And yeah, women want white collar jobs too. Go figure - A diverse population of women, with different abilities, interests and levels of education, are all fighting for the right to seek diverse forms of employment. Fighting for equality in one sphere doesn’t mean that we’ve forgotten about the others.
Just because you aren’t paying attention to the feminist movement doesn’t mean that the feminist movement is nonexistent.
Many jobs such as these (although I don’t know that this is the case for these exactly) have been denied to women based on the idea that doing a particular type of labor or being in a particular environment would be too harmful to women.
And by “too harmful to women” I of course mean “too harmful to their uterus.*”
Like, there was a case back in the… 80s, I think? where some women worked at some sort of factory or plant or something. (I’ll be honest, I don’t remember a lot of the details of this— Google, however, informs me that I was right and it was in the 80s).
Anyway, there were hazardous materials in the plant. And, using laws that were intendedto protect pregnant women, the company basically realized, “hey, wait a minute, we don’t need to have any women working here and we can get away with it!” Because, see, hazardous materials like that are bad for fetus.
So the company basically told a bunch of women “you can’t work here anymore because you can have babies and it’s not safe for you.” But, you know, one thing they could do would be to get sterilized, and then they could keep working there. So women did— women who would not otherwise chosen to have been sterilized got sterilized because it was either that or lose the jobs that they desperately needed.
Stuff like this gets ignored all the time. I hear the argument all the time “well women can’t be drafted…” Well, first off, let’s set aside the whole issue of the draft because that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms. But you’re acting like there aren’t any women who would want to volunteer to be in the military. There are plenty. Only lots don’t because they’re discouraged from it or aren’t allowed to serve in the role they want. Or they dojoin but often leave because of severe sexual harassment and even sexual assault.
Saying that women “don’t want” these jobs is ridiculous on multiple levels— but what it doesdo is work to affirm the idea of women as illogical, weak, and “naturally” not suited for particular jobs.
*It is important to acknowledge that being a woman =/= having a uterus. However, such associations are made and utilized in this particular discourse (i.e. people equate being a woman with having a uterus, and that gets tied up in the discourse surrounding excluding women from jobs).
Four times more male characters in literature than female, research suggests
A study by University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering used AI to measure pronoun use, uncovering a huge disparity in gender frequency
Mayank Kejriwal at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering was inspired by work on gender biases and his own work on natural language processing to carry out the experiment.
Kejriwal and fellow researcher Akarsh Nagaraj used data from 3,000 books that are part of the Gutenberg Project, across genres including adventure, science fiction, mystery and romance.
The study used Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify gender-specific characters by looking at things including female and male pronouns. The researchers also examined how many female characters were main characters.
“Gender bias is very real, and when we see females four times less in literature, it has a subliminal impact on people consuming the culture,” said Kejriwal.
“Flawed algorithms can amplify biases through feedback loops,” professors James Zou and Londa Schiebinger wrote in a paper titled “AI can be sexist and racist - it’s time to make it fair.” “Each time a translation program defaults to ‘he said,’ it increases the relative frequency of the masculine pronoun on the web - potentially reversing hard-won advances toward equality.”
Can AI be sexist? Yes, it can be as sexist as people who created it and as sexist as the corpora it learns from.