Billionaire Ken Fisher uttered some pretty despicable comments at a financial conference last week, likening building trust with a client to the process of “trying to get into a girl’s pants,” among other sexist remarks. The money manager is now facing major business repercussions, with clients pulling hundreds of millions of dollars from Fisher Investments.
Given the urgency of the other issues women face in the workplace, complaining about gendered language may seem like misspent energy, particularly when it doesn’t go as far as Fisher did and is of the more commonplace variety, e.g. “How many man hours will that project take?” But that is far from the case, and a dangerous misconception, experts agree.
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Carole Simpson, a longtime television newscaster, was told early in her career that she could not be an anchor because “women don’t like to hear other women on the air.”
“Women’s voices are shrill and not authoritative enough,” one boss told her, noting that news coming out of their mouths “sounds like gossip.” ”En våt dröm”Swedish translation "A wet dream"
When a female pop star makes these comments about a man, is it considered inappropriate or an expression of healthy female sexuality? If this were said in reverse, how would the public react? "When gender expectations meet capitalism."
Trail-mix, earbuds, donuts... These needlessly gendered products help reinforce hetero-normative behavior in children at a very early age. When girls are implicitly told they cannot dress up with a doctor's costume, it could have a lasting effect on their future expectations. But of course gamers don’t leave the real world behind when they play online. Women, for example, tend to be harassed more than male players, so this tool might help more women feel safe in these online communities. Female gamers already mask their identity to avoid harassment by avoiding verbal communication with other players, according to a 2018 study of 270 women players in the Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.
Artificial intelligence-powered voice assistants, many of which default to female-sounding voices, are reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes, according to a new study published by the United Nations.
Titled “I’d blush if I could,” after a response Siri utters when receiving certain sexually explicit commands, the paper explores the effects of bias in AI research and product development and the potential long-term negative implications of conditioning society, particularly children, to treat these digital voice assistants as unquestioning helpers who exist only to serve owners unconditionally. This is a BBC News interview with Professor Robert Kelly. Suddenly, his two small children burst into the room while he was live on air This has been viewed hundreds of millions of times. BUT ... commenters on social media and initial reports from news outlets assumed that Jung-a Kim, the Asian woman who ran in to usher the kids out, was the (soon to be fired) nanny – not his wife. Did people assume that the Asian woman in his home was the nanny because she seems to behave in a subservient way? She seems scared, flustered, her posture is low to the ground and she doesn’t make eye contact or speak. Or is it that she can’t possibly be the heroine because Asian women are routinely depicted as secondary figures in the media, if they are visible at all. “No one is purely good or purely evil,” says Anna Akana. “I think it's important to convey that on screen so that you not only feel represented but accurately so.”
"For what seems like ages, Asian-American girls have regularly seen themselves on TV or in the movies as meek, nerdy, goody-two-shoes high school overachievers. And while that trope is evolving, with Asian actors being allowed to play characters that have normally been reserved for white performers, those who have been in the industry for a while have continually faced an uphill battle in finding roles that go behind this flat typecasting." Study Shows That Bias at Work Harms Women of Color and Their Ability to Thrive - Selena Hill2/12/2019 Black and brown women and workplace stress regarding their ability to "measuring up."
"According to the study, professional women of color are affected by an 'emotional tax,' which is 'a heightened experience of being different from peers at work because of your gender and/or race/ethnicity.' In turn, they constantly feel undervalued, singled out, and 'on guard in work environments. Feeling on guard also compels women of color to feel the need to outwork and outperform their colleagues." Interview with Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick.
"On the most basic level, the fact that basically until the 1970s, there were essentially no women involved in medical practice or research. Certainly, I think that is the root problem, but I do think that one of my big takeaways from the research is the systemic problem I see, that I describe as a knowledge gap, where we just don’t have enough information and medical knowledge about women and their bodies and their conditions that disproportionately affect them. And then this trust gap, this tendency to not believe women’s reports of their symptoms." |