Unit A - Blog 2

Sex segregation is the concept of paying women less money for the same job a man might perform. It also refers to the idea that there are "female jobs" and "male jobs." Within our socialization process in the United States, there is an assumed notion that males become the doctors and females, the nurse. Teachers in elementary school are thought of as female while professors in college are depicted as men. You can see this example in the faculty of ASU. In areas like biology, mathematics, and economics there appear to be many more male professors and male TA's. In social science such as political science or English classes I have seen more women professors. I know there are always exceptions to the rules, but from personal experience these are the trends I have observed.

Personal socialization in my life has led to many gender specific roles but because I grew up fascinated by academic works and ideas I have always maintained an awareness for how women and men are expected to play certain roles. My family is a prototypical four person household with a mom and dad that have been married for 30 years and met in high school. They have two children, one boy and one girl, and we always had dinner together with mom being the cook 90% of the time. However my mom and dad made about the same amount of money for the first 10 years of our family life. My dad worked during the day and my mom worked at night forcing my parents to share the household work. So what may seem like an idealized situation where the man and woman had to share chores, I notice looking back that the chores they chose to do were still gender biased. My mom still did the cleaning of the house while my dad would do the yard work. My mom still did the grocery shopping and cooked while my dad would do the maintenance on the cars. I think still that seeing them share the work helped me realize that women should not be expected to do everything and if my mom had to work overtime my dad would cook dinner showing us that a family always works together regardless of your gender roles.

With the current economic situation it is not a shock that more men are being unemployed than women. With men assuming the position as the "bread winners" they are in more jobs that are blue collar and stereo-typical of men. Construction sites have very, very few women at them and that field has been one of the hardest hit in the crisis. However, it is easier to keep women underpaid because they are willing to take the lower pay just so they can keep the job. Many women will say they just "feel thankful to have a job at all" and therefore they do not feel they are in a position to demand a higher wage. Plus, with so much unemployment people are desperate for jobs, so if a woman demands more pay a company will fire her and replace her with someone willing to take the position. This is the reason there needs to be a lobby for women in Congress that can actually make a difference for all of us. This should be a national issue, not something that every woman has to fight on her own.