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    Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century
    Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century
    Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century

    By Katherine Peirce-Burleson

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    About The Author


    Katherine Peirce-Burleson is Professor of journalism at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. She teaches research methods on the undergraduate and graduate levels, media and society on the graduate level, copy editing for undergraduates and gender, race and media to both undergraduates and graduate students. She has taught at Texas State since 1988 and developed the undergraduate course in gender, race and media in 1992. She has published articles and presented papers on the subject since the 1980s. She has looked at gender differences among child characters in prime-time television, stereotyped messages in teen magazines and whether or not advertising spokes - characters have to be male to please audiences (they do not). Dr. Peirce-Burleson earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Florida State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining Texas State University, she taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.


    About The Book


    It is a book about gender, race and media from a social science perspective. It is grounded in gender-role-acquisition theory, feminist theory and racial identity theory. It includes discussion of socialization forces other than media and chapters devoted to the coverage of women and minorities in various media and the experience of women and minorities working in media. The text is aimed at upper-level undergraduates and graduate students.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSentia Publishing
    Release dateDec 31, 2015
    ISBN9780990877158
    Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century

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      Book preview

      Women, Minorities, Media and the 21st Century - Katherine Peirce-Burleson

      WOMEN, MINORITIES, MEDIA

      AND THE 21ST CENTURY

      1st Edition

      Katherine Peirce-Burleson

      Copyright © 2015 by Katherine Peirce-­‐Burleson

      Sentia Publishing Company has the exclusive rights to reproduce this work, to Prepare derivative works from this work, to publicly distribute this work, to publicly perform this work, and to publicly display this work.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      ISBN 978-0-9908771-5-8

      Chapter One - Gender-role Acquisition

      Stereotypes

      Boys play football and girls play with dolls. Boys are good at math and girls are good at reading. Boys are loud, obnoxious and aggressive and girls are quiet, passive and nurturing. Boys solve their problems with their fists while girls solve problems with their brains. Or so the gender stereotypes go. A stereotype is a classification of a group of people based on a shared characteristic, which might be birthplace or residence than gender: All Italians are in the Mafia, All Texans have oil wells and ranches, All Asians are brilliant." Stereotypes are rooted in reality, somewhere in a distant past or dark place. While it is true that some Italians are in the Mafia and some boys are better at math than some girls, it is not true of all Italians or all boys. Unless information to the contrary is provided, however, the stereotype will be passed on to and believed by others.

      The pervasiveness of stereotypes can be seen in the response to one female college student upon finding out that another student was one quarter Japanese: Oh good, you can program my electronics! The stereotypes will be harmful in varying degrees. While the part-Japanese student was more amused than harmed, that is not the case with a young Hispanic denied employment because the employer believes that all Hispanics are lazy or with a little boy who is taunted because he plays with dolls. A young girl who sees her mother cooking, cleaning and sewing and her father mowing the grass and building things in the garage is going to assume that that is the way things should be and her options will be limited. Counter-stereotypical images, such as watching Dad cook dinner, will send an entirely different message to the child.

      Gender-Role Theories

      Children understand from an early age that males and females are different. How they come to understand this is the subject of many debates. Sociobiologists will argue that gender roles are innate and do not have to be learned or understood and that men are better suited for certain roles while women are better suited for others. They believe that certain activities or character traits are universally associated with women and others with men and that the activities and traits are genetically programmed. They will argue that men are inherently aggressive and assertive and women are inherently passive and docile. There are those who say that testosterone is responsible for competitiveness and aggressiveness, which is why boys prefer competitive and active sports and games and girls, lacking testosterone, prefer quiet sedentary activities. Were the sociobiologists correct in their assessment of gender-role acquisition, it would be good news for those hoping to maintain the status quo. Patriarchal society, in which men reap most of the benefits, make the rules and earn the largest salaries, is, therefore, genetic destiny. Divisions of labor are biologically preordained. Women’s second-class status is simply the way things are. While there are certainly anatomical differences between males and females, the biological explanation does not explain all of the differences between them. If it did, men would exhibit masculine traits and women feminine traits across time and cultures. This is not the case.

      Consider, for example, the Iroquois Indians of northern North America and Canada. Traditional Iroquois culture believed women and men to be equal contributors to the survival of their community. While labor was divided, neither men’s work nor women’s work was deemed more important. Men prepared the fields while women planted and tended crops and harvested. Women gathered wild foods and were responsible for domestic tasks and childcare. Men hunted, fished and traded. Both men and women helped form public policy. Contributions of all were highly valued, socially recognized and rewarded (Bonvillain, 1998).

      Then in the late 18th century, the establishment of reservations led to a shift in economic roles and a decline in women’s status. Canadian and American officials suggested that men take over the farming tasks and women the domestic tasks. They began teaching the men new farming techniques. They refused to negotiate with women. They ignored women’s opinions and suggested men do the same. Women were disenfranchised when the previous system of having clan mothers choose the chiefs was replaced by an election system that did not include the women. The men had succumbed to the pressure and rewards from the colonial powers (Bonvillain, 1998).

      The story of the Iroquois illustrates that gender roles are learned rather than innate, that patriarchal society is not genetic destiny, and that women’s roles can be – and have been – as valued as those of men. If gender roles are not determined biologically but are in fact learned, it is through the socialization process that we learn them. Socialization is the process by which people learn how to live in the world. Arnett (1995) believes there are three goals central to the socialization process: 1) impulse control, including the development of a conscious; 2) role preparation and performance, including occupational roles, gender roles and roles in institutions such as marriage and parenthood; and 3) the cultivation of sources of meaning: What is important, what is to be valued and what is to be lived for. Socialization, then, is learning how to live productively in different types of communities and gender-role socialization is learning how to live in the world as a male or as a female. Various theories attempt to explain how gender-socialization works.

      Psychoanalytic theory stresses biological factors and parental identification and is based on Freud’s view that sex-role development proceeded from the anatomical sex difference to identification with the same-sex parent to adoption of sex-typed behaviors (Basow, 1986). Psychoanalytic theorists believe that gender identity develops as an infant internalizes other people. If the child’s mother is kind, caring and nurturing, the child will become those things as well. Children who are lovingly nurtured will incorporate their mother’s view into their sense of self and regard themselves as valuable (Wood, 1997). Until age four, when they learn to discriminate between male and female genitalia, all children identify with the mother as primary caretaker. Then boys, perceiving female genitalia to be the result of castration, will begin to identify with their fathers (Boudreau, 1986). There is little support for traditional psychoanalytic theory and its concept of anatomy as destiny, but there are those who believe that psychodynamic principles are the primary shapers of gender identity (Basow, 1986).

      Social learning theory, as proposed by Mischel, sees gender identity as the result of children’s learning that certain behaviors have consequences that vary for each gender and they will learn to perform these behaviors with different frequency. Children learn differences in parental expectations concerning sex-appropriate behavior (Mischel, 1966). Children then learn their proper gender roles through differential treatment, rewards and punishments and observational learning and modeling. Social learning theory assumes that children will imitate same-sex behavior and views the child as relatively passive in the learning process, neither of which is supported by research (Basow, 1986).

      Cognitive developmental theory, unlike social learning theory, assumes that children play an active role in developing their identities (Wood, 1997; Basow, 1986). As outlined by Kohlberg (1966), cognitive development stresses the active nature of the child’s thought as he organizes his role perceptions and role learnings about his basic conceptions of his body and his world. Children do not have a firm gender identity until about age 5 when they begin valuing same-sex behaviors and attitudes and devaluing other-sex behaviors and attitudes (Basow, 1986). Kohlberg’s views differ from Mischel’s in that social learning theory says that a child wants rewards, is rewarded and, therefore, wants to be a boy/girl. Cognitive-developmental theory says the child is a boy/girl and wants to do boy/girl things and, therefore, the opportunity to do boy/girl things is rewarding (Kohlberg, 1966). Support for this theory comes from studies that found that children do value their own sex more highly than the opposite sex; however, Kohlberg used only males in his studies.

      Other theorists have attempted to combine the best of the aforementioned theories in order to create a more meaningful theory. Bem’s gender schema theory includes elements of social learning and cognitive-developmental theories as

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