Claudia: First off, I want to say that I loved watching this documentary. I thought the fact that it had so many influential and powerful women featured in the commentary spoke volumes about the importance of the message it aimed to spread. I had seen this documentary before, but as I watched it again during the end of a semester in which two of my classes were focused on analyzing media, I felt that I understood it in a new light. The message is always alarming no matter how you view it: if things don’t change now, it’s only going to worse. And media is doing way more harm than good for the minds and perceptions of its young (and old) viewers. Continue reading →

Katrina: Gender dynamics in the world of paid labor have become very stereotyped.  Women face multiple barriers when striving to attain a career in the professional world today.  Wood explains that these gendered stereotypes cast women into four main categories, the sex object, the mother, the child or the iron maiden.  Women are defined as incompetent, skilled only in a maternal sense, or unfeminine.  As discussed in class, these stereotypes are very much culturally constructed.  Society is taught to adhere to these stereotypes from the media, television shows and films.  We find a male nurse to be hysterical, and the sexy secretary seducing her male boss to be completely expected. How did these stereotypes come about? Women are expected to be innately maternal and if they are not, they automatically become the “iron maiden.”  Continue reading →

Wood’s Chatper 8 brings up a lot of interesting topics which I had not thought about regarding education and gender. In our group discussion in class we talked about how we never realized there was such a gender divide when learning about history. Growing up, I didn’t notice I was learning about mostly men doing the great things in history because that’s really all I knew. Looking back on everything, it really interests me to see that even when we learned about women in history it was always about more traditional women’s roles, like sewing the flag. In the same section on gender-stereotyped curricula, a point that stuck out was straight biological facts are not always gender neutral. For example, Wood sites the “active sperm invading the passively waiting egg” hinting that the egg (female) just passively waits for the sperm (male). While it states gender biases like these are becoming less, it still amazes me they were even there at all.

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