Hawt Bodies: Reprise
Posted by Zuska on September 10, 2008 So, to recap: A couple of women are having a conversation, and the topic turns to tit-ogling. “No one should be staring at my tits in the workplace,” they all agree. “That makes me uncomfortable, creates a hostile work environment, and constitutes sexual harassment! How difficult is it to look at my eyes? Staring and…
Stereotype Threat in a Real-Life Setting
Posted by Zuska on August 4, 2008 A great post at eduwonkette looks at gender and stereotype threat in math performance. Stereotype threat has been well-documented in “laboratory” settings, but eduwonkette reports on a study in a real-life setting: These men and women were, by all accounts, in the pipeline for math and science careers. Students in the “gender nullifying” treatment read…
Physioprof at Feministe
Posted by Zuska on July 16, 2008 Hello, dear readers…if there are any of you left…I’ve been away for a week taking care of mom, plus the usual migraine breaks…back home now, and hoping to get back in the blogging groove asap. Meanwhile, Physioprof is off guest-blogging at Feministe for two weeks and you absolutely have to read his deconstruction of a…
The Bimbo Game
Posted by Zuska on June 30, 2008 Rarely, it happens that I am left speechless.
It’s Just No Use, Girls: A Profound Analysis of Gender and Engineering
Posted by Zuska on April 30, 2008 UPDATE: Apparently it was not clear to some people that the second “quote” below is a parody written by me, of the first quote written by someone else. I hope this clears it up. You may want to advocate for gender equity in science and engineering. But you are just wasting your energy. Pat O’Hurley…
The Reproduction of Sexism
Posted by Zuska on April 30, 2008 For a long time now, I have not been what you would call a believer in progress. That is, I do not think things are bound to improve in the gender equity arena. I think we are in the middle of a backlash (more on that later); women’s enrollment in undergraduate engineering has stalled or…
Explaining (Away) Women Geeks
Posted by Zuska on April 8, 2008 Liz Henry’s delightful, insightful skewering of the sexism deployed in an article about Google VP Marissa Mayer provides a very recent example of a pattern noted by Ruth Oldenziel in Making Technology Masculine: Women who love technology require an explanation; men who love technology are just being masculine. Oldenziel notes: