Unit C Blog #15

Statistically women have been incarcerated at a much higher average than men in the last quarter of a century. In fact it has gone up over 700%. Women prisoners have gone been gendered for much longer than males, being forced to do things like cooking and sewing while in jail. They were also trained to be servants for middle class women and then had middle class values pushed upon them. Women were also treated as less than "women" when they were placed in jail. They were assumed to be abnormal and outside the normal realm of how women should be and behave. Eventually this ideology has changed so that women are being treated more fairly in the respect that they are not being as stereotyped hence why there has been a much larger increase in women going to jail over males. Male incarceration has been steady since the beginning of the jail system.
Arizona history is similar in the respect that it focused on males primarily. However, they caught up more quickly to placing women in jail and they have many women correction facilities. Arizona also has been more progressive in employing in women at jail facilities. The biggest problem is tent city where more men are pulled over and arrested for DUI's then women. Whether it be the lack of women actually being caught for DUI's or the lack of women actually driving drunk, men are disproportionately represented in Sheriff Joe's tent city. Another trend that Arizona follows is that mostly men are in higher positions at jails. Sheriff Joe has been the sheriff for a very long time and is extremely conservative which makes him not a high candidate for enforcing women's rights.

Unit C Blog #14

Britton's theory of gendered organizations focuses on the persisting wage gap between men and women due the structures of organizations, cultural assumptions, and the agency themselves. In part she is asking how all these affect why women are getting paid less and that there is no one single reason, but an array of factors that need to be considered. Structure, agency, and culture all affect prison guards for example. Within the structure, there is hierarchy and men have always been placed at the top. In cultural terms we have been taught that men are the punishers within our society. At the agency level, female guards are more likely to be give secretarial work over then men within the same facility. All of this affects the way that women are paid and viewed within their fields. When Britton says that structures are gendered she is talking about how men and women act "men and women" in their organization and reproduce how other men and women in their positions have before. They act with appropriate gendered characteristics such as a women lawyer will take on family cases before a male coworker does. In private and public spheres there are many gendered concepts. Private spheres are able to discriminate more based on sex and public spheres are not. I think that in some cases public spheres will have more women because they are required to and are trying to show a change. In private spheres they will hire women and pay them less because they can. Labor laws have been mainly directed at public spheres until recently when laws were passed for equal pay rights.

Unit C Blog #13

Britton writes that the media version of a correctional officer is popularized as a bug, hulking man. You imagine a tough guy who never cracks a smile and is ready to use violence against violence within the prison walls. Likewise when you imagine a jail, you imagine chaos and unruly men. The truth of the matter is that women are entering the prison workforce in large numbers and in the book it mentions in 1995, 19% of correctional officers were female. Considering that is almost 15 years ago, the numbers are probably much higher. When discussing this with a fellow student who spent some time in tent city he mentioned that a majority of his correctional officers were female. He even mentioned that one of them was a very attractive female. This struck me as interesting because it depicts how even if we are open to the idea of females in prisons, we think of them as being masculine and unattractive. This is a major problem facing many women who work in non traditional roles. Because they are entering places that are male dominated, they are considered to be "less feminine" and unattractive. I think that this is a leading problem with encouraging women to enter other job fields even if they are interested in the subject. Women do not want to be perceived as manly. I think that in male prisons, male officers are shown to be extremely tough and not likely to be very caring. In female prisons, the male officers are probably a little more soft but women can be just as dangerous so I do not imagine it is that different. As far as recruitment videos go, females are portrayed as being very physically fit and motivated to be at their job. They usually are attractive looking because it is still a media piece and they are advertising ideals of how women should look.

Unit C - Blog 12

Sex discrimination still persists because many women will not even try to apply for jobs because they have traditionally been taught to not pursue male dominated careers. Employers can also discriminate by using methods of physical discrimination by posting heights, weights, etc as required ideals for a position. Atmospheres in the work environment can also be hostile forcing women to quit their jobs even if they liked them. This also happens because of the way we are brought up as children being told that girls become teachers and boys become firefighters. We give kids toys that enhance these views, such as trucks for boys and barbies for girls. By enforcing these ideals throughout our lives by the time we get to college, we pick majors that fit this criteria and then careers that match our gender related majors. Social institutions that inflict this upon us would be our schools and churches. Schools are a major influence on a child growing up. If they see mainly woman teachers, they assume that is what is normal. However, they also see males as the principals of schools and so they get this idea that the male is generally in charge. In a church, the leaders are principally male as well. Over and over in your most social institutions you see men as the leading figures and women as the followers.

However, when women break into these roles that are male dominated, they are serving as role models for young girls. The can be inspirations for other females their own age as well because they prove that women are just as capable in a field as men. Women are also able to make more money in these male dominated fields. Especially in trades, hourly wages start out much higher that receptionist type work. Males can definitely gain from women entering these fields if they got over the fact that a woman is "entering their domain." Women will offer a perspective they may have never thought about before. It is also a fact that women work harder to prove themselves because they feel they are being weighted more against men. Men will benefit from this because they will have co-workers who truly care about their labors and are willing to put in 110% effort all the time. There is no downside to allowing women to enter these fields, and in fact should be a desired quality for any work environment to have.

Unit B - Blog 10

Ajay Chaudry based his studies off of working poor women who had to deal with being in the welfare system and what to do after it failed. Many of these women had no choice but to find adaptive strategies outside the system because welfare programs were simply too full. A preferable choice would be father care if this is an option. Most mothers desired for their kids' fathers to be around, but only if they were positive influences in their kids' lives. For people like Julia, she was not happy with the laziness that her kids' father presented and eventually they broke up and she never heard from him again. The most common choice that these women went with after father care was kin care. This is of course the most obvious and probably best choice for many women. Family is someone that you can trust and rely on to actually love your kids and provide a home life setting...or so most people thought. In the case of Julia and Jacqueline, Julia asked her cousin to watch her three children but she complained that her cousin was "lazy" and only willing to help because she got paid the welfare checks. When the checks were delayed, her cousin actually denied Julia childcare assistance. This is a problem that many women face-they do not have family that either lives nearby or is willing to provide the care. At this point, many women had to find outside child centers. This could be in people's homes or actual businesses that are set up for child care. Many women found that the cost and strict time limits at these centers were very hard to keep up with. However, mothers also liked the stability and structure that it gave to their children. If it was a center that was run right they felt that it was the best option outside of their own care. But in some cases, such as Jasmine's, she felt that her child was being neglected at her care center and she knew she could not leave her baby there another day. What I found most interesting too was that the hours provided by care centers do not really match up with a work schedule. If a day care is open 8-5, most people have to be at their place of work BY 8 and cannot leave UNTIL 5. This leaves the mother in a jam, be late to work and leave early, or pay the extra fees to pick up a child late?

This leads into how work and care are related in so many ways yet treated by society as two completely different entities. Working hours and day care hours cannot be the same time. Day cares need to be open before and after normal working hours, for at least an hour, to allow time for traffic, accidents, meetings, etc. How can we expect mothers or fathers to make it to and from jobs at exactly the same time everyday? And how can a person ever grow within their company if they are late or leave early every time? If a mother loses her job because of this she can no longer send her child to day care and the day care loses a client. Work and care also directly impacts a child and how they grow up in the world. This is probably the biggest effect of a working mother on her child. Even if a mother has a part time job working 30 hours a week, that is 30 hours where the child is awake that he or she must interact with someone outside the home. In many cases these outside resources made children feel uncomfortable, sad, or bored. Many mothers recognized the changes in their children but because they were young they were not able to communicate what was really wrong. In most cases though mothers were working full time and usually more than 40 hours a week or like Julia, she was working and going to school, needing well over 40 hours a week in child care. This of course is a lot of separation time between a mother and her kids.

Lastly what Chaudry's critiques run along the same lines as those that we have been learning about throughout the semester. There is simply not enough being done on the part of welfare reform. There is no way for these mothers to make a decent living without the assistance of child care. People keep saying these mothers need help getting an education, and they do, but no one bothers to mention that when they go to school there needs to be someone to watch their kids. I mention this throughout my blogs, but unless we bring attention to this serious matter, nothing will change because we are not forcing politicians to deal with the problem at hand. Welfare needs to stop being seen as a vice in the American eyes and instead be seen as an aid in helping mothers who truly are trying to just take care of their children and provide them with a decent life.

Unit B - Blog 7

Jacqueline and Julia are just a sample of what many poor working women face on a daily basis. The welfare program in the United States is very inconsistent and messes up a lot according to Julia. Because working women usually have to take jobs that do not have 8-5 hours, they require childcare at an inconsistent level. In Julia's case she was trying to go to school and work an internship. Between school hours and an internship she would obviously require more child care for her youngest two daughters. When she took her first internship, she was not getting paid enough so she worked at a fast food restaurant. Hours there are never normal and so her and her sister worked alternating shifts in order to provide care for Julia's children. The problem with welfare at this point is that they do not offer assistance to Julia even though she is going to school and working hard. She was on a list to get assistance and there was a long line. Welfare is so behind in being able to meet the demand, that working poor mothers are forced to take whatever care they can get. When mothers are waiting to receive assistance from welfare, they are taking harder financial hits because they must rely on outside childcare. Julia had some family such as her sister, but her sister eventually moved on. Then she had a cousin, but the cousin was "lazy" as Julia says and refused to take care of Hope and Jacqueline when the welfare checks stopped coming to pay her. If Julia had no family she would have had an even worse time finding care and probably would have found it impossible to continue her education.

In another example, the Scotts are a married couple with two children who make low income. They started at a day care center and received a scholarship through United Way to help them supplement their bills for the child care cost. When the mother received a raise they took the scholarship away and forced the Scotts to hire a friend who was a substitute teacher. If she gets called in to work, the only option the Scotts have are a very sick father in law who is waiting for a kidney transplant. This is clearly not an environment for two active young kids. It is situations like this that force working poor mothers to continue to struggle for assistance.

I think what is really sad about all of this is that I never realized the problems with welfare and child care until I took this class. I never stopped to think about it and a large part is due to the fact that there is zero media attention on this crisis.