揽瓜阁俱乐部 Day10 2020.05.20 节日快乐 【社会科学-性别】 Women still face barriers in the workplace （817字 精读 必做篇）
Women have made great strides in the employment market over the past 50 years. But many still feel that their progress is being obstructed and, to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8th, two new books by feminist writers tackle the issues.
In “The Fix” Michelle King, director of inclusion at Netflix, a video-streaming giant, observes that women are constantly told they need to change themselves—be more assertive, work longer hours and so on. Instead, she argues, working practices should change to accommodate the needs of half the adult population. In “The Home Stretch” Sally Howard, a journalist, suggests that a big reason why women are held back is that even those who work full-time are still expected to do the bulk of the housework. To cite the book’s lengthy but apposite subtitle, she makes a strong case “why it’s time to come clean about who does the dishes”.
Male managers may find these books an uncomfortable read, peppered with talk of the patriarchy and gender privilege. Sometimes, the authors go too far. Ms Howard links the patriarchy with capitalism so often that one wonders whether she has ever seen a picture of the Soviet Union’s all-male politburo or considered the harm done to women and baby girls by the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy.
But men do not need to forsake the capitalist system to appreciate the plight of female workers. They just need empathy. Are women in the workplace judged by the same standards as their male colleagues? Are they described with adjectives (strident or emotional, for example) that would not be applied to men with the same characteristics?
Despite recent progress, women still face a glass ceiling. A couple of stories in Ms King’s book illustrate the point. Sarah was an executive at a multinational who worked late, underwent management training and enthusiastically received and acted on feedback. After many years of rejection, it seemed she was due for promotion to the next tier, which was 100% male. But at the key meeting a male executive said: “I don’t know; she just doesn’t fit. She has those glasses and she wears that clip in her hair.” Not exactly “scientific management”.
In the other tale Ms King, on her first day in a new job, walked into a kitchen full of men. Her boss said “Hey, Michelle, there are dishes in the sink and you are a woman, so, you know, wash them.” His colleagues laughed. When she protested, she was told to learn to take a joke.
Bullying disguised as humour is still bullying. And women are expected to put up with it. They must also tolerate different dress standards. Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, often messes up his hair before public appearances to maintain his “lovable buffoon” image. Dominic Cummings, his adviser, dresses scruffily, which suits his persona as the “eccentric genius”. It is hard to imagine any woman reaching a position of political power while adopting a similar style.
Sometimes the excuse for the lack of female progress in certain professions is that women and men naturally choose to pursue different career paths. Yet those outcomes may simply be the result of formal or informal barriers against female success. At the end of the 19th century, when only 4-5% of American doctors were women, some men no doubt put this down to a lack of aptitude. Many medical schools, perhaps sharing that preconception, did not admit female candidates; Harvard’s began accepting women only after the second world war. In Britain women were not allowed to become practising lawyers until they were admitted to the Law Society in 1922.
In both professions the playing field was eventually levelled. The result? In 2017 more women were admitted to American medical schools than men for the first time. By 2018 half of British solicitors were female.
Another common argument is that it makes sense for married people to specialise, with the man taking on higher-paid employment and the woman doing more of the chores. It is equally dubious. One study, for instance, found that husbands who earn less than their wives do even less housework than those who earn more.
Many of the arguments that women’s lack of progress is down to aptitude or choice look like a convenient fiction for men, who do rather well out of the bargain. Women, who end up doing most of the chores as well as working long hours, get a raw deal. It is not them who need to change—it is the attitudes of men.
Source: The Economist
【社会科学-性别】 Attractive Young Females May Have Justice Edge （397字 2分38秒 精听 必做篇）
Eight years ago, the jury in the trial of Casey Anthony announced their verdict. "As to the charge of first-degree murder, verdict as to count one, we the jury find the defendant not guilty."
Anthony had been charged with murdering her two-year-old daughter. But like the murder charge, the jury's decision for additional charges of aggravated child abuse and aggravated manslaughter were again "not guilty."
"That caused this huge outcry." Christopher Ferguson, a clinical psychologist at Stetson University in central Florida, not far from where the trial occurred. "There was this narrative that she got preferential treatment, maybe not on purpose, but that the jury was more sympathetic to her because she was this pretty young female and that kind of conflicted with people's impression of who a murderer is."
Mock trial studies have suggested that attractive people have an edge in the criminal justice system. So Ferguson and his colleagues looked into that stereotype using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the largest long-term study of people who began participating in the study as teens.
The interviewers asked the youths a multitude of questions—and also rated the respondents' degree of attractiveness, a measure that's been used to examine links to health and wealth.
In this case, Ferguson and his team looked at a subset of nearly 8,800 respondents and examined the correlation between attractiveness and arrest, conviction and sentencing. After controlling for things like gender, race and socioeconomic status, they found that attractiveness did have a protective effect—but only for females.
"Girls or women who are more attractive were less likely to be arrested if they'd committed a crime and less likely to be convicted if they were arrested for that crime. However, it did not have any impact on their sentencing. So once they were convicted, attractiveness conveyed no further benefits." The results are in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law.
It's just a correlation, of course, and there are limitations. The attractiveness ratings were an average of four different interviewers' assessments, made over a dozen years. But beauty, as they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. And the effects weren't huge. Still, Ferguson says, "being alert to our stereotypes and prejudices sometimes can help us combat them a little bit"—and perhaps get us a little closer to the ideal that justice should be blind.
Source: Scientific American
【社会科学-性别】 Ladies of the lab: Why half the scientists in some Eastern European countries are women （378字 精读 选做篇）
Science is still a man’s world. Since 1903, when Marie Curie first won the Nobel Prize, almost 600 blokes but only 19 women have taken home the coveted award in physics, chemistry or medicine. In the realms of more ordinary talent, just 28% of the world’s researchers are women. Even in the EU, where the sexes are more equal than in other parts of the world, a mere two-fifths of scientists and engineers are women. In Germany and Finland, it is less than one in three.
Eastern Europe bucks the global trend, according to a recent report from Leiden University in the Netherlands. In Lithuania, 57% of scientists and engineers are women. Bulgaria and Latvia follow close behind, at 52%. Universities in Poland and Serbia were ranked among the best in the world for sexual equality in research publications. South-east Europe is roughly at parity: 49% of scientific researchers in the region are women. Some of this is a legacy of Soviet times, when communist regimes pressed both men and women into scientific careers and did not always give them a choice about it. The coercion has gone, but the habit of women working in labs has remained.
In Europe today, campaigners to get more women into top boffin jobs complain of a “leaky pipeline”: many women end their involvement with STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) after finishing college. However, a study by Microsoft finds that female role models strongly increase girls’ interest in these subjects.
According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, closing the gap between men and women in STEM would lead to an increase in the EU's GDP per capita by at least 3% by 2050 and create over 1.2m jobs. Over the past decade, employment in Europe’s tech sector has grown four times faster than overall employment. But the European Commission predicts that by 2020, the region’s growth could be hampered by a shortage of 500,000 information and communications technology (ICT) workers.
In 2017 more than half of EU businesses that tried to recruit ICT specialists had trouble filling the vacancies. Lithuania, which has Europe’s narrowest employment gap between the sexes, and Bulgaria, which has the highest proportion of women in ICT specialised jobs in the region, found it easier.
Source: The Economist
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-5-19 22:30:40
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