Gosh, it must be hard to be a woman

First the ECONOMIST

How gender is (mis)represented in economics textbooks

Fewer women appear in examples, and they are relegated to lesser roles

Gender balance shows, women not inventive. So sorry.

Women not inventive? Sorry, but there is no empirical evidence judging from the crap they can come up with.

OK, let's consult Inside Higher Ed.

Gender Bias, by the Numbers

God, it's looking ugly for female economists. Hardly ever mentiond
by anybody

New study says economics textbooks underrepresent women in both real-life and imagined examples -- and that fixing that could help attract more women to the field.

Economics remains dominated by men, both in terms of faculty members and students. New research suggests that while economics textbooks aren’t necessarily to blame, they’re not helping close the field’s gender gap.
A study of leading introductory economics textbooks, presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, found that three-quarters of the people mentioned in the books (77 percent), real or imagined, are male. Some 18 percent of mentions are female and 5 percent are gender neutral.

The real-life economists mentioned tend to be men, but not because they’re key historical figures, according to the study. And when these textbooks do mention women in relation to economic principles, they’re more passive than their male counterparts and more likely to be involved in food, fashion or household tasks. Men are more likely to be appear in relation to business or policy.

“In any kind of teaching material that we’re creating as instructors, we’re using the body of knowledge we have about the world we’ve experienced -- and that means that teaching materials, almost by definition, are backward-looking,” said the lead author, Betsey Stevenson, associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.

More here

Whereby I would like to draw the attention to the 'Anamnesis of the hidden constants' where Pierre Bourdieu writes:

It is no doubt in the encounter with the 'objective' expectations' inscribed, mostly in the implicit state, in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differentiated division of labour that the so-called 'feminine' dispositions inculcated by the family and the whole social order are able to be fulfilled or even blossom, and, in this very process, to be rewarded, thereby helping to reinforce the fundamental sexual dichotomy, both in the jobs, which seem to call for submissiveness and the need for security, and in their occupants, who are identified with positions in which, enchanted or alienated, they both find themselves and lose themselves. The essentially social logic of what is called 'vocation' has the effect of producing these kinds of harmonious encounters between dispositions and positions in which the victims of symbolic domination can felicitously (in both senses) perform the subaltern or subordinate tasks that are assigned to their virtues of submission, gentleness, docility, devotion and self-denial.

The socially sexed libido enters into communication with the institution which censors or legitimates its expression. 'Vocations' are always in part the more or less fantasmatic anticipation of what the post promises (for example, for a secretary, typing documents), and what it permits (for example, a relationship of mothering or seduction with the boss). And the encounter with the post may have an effect of revelation inasmuch as, through the explicit or implicit expectations that it contains, it authorizes and favours certain behaviours that are technical and social but also sexual, or sexually marked.

God, I love these French.

(Disclaimer: I am usually not into any sort of gender crap. As a chevalier, it bores me.)