Beth T. sent us this picture of some books for sale at the NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. I found some more at the website. They nicely illustrate the gendering of jobs. Only because we implicitly think that zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists, and architects are men, is it necessary to modify the term with “woman.”
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They’re simply aimed at girls, trying to get more girls to take an interest in science. Surely you’re not complaining about THAT. It’s not that we implicitly think of anything, it’s that, as a statistical fact, less girls take up sciences than do boys, and these books are a part of an effort to change this.
I would find an analysis of what’s IN the books more interesting than just this comment about the fact that they exist.
Dubi,
My goal isn’t to inspire outrage. The post isn’t supposed to make you mad. I just thought it was a nice illustration of how jobs are gendered.
Right. You wouldn’t find, after all, a book called “You Can Be A Woman Nurse,” or “You Can Be a Woman Schoolteacher.” Just like you wouldn’t see “You Can Be a Man Doctor,” or “You Can Be a Man Engineer.” The qualifiers in both these examples sound weird–especially “man.”
Right, we don’t implicitly think of anything. Like when I say ‘doctor’ or ’scientist’ the person who comes to your mind isn’t male. And these books aren’t completely playing into that by calling themselves what they do, and not something like “You Can Be An Engineer: A Book For Girls.” Pull the other one.
I am constantly astounded about how most of the readers of this blog seem to disagree with its basic stance on the world, and how little the bloggers seem to do to curb the ignorance in the comment threads.
I can’t be a woman engineer. At least, not without hormone therapy and a lot of expensive surgery. Who comes up with these titles?
Am I the only one who finds these titles ludicrously nonsensical? Objectionable, yes, but also completely bizarre.
When I read “You Can Be A…”, my default image of a paleantologist or architect or oceanographer *is* female, probably because I am female. If they are talking about what I can grow up to be, then the eventual grown-up will be a woman, just as my childhood self was a girl. Presumably a boy would plan to grow up to be a male version (assuming gender continuity for the people in my example.)
Of course, that initial idea has to be backed up by equal representation of both sexes in the illustrations and text, but explicit gendering is attempting to correct a problem that doesn’t exist in my mind and probably doesn’t exist in the minds of most children. Maybe we should go back to the children’s books written in the 80’s, because apparently they avoided some gender pitfalls when they molded me.