Women’s experience of the stereotyped social capital and power structures
Various groups are stereotyped in various ways and to various detriment. Aside from gender, race, preferences and habits people perceive their potential selves and belonging. All therefore occurring groups can easily be seen as social types and have their own representation. Historically, transnational women’s movement gathered exciting spaces where ideas became exchanged, friendships were formed, as well as national and international senses were brough to co-exist. Nonetheless, national and transnational suffrage is acknowledged to have been complexly white, wealthy and Protestant. It is during the 12th congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), in 1935, that a Jamaican feminist and journalist Una Marson made the attendance. The imperial feminism, as it was called, complicated the inclusive nature of the suffrage dialogue. Simultaneously among other historical considerations, questions of women’s citizenship, women’s rights and women’s political participation came to the forefront and left an undeniable imprint on the power dynamic and exclusionist, often patriarchy infused, constructs heading into the future.
Stereotypes are shaped by a set of features that in people’s opinion are characteristic of members of a certain social group. Stereotypical perceptions of groups arise, develop and are transmitted through interpersonal and mass communication. Marginalized groups are reduced to stereotypes and there is a much narrower set of roles open to members of such groups.
Embraced stereotypes can exceed the posed limitations. Identity is an important part of who we are, who each person is and redefines gravity into a way defined by some rather different, other powerful group in part possibly proposing a direction of disappointment and that could perhaps be harmful to another. Consideration for possible selves 1 enables to think about the past, present and future self and possibly wanted, avoided, lost selves in the formulation of possible negative or positive self. Gaining of new identity, for example through education that has been noted uneasy after incarceration and namely for individuals with experience of incarceration, been said to be very important. Furthermore, struggling with stereotype threat individuals change their existent group belonging through means of virtual, digital world facilitated interactions and create new groups, new senses of community belonging. Emergence of new groups and groups’ belonging is notably linked to emergence of new stereotypes and experiences of stereotyping. Social media enables bases for formation of social capital as individual’s are bonded by mutual recognition and somewhat almost institutionalized relationships that allow them to combine individual resources into collective, shared. Individual’s worldview has wide-ranging implications. Evangelical worldview or engagement in environment influenced by evangelical perspectives 2 can result in distinct identity, cultural and sociological phenomenon. While potentially theologically informed, religious identity often becomes contradicted by sanctified or benevolent sexism.
Moreover, exploring media driven depictions, many stereotypes can be spotted when various groups are portrayed. Gendered stereotypes are not an exception. The long-standing experience of gender asks to check for best practices and balance in perception proposed in the introduced way of thinking about the world. What are the people proposed to learn about the people in the televised or radio broadcasted, or magazine published story and what role is given to those people in the news? What details are made available and which ones are omitted? How credible is it and why do the audiences think so? Is this information consistent? Is it the same across various groups and places or there are some differences? Who are the spokes people? Experts? Commentators? Who offers public opinion and personal experiences? Do you feel that some aspects and voices are being missed out and why are they not brough to public attention or maybe have a voice in the same way as those who do? Contemporary mass communication allows people to express positive or negative attitudes toward a social group and to portray them in relation to specific actions.
Gender making when it comes to women is complex. Insults used against female politicians 3 and women who are seen to somehow step out of line are still existent and target women candidates in ways different to the ways men are formulated. This further is observed warranted by historic experience of patriarchy and power dynamics complexity. While merit-based assessment and requirement for skilled and educated approaches is necessary, blatant cases of disregard are quite present and obvious and those are in fact in question. Women who are reminded about stereotypes could in some instances perform tasks worse than those who do not receive such reminder. Notably sense of understanding of the occurrence and its unacceptable discriminatory nature can reduce the harm of encounters with social threats overall and ease the psychological detriment of sexist, racist, discriminatory interactions. Derogatory terms targeting men are most definitely there, but rarely gendered and therefore raise awareness of some uneven distribution of gender markers in perception of social participation whereby questions of manliness are possible and belittling remarks can use gender, however somehow contrasting to some inherent female derogatory nature that unlike men’s exists much more acutely. The mythical ‘girl’ in the room of the political arena against whom politicians are contrasted and narratives are constructed.
Care is another contested territory. While care is not a good to have, historically it has been assigned to women and remained often underpaid when transformed into the realm of paid care, more complexly dealing with labour dynamics and the socioeconomic participation when it comes to women and men in the workforce. Moreover, economists have observed men’s preference toward unemployment as opposed to consideration of nursing or elderly care, or home healthcare aide positions. In Canada in 2016 women represented 75% of all care workers 4 in the country preoccupied with nursing, early childhood education, elementary school and kindergarten teaching. Furthermore, complexity has been perplexed by income gender gap disproportionate to education levels.
Women in general and to some greater extent evangelical women encounter, in similar way to the notion of ‘care’ an idea of ‘marriage’ and parenting as integral to primarily women’s identity. Simultaneously when as much as care, ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’, ‘fatherhood’ and ‘parenting’ are essential to every person’s experience.
Taste based choices of a social persona or rather behaviors of participation and consumption make it clear that differences in how individual is to be seen, what identity constructs individual engages with are perceived and potentially inform of what networks of social power are becoming formed.
People of similar occupational class are noted to have similarity of attire, sports preferences, reading collections and meal ideas. The socio-cultural capital or rather cultural capital is noted to serve as a source of social power along the economic and enable various explorations of biographical and historical times and places. The common examples of home space and sense making with exemplary women hosts and cooks while finding contemporary neutrality to the common modernity of timeless ques of good taste, commonly associated with luxury, remain ideals of nostalgic society making therefore bridging contested lines of nature’s and society’s forces of contemporary social sense making and livelihoods.
1 Markus, Hazel & Nurius, Paula. (1986). Possible Selves. American Psychologist. 41. 954-969. 10.1037/0003-066X.41.9.954.
2 Dahlvig, J. E., & Longman, K. A. (2016). Influences of an Evangelical Christian Worldview on Women’s Leadership Development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 18(2), 243-259. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422316641417
3 Inter-Parlamentary Union. (2022, November 24). Violence against women parliamentarians: causes, effects, solutions. https://www.ipu.org/news/news-in-brief/2022-11/violence-against-women-parliamentarians-causes-effects-solutions-0
4 Statistics Canada. (2022, January 25). Women working in paid care occupations. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2022001/article/00001-eng.htm