The first image that really grabbed my attention was the boys and girls versions of a medical kit toy. The boy version was to play doctor, and the girl version to play nurse. Now, I was upset. What if my daughter wanted to be a doctor? Or my son wanted to be a nurse? I know you can’t please everyone all the time, but it is definitely evidence of a larger pattern of a social gender segregation in our society.
There were dozens of examples on the “Sociological Images” website that I was able to find in a relatively short amount of time, and I am sure many others could be found without too much effort. The female-shaped flight attendant call button on airplanes, the pink hard hats in the Galls catalog, and the sexy costumes depicting male-dominated career fields…
We live in a time and place where women supposedly are able to do anything a man can do, yet there are still subtle ways that the “man” is holding women down. This example of career books for children illustrates this example perfectly. A man who goes into engineering as a career field is an engineer, but a woman pursuing the same career path is a “woman engineer.” An entirely new classification is created which creates an unfair assumption that there are differences between the two, and the difference that is most likely to be implied is that women are inferior.
And while I could easily come up with hundreds of examples of the unfair treatment of women in the workforce, the treatment of males in female-dominated career fields is equally alarming. Women can be just as discriminatory against men encroaching on their territory. When I was pregnant and delivering my oldest son, the nurse who was there when I walked in was a male student nurse who asked if he could help. The female corpsman who was present actually had the nerve to tell me that I needed to ask for a woman nurse because a man being there when a woman has a baby “ isn’t right.” What I thought wasn’t right was her trying to deny a student the chance to learn. Obviously he wasn’t there for some perverse reason; he was a professional.
And as to be expected, men harass each other for going into “female” fields. My husband is currently serving active duty in the Navy and is surrounded by manly-men who feel the need to make fun of my husband’s decision to become a nurse. My husband is tough though (a lifetime of not being into sports does that) and just laughs it off and tells them to wait until they are hurt and he can help.
It is good and well that we tell our children that they can grow up and become anything they want, but until society starts providing more options and stops ridiculing those who step into untraditional roles, it will be a long a bumpy road to true freedom of choice…
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