Unit 7: Equal Rights
Glass Ceiling
A metaphor that refers to the lack of women at the top ranks of the corporate ladder. Unit 7 Lesson.
De Facto Equality
Actual, day-to-day equality. Looks at results of social, economic, and cultural biases and is much harder to eliminate because it results from patterns of behavior embedded in society. Unit 7 Lesson.
Strict Scrutiny Test
Courts assume that a law is unconstitutional unless overwhelming evidence is provided saying the law is necessary. The court considers race and ethnicity to be suspect categories that are presumed to have discrimination as their purpose. Affirmative action is an example of a law that has passed this test. Unit 7 Lesson.
Reasonable Basis Test
Courts require only that the government shows that a particular law has a sound, nondiscriminatory basis. Age restrictions—for example, requiring that a person be 16 to drive a car or 21 to drink an alcoholic beverage—are valid reasons for age discrimination. This test does not apply to racial or ethnic classifications. Laws that treat people differently based on race or ethnicity are subject to the strict scrutiny test. Unit 7 Lesson.
De Jure Discrimination
Discrimination based on law. Most forms have been banned in America. Unit 7 Lesson.
De Jure Discrimination
Discrimination based on laws. Unit 7 Lesson.
De Facto Discrimination
Discrimination resulting from social, economic, and cultural biases. Unit 7 Lesson.
Intermediate Scrutiny Test
The court considers sex distinctions to be "almost suspect," meaning that laws based on sex may be justified in some instances. For example, until 2012, women were excluded from participation in front-line military combat. Women are still excluded from selective service registration. The courts have not embraced the use of this test in sex discrimination cases but do subject these claims to a higher level of judicial scrutiny than require by reasonable basis. Unit 7 Lesson.
"The Problem That Has No Name"
Widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s despite living in material comfort. Unit 7 Lesson.
The Earnings Gap
Women continue to learn less than men ($0.82 to the dollar on average). "Graduating to a Pay Gap," a report conducted by the American Association of University Women, found that the 18% disparity was only partially explained by men being more likely to enter higher paying fields or male willingness to negotiate higher salaries. Close to 7% was unexplained for any reason except discrimination. Unit 7 Lesson.
The Maternal Wall
Women who take maternity leave are often seen as less committed to their jobs, and women with children suffer from a "motherhood penalty." Unit 7 Lesson.
Strict Scrutiny Test.
Laws using race or ethnicity are assumed to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. Unit 7 Lesson.
The Problem That Has No Name by Betty Friedan
- "In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of these petty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over spotless kitchen floor." - "Suddenly they realized they all shared thw same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone." - "No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful, for a woman, not to hear the strange, disseminated voice stirring within her." - "And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse." - "If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recolonizes."
Why Women Still Can't Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter
- "What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion's share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home." - "I still strongly believe that women can "have it all" (and that men can too). I believe that we can "have it all at the same time." But not today, not with the way America's economy and society are currently structured." - "Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States." - "The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a "new gender gap"—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone." - Myths include... 1) "It's possible if you are just committed enough." --> "These "mundane" issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap." 2) "It's possible if you marry the right person." --> "In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family." 3) "It's possible if you sequence it right." --> Regarding all the ways to "sequence" one's life "But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make." - "Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers." - "If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us."
Makers: Women Who Make America Part I
- Most women of the 1950s got married in college. The ideal life for a woman was to get married and to serve as a mother and wife. - "Though the number of women in the workplace gradually increased throughout the decade, their jobs were almost always low paying and dead end." - "Here they were, they had better lives than their mothers or their grandmothers, they were living in better homes, and they were thinking to themselves "I ought to be the happiest person in the world." But they weren't." - Flight attendants were discriminated against based on age and looks. Reinforced the idea of lookism in America. - Betty Friedan helped organize NOW (Nation organization for Women) Makers: Women Who Make America in order to address sexism. NOW took on cases of discrimination in order to achieve equality. Obviously, we are still working towards this today. - Civil rights and equality movements influenced younger generations of women. - Phrase of the movement: "The personal is political." - Protest example: Sit in at Women's Home Journal and protests outside Miss America Pageant. - Women of color argued that the feminist movement was shaping up to be a white women's only movement. "We wanted a feminism could account not just gender issues and gender oppression, but racial oppression and class oppression, WE just wanted the face we saw in the mirror to be reflected in organizing what we were doing." - Te founding of Ms. Magazine helped show women the promised of feminism.
All Deliberate Speed by Charles Ogletree
Key Point: " The worst indictment of the Brown decisions: their faith in progress and their failure to see how quickly people of a different mind could not only resist but, once the tide had turned, even reversed the halting progress toward a fully integrated society." Notes: - The "deliberate speed" outlined by the Supreme Court did not have great impact. However, events like MLK's assassination forced institutions to open their doors much faster than they had contemplated." - "What differentiates Brown from Bakke is the force abandonment of a legal and intellectual justification of integration based on remedying past discrimination. Bakke place the legitimacy of affirmative action in university squarely on educational diversity rather than on remedial aims." - "So long as the admissions program does not constitute the type of quota system of "racial balancing" outlawed by Bakke, it may admit "a critical mass " of minority students in an effort to obtain a racially diverse student body." - "The effective compromise reached in the United States at the close of the twentieth century is that schools may be segregated by race as long as it is not due to direct government fiat." This applies to why some schools have almost entirely minority populations, while others are primarily white. - "What underpins the supposedly "rational" decisions based on racial stereotyping: an inability on the part of the majority of Americans to acknowledge that minority citizens are "just like us."" American Polity, Pages 357-365.
Whites Underestimate the Costs of Being Black, Study Finds by Jeff Grabmeier
Key Point: "How much do white Americans think it "costs" to be black in our society, given the problems associated with racial bias and prejudice? The answer, it appears, is not much." Note: - A study conducted asked participants how much they would have to be paid to be born black. Generally, the number was less that $10,000. However, the average amount of money participants requested to give up television for life was over one million dollars. - "When whites say they would need $1 million to give up TV, but less than $10,000 to become black, that suggests they don't really understand the extent to which African Americans, as a group, are disadvantaged" - However, the amount requested increased (to about one million dollars) when participants were asked how much they need to be paid to be born in the minority.
Simple Justice by Richard Kluger
Key Point: A passage reading that accounts how then newly appointed justice Earl Warren persuaded the Supreme Court to vote against Plessy v. Ferguson. Notes: - "The earlier racial cases - Sweatt and McLaurin - they had managed to cope with by chipping away at the edges of Jim Crow but avoiding the real question of Plessy's continued validity." - "On the merits, the natural, the logical, and practically the only way the case could be decided was clear [to overturn Plessy]. The question was how the decision was to be reached." - "Segregation he [Warren] had told his new colleagues, could be justified only by belief in the inferiority of the Negro; any of them who wished to perpetuate the practice, he implied, out in candor to be willing to acknowledge as much." - Ruling was in favor of Brown, and "no Americans were more equal than any other Americans." American Polity, Pages 349-356.
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can't Close Racial Gap by Michael Luo
Key Point: African Americans are still discriminated against in the job market, even if they are more qualified. Notes: - "But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of white. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared to those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field - in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven." - "The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates - 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent." - Regarding black people, "Nearly all said they agonized over job applications that asked them whether they would like to identify their race. Most said they usually did not."
A Class Divided by PBS Frontline
Key Point: Teacher Jane Elliott preformed an experiment with her third grade class the day after MLK's assassination. The experiment divided the class by eye color, with blue eyes being superior, in order to demonstrate racism in America. Notes: - "I watched what had been wonderful cooperative, marvelous children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders in the space of fifteen minutes." - The documentary observes out the "superior people" are exposed to positive effects. For example, the students who were the minority the day before cut their flash card time in about half when they were considered superior. - "It immediately created a microcosm in a third grade classroom."
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
Key Point: White people have a long list of day-to-day benefits that other racial groups do not not have. These benefits are hidden away in the "invisible knapsack." We must be aware of white advantage, just like male privilege, and address the issue. Notes: - "As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage." - "I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups." - "I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives." - "It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all."
Intermediate Scrutiny Test
Laws discriminating against one sex are impermissible unless an important government objective is served. Unit 7 Lesson
Reasonable Basis Test
Laws treating individuals unequally are permissible for valid government interest. Unit 7 Lesson.
