David Winter, and I (Devon McClellan) chose to upload our video to YouTube for our podcast. We discussed our two most interesting DSI’s that we wrote about, and delved deeper into what made them so pertinent to what we’ve been talking about in class this semester. We each discussed two DSI’s in particular that we found, in which both of the situations were extremely sexist towards females, and we later discussed what could’ve been done differently for a more positive and favorable outcome for both parties.
Xixiang: The phenomenon that women only occupy a small proportion of STEM fields has existed for decades. I think the opinion is divided over that if this is sexism. We can talk about this issue and analyze them deeply together today.
Haoxiang: Yeah, I also mentioned it in my Diary of Systemic Injustices. I found that some surveys indicate that, for STEM areas in America, the female worker only has 15% of the engineering workforce. The main reason behind this is women’s pregnancy will increase companies’ costs. Companies need to not only give them long-term maternity leave but also continue to pay their insurance fee. Meanwhile, during that time, companies need to find substitutes for them to remain the project in operation. Because of such concern, most companies in STEM fields prefer to recruit males. Do you think this is a kind of sexism?
Xixiang: I think we can’t deny that if the female workers in labor, it may cause the company to pay the higher cost to make her job done. However, I think that giving birth to the next generation should be the responsibility of all society, but not pushing this responsibility to just females. Also, we shouldn’t make them fall into a vulnerable group because of this irreplaceable contribution. Therefore, I think the case you mentioned should be classified into sexism.
Xixiang: I also noticed that some people hold the view that the amount of female students in the college who are studying the STEM major is significantly lower than the male students. Therefore, this naturally leads to the result that most of the STEM job positions are occupied by males. In other words, they think it is not caused by sexism, but just many female students didn’t choose STEM majors in college. What do you think?
Haoxiang: In my mind, the cause of this phenomenon is because many females know it is not easy for females to find a job in STEM fields which causes them to avoid STEM as their major in university. And I think it is a result of sexism.
Haoxiang: However, there is another scenario.In general cases, males always have better physical strength than females, which makes males able to adapt to a high load working-environment. From that point, many people claim that the reason why many companies prefer to recruit males is that these companies only want to maximize their profits instead of having a bias on females. So they don’t think it is sexism.
Xixiang: I think I can’t agree with the people’s points you mentioned. Nowadays, most of the job positions in the STEM field don’t have a very high requirement for physical strength. For example, like software development, the most vital factor of brain power but not the physical strength. Therefore, although the average physical strength of the male may be stronger than the females, I don’t think hiring more male staff can help the company raise profit.
Xixiang: Following what I just say, some people also claim that the average level of the college degree of females is also lower than the males. Although we can say the difference of physical strength between males and females doesn’t count too much on today’s STEM working environment, in the field of brainpower, males still perform better than the females. Therefore, the reason why we see the company select more males than females is just that the male’s average education level is higher than the female’s. They don’t think it is sexism.
Haoxiang: It might be true that in the past decades males often have better performance than females because of educational differences. However, in recent years, some statistics reports show that the proportion of college-educated women has nearly matched that of men. However, as the proportion increases, the fact that it is difficult for women to find a job in STEM fields doesn’t get changed.
Xixiang: Yeah, from the discussion we just made, I think the phenomenon that male occupy much more workforce in STEM fields represent sexism. It reminds me of the class materials we have read in the first two weeks in this semester. As de Beauvoir says in her novel, “The Second Sex”, the male has always been on the more powerful side in the comparison with the female since ancient times. For instance, the male is referred to the Sun, but the female is referred to as the Moon. With the rise of the feminist movement in modern times, the status of the female has a significant promotion. However, the prejudice among females since the ancient age still exists in many people’s minds. The unfair treatment women faced in the STEM workplace can clearly represent this issue.
Haoxiang: Yeah, I totally agree with you. The reason why many people don’t think it is sexism is that they are a group of males who are Ones in our story. As de Beauvoir mentions in The Second Sex, “The other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim”. Because males are not experienced in searching for a job as females, their point of view is different from females. They never have the dilemmas faced by females. The reciprocal claims against each other lead to that many males don’t think it is sexism but most females think it is.
Haoxiang: What’s more, decades ago, women’s rights had not been liberated totally before. The factors like educational differences and social prejudice against women’s work led most STEM jobs which require sophisticated skills to be occupied by males. And the sexism of it leads to the phenomenon that females are Othered in STEM fields. In order to solve the issue, in my mind, females also need to make efforts. Like de Beauvoir mentions in The Second Sex, “the Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view.”
I’m Jordyn we’re going to talk about our systemic injustices today. This January Food Hall posted a dress code that discriminated largely against African-Americans the dress code restricted items such as saggy pants, flat billed hats, some types of tennis shoes, athletic wear. They did come out and apologize for a large part of the dress code and took a decent amount of it back. What are your thoughts on this?
Okay so believe it or not I went to Food Hall with some buddies and I own a pair of timberlands. And they’re not real worky or nasty or anything and I walked in like, I was in line for like 10-15 minutes and i got there and the guy was like “hey buddy you can’t get in” and i was like what. It was still kinda wild because it’s like because of shoes you’re not going to let me in somewhere. Like I had shoes on there was no reason for me to not be able to enter the bar at all so I do agree that the dress code is you know completely out of whack. And if you do look at it I actually had for one of my weeks I wrote a systemic injustice about it too and I completely agree because the code included I think it said ill fitting or excessively baggy clothes, work boots, athletic clothing, jerseys, sagging of pants, excessive jewelry and stuff like that. And that does you know, tend to go towards a certain race and stuff like that simply isn’t right. I completely agree with you in that being an injustice.
I have a lot of friends who have gotten in with ripped jeans, no issues, and then there are other people who get turned away. It’s just very inconsistent. Also the fact that you can’t wear flat billed hats but regular baseball caps that creates a very specific rule.
Yeah that’s pretty crazy I actually did not know that but that’s definitely something that needs to be addressed and needs to go away, that’s for sure. Alright so I’ll talk about one of mine. So a couple weeks ago me and my girlfriend we went out to a regular dinner and we set down and at the end of the dinner the waiter went straight to me to hand me the bill. And i know it’s not anything incredible and you can say it’s just being a man or being a gentleman but why did he hand me the bill? What structure is put into place because this happens all the time and quite frequently generally I do take care of the bill but we have an agreement where she pays sometimes and I have to pay some other times. But 9 times out of 10 when i go to a restaurant they’re like, “here you go, here’s your bill.” And back in the day and what I wrote was back in the day women stayed at home and it was a man’s job to provide the income. But you know obviously this changed and in a good way and it shouldn’t be the responsibility for a man to pay the bill because both men and women should be treated equally. And I do understand that sometimes it is more of being a gentleman and stuff like that but in today’s society I think this is an old tradition that needs to be changed. What’s your thoughts?
I agree I think that it’s not wrong if you do and it’s not wrong if you don’t but I think when both parties are bringing in the money. And back in the day only men worked and women didn’t have the income to pay and all that so i think it is important that it shouldn’t be all on the man. It should be considered that whoever is paying for it is paying fo r it because both parties are working. If women want equal rights in the workplace they should take equal responsibility for stuff like that.
I completely agree with you. Alright i guess we’ll move along to another one of yours.
So CelebrateOne is an organization in Columbus. They focus on decreasing the infant mortality rate. They have a list of high priority neighborhoods and they have found that African American infants have a mortality rate of 2.5 times that of a white baby. There are many factors that contribute to that but one of them is the overall lack of resources for new parents to raise their children. A lot of items in these high priority neighborhoods there are not a lot of grocery stores it’s a lot of gas stations that sell food and it’s like drug mart type places and the food is more expensive. So not only do they not have access to a lot of the stuff they have to pay a higher price and then they can’t get out of a poverty system. And a lot of the women don’t have access to birth control and what they need to provide for their kids and so it all just attributes to that.
And are you saying that’s in like the area where the low income families are generally like the stores and stuff are generally higher priced than if i go say to Kroger in New Albany or something like that.
They have generally said that it’s not like Kroger is more expensive there it’s more just like they don’t have it and so basically if you go to buy milk at CVS it’s going to be more expensive than if you do at Costco.
Yeah I completely agree. Yeah I mean that definitely makes sense you know why these places aren’t in these areas is kinda concerning. It kinda looks at why? And you know they think “I’m not going to make as much money there” but that becomes a problem when you’re isolating areas from other areas based on income or race or anything becomes a problem. I completely agree that was a good one. Alright so I’ll move on to another one of mine and this was my main one this was what I wrote for our last week’s blog post and I was talking about the systemic injustice in our criminal justice system. And i think there is a lot but one i went into specifically is the money bail system. And essentially the thought process is that people have to pay a certain amount of money to get out of jail until their court date and then when you go back to your court date you get the money back. Well what happens if you can’t pay? If you think about it and you know what happens, you stay in jail. And this is highly impactful to the lower class people who simply can’t afford to make bail. Why is it right to say that a person who has money can get out of jail and then another person who doesn’t has to sit in jail until their court date? It is really targeting the lower class people. And I was looking into it, I have statistics but I’d have to pull them up. Generally if you are falsely accused of something (I forget the exact statistic) but there are people who are falsely accused for these crimes because you know until your court date you are innocent until proven guilty is what its called. And these people are innocent, sitting in jail, that could possibly be proved innocent so they just sat in jail for however much time for absolutely no reason. And I do think this is a major issue and upper class people are given a major advantage for having money in their pocket. I think a new system needs to be put into place that doesn’t focus on social classes determining being put in jail or not.
I completely agree and I think even when bail is set at half a million dollars but you’re a multimillionaire you either have access to it or you have it in your bank account. Where it’s set at $100,000 for someone else most people don’t have that laying around and it does create a major injustice because you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty but if you’re forced to be in jail you are basically being wrongfully accused it just isn’t fair.
And I completely agree, let’s move on to another one of yours.
So I actually was in a conversation with some people and we were talking about suburbs of Columbus and everything and there were some older people in the conversation and they were talking about an area that has become a little more run down and it was becoming more diverse and they were like “oh it’s time for wite flight” and that’s just not really acceptable in today’s society. I think that we are creating a more diverse culture and it shouldn’t be a term that we commonly use and it shouldn’t be a term that is viewed as positive. There shouldn’t be a need for it.
Can you define white flight? I’ve actually never heard of it.
It’s when an area becomes more diverse and then all the white people move.
Really? Well that doesn’t sound right. I completely would agree with you and I think that phenomenon needs to be addressed. So it’s literally like a group of people a diverse culture are living together and then the caucasion just bounce from there leaving it strictly a minority area.
Yeah.
Yeah i definitely don’t see how that is right. WHy do you think that happens? Do you think it’s like a racial backing behind that?
Yeah the term basically implies a racial issue like they want to be only around each other and that is what leads to it.
Well interesting because i’ve honestly never heard of that term. That’s definitely something that i will look into after this conversation is over. Well thank you very much i will go ahead and move onto one of mine.
Alright so me and my dad were having a conversation and my dad is kinda naive, the man he is. And I was like I do think there is still a decent wage gap between women and men that needs addressed. And he was like ya know today i think it’s not that bad. So I did some digging and I found out that he was completely wrong. So in just Ohio, I learned that Ohio has the 14th largest wage gap in the nation. In just Ohio women are paid $10,000 less than men on average. And you know, how is this right? Supposedly we live in a society that promotes gender equality yet there is still a $10,000 wage gap and it doesn’t really make much sense. Men in Ohio just for being a man are given a strong financial advantage just for being a man.
I agree. And I also saw something recently that was saying how much the minority wage gap difference is. And it’s significantly lower as well than like a Caucasian male in the same position.
Yeah so i think all these things need to be addressed and you hear so many things that “were promoting gender equality” and this and that and the other yet you know behind the scenes there is still this large wage gap that you don’t really hear too much about unless you do research on it. I definitely think that men are given an advantage in the workforce than women. I think people should get paid based on the job that you’ve done and their work ethic towards it. Gender and race should have nothing to do with the amount of money you do on the job.
I agree. Well it was great hearing your thoughts on all of this.