At Sony’s Columbia Pictures division, a man and a woman have the same job and—oh dear, this is awkward—he’s making close to a million dollars more.
Slate
Just a few. For more, go to Slate.
Baby, You Can’t Drive My Car: Why does the auto industry get women so wrong?
It was the soft gruntings of subjects’ reptilian brains, Rapaille says, that clued him in to the fact that women are obsessed with cup holders. Cup holders signify coffee, he says, and coffee signifies safety, and safety is what women want most in cars.
Oxytots: Instead of learning from the unfounded hysteria of the crack baby era, we’re repeating it (Slate)
As we now know, the mass hysteria over “crack babies” and their deviant mothers was unfounded. Crack cocaine doesn’t do the kind of damage we thought it did to developing babies. Unfortunately, instead of learning from this heady mix of bad science, a sensationalist press, over-reaching prosecutors, and the narrative of the selfish mother content to damage her baby, we’re repeating it.
TV producers think boys won’t watch girl heroines. Turns out that’s not true. (Slate)
It’s 2013, not 1985, but it’s still considerably harder for my preschool-age daughter to find representations of herself onscreen then it will be for our newborn son, once he starts watching TV.
Is Diet Soda Girly? Marketing companies take on gender contamination, the idea that when women flock to a product, men flee
Within the business world, this squeamishness has long been the problem that has no name; marketing executives and consultants I spoke with were well aware of the issue but didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. Avery had to borrow from anthropology to find the term ‘gender contamination,’ which traces back to the kind of ancient cultural taboos that banished menstruating women to special huts for fear they’d pollute everyone else.