Gender Aspects of Reproduction of Professional Dynasties in Medicine

The number of female health workers is predominant in the current health care system. However, in terms of the distribution of power and authority, career trajectories, and the culture of relationships, medicine still remains gender-related to men. Reproduction processes of the professional structure of medicine, in which professional dynasties occupy a special place, is also marked by gender differences. Thus, the article addresses the gender specificities of the institutional reproduction of medical dynasties in modern Russia. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty representatives of multigenerational families of doctors from ten cities, gender scenarios for the transmission of professional positions and the gender specificity of using the social and symbolic capital of the dynasty in the context of their reproduction are analyzed. According to the empirical research findings, the dynastic model of marital status transfer maintains and reproduces gender inequality in the medical profession. There is low gender sensitivity in doctors’ dynasties, where women are more likely to be passive or under family pressure to pursue educational and work tracks. The choice of professional specialization is conditioned by gender stereotypes. Career and professional opportunities of women doctors are limited by an imbalance between work and home responsibilities. Dynasty social and symbolic capital investment strategies are less resourceful for women in clinical practice and more effective in academic medicine. The deconstruction of the traditional gender display in the profession is proceeding at a slow pace, while medical dynasties continue to rather reproduce the inequality and male ethics of the medical profession.

The Visual ‘Masculinization’ of Moroccan EFL Textbooks: A Social Semiotic Analysis

The aim of this paper is to examine and assess the portrayal of women and men in the visual contents of Moroccan English as Foreign Language (MEFL, henceforth) textbooks from a social semiotic perspective. Central to the analysis here is Goffman’s (1979) theoretical model of gender display recently heralded as a more powerful technique to unfold the semiotic positioning of women and men in visual images. The analysis of a corpus of photographic data has helped unveil an array of social and cultural misconceptions in discrimination of women. Female characters continue to be linked with submissiveness, absent-mindedness, and socio-psychological vulnerability. They are further presented associated with menial activities, low-status jobs, and oftentimes being positioned in the backstage behind men. The paper ends up presenting the conclusion along with some implications.

Beyond “Commercial Realism”: Extending Goffman’s Gender Display Framework to Networked Media Contexts

Erving Goffman’s gender display framework is a typology of nonverbal posing codes that connote the subordination of women in commercial imagery and a prominent tool for assessing visualizations of gender stereotyping in mass media. Researchers have recently begun to apply the advertisement-based framework to a new context: user-generated social media photos. Despite findings that gender display appears prevalent in such images, deeper critical examinations of how the framework changes when applied across media contexts have not been meaningfully undertaken. Drawing from the interplay of Goffman’s concepts of hyper-ritualization and commercial realism, I argue that the manifestations and interpretive implications of gender display are contingent upon the standard of realism at play, proposing a standard of networked realism that differently modulates gender display in user-generated photography. Ultimately, I suggest that gender display must be more thoroughly contextualized in networked media research and provide a groundwork for future feminist studies of visual gender stereotyping.

Quantifying the feminine self(ie): Gender display and social media feedback in young women’s Instagram selfies

A growing body of research suggests that young women tend to replicate normative feminine cues popularized through mass media in their selfies, or self-taken mobile phone photographs. Among these stereotypical cues are posing behaviors documented in Goffman’s gender display framework, which visualize a power imbalance between men and women. We completed a content analysis to investigate gender display in young women’s Instagram selfies alongside its relationship to feedback such as likes and comments. In this study, a novel scalar measure of gender display captures both the categorical manifestation and the exaggeration of gender stereotypical cues. We found that gender display is prevalent in women’s Instagram selfies but presented in subtle ways. In addition, women who incorporate and exaggerate gender displays in their selfies tend to receive more feedback. We suggest that gender stereotyping in Instagram selfies is related to reinforcing feedback and call for closer measurement and contextualization of gender performance in user-generated content.

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Its Consequences for Family Life

Although men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. We review the literature about the implications for union formation, assortative mating, the division of paid and unpaid work, and union stability in Western countries. The bulk of the evidence points to a narrowing of gender differences in mate preferences and declining aversion to female status-dominant relationships. Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands now outnumber those in which husbands have more. Although such marriages were more unstable in the past, existing studies indicate that this is no longer true. In addition, recent studies show less evidence of gender display in housework when wives have higher status than their husbands. Despite these shifts, other research documents the continuing influence of the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage.

‘Good Morning Fitfam’: Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram

Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eating hashtags and how the architecture of Instagram constrains and enables certain identities around shared lifestyles and commercial interests. Our findings reveal the symbolic significance of hashtags for group membership and the degree to which gender identities on Instagram are configured around platform interfaces.

Flipping the (Surname) Script: Men’s Nontraditional Surname Choice at Marriage

Using unique, nationally representative data that asks individuals about their surname choice in marriage, we explore heterosexual men’s nontraditional surname choice. We focus on how education—both absolute and relative to wives’—correlates with nontraditional surname choice. Following class-based masculinities theory, we find that men with more education are less likely to choose a nontraditional surname. Despite being more egalitarian in attitudes, men with more education are more likely to have careers that give them privileged status in their marriages and may have “more to lose” in their career by changing their name. In addition, men with less education than their wives are less likely to change their surnames. We argue that this is consistent with compensatory gender display theory. Men having less education in marriage may translate into having less earning power, which is gender nonnormative as men are culturally expected to be primary breadwinners in marriage.