Sociology of Halloween Costumes for Women

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Today is Halloween in Australia. We don’t really celebrate Halloween as a nation, although trick or treating is slowly becoming more common in some areas. (The kids in my court have been preparing all week by walking back and forth to each other’s houses with little Halloween buckets!) So unless you’re a horror lover like myself, you may only see costumes if you got to a Halloween party. But if you’ve ever had to dress up, as I did a couple of months back for my niece’s party, it can be tough to find a costume that doesn’t hyper-sexualise women, unless of course you make your own.

There’s a scene in the Tina Fey movie Mean Girls, where the lead character dresses up in an awesome scary costume and everyone is astonished because she isn’t in a revealing outfit (acceptable outfits featured are “sexy mouse”). In the film, they call this the “slut rule.” From the script:

“In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.The hard-core girls just wear lingerie and some form of animal ears.”

– Mean Girls

This passage not only shows how society pathologises women’s sexuality (if you’re sexual you must be a “slut”), but it also reflects how women are punished for their sexuality when acting outside of the constrictive social norm (you’re only allowed to be “sexy” on special occasions, like Halloween, and even then you have to follow inane rules about what’s deemed attractive).

Halloween is also a time when people will be culturally insensitive with their costume choices, thinking minorities should be flattered that their culture is sexualised and fetishised for one day of the year.

I love ghouls, so if you can’t revel in horror with your costume choice, women can still have fun and be empowered, like this little girl who dreams of being a scientist working for NASA!

Credits

Image: Jeff Parker. [Text] “Don’t get me wrong, the princess costume is nice, Mum. But this Halloween, I thought I’d dress up as a NASA Mission Commander…”

Women and Girls on Film: “Inequality is Rampant”

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Storify is closing and over the coming weeks, I will be migrating my posts to my blog. This is an archive of my article first published on Storify on 24 September 2014. 

In September 2014, the United Nations, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and The Rockefeller Foundation published a study on the representation of cisgender people on film. Here I report on the major findings and include some of my related social media posts.

The study conducted by Dr Stacy Smith, Marc Choueiti and Dr Katherine Pieper included 120 globally released movies in 11 major film regions: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, United States, and the United Kingdom. The study included almost 5,800 speaking or named characters. The researchers find that, globally, only 31% of speaking roles in films are given to women and less than a quarter of films are centred on a woman protagonist (23%).

The study finds that girls and women are slightly better represented in the UK (38% of speaking roles), Brazil (37%) and Korea (36%). Women and girls’ representation in Germany (35%) and China (35%) is relatively worse, but gender inequality is even more entrenched in India (25%) and the USA and U.K. (24%). This is especially alarming since Hollywood is the biggest exporter of films globally and they are clearly leading in the wrong direction.

Only 28 films in the sample (23%) feature a woman or girl in the lead role or otherwise sharing the story with another main character. The study also considers the gender balance of film casts (where 45 to 55% of characters are women or girls). Only 12 films met this criteria (10%). When women characters are featured in the main storyline, they appear in highly femininised genres. For example: women feature in 33% of comedy roles; 34% of dramas; and 29% of animated movies, but they make up only made up 23% of characters in action/adventure films.

The study included 1,452 film makers and people working in key roles behind the scenes. Women make up only 7% of directors, less than 20% of writers, and 23% of producers. The UK (27%) and China (17%) are comparably better, while France, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the USA are below the industry average of 7%.

Around 60% of younger characters (children and teenagers) are boys while 40% are girls. While 34% of men are cast as characters aged 40 to 64 years of age, only 19% of women are depicted as middle aged characters. The researchers find this is especially problematic given that the younger women who do appear in films are highly sexualised.

Women are more than twice as likely to wear sexually revealing clothing (25% of women vs 9% of men). Women are more likely to be thin (38.5%) in comparison to men (16%). Women are also more likely to be partially or fully naked (24% women vs 11.5% of men). Women characters are also five times more likely to have their looks commented upon by others (13% vs less than 3%). Younger women are more likely to wear revealing clothing, but women across the ages of 13 to 39 years are equally likely to be sexualised.

Continue reading Women and Girls on Film: “Inequality is Rampant”

Everyday Sexism in Academia

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Myth women in Science Flawed research design

I recently wrote up an overview of the sociological and legal definitions of sexism, which you can find on the STEM Women website. Sexism describes the ideology that one gender is superior to another. To put it another way, it’s a system of attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes, and other types of bias that perpetuate the idea that women are somehow lesser than men. These attitudes may or may not be voiced overtly, but they nevertheless guide social interaction and behaviour.

The word “sexism” has taken on a life of its own in the public imagination, when people joke about what it is, even suggesting that there’s such a thing as “reverse sexism” (there isn’t), typically when denouncing affirmative action or gender quotas at work. The scientific meaning of sexism is lost when people argue about what sexism is or isn’t. Many people think sexism is subjective. That’s incorrect.

There are different terms floating around that often confuse people. For example, hostile sexism is the type of overt physical and verbal aggression people often think about when they think of “sexism.” Benevolent sexism includes inappropriate “compliments” that focus on a woman’s looks, which inadvertently reproduce the idea that women should be judged primarily on their physical appearance and sexuality.

“Unintentional” or “accidental” sexism encompasses the “jokes,” comments and behaviour that people put down to ignorance. This includes everything from putting up pictures of semi-naked women at work, “overlooking” women on meeting invites or other career opportunities, and “casual remarks” and “oversights” like speaking about professionals, such as engineers, using the pronoun “he.”

In the STEM Women article, I show that these various terms and the attitudes and behaviours described by hostile, benevolent and unintentional sexism are all the same: they are all examples of sexism. The fact that one person might view one example as more extreme than another has no bearing on the impact these attitudes and behaviours have on women. Their cumulative effect is that women are denigrated, undervalued and expected to “put up” with sexism.

The sociological concept of everyday sexism captures the idea that everyday social exchanges, whether they’re “benevolently,” “unintentionally” or “accidentally” sexist, are actually connected to broader issues in sexist culture, such as sexual harassment and institutional discrimination. Sexism is more than the things that we say and do: it’s about the prejudices that underpin sexist culture. It’s about all the individual and collective things we do and say that makes possible sexual harassment and discrimination.

Continue reading Everyday Sexism in Academia

Rethinking Gender and Sexuality: Case Study of the Native American “Two Spirit” People

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Sociology and anthropology have long used the experiences of “third sex” cultures, such as the Native American Two Spirit people, to teach students about the social construction of sex and gender. In many cultures around the world, people are allowed to live their lives beyond conventional binaries; they need not adhere to the biological sex they were born into. These people are usually revered and there are special circumstances where individuals are allowed to shift their gender position. These groups, including the Two Spirit people, are used as examples in the sociology of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersexual (LGBTQI) issues. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this practice, demonstrating that social scientists are applying Western concepts to misunderstand the Two Spirit phenomena.

Continue reading Rethinking Gender and Sexuality: Case Study of the Native American “Two Spirit” People

What The Sociology of Shoes Says About Gender Inequality

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

17th Century Persian Men's Shoe. Via BBC
17th Century Persian Men’s Shoe. Via BBC

By Zuleyka Zevallos

High heel shoes were once a status symbol for powerful men, from horse riding soldiers in 16th Century Persia, to European aristocrats in the 17th Century. Since the Enlightenment period, heels became associated with “irrational” fashion and pornography, and so “impractical” shoes became a symbol of femininity. What changed? Today’s post examines how history and fashion trends related to high heels help us to see how gender is a performance that entrenches inequality. Continue reading What The Sociology of Shoes Says About Gender Inequality

Google’s Glass Ceiling: A Case Study of Why Organisations Lose Innovative Women

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Google's Glass CeilingBy Zuleyka Zevallos

Last month, The New York Times gave a disheartening insight into Google’s Executive hiring practices. Google is predominantly staffed with young men,* and they have trouble hiring and retaining women. Google turned to its “famous algorithms” to work out why this was the case, developing spreadsheets to help address the matter. In Google Executive land, it seems, engineers and computer scientists are characterised as “guys” who are proactive in advancing their careers, while women are seen as failed “business” people who don’t ask for promotions. Google has taken some measures to address their hiring practices, but its Executives seem to accept that their gender imbalance (30% women to 70% men) is unlikely to change much. While I focus on Google as a case study, my analysis deconstructs the flaws in the gender logic that large companies have about workplace inequality. Studies find that it is not the fact that women do not ask for promotions that impede their career progression; nor is it simply the decision to exit the workplace to have children. Instead, empirical data show that when employers are faced with equally qualified and experienced candidates who put in the same amount of work and who have the same outcomes, they are more likely to hire, promote and remunerate men over women. I argue that there is a resistance in workplaces to understand how their organisational practices are structured in ways that impede women from thriving professionally.

Gender imbalance and inequality are not inevitable. These are the outcome of daily interactions, organisational practices, policies, and unexamined norms and values. Sociology can help workplaces address gender inequalities by taking an organisational approach to gender. Such a framework makes gender biases visible and involves everyone in addressing inequality – not just women, but people of all genders, as well as the Executives who hold ultimate power in organisational change. Continue reading Google’s Glass Ceiling: A Case Study of Why Organisations Lose Innovative Women