Opposition From All Sides
An Annotated Bibliography
Feminism has been a popular topic for years now, so I knew it would not be hard to find sources that would help me better understand the obstacles my mother faced when she left the quiet, rural town of Moultrie to work in bigger cities with STEM companies.
As a tribute to the statistical nature of my mother’s job, I knew I would want to get some hard facts from statistical, and otherwise, studies, but I did not want my sources to be limited at that. I wanted to dive into the culture my mother grew up in by looking at her favorite movies, music, and celebrities to see how she had become the woman she is and to understand what type of person she was when she made that difficult decision to leave home.
I have learned a lot about what all women go through in all workplace environments, but above all I have so much respect for my mother, the woman who had to face all these problems when almost everything was against her.
Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation by David Beede, Tiffany Julian, David Langdon, George McKittrick, Beethika Khan, and Mark Doms
Published by the U.S. Department of Commerce
From 2000 to 2009, the percentage of the workforce that are women went up from 47% to 48%, but the percentage of the STEM workforce that are women has stayed at 24%
This was an obvious source to look for when I first thought about how I was going to learn about women in STEM. This statistic surprised me immensely. Although I knew that there were less women in STEM, this is a staggering amount less, and I am also very surprised that the number has not changed from 2000 to 2009. I thought that major advances were being made to support women in STEM fields, but apparently it is not as quick as I thought it was.
This makes me feel terrible for women who are interested in STEM. I can imagine that many women will turn their efforts towards something that they are more likely to get hired for. I know that I might in the same situation. I am so proud that my mother is a part of such a small group. Although women in the business world have their own prejudices to overcome, it is obvious that women in STEM have had a history of being underappreciated and that the changes being made have not been effective enough.
Discovering the Barriers to Rural Women in STEM — A study by Jennifer Kreft Pearce, Sara McCaslin, and Leann Morgan
Morgan, Leann, Jennifer Kreft Pearce, and Sara McCaslin. Discovering the Barriers to Rural Women in STEM. N.p.: SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, 2011. Print.
While searching for sources this piece of information caught my eye. A study was done where women and men in Texas were asked about their level of interest in STEM fields like physics and engineering. The results were surprising to me because typically girls I have been friends with disliked, and even hated, math and science classes more than the boys I have grown up with. When they looked into the apparent causes for these women to not pursue STEM careers even though they were interested, the same barriers that I have been seeing from many of my other barriers showed up. Namely, “self assessment of ability, lack of role models, and confusion about work/life balance issues” were determined to be significant factors.
Although these factors are derived from my other sources like Pioneer Programmer with Jean Jennings and Lean In with Sandberg as well, this source stands out to me because it is physical evidence in the form of a study of a whole population as opposed to the accounts of a woman or a group of women.
I also love this study because I have personally seen my mother struggle with some of these factors. After having children, she began to work from a home computer as opposed commuting to Atlanta everyday, but sometimes they would make her come into the office for periods of time and it took a toll on my mother. It is hard to get much done around the house when you get back from a long day sitting in front of a computer or sitting in traffic. Ruthless children do not usually help either. This makes me wonder what made my mother different from other women. I am not sure if she had a major influence in her life or if she just always understood that she could succeed with anything she wanted since she was young, but I imagine it was a little bit of both.
”I’m just surprised at something so taxing” — Colonel Jim Johnson to Katherine in “Hidden Figures”.
I looked into using Hidden Figures as a source for my project because I think that it is a great story that is so similar to the situation my mother went through. Also, it is currently very prevalent in popular culture, grossing over 215 million dollars internationally to date and winning over everyone’s hearts as an inspirational story that was not in the eye of the public until now. It empowers both women and African Americans, and I have personally seen people from both groups feel a huge amount of pride and positivity from the story which surprises me once again how amazing events like this can just be swept under the rug in history when so many people are so heavily interested.
This specific quote stood out to me because of how bad it makes me feel for both the offender and the offended. This scene takes place at a church barbecue where Colonel Jim Johnson meets Katherine, one of the main characters, and attempts to get to know her, showing that he is obviously interested in her. The scene does its job at making you cringe with Mahershala Ali as Colonel Jim Johnson fumbling to explain himself when he unintentionally offends Katherine. It even seems like he was trying to give her a compliment, but Katherine, being the strong female protagonist in this story, does not put up with it even with his good intentions.
This is similar to many of the other ways that I have observed women being oppressed in their workplace in the mid to late 1900s because it shows a man assuming that the gender of someone makes it harder for them to complete the same work as male counterparts, but it sets itself apart because of the honestly positive intentions that Colonel Jim Johnson had. He was meaning to compliment Katherine and continue to flirt, but his view on women that has been produced from his upbringing in this society causes him to insult Katherine and he has to make up for it later in the movie.
This movie is a great example of how successes of the women like my mother and the women Hidden Figures portrays have been so moving. This is not just art displaying their struggle, but very popular art.
“As for the ENIAC women, we were lost in the shuffle when World War II, which had ushered women into many non-traditional roles, ended and the country reverted to its comfortable, male-dominated mode. When histories of the ENIAC were written, the ENIAC women were seldom even mentioned.”
Bartik, Jean, Jon T. Rickman, and Kim D. Todd. Pioneer programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the computer that changed the world. Kirksville, MO: Truman State U Press, 2013. Print.
In her autobiography, Pioneer Programmer, Jean Jennings Bartik recounts how she was a part of the group that programmed the first electronic computer, the ENIAC. She does admit that she fell into this role by chance, due to the massive need for female workers during World War II, but that does not change the fact that she made huge accomplishments that changed the world forever.
I cannot even imagine what it feels like to put all of your effort into a job and then have your work discredited and taken for granted just because of your sex. Although the sexism of the American business and scholarly worlds have gotten much better since the 1940s, I can definitely imagine my mother having to struggle to get the credit that she deserves for her work. It amazes me that a woman as bright and influential as Jennings had all of her contribution to this amazing machine swept under the rug, so I know that my mother had to deal with this more frequently.
My mother, similar to Jennings, works closely with classified military data in her job which created an even more difficult situation of sexism for Jennings and which I am sure had the same effect on my mother. Only just before my mother went to college were the first women admitted to military academies, and these same stigmas associated with women and the US military extended to all women involved, not just the ones trying to serve.
Now that I have read accounts on the treatment of the women who built the first electronic computer, I am sure there are levels of discrimination my mother has endured that I cannot even conceive. The fact is that the people in power above these women are men, and these men are allowed to write the history books simply because of their preexisting rank. This leads to the opportunity to shift credit whichever way they please, which many people will take advantage of to further their own gain, and I am sure my mother was oppressed by this fact simply because she wanted to live a more challenging life than that of the traditional roles set before her from birth.
Feminism in Comedy
Female comedians have faced similar barriers to women in STEM. Both groups are assumed at times to be less productive in their respective fields before they are given a chance. Also, both groups have come a long way from decades ago and continue to push against expectations. The beautiful thing about comedy is that serious social issues can be brought up in a way that effectively makes its point without offending anyone or starting a huge debate.. because it is funny! This one example makes a good point that amazing deeds of Clooney’s wife have not been given the attention they deserve in popular culture, but I also think it is hilarious how they present the joke which makes me realize there is a problem, but does not make me want to angrily yell at someone about it. Comedians/actresses like Amy Poehler and Tina Fey have been doing things like this for years and effecting so many lives.
This source gives me hope more than anything. After seeing so much evidence that women are indeed held back by the society they live in and that this is majorly caused by lack of role models, this makes me feel great! These women, who are household names, are the role models for so many generations after them. Even though they do not work in STEM fields, they empower women of all kinds. For instance, my mother did not just need a programmer role model to advance her career. She needed the general confidence to make the last push and decide to move away from her family and be independent, and that takes a substantial amount of confidence. Figures like Poehler and Fey fight for this confidence in women and do it so subtly they will not even realize it, they will just grow up being as successful as they can be which is how it should be.
Mary Lou Jepsen and Her “One Laptop Per Child” Organization
Mary Lou Jepson is another example of how an inspiring woman has overcome the barriers in the STEM world to make an amazing story. She holds the title of First Chief Technology Officer at the One Laptop Per Child organization and she is responsible for making it possible for very inexpensive laptops to be made that are more suitable for third world countries. This is a truly selfless and impressive accomplishment for anyone to have made, let alone a woman who has had to fight forces against her to become a leader in this business world.
The truly great thing about this story, I believe, is that I think she turned the hardships she faced into inspiration to help those who have similar barriers. As a woman, she most likely grew up facing barriers that made her harder to pursue a life in STEM, but instead of giving up, she pushed past this and now uses her success to help eradicate the barriers to pursue STEM dreams of children in third world countries. It is so easy to be pleased with yourself once you have become a successful, skilled person, but Jepson was determined to make a difference and her work with computer has drastically done so.
This reminds me so much of my mother because she is always so kind and looking to help anyone that needs it. She has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I know and it shows every day, but especially when we watch movies where someone goes through a lot of hardship. She has not exactly changed the education system in third world countries through her work, but she consistently volunteers with Hewlett-Packard in events that help the less fortunate which I see as her having success, but realizing that she can use that success to be a passionate human being and help others, much like Jepson. Both women are inspirations to me and many others I am sure.
“Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg
Sandberg, Sheryl, and Nell Scovell. Lean in: women, work, and the will to lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Print.
“My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. Others have argued that women can get to the top only when the institutional barriers are gone. This is the ultimate chicken-and-egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. We will march into our bosses’ offices and demand what we need, including pregnancy parking. Or better yet, we’ll become bosses and make sure all women have what they need. The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into these roles in the first place. Both sides are right.”
I know that my mother was limited by her first job simply because she was a woman. For a long time, she continued to work there because it was a boundary that she could not control or that she had not barely even noticed. Eventually though, she became the brave woman described in Sandberg’s “Chicken” situation by creating her own path to rise in her field instead of focusing on dragging down the barriers that were set in place in this old, rural-based business.
In her book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg argues that some women need to push past the barriers that thousands of years of patriarchal society has built up in order to make opportunity and equality for women a real, feasible goal. This involves leaving their comfort zone, possibly offending people, and believing in yourself when others will not. This is misinterpreted by many people, including many women, as being insensitive to fact that women cannot reach for these lofty goals of leadership and power because of the barriers in place, but I agree with Sheryl in believing that these two things are two sides of the same coin.
I see so many similarities between the experiences of Sandberg and my mother. Both women recount that many times they would be the only woman in the room where important decisions were discussed, and they both distinctly noticed the difference in pay for women that performed the same job as men. She may have embodied this character without even knowing it at the time, but she was conscious of the fear going into this new world of higher responsibility and the enormous self-confidence needed to make these leaps for herself in the business world. She had always relied on her family, and she was scared of what could happen without that safety net below her. She recounted that she needed to take baby steps to get to where she was today, but once she finally moved away from Moultrie and began to work for bigger companies, her confidence made giant leaps.
“Please don’t cry or I will too. I have a strict policy that no one cries alone in my presence” — Truvy Line in “Steel Magnolias”
Steel Magnolias was an easy pick for me to use as a source because my mom loves it so much. I used to continually reject watching it with her because it was a “girly movie” and the middle school version of myself could not have that weight hanging on his conscience. Now, I understand why she enjoyed the movie and why it made her so emotional. The story is a very accurate portrayal of the relationships between southern women.
In this scene, Shelby cuts Truvy’s hair and Truvy is surprised to say the least when seeing her short hair, as shown in the above picture. Shelby gets upset, and Truvy consoles her with this line. As the story goes on, the group of women help each other through other tragedies and continue to grow closer and closer, but this quote spoke to me above others because I believe it shows how southern women genuinely understand what each other go through and how they can understand each other’s pain. Also, I love how the way she says it, in a commanding tone, also shows the strength in southern women, who have learned to be independent through the culture that more often than not has the male partner out of the house most of the time working or with his friends.
I believe this is exactly the kind of relationships that made it so hard for my mother to leave her hometown of Moultrie. In southern culture, women commonly depend on each other because the men are busy doing other things, so I can imagine that my mother was helped through her own tragedies by the consolation of her friends and the women in her family. My mother goes on regular trips with her high school girlfriends from Moultrie to this day. They have some of the strongest bonds between people that I’ve ever seen. Leaving that source of support while simultaneously facing many new challenges had to be extremely daunting. Before, my main perception on why it was hard for my mother to leave home was because she would be leaving that ideal, picturesque lifestyle of being an at-home mother that she had imagined her whole life, but this shows me a completely different forced that was holding her back from moving. This adds another level of appreciation to the strength of my mother to make the final decision to leave Moultrie and advance her career.
‘Sexism killed her. People kept saying that she was just “one of the guys” . . . that’s a real sexist bullshit trip, ’cause that was fuckin’ her head around . . . she was one of the women.’ — Country Joe McDonald
O’Brien, Lucy. She bop II: the definitive history of women in rock, pop and soul. New York: Continuum, 2003. Print.
My mother grew up listening to rock and roll on her weekends. When I think about women in rock, I think about Janis Joplin, an undebatable legend. Although she is an example of someone who broke through her own barriers to become a famous rock artist, but the way she did it ultimately led to her death as well, according to Country Joe McDonald. Several people said that the way she lived her life was to prove that no man around was tougher than her. She gave crazy, exciting performances, drank and smoked more than anyone else, and she kept getting deeper. She did this so that people would not write her off as a soft girl who has no place in rock music. Instead of changing the people in the rock and roll culture to accept that kind of a person, she was constantly proving herself.
This shows the dangers that women face trying to push into a world of equality. The quicker option at times would to portray that you are a type of person that the culture of a group already accepts, instead of changing the opinions of that group. This probably accounts for the lack of confidence that bars women from entering into STEM fields. Changing yourself to fit into someones culture is a depriving thing and many women will not do it. Since many believe that that is the way to move into the STEM world, many do not even entertain the thought of doing it, though they may be very interested like in the Texas study of women in an earlier source. Luckily, I think my mother did not sacrifice her southern, womanly self. I am very thankful for that because her personality accounts for many of my favorite childhood memories, but I know she had to work very hard to prove her worth over male counterparts who might fit the culture of a STEM company more.
Apple Ads in the 1980s
Unlike many of my other sources, I knew I wanted to use advertisements from the minute that I realized what I would write my project about. I have experienced women being sexualized in advertisements constantly in my lifetime, and I know this had to have been prevalent in the late 1900s as well. I chose these apple ads for two reasons. Apple has always had novel, influential ads that are known for catching the attention of their audience, and because there are obvious sexist undertones in their ads, especially in these two ads which were made in the 1980s.
The first ad infers that a man is who owns a computer, not a woman. This was most likely not the intention, but it does not have to be. When someone like my mother grows up seeing ads like this it lowers her confidence that she should work with computers, and when she does see a woman in an ad, it has nothing to do with a woman being able to work with computers, but utilizes the woman’s looks instead like in the second ad. There were undoubtedly many more ads of this nature because Apple most likely targeted men as their audience.
This type of influence is very important because it affects the audiences subconscious as they grow and build up their perceptions on STEM and gender roles. A young adult in the 1980s like my mother would see so many ads like this growing up and have to push past this and create the image in her mind that she is capable of being an intelligent, hard worker instead of just relying on her looks. Instead of being a very apparent, visible form of sexism, it can slide past the conscious mind, making it much harder to stop it from affecting the views of people who see it.
Gender-Bias Primes Elicit Queen-Bee Responses Among Senior Policewomen — a study by Belle Derks, Colette Van Laar, Naomi Ellemers, and Kim de Groot
This study has shown that women in jobs that are not traditionally female, have to worry about discrimination from other women at times, too. This comes from older generations of women who went through large amounts of discrimination and resistance making sure that the younger women have to deal with the same thing. This probably has a huge psychological effect on women because they would expect for other women going through the same hardships to be supportive and empathetic.
Especially when women have come from such a strong support system of female friends, like my mother, this has to hit hard. I know my mother had trouble leaving Moultrie because of all the people she depended on were being left behind, so if she ran into a situation like this, it would have been very stressful. She made the huge decision to leave people she loved behind, and then she would have had to face opposition in almost every direction. I understand, in a way, why older women would do this, but I hate that there are so many ways that women can be oppressed in non-traditional jobs.
“[HP] committed $1 million over four years in 2014 to the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s Aspirations in Computing Collegiate Program which supports women studying undergraduate computing” — HP’s website
“committed $1 million over four years in 2014 to the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s Aspirations in Computing Collegiate Program which supports women studying undergraduate computing” — HP’s website
Although when you look at the history timeline of HP, my mother’s employer, there is no mention of a woman executive and there is not even a single picture included showing a woman involved in the production of their products, HP does actively support the presence of women in STEM today.
I think that this change from an obviously male-dominated world of engineering and programming to the HP that we see today is due to brave and successful women like my mother. To change from being surprised that women are smart enough to work in this field into actively recognizing that the reason women are not as prevalent is because of difference in opportunity and also working to change that opportunity boundary takes a large amount of convincing and change of mindset.
Women like my mother have had to produce extremely high quality of work just to be considered as competition for their male counterparts and they have had to do it for many years without fail for entire organizations and social structures to have changed like this.
As I think about my memories in Moultrie, I wonder what led my mother to choose the path that she has taken. The first images in my head when I think of Moultrie is stretching farmland, fishing by a pond, and enormous amounts of food on the kitchen counter. If anything, you would think that she was attempt to pursue a degree in agriculture or home economics, as she understood and enjoyed the idea of both.
Nevertheless, this source gives me hope. Advances are being made in the world. Even if this change has not sunk deeply yet, the world will be a better place for women pursuing STEM in the future.
