I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go
so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”
nice idea and all
but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized”, and it becomes devalued.
as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.
observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind
so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable
but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time
“observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field.”
Personal anecdote time! I’m in a biology graduate program. An acquaintance wanted to introduce some guy to me because his son was thinking about becoming an undergrad science major. When he found out I was in the biology department, he grinned and said, “Well, I guess that’s kind of related to science.”
I gave him what I hope was an icy look and said, “Isn’t it strange how men outside the field started saying that right around the time biology majors shifted from mostly male to mostly female?”
The guy got this look on his face like he was about to play the “just a joke” card, and then an older woman who had been standing nearby, talking to someone else, turned to me and said, “The same thing happened with real estate.” She went on to explain that, over the course of the career, the male-to-female ratio among real estate agents had dropped, and the pay and “prestige factor” of that job dropped along with it.
Same thing happened to literature. Used to be poetry was the medium of educated men, and novels were “the trashy, unprofessional writings” of women. The more poetry women wrote, the less esteemed it became, and the more men wrote novels, the more value novels had. Now YA novels are frowned on, and also considered women’s territory. If I could find it, I read a few months ago the personal experiences of a female scifi writer and the bias there. Women are expected to write “less intelligent” soft scifi while hard scifi is for men and considered superior. One is valued more than the other based on the genders that tended to write them, and now men and women are pigeon-holed into those genres and disrespected if they don’t adhere to them.
This is probably like 90% of the reason for the backlash of “Anti-gamers” when it comes to women in nerd culture. Nerd culture isn’t really respected anyway and even though it originated as a massive boys AND girls club (really more a girls club since the first ever sci-fi nerd convention was created by women for their love of star trek) but there’s probably a subconscious knowledge that whatever respect they do have (and it’s getting more respect right now too thanks to nerds growing up into people with money and making movies) that it’ll be “lost” if taken over by women because we’ve been taught over and over again that women ruin everything.
NO GURLZ ALLOWED!!!
Why? Because we live in a society that has been hard wired for centuries that to BE a woman is weak so anything women excel at must be also weak and of no value, hence why we try to keep women out of EVERYTHING and then once they get in people scoff and go “yeah well it wasn’t that hard to begin with that’s the only reason you got in at all…”
God all of this is so true. People always change the rules and change the goal posts and it is fucking frustrating as hell.
I had a pharmacy school professor who would go on and on about how it was SUCH a SHAME that women had entered the profession in such numbers, that we would ruin the profession and that our presence would devalue the profession — that women in pharmacy drag down salaries, make the profession less respected, and basically be the Ruin of Pharmacy As We Know It.
The thing that really grates, though? He didn’t hate the societal attiudes that caused this — he hated women for entering his profession, because the drop in salary, devaluing of the profession, etc., would be *our* fault for entering it — not the fault of people who automatically devalue any profession that has a large percentage of women working in the field.
