Where are Men and Women Happiest in Their Homes?

There have been a number of different methods for attempting to document what people do in their homes, how people living together divide housework between themselves, and how they feel about it.  Initially, scholars just asked people questions like, “How many hours a week do you spend [fill in the blank with various household activities and obligations]?”  Certainly this method lends itself to statistical analysis, but what are we actually learning about people?

Research has found that people tend to over-estimate how much housework they actually do when asked on surveys.  Time use diary studies are a bit different and a lot more accurate.  This method asks participants to record their daily tasks and activities (where they were, what they did, how long they spent doing it, who they did it with, etc.) for small periods of time over the course of an entire day.  Most scholars agree that time use diary studies are more accurate portrayals of people’s actual experiences than surveys.  And it makes sense.  If you’ve ever tried to lose weight by eating less and then tried counted calories to lose weight, you can understand why.

Less research, however, focuses explicitly on how we feel when we’re doing different things throughout the day.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a psychology professor at the University of Chicago) set out to do just that (see here and here).  He gave study participants beepers that were programmed to go off at random moments throughout the day.  When paged, participants are asked to record what they are doing, who they are with, what they are thinking about, rate their emotional experience of the moment, and – significant for this blog – where they are. 

Review: Where Men Hide

Alright, so this is a bit of an essentialist text, but the images are amazing.  The book is the result of a collaboration between James Twitchell (an English and advertising professor at the University of Florida) and Ken Ross (a photographer).  Professor Twitchell happened upon an article that mentioned a recent showing of Ross’ photography as he was waiting to get his hair cut.  Ken’s undertaking was a collection of photographs from spaces occupied primarily by men.  He called the show “Men’s Rooms.”  So, Ross shot dens, masonic lodges, boxing gyms, old bowling alleys, bars, hunting lodges, barber shops, and more (read more here; see some of the shots here).

James Twitchell teamed up with Ken, asked him to take a few more shots of some spaces he thought might add to the collection, and writes short cultural histories of the spaces documented in Ross’ photography.  Twitchell explains their significance to the men that occupy them and also historicizes the cultural forces that have pulled men away from these homosocial man dens of old.

The U.S. Gender Gap in Traffic

“[A]n analysis of traffic can enrich sociological theory.” (Schmidt-Relenberg, 1968: 121)

Almost everywhere we go is a “gendered space.”  Although men and women both go to grocery stores, different days of the week and times of the day are associated with different gender compositions of shoppers.  Most of our jobs are gendered spaces.  In fact, Census data show that roughly 30% of the 66,000,000 women in the U.S. labor force occupy only 10 of the 503 listed occupations on the U.S. Census.  You’d probably be able to guess what some of these jobs are just as easily as you might be able to guess some of the very few Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs.  Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as occupational segregation, and it’s nothing new.  Recently, I did read about a gender segregated space that is new (at least to me): traffic.

When I picture traffic in my head, I think of grumpy men driving to jobs they hate, but this is a horrible stereotype of traffic that’s misleading.  Women actually make up the vast majority of congestion on the roads.  One way of looking at this is to argue that women are causing more congestion on our roads.  But another way to talk about this issue (and the way to talk about this issue that is consistent with actual research – and ought to make us feminists smile) is to say that women endure more congestion on the roads.

Retiring and Gay? Where?

If you were 18 the summer of the Stonewall Riots, Happy 60th!  (Sorry if I missed it.)  As the generation of gay men and lesbians that came of age during the gay rights movement reaches their 60s, we need to get serious about a conversation about sexuality and retirement.  How will these men and women choose to retire?  Are retirement communities for heterosexual individuals and couples heterosexualized in ways that make them unattractive to gay and lesbian couples and individuals?  Are they open to sexual diversity?  Is this how gay men and lesbians want to retire?  And if so, can we expect them to have the same rosy experiences marketed to heterosexual couples?

Some new research suggests that this is a significant issue.  Older gay men and lesbians ought to worry about retiring and growing old in communities where they don’t experience stigma.  The study focuses exclusively on gay men, but did compare single gay men with gay men with domestic partners and legally married gay men.  They found that stress related to aging was compounded by “sexual minority stress” in ways that pose significant mental health risks for gay men.

Could kicking some men out of the gym make it better for the rest of us?

I studied a group of amateur and professional bodybuilders a few years ago.  Calling the gym a gendered space is really nothing new.  Most gyms in America move equipment around such that “feminine” and “masculine” machines are not too close.  But the amount of thought that goes into how the gym is organized is more than you might think.

In many gyms, most of the mirrors located outside of the locker room are located in the “masculine” areas of the gym.  During my study, I asked a gym manager about this.  He laughed at me and said, “Women come to the gym ‘cause they don’t like to look at themselves, men come to the gym ‘cause they do.”  This is obviously a gross generalization, and I immediately thought of lots of counter-examples of both men and women.  But the men to which the gym manager was referring are a pretty specific sub-group.

Gold’s Gym brought Venice Beach bodybuilding culture all around the country for Americans to enjoy.  And in most Gold’s, like other large gym chains, you can find the same group of men about whom the manager was talking.  They’re lumpy, lumbering, and when they work out, they’re loud!

Gyms are interesting spaces to study, because they are frequented by people that might not ever meet outside of this setting.  A new gym – Planet Fitness – has an interesting policy aimed at altering the dynamic of commercial workout space in the US.  Planet Fitness’ policy is to not allow lunks to work out at the gym.  They define a lunk as “lunk (lunk) n. [slang] one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.”  Now, you might think, how do they actually police this?  Each Planet Fitness if equipped with a “lunk alarm” that goes off when anyone begins acting like a lunk.  A gym employee approaches the offender, asks them to leave, and they are not allowed back.

Wikipedia – Gendered Space, Gendered Knowledge

I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
–Donna Haraway

Google just about anything these days and Wikipedia’s answer is sure to be high on the list of results.  New technology brings with it new expectations and many of us have grown accustomed to instant access to answers to just about any question we can imagine.  Have you ever have a conversation with someone and been unsure about a date, a name, or the title of a movie?  It’s fun.  You rack your brains and sometimes come up with the right answer or sometimes agree to move on without the information.  Ever had a similar conversation with an iPhone owner?  Less fun.

Part of the attractiveness of the internet and internet search engines and wiki’s is that they feel like they ought to be more democratic.  The reason that Google works is based on the collective wisdom of internet users (though certainly people have found ways of attempting to exploit it).  Wikipedia is similar.  It’s basically an online, evolving encyclopedia.  Anyone can contribute, edit posts, add new information, or even new items currently lacking a post.  The interesting finding, however, is that although anyone can participate, it’s not just anyone that does participate.

Wikipedia has a huge gender gap in contributors to the site.  The results from Wikipedia’s survey of users found that less than 15% of contributors to the site are women.  Less than 15%?!??!  This gap in contribution is compounded by the fact that Wikipedian women, on average, post on fewer topics such that women’s overall contribution to Wikipedia in terms of actual material is less than 10%.  Seen from a different angle, men produce more than 90% of the material on Wikipedia!

Are gay-friendly workplaces gay-friendly?

Building on Arlie Hochschild‘s now famous conceptualization of “emotional labor” (which documents the gendered care work that is required but not requested in many occupations), a new literature in the sociology of work deals with what scholars are calling “aesthetic labor.”  Aesthetic labor refers to the embodied performances subtly (and not so subtly) required at work.

So, just as Hochschild studied the ways that the job of flight attendants went beyond providing refreshments and safety information, scholars are now discussing the ways that certain aesthetic performances of self are required at work as well.

Increasingly, the questions “What does a [insert your occupation here] look like?” or “How does a [insert your occupation here] act?”  matter as we consider how to behave, what to wear, and how to look in the workplace.

Progress?

I think many people understand American society as on a steady march toward the end of gender inequality.  We might call this the “narrative of progress.”  Within the boundaries of this narrative is the ability to recognize that women are still subject to various disadvantages, but (and here’s the important part of this narrative) things are better now than they used to be.

This particular form of collective nostalgia might be seen as empowering as it could potentially help us continue to push gender boundaries in new arenas.  However, it also has more sinister consequences.  This narrative only acknowledges forward progress and fails to examine the ways that “progress” is often accompanied by new forms of inequality.  I’ll briefly discuss the narrative in relation to heterosexual families.

This narratives occurs in many ways, but three of the most pernicious ways are: (1) it’s not going to happen all at once, but we’ve always been moving in the right direction; (2) lots of heterosexual couples have achieved equality; and (3) even if men and women are responsible for different things around the house, what’s the big deal?