One Red Hot Country Mama!

I found this He/She Ratio tool that compares the instances of "He" on a domain compared to the instances of "She". I took my favourite news sources and checked out the results:

• New York Times (www.nytimes.com): 76% He/24% She
• The Economist (www.economist.com): 85% He/15% She
• The CBC (www.cbc.ca): 73% He/27% She
• The Globe and Mail (www.globeandmail.com): 64%He/36%She
• Wired (www.wired.com): 77%He/23%She
• Salon (www.salon.com): 65%He/35%She

So, do you think that anybody is left out?

I remember when I got out of school and started my first corporate job, some strange things were happening. Even though I was a Marketing Analyst, the receptionists told me that I would have to take the phones on their breaks. Also, people would give me their coats and ask me to take messages for my boss. Eventually I figured it out… because people were used to young women being assistants and receptionists in that office, they did not "get" that I was there to analyze the business and market products. So – my young looks and my gender trumped my education, good grades, skills or even job description to them.

My sister-in-law, who is a physician, had the same problem when she started interning – the nurses assumed she was a nurse too, and there was a very awkward moment when she was asked to change bedpans! My brother, who is also a physician, never had an issue. Of course, my sister-in-law and I set them straight, but if you think that the old-fashioned attitudes are gone – think again!

The opposite is also true. I worked with a man who owned a PR company, which he started in his early-20s. He said the secret to starting his business young was that he started balding when he was 22, so people thought he was older and more trustworthy at an early age. I guess I never had the ‘luxury’ of balding .

This weekend something else strange happened. During Easter, people kept asking me about my son – how old he was, what grade etc. My son? I don’t have a son! Then I figured it out – my 5-year-old nephew and I are very close, we kept playing together and he kept coming to me and there is a pretty strong family resemblance – so from that they assumed he was mine. Again, I set them straight – but it surprised me that people thought I was a Mom when I think of myself as a single-urban-career-chick ready for the next adventure.

So – maybe this isn’t all that revelatory, but I tend to think of the world on a pretty equal basis. Meaning, you are your ideas, your words, your warmth, your experiences… not your looks, your race, your age, your gender or your act. I remember my Psychology 101 professor saying he perceived people as "floating brains", culling away all outside appearances and seeing people for what they are. But, I see most people don’t think that way. Actually, some people laugh their heads off when I explain the "floating brains" thing. It’s too bad because I think it is a pretty good ideal to strive for.

In 2002, I was fortunate enough to attend a public lecture of Dr. Sima Samar, who was the Deputy President of the interim government in Afghanistan. Her words, her bravery and her mission were impossible to forget. She wanted to improve the human rights situation in Afghanistan (for example, making rape illegal) and allow women to go back to school and work (under the Taliban, women were not allowed to work, and buying a girl a pencil and notebook was considered a crime.) Not long after I saw her speak, she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning Islamic laws and subsequently left her post.

I tried to find a transcript of her talk at University of Toronto, but I couldn’t. The closest I could see was her speech at Brown. The following quotes are from that speech. On human rights violations:

As a part of our national consultation process, we released our report, A Call for Justice, that represented the opinions of the Afghan people on transitional justice. We conducted interviews of 4,151 people and more than 200 focus groups involving thousands more people. Of the people surveyed, 69 percent identified themselves or immediate family members as victims of human rights violations in the course of the last two decades of conflict.

On women going back to school:

The media shows thousands of girls going to school, but they do not show what the quality of education is and how many girls do not have access to education facilities. It is the lucky girl that walks for two hours with a piece of bread to get an education, but even these facilities are not available to most girls. The media also does not show the more than 30 girls’ schools that have been set on fire or bombed by fundamentalists in the past three years.

On thesouthasian.com from 2001, speaks about the problems from a medical point of view:

Sima also has a medical clinic in Kabul. "Almost every woman I see has osteomalacia," Samar says. "Their bones are softening due to a lack of Vitamin D. They survive on a diet of tea and naan because they can’t afford eggs and milk and, to complicate matters, their burqas and veils deprive them of sunshine. On top of that, depression is endemic here because the future is so dark."

I find this woman to be one of the most inspirational people I have ever seen speak. Despite her uphill battle, she still keeps fighting for the cause she believes in. She says:

I have three strikes against me,- I’m a woman, I speak out for women and I’m a Hazara, one of the minority tribes.

Even with those strikes, she still continues to be strong and to speak out for and inspire others around the world. In her speech at Brown she finishes with:

Sometimes I think of the world as a bird. If a wing or a country is broken, the bird cannot fly. As a global community, we are all responsible for treating the bird so that it will fly.

Finally, after years of reading the opposite, the Boston Globe published a piece by Stephanie Coontz on how successful, educated women can also be happy in their sexual and romantic relationships. Here is some of the traditional view (don’t you want to just yawn?)

Or as a forbes.com writer put it in an August 22, 2006, column directed at men: "Don’t marry a woman with a career." She won’t look up to you, warned author Michael Noer; she won’t be happy in marriage; and she might even cheat on you.

Note to self – take all Forbes advice with a giant grain of salt… what kind of advice is that? More:

Columnist Noer writes on forbes.com that if a wife outearns her husband, both will be unhappy. And pundits have seized on the work by sociologists Wilcox and Nock to suggest that wearing rose-colored lenses and maintaining a "family myth" of fairness will help women bolster their marriages more than trying to get husbands to share housework and child care. Today’s advice to educated women seems to be, have a job if you want, but don’t earn too much money or expect too much help at home.

Here is some of the shiny new research on the matter:

One reason educated women are more likely to marry today than in the past is that modern men are less threatened by equality and more interested in finding a mate who can share the burdens of breadwinning. Many studies show that men now want a wife who is at a similar educational or occupational level. The 2001 Journal of Marriage and Family paper found that in mate-preference surveys taken in 1985 and 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to number 5 on men’s list of desirable qualities in a mate in both surveys, ahead of good looks. Meanwhile, the desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place in both surveys, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. And in choosing a spouse, males with a college degree rate good looks much lower in importance than do high school graduates. "In a high-achieving man’s definition of an A-list woman, the A increasingly stands for ‘accomplished.’ "

Finally, an article that recognizes strength and potential in women, and the strength in the men who appreciate them . Thank you Boston Globe! Hopefully the likes of forbes.com will eventually catch up to the rest of us. 

I was looking at my niece’s amazing coloring the other week, saying the genuine oohs and ahhs about her impressive work and remembering how much I used to love the subject matter she was coloring. Beauty and the Beast was always an inspirational story for me (so much so, that the story inspired my adult dating patterns… just kidding… kind of). I liked it because it was a story of compassion and non-conformity. The main female character, Belle, could see beyond the beast’s physical appearance, and love the inside of him.

Now I look at this story, and other similar ones (such as Cyrano de Bergerac) with more doubt. Why is it always the woman who has to see beyond the man’s ugliness, yet she is still pretty? Why is there never a story of a female "beast" attracting the gaze of a handsome man, who sees beyond her physical appearance and loves her from the inside? It is a message we never see – and it is another example of the double-standard between men and women. 

Actress Geena Davis, has started a movement called See Jane, which has a mandate to reduce the gender stereotyping in media made for children 11 and under. Geena says:

"By making it common for our youngest children to see everywhere a balance of active and complex male and female characters, girls and boys will grow up to empathize with and care more about each others’ stories."

You can see her making an interesting and funny speech about it at the National Conference for Media Reform: here (unfortunately the sound quality isn’t the greatest). In the speech, she outlines some key stats found in a report See Jane called Where the Girls Aren’t.

The methodology:

Where the Girls Aren’t is the first of several research briefs drawn from most in-depth content analysis of popular G-rated movies ever conducted. Led by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, researchers from the Annenberg School for Communication (ASC) at the University of Southern California (USC) studied the 101 top-grossing G-rated films released from 1990 through 2004. The research analyzed a total of 4,249 speaking characters in the movies, which included both animated and live-action films.

Key findings show that:

• In the 101 studied films, there are three male characters for every one female character.

• Fewer than one out of three (28 percent) of the speaking characters both real and animated) are female.

• Fewer than one in five (17 percent) of the characters in crowd scenes are female.

• More than four out of five (83 percent) of the films’ narrators are male.

During the time period of the study (1990-2004), there was no gradual increase in female characters featured. Imagine the impression this leaves with young girls watching this? Davis has been speaking to different content producers regarding making changes (ie. moving towards a more 50/50 representation), and their reaction is surprise. They didn’t intentionally produce such imbalanced message, it just somehow happened. Thanks Geena, for making a difference in young girls lives . When we start seeing a male beauty and a female beast, even better.