Gender codes in daily life

Yesterday, at a “mad science” show we had for my daughter’s birthday party. The “mad scientist” host was preparing the demonstrate the chemical properties of acetone by letting it eat through a styrofoam cup. He asked the kids, holding up the bottle of acetone, “Do you know what this is?” Silence. “I’ll give you a hint. Your mommy might use it at the end of the day on her hands. No? It’s nail polish remover.”

I’m guessing few of the kids’ mommies wore nail polish on a regular basis, so I’m not surprised no one guessed it. On the other hand, it probably was the best clue available, and adding “mommy” rather than parent was probably a good hint. Overall — clearly gender coded, but I’m not sure what would have been the better, gender neutral clue.

But if you asked for acetone at your local grocery store, they probably wouldn’t know to direct you to the cosmetics aisle.

I would love to see the results of such a project, especially if the results are treated with some care. The acetone example shows that it is hard to distinguish between unnecessary gender mentions and descriptions of pre-existing gender relations.

My own example of the difficulties involved: I recently visited a graduation ceremony ( my own, lucky me). My field has a low percentage of women participants, and the organizer of the ceremony ( a woman) is always actively busy to attract more women. In this case, she gave an extra present to the female graduates.

Most women in the audience did not like this extra attention on gender, partially because the well-meant gift did cast a troublesome light on the rest of the ceremony. Before the gifts, each professor gave a short speech on their pupils, and the extra gift did leave the feeling that the preceding speech, and by extension the actual graduation itself, had been a bit nicer to the female candidates than they would have been to male candidates.

So the gift was meant to symbolize the extra difficulty for woman to succeed in a man-dominated field, but somehow left a slight feeling that it was actually easier for women to finish these studies.

At the hospital when my niece was born I was stunned at the lavish praise my brother-in-law got for changing her diapers (instead of calling for a nurse). Mind you, my sister was not in any physical condition to stand up, and she was using what energy she did have to breastfeed.

This was in 2007.

On a form I had to fill out at Kaiser one question asked who my daughter’s “primary caregiver” was. The next question, a short essay, asked what “involvement” her father had had in her upbringing.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet. In a women and work class we taught I think 6 years ago we had a couple, unmarried, who had a baby. They went through all the Lamaze classes together, were planning the wedding, etc. At the hospital, the functionary who did the paperwork advised the dad not to have his name put on the birth certificate: she warned him that if he did he would be liable for child support. He was black and was outraged because he took it as racism as well as sexism–and IMHO he was right.

anonymous @ 8: I don’t usually bother to correct them, but partly because of this I insist on addressing all unnamed third persons as “they”. Screw the grammar Nazis.

“They” for ungendered 3rd person singular in English has been in common use for hundreds of years. Fowler includes examples from 18th and 19th century English novelists, and the OED cites examples starting in the early 16th century.

Read your post over again and tell me you still thing “outrage” is an appropriate response to this. Genocide might outrage you. Assaults on civil liberties might outrage you. Many terrible things might outrage you, but perhaps a gentler response (irritation, amusement?) might be more appropriate in the face of someone’s facile assumption that “Mommies” would collect children. This kind of emotional and linguistic inflation is a hindrance to rational thought.

Naw, kill ’em all! Dirty furriners snarlin’ up our interwebs with their purty talk….

It was a hard slog for my mother to get credit cards in her name, even after my father died, and everything tends to revert: I, her son, am commonly assumed to be her husband. At every concert we attend I find my perhaps overly generous contribution to the local philharmonic society credited, in every copy of every program, to Mr. & Mrs. Jim, Jr.

Doesn’t the “What to expect” series exclusively assume that the caring parent is female?

When my daughter was 5 she, in her school journal, wrote about me vaccuuming up my toe and drew a gory picture of it (it was true, but not that gory). The teacher wrote “Well, I bet he won’t want to help out with the vaccuuming any more”. To be fair, my daughter found the comment completely incomprehensible until she clevelry said “Dad, you’d better stop helping yourself out with the vaccuuming”.

Gender codes that underpin systems of gross inequality at the heart of patriarchy do support behaviors that cause physical harm and occasionally kill. And that IS outrageous.

When my daughter first started playing mummies and daddies at school I asked her who played doing the cooking, a boy or a girl, since at home I always do it. She said it was a mummy and that she was not going to tell anyone that daddies did the cooking because she did not want to be different from the others.

mikhail has a good point: how many fathers actually do pick up their children from this particular school? In my (limited) experience of Italy, the language is coded because reality is coded, and it’s no more bizarre than it would be to say something like “If you asked a random Fortune 100 CEO (or serial killer) about this, he would probably say…” because almost all F100 CEOs and serial killers are male.

how many fathers actually do pick up their children from this particular school?

Not really the point. The point is to be respectful of others. So we have an example of a gender code right here in the comments. Being respectful and considerate is generally typed as feminine and being rude and inconsiderate is considered masculine.

reality is coded
Nonsense, you can’t be serious. Did I misread this?

Ingrid – go watch Pixars recent movie “Wall-E”. It’s the story of two robots who fall in love. First just enjoy it but after that pay attention to how the robots are gendered. They are just machines after all, how did Pixar convey gender through messages encoded in the movie? Here are some of my thoughts.

Wall-E is rough and square. He works hard and pack a lunchbox, he’s dirty (physically not sexually). He is also an incurable romantic and obsessively pursues his love interest. His hands are thick and somewhat clumsy. But most important of all, he presents his love with a present. It’s literally a gift of life.

Eve is smooth and round. Her voice is pitched higher and her language skills are better than Wall-E’s. Her temper can be lethal. Her movements are refined and graceful whereas Wall-E is awkward and comical. When she accepts Wall-E’s gift she immediately goes into new state where she is unavailable to Wall-E’s romantic advances.

Cartoons and the newer 3d cartoon animation movies are good sources for understanding how gender is communicated. The classic example would be Mickey and Minne Mouse. Minne is just Mickey in drag. I guess drag would be the lowest common denominator here.

With more recent movies the characters are not always obviously male or female to just look at them. Which characters in Ice Age or Madagascar are male or female? How is that communicated?

Back to real life how our lives are gendered is encoded in every waking moment. We give ourselves gendered messages to re-enforce our own sense of what gender we belong to. Change those messages and you change your gender.

How one dresses is of course the first thing someone notices followed rapidly by one’s voice. We decide on a stranger’s gender within the first 5 seconds or so. But it isn’t just drag and it isn’t just a high pitched voice. These days men and women dress kind of the same except for special occasions. Paying attention to the small gendered signs in casual dress is important. Speech is also important, women don’t just speak in a slightly higher register. We speak differently. There is more inflection, more of a sing song quality (at least here in the West). Women tend to articulate their words more clearly paying attention to the t’s and s’s at the ends. Men tend to slur or mumble their words more. Women also tend to raise the ends of their sentences slightly making it more plaintive where men tend to clip their sentences making them more declarative.

Gender is also signaled by how we relate to others in a group. Next time you’re out with friends of mixed gender notice the group dynamics. Men tend to dominate conversations and will not always wait for the other to finish speaking before talking. We are all probably familiar with these examples but also pay attention to movement and personal space. Women tend to occupy a smaller space where men will spread out physically grabbing more territory. Men also tend to have large broad movements both walking and sitting in company.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I think a gender code diary is a great idea, as it’s the sort of thing I get irritated at but then forget the specifics of quite quickly!

One thing that springs to mind is the baby/children’s goods chain in the UK called “mothercare”. So strangely outdated.

@29, “mothercare” kind of depends – since their core business is the appurtenances of childbearing, which, alas, we gender-heroes of the new-male age have not yet managed to share in its entirety. I’m willing to consider gender-neutral uses for disposable post-partum undergarments, cracked nipple cream and breast-pumps, but I’m not holding my breath…

(amended to make quote clearer)

noen: “They are just machines after all, how did Pixar convey gender through messages encoded in the movie? Here are some of my thoughts.
Wall-E is rough and square. He works hard and pack a lunchbox, he’s dirty (physically not sexually). He is also an incurable romantic and obsessively pursues his love interest. His hands are thick and somewhat clumsy. But most important of all, he presents his love with a present. It’s literally a gift of life.
Eve is smooth and round. Her voice is pitched higher and her language skills are better than Wall-E’s. Her temper can be lethal. Her movements are refined and graceful whereas Wall-E is awkward and comical. When she accepts Wall-E’s gift she immediately goes into new state where she is unavailable to Wall-E’s romantic advances.”

I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m not an expert on analysing literature and gendering and things, so I may be being stupid, but judging by the reviews, you missed out a couple of little clues:

Wall-E has a man’s name and is voiced by a male actor;

Eve has a woman’s name and is voiced by a female actor.

At Mets games they play a little “Meet the Mets” sing-along video that includes the lines “Bring the kids/Bring the wife.” Cuz wives don’t watch baseball unless they’re brung.

I’m sure the video’s been around for years, but it was still amusing.

@34: Transgendered persons, either in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere, don’t need a gender neutral pronoun, as they are not gender neutral (unless you delve into genderqueer land where some folk favour the use of ‘zie’, etc… but let’s not go there)

Ajay
Wall-E has a man’s name and is voiced by a male actor;

Sure but a name is not sufficient. What I was getting at is gender is a performance. One that is coded in almost everything we do even when we are alone.

… without passing judgement on the article or the author, I like the conclusion:

“Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform” – http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia%2016-1.html

“… But we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.”