Geena Davis as the best female movie Charly (The Long Kiss Goodnight, 1996)
Charles was a top-10 name for boys in the U.S. into the 1950s, and it has always been more than 99% male. American parents have shown no interest in breaking down that barrier. However, since the early 2000s, they have started naming their daughters Charlie, Charlee, Charleigh, Charli, Charley, and Charly. Last year 4,882 girls got one of those names, which is more than Anna or Samantha (and more than twice as many as were named Mary).
Near the start of that wave, the Disney TV show Good Luck Charlie — about a married, White couple with four children, the last of which was named Charlotte (nick-named Charlie) — debuted in 2010, and peaked in 2012, with 7.5 million viewers on one Sunday.
But Charlie has not become a girls’ name. As a I reported last week, Charlie is now the most common androgynous name (between 40% and 60% female), with 3,556 births split almost equally between boys and girls. The other variations are more female: All versions of Charlie together are 74% female.
So, with girls pouring in, are parents heading for the exits, as we saw with names like Taylor and Kim? Not yet. Charles is much less common than it once was, but it has not slipped appreciably since girls started picking up its nickname. Here are the trends back to 1880:
As girl Charlies have gained ground, in fact, even the spelling Charlie is rising in the rankings for boys, up to 218th last year from 306th a decade ago. Parents are now naming their boys Charlie at twice the rate they did in 1968. This figure zooms in on the Charlie wars for the last 50 years. (For this I combine all the spellings for boys, but 92% of them are Charlies.)
If Charlie follows the path of previous gender battleground names, however (see Tristan Bridges’ twoposts on this from last week), we might still see a male crash, or a female crash, or both. Androgyneity has historically been unstable in this system, especially when (from parents’ point of view) femininity contaminates a masculine space.
If the collapse doesn’t come, maybe it will be because both sides have gender unambiguous reinforcements: Charles for boys (99.8% male), and Charlotte for girls (99.9% female). So parents who like the name Charlie, including those who may choose it precisely because of its androgynous image, also know they have a gendered space they or their children can retreat to if necessary.
Data for this analysis are from the Social Security Administration. The data files and my Stata code are available on the OSF, here.
I’ll get to Taylor and Kim, but first more general data.
How gender binary is the practice of naming babies in the U.S.? Very. In 2018, 76% of babies were given names that were more than 99% male or female, according to data from the Social Security Administration (which releases name counts for only two sex categories).
That looks extreme (kurtosis = 1.06!), but 76% is actually the lowest that number has ever been. Here is the trend in babies with >99%-typed names back to 1880 (note the y-axis starts at 70%):
How important are the trends in name binaryness?
In her New York Timesarticle on the rise nonbinary gender identities among young Americans, and a follow-up, Amy Harmon interviewed nonbinary people named Flynn, Keyden, and Charley. (In 2018, 85% of the babies given the name Charley were identified as girls at birth, compared with 0.2% of those named Charles and 52% of those named Charlie — the most androgynous spelling of the three).*
One notable development in the striking rise of nonbinary identities has been the supportiveness of some parents. But are such parents reacting positively to their children’s development, or — not waiting to be prompted — giving their babies more androgynous names at birth? Extreme sex-dominance of names has become less common, but still dominants. And truly androgynous names, say, between 40% and 60% associated with one sex, are very rare.
Over the long run, the U.S. is becoming a less sex-binary society, but that evolution is far from direct. From 1950 to 1975 (the period featured in Jo Paoletti’s book on the unisex movement in fashion), the percentage of babies given names that were less than 95% associated with a dominant sex almost doubled, to 7.4%. And since then it has increased to 13%. However, the percentage given names that are between 40% and 60% sex-dominant remains barely over 1%. Here are those trends, back to 1940, using data from the Social Security Administration.
Are the parents giving androgynous names even doing it on purpose? I’m not sure how we can tell. Despite phonetic cues, which are guides but not rules, the gender of a name is ultimately determined by the gender of the people who have it. When names are very rare, it’s likely parents just don’t know the sex of the other babies getting the name. Maybe parents giving the names Charlie, Finley, and Dakota — the most popular androgynous names — chose them because they like their androgynousness. But others, like Justice or Ocean, probably just don’t have stable genders attached to them. And the conventional wisdom (from Stanley Lieberson and colleagues) is that androgynous names are not stable — they either swing toward one gender or fade away.
Here are the most common names between 40% and 60% sex dominant in 2018. Maybe blog readers can say something about the motives of the parents using these.
In that 2000 paper by Lieberson et al., which used data on Whites only from Illinois, through 1989 (how did people ever do sociology with such paltry data available to them?), they reported that the parents of girls are more likely to assign them androgynous names than the parents of boys are. That is consistent with the idea that the penalty for gender non-conformity is greater for boys than for girls, that femaleness is the contaminant more than non-conformity — which is why the move toward gender equality meant women wearing pants more than men wearing dresses. But now that may have reversed. Boys are now more likely to be given names that are less than 95% sex-dominant.
I think this is a good avenue for exploring changes in gender attitudes, including regarding nonbinary identities and gender conformity. This will require looking beyond name count trends, obviously.
Kim and Taylor
Another avenue for research involves name contamination (another Lieberson idea, which Tristan Bridges and I have written about; see also earlier posts). From a wide angle, it’s easy to see that androgynous names usually don’t stay that way, or they disappear. But the specific mechanism may be that parents of boys are spooked by the rising femininity of a name and thus turn away from it.
In that Lieberson et al article they cite the case of Kim, which (among Whites in Illinois) was increasing among both boys and girls before Kim Novak burst on the scene in 1954, as a sexy female movie star. And they also observe the rise of Taylor, just beginning by the end of their dataset, in 1989. Now we can update that, and expand it to the whole country, to see the amazing similarity of the cases. Amazing similarity, that is, if you remember who Taylor Dayne is.
Taylor Dayne was a big deal very briefly, at the end of the 1980s, with three gold singles, “Tell It to My Heart”, “I’ll Always Love You,” and “Love Will Lead You Back.” She was nominated for a Best R&B Vocal Performance Grammy for “I’ll Always Love You,” in 1988 (losing to Aretha Franklin). Did Taylor Dayne kill Taylor — right after giving us Taylor Swift (born 1989)? I’m open to other suggestions, but I think it fits. She was a big star briefly, and the music she made (no offense) didn’t turn out to be the most memorable of the period, which was awkwardly sandwiched between decades. There is a difference in scale between the cases, as Taylor peaked at the #6 most popular girls’ name and the 51st most popular boys’ name in the mid-1990s. Also, Taylor still ranks, and is still 18% male, while Kim virtually disappeared. So maybe the dynamic is a little different now.
Anyway, I love the idea that Taylor Dayne killed Taylor, because she isn’t even a real Taylor — she was born Leslie Wunderman (were any other Jews nominated for R&B vocalist Grammys?), and only chose the name Taylor in 1987, as it was already spiking upward. It also raises an issue relevant to the question of nonbinary-supporting parents: name changes. If gender identities are increasingly fluid, maybe names will be, too. In addition to being less sex-typed, names may also become less permanent. Just a thought.
* In the original version of this post I mistakenly wrote that 20% of Charles’s were girls, it’s actually 0.2% (I read .19 as a proportion instead of a percent).
Data and code for this analysis are on the Open Science Framework here: https://osf.io/m48qc/.
This is an update of previous reports with some new analysis at the end.
In my book Enduring Bonds I showed the distribution of income within different-sex married couples from 1970 to 2014. Here is the updated trend to 2017:
The change from 2014 is a modest continuation. Here’s the detail from 2017, with the couples reporting exactly-even incomes broken out in the middle:
In 2017, for different-sex couples with wife age 18-64:
26% of wives earn more than their husbands (up from 15% in 1990 and 7% in 1970).
The average wife-who-earns-more takes home 69% of the couple’s earnings. The average for higher-earning husbands is 79%.
It is 8.3-times more common for a husband to earn all the money than a wife (18.7% versus 2.3%).
In the book I offer the following summary:
Actually, this triplet pattern fits a lot of trends regarding gender inequality: yes, lots of change, but most of it decades ago, and not quite as fundamental as it looks.
New breakdown
At the request of Stephanie Coontz, I ran the 2017 numbers by income bracket (and including all ages). I broke the couples into the bottom 10% (under $27,000), the 10-25th percentile (to $47,000), the 25th-5th (to $80,000), the 50th-75th (to $130,000), the 75th-90th (to $202,000), and the top 10% ($202,000+). Here is the income distribution within couples for each income bracket, with a few points labeled for clarity:
A key point here is that although wives rarely earn the dominant share of income, most couples rely on the wife’s income to maintain their standard of living. For example, a couple at the median, $80,000, would have to drastically alter their lifestyle without the 40-49% share contributed by the wife’s income. Breadwinning in its 1950s connotation is is distracting from this contemporary reality, and we should probably drop the term.
This updates a series of posts that have addressed gender in academic sociology, starting in 2011 and updated in 2015, along with various tweets (to see random fact tweets from me on Twitter, Google familyunequal “now you know”).
Gender in academic sociology is complicated because the profession is running pretty female these days, with more than half the U.S. PhDs going to women since 1994, and more than 60% overall since 1999. So although there are various kinds of exclusion, it’s not as simple as excluding women from the discipline, and the representation of women’s representation depends on the choice of denominators. For example, a recent report found that, in the top 100 U.S. sociology departments in 2012, women were 60% of the assistant professors, 54% of the associate professors, and 34% of the full professors. This probably reflects a combination of age and tenure, with this year’s full professors representing yesteryear’s hiring, as well as women having lower rates of progression up the hierarchy.
Also, feminists (myself included) cheer the entry of women into formerly male-only professions but bemoan their concentration into female ghettos, but there is no bright line beyond which one process transforms into the other (don’t get me started on “tipping points“).
But however we want to interpret the trends, we have to know the trends. So here are some, starting with updates on previous reports (degrees, sections, elections), and then some new ones (journal articles, peer reviewers).*
Degrees
The National Science Foundation reports the number and gender of PhD recipients by discipline (since 2006, earlier). This is what we get (smoothed with three-year averages): mostly more than 60% female since the late-1990s, with women accounting for most of the growth.
Sections
Sociology is a very broad discipline, including people who specialize in many distinct substantive and methodological areas. Within the American Sociological Association (ASA), we divide into 49 sections, which serve as a mechanism to organize conferences and journals, and to give awards (people can belong to as many as they want, for a small charge). The sections are pretty segregated by gender. Here are the gender compositions of each, from Sex and Gender (86% female) to Mathematical Sociology (22%):
Elections
The ASA leadership is elected in annual balloting by the membership, which is open to anyone who wants to join as long as they claim some affiliation with the discipline (the price ranges from $51 for students to $377 for people with incomes over $150,000). The association elected its first president in 1906, its first woman in 1952 and its second woman in 1973. In the last 10 years 7 of the presidents have been women.
Is the shift toward women presidents because there are more women in the association, or in the hierarchy of the association, or because of the preference of the membership? The president, along with all the other elected officers, are selected for the ballot by a nominations committee. In recent years it has become conventional wisdom that men usually lose to women in these elections because ASA members vote for a woman if they don’t have a strong preference between candidates, but I don’t know how well-founded that perception is.
Here is the gender of candidates for top positions (president, vice president, secretary, and council members), and the gender of the winners, from 2007 to 2018. Note that in the last three years they have nominated fewer women, but except for 2016 the membership has voted for more women (with 2018 being having the widest gap yet):
Papers
I’ve only done a little of this, but here is a quick look at the gender of authors in two of the highest-status sociology journals for the last several years. American Sociological Review (an ASA journal published by Sage), and American Journal of Sociology (an independent journal published by University of Chicago), 35% of authors in the last 11 issues have been women (by my assessment, regular articles only)
Someone could easily do a much more serious assessment of gender in sociology journal authorship.
Reviewers
For the last few months I have been working on peer review in sociology and the social sciences — how it works, how it doesn’t, and how it might be improved. (Here are slides from a talk I gave, with Micah Altman at MIT). One of my concerns about peer review is its general lack of accountability; no one supervises the process, generally, as the only person who knows everything at a journal is the editor, and the only thing the public sees is the published outcome. And yet publication peer review determines all manner of statuses in academia.
Looking for externally accessible data that might shine a light on the process, I checked for reviewer acknowledgement lists, which some journals publish at the end of a volume (lots of journals don’t apparently, including Social Forces, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Science Research, Sociological Forum, Sociological Theory, Work & Occupations, Social Currents, and Mobilization.) I used the genderize.io API to count the genders of the reviewers, using 80% confidence for the first pass, and then personally checking or Googling other names (I didn’t do all the names, but almost).
The reviewer gender shares are a little higher for ASR and AJS than they were for authors, with the former having somewhat more women. Publication in one of these two journals is the probably most important gatekeeping mechanism to the upper echelons of the discipline. The methods journal has the lowest representation of women, the gender journal as the highest. Unknown here is the proportion of women among the pool of reviewers solicited by the editors.
So, that’s my report.
* These data all treat gender as sex as binary, either because the data were reported that way, or because I coded them from names. I don’t address race, ethnicity, or other traits for the same reason.
Israel’s trajectory is unsustainable in more ways than one.
The political situation is not the subject of this post, but it’s necessary to say at the beginning that the oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel, made possible by the United States, is morally unacceptable and relative to all the other national oppression in the world rates pretty bad. For that reason, although I don’t endorse the movement for academics to boycott Israel, I oppose the movement to censor it.
So, last month I went to Israel for the first time since 1979. Since this is a blog I can include both academic and personal observations from that visit.
The workshop I was invited to attend was a joint effort of colleagues at the University of Maryland and Tel Aviv University, with the Israel Forum for Population, Environment, and Society, called “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Culture and Sustainable Population Dynamics.” The main organizers were Alon Tal and Michele Gelfand. Tal has written a very good book called, The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel, which is both a demographic history and an ecological analysis, from which I learned a lot.
I’m not expert on the ecological stuff, but the demography is quite shocking on its own. (In the demography here, unless noted I’m talking about Israel within its pre-1967 borders, which is now most of these statistics are reported.) Israel is very densely populated, although everyone I talked to (besides demographers) was surprised to hear it. That may be because when you travel outward from the cities, it quickly looks like barren countryside — it’s just that the empty countryside doesn’t go on very far before you get to the sea or a border.
The population of about 1 million in 1950 is now almost 9 million, having doubled in the past 30 years. This figure shows the population density of countries with 5 million or greater population in 2016, with select countries labeled using World Bank codes and those with populations over 100 million circled. The 1986 density is on the x-axis and the 2016 density is on the y-axis, so to distance above the diagonal is the increase. That’s Israel way up at 200, 400 (click to enlarge).
The rapid rise in population density in Israel will invariably exacerbate their problems with water, energy, transportation, housing, habitats, pollution, and — of course — politics. These are all pretty bad problems, which Tal explains at length.
Contrary to popular belief, since the wave of ex-USSR immigrants in the early 1990s, most of the population growth has been from births, not immigration. And contrary to other popular beliefs, the growth is now — and increasingly — driven not by the Arab or Muslim populations but by the so-called Ultra Orthodox or Haredi population. (Here I cite a paper by Barbara Okun, but we also heard from demographers Eliahu Ben Moshe and Ameed Saabneh, whose presentations I do not have to share.) This figure from Tal’s book shows the Jewish/Arab breakdown. Where in 1997 there were about 2.3 Jewish births for each Arab birth, in 2013 it was more than 3-to-1:
Overall, Arab and Muslim fertility have fallen a lot, and Jewish fertility has not (most but not all Arabs are Muslim; some Jews have Arab ancestry, but they don’t count as Arab). Here are the overall trends, using completed fertility by birth cohorts, from this paper by Barbara Okun:
The Arab/Muslim trend looks like a lot of poor countries, while the Jewish and total trends (Israel is about 80% Jewish) does not look like a lot of rich countries. As a result, Israel has the highest birth rate of all OECD countries, by a lot, and it’s now rising (runner-up Mexico shown for comparison):
Why is Israel’s birth rate rising? Increasingly, because of the Ultra-Orthodox population, among whom the most recent cohorts to reach age 40 have averaged about 7 children per woman:
Right now the Haredi population are 13% of the total Jewish population. Not-that-long story short, the Haredi will be the majority of Israeli Jews pretty soon (maybe 50 years). And because of population momentum (the next generation’s parents are already born), that is likely almost no matter what else happens.
As Ben Moshe pointed out, this process of rising ultra-orthodox dominance may be accelerated if the “secular” Jews (two-thirds of whom think having a religious wedding is “very important,” and 38% of whom fast on Yom Kippur) reduce their fertility rates to something more like the European norm. If that happens, it won’t do much to slow Israel’s population growth, but it will change the composition of the population. The math of this is pretty dramatic.
Postmodern premodernism. She wears a fashionable wig, he wears an old European-style hat and coat, the baby (girl, just guessing) wears pink. (photo pnc: https://flic.kr/p/24BvW9C)
The idea of a policy to reduce birth rates — that is, Jewish birth rates — in Israel is so far a complete political non-starter. Even among secular Jews, Ben Moshe reports, 80% say they would like to have three children or more. State policy is very pro-natal. The national health insurance pays for unlimited IVF cycles, and Israel has more than 10-times as many IVF treatments per capita as the US does, and more than twice as many as the next highest country (as Daphna Carmeli reported). Same-sex couples can’t marry or adopt children, but they can produce and parent them with IVF or through surrogacy. Abortion is technically legal but discouraged. The state pays monthly child subsidies for each kid, and provides child care from age 3.
The Haredi population, which plays a pivotal role in the country’s parliamentary coalition, controls their own state-funded school curriculum, and they are exempt from the mandatory military service that most other Jews are required to perform. In addition to fostering resentment among the non-orthodox, this also means they get started on their childbearing earlier, since they don’t have military time after high school. Of course, these are not biologically distinct populations, and people can move in and out of the groups, but thus far the Haredi population is not experiencing much intergenerational defection, partly because of the institutional supports they have from the state.
Remarks
Anyway, I had the chance at the workshop to offer remarks, which I present in edited form here, in a 15-minute audio clip.
One part is was a warning about “population policy” from Puerto Rico and China. And I commented on gender inequality, saying, “It’s indelicate to walk into a place and say that. On the other hand, if we look at the history of extremely high-fertility, very religiously-oriented, patriarchal societies, that’s what they are,” and talked about how education affects birth rates:
It’s one thing to increase an individual woman’s education and then see that she is less likely to have more children. But you’re not increasing her education when she’s 18, you’re increasing her educational opportunity when she’s 18, or her vision for herself 20 years in the future that’s going to change her behavior at age 18. If you say to an 18-year-old, “You live in a society where everybody goes to college, and women have good jobs when they come out,” then her behavior at age 18 is much less likely to be marriage and children right then. It’s more likely to be, “I will pursue this education, and then I’ll be in a better position to pursue my career, to bargain from a better position in terms of choosing a spouse,” and the behavior follows from that knowledge of the future.
Also some comments on the border situation, where I said, in a very roundabout way:
I think it’s interesting for the discussion of why do the secular Israel Jews still have such non-European fertility levels, and it partly is the context. Maybe it’s how religious were their parents, or their other relatives or their siblings, or maybe it’s their city or the culture they were brought up in in some way, or the policies of their government, but it’s also — in terms of the war and ethnic conflict — it may have to do with the political or ethnic or perceived national threat. And so in my idealistic world when we open all the borders, one source of conflict is actually reduced, and the people’s behavior is changed.
Here’s the talk:
There was a writeup on the workshop in the Jerusalem Post, here, which includes more from Alon Tal.
Entering the Western Wall Jewish area of the Old City in Jerusalem. (photo pnc: https://flic.kr/p/23AxGdJ)
Visiting Israel
As far as I’m concerned I’ve always been White in America, which is the dominant status. But once in a while being Jewish makes me feel I’m down a peg. Or even sometimes, for a fleeting minute, as the Nazis on Twitter like to tell me, that I’m not really White. Funny thing about being in Israel, for me, was that it felt kind of like being really White in America. My people were on top, as they usually are, but a little more specifically. Surprisingly, perhaps, this felt less morally compromising than I expected, at least in comparison to how I normally feel in America. It also reinforced my growing sense of Jewish as ethnicity rather than religion in the US context (I’m an atheist), which has of course been exacerbated by the current pro-Nazi regime and anti-Semitic attacks I get on Twitter since Trump took power.
Being a Jewish-American (the ethnic term) anti-Trump person on Twitter is odd. One of the weirder things I did not predict, but which I see very often, is the gotcha thing the anti-Semites give me when I speak out against Trump on xenophobia and the Mexican-border wall. For example, these are tweets I got from people I don’t know in response to posting this photo essay on the border wall in Contexts, without mentioning Israel.
Contrary to popular belief among Nazis, some Jews don’t support Israeli apartheid. (I wrote a post comparing the Israel/Palestine and US/Mexico borders, here.) Anyway, on top of that, I have family members in Israel whom I dearly love. And on top of that, some of those family members are Jews with whom I have the most in common about Israeli politics (and some, not much at all). So, it’s complicated.
On the bus in Jerusalem. (photo pnc: https://flic.kr/p/GxAkrE) Also on the bus was a sign that read: “Anyone may sit anywhere (except places marked for disabled people). Harassment of a passenger on this matter may be a criminal offense.” This was to stop ulta-orthodox men from forcing women to sit in the back of the bus, and represented a victory for feminists.
Of course, the closer you look the more “nuanced” things become. To Haredi folks, for example, there are large, vital differences between different Haredi communities, that you or I would probably find hard to discern. And for another example, there are a lot of negative attitudes toward the Haredi people from some secular Jews in Israel, for living off government benefits, not serving in the military, not letting the buses run on Saturday, and subjugating women. And sometimes, maybe just because I’m more defensive about anti-Semitism these days, those attitudes have a slight anti-Semitic aftertaste. So they are simultaneously the “most” Jewish people in a “Jewish state,” with outsized political and cultural influence, but also something like a disparaged minority.
Anyways, I have no conclusion.
These photos, and others from the trip, are on Flickr under Creative Commons license: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmeU5n6s.
I’ve been working on my review of Mark Regnerus’s new book, Cheap Sex, in 10-minute power bursts. Here’s one funny thing I noticed: Hanna Rosin’s most prominent error from The End of Men apparently repeated telephone-style by Regnerus.*
In the Atlantic article, which led to her TED Talk and then book (full review), The End of Men, Hanna Rosin’s editor chose two dramatic statements that were wrong to lead with:
That year, 2010, women were not the majority of the workforce, and most managers were not women. And they still aren’t. What was true was that for 10 months women outnumbered men in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports as the “nonfarm payroll,” from June 2009 to March 2010. In every month before and since, men have been the majority. Here’s that trend, by month:
a measure of the number of U.S. workers in the economy that excludes proprietors, private household employees, unpaid volunteers, farm employees, and the unincorporated self-employed. This measure accounts for approximately 80 percent of the workers who contribute to Gross Domestic Product.
It’s not “the workforce,” but it is a good indicator of shocks to the economy — private companies may lay people off immediately, while self-employed people still consider themselves employed even if they’re suddenly losing money. Anyway, in the BLS’s household survey that asks people if they are working, the Current Population Survey, there were about 10 million more people counted as employed, and men’s majority have never been threatened. This is a reasonably called “the workforce.” Note the time trend here is longer, and it’s annual:
The source of the wrong statement about managers is just Rosin combining managerial and professional specialty jobs into “managers,” which she also did in the TED Talk, which is just wrong. Professionals include a lot of women, like nurses and teachers. The managerial occupations have never been majority-female either. Both are important, but only one fit her narrative.
Anyway, the point of this is that Mark Regnerus picked up this meme — which Rosin popularized but lots of other media repeated — and stated it as current fact in his 2017 book. So powerful (among those not powerfully applying themselves) is the idea of automatic gender progress in one direction, that this is not the kind of thing they think they will ever have to check again. Once women pass a milestone, it’s passed, period. (That’s why Rosin’s full sentence was this: “Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.” She was misapplying the clickbait concept of “tipping point” to imply that the change will now continue and accelerate in the same direction.)
This is why Regnerus apparently felt no need to recheck his facts when he wrote, “there are now more women than men in the paid labor force.” He didn’t cite Rosin (or anyone) for this fact, but it appears during a passage sandwiched between parts that cite her book, so I assume that’s what he was borrowing from, and maybe just changed “workforce” to “paid labor force” to sound different or sophisticated.
Anyway, Rosin doesn’t feature prominently in the Regnerus review (you’re welcome), but this was an interesting nugget, because for all their differences, there are some similarities between Regnerus’s fanatical religious anti-feminism and Rosin’s sophisticated postfeminist antifeminism. Both think feminism has gone too far, and both see the rise of women as resulting from a technological change — Rosin from deindustrialization and Regnerus from the Pill. Also, they both use facts not to learn from but to demonstrate things they think they already know.
With gender and Hollywood in the news because of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, I haven’t seen anyone count up the women who produced his movies. I counted off every tenth movie from his 300 or so producer credits on IMDB, and eyeballed their names (or images) for gender. The result: 23% of 373 producers were women.* (Some have a lot of producers, but if you use movies as the unit of analysis the average is also 23%.)
Here is the breakdown of these 30 movies, by decade:
Weinstein seems to be right in line with the industry on this. (With a range of 5 to 70 producers listed, none had more than 50% female producer teams.) Producer jobs are the most gender integrated of the major behind-the-scenes leadership positions in Hollywood movies, as reported by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. And, like the other major positions, in his movies and in general, there is zero movement toward gender integration in the last two decades.
In turn, Hollywood looks a lot like the economy in general, which also shows basically no progress on integrating women into leadership positions over the last two decades. Here is percent female among those employed in managerial occupations (using the IPUMS occ1990 coding scheme for consistency):
Putting women in top leadership positions is not a panacea for gender inequality. But for the sexual harassment situation I am quite sure it would help a lot. Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes may or may not have been an open secret in Hollywood, but the lack of women in positions across the industry, and the economy, is plain for all to see — and to act on, if they choose.
For other posts on movies, mostly having to do with gender, follow the movie tag.
* If someone wants to code all of his movies I’ll happily update this. Here’s the list I generated:
