For this post, I looked into the idea that women let men take
credit for their work. This was a very interesting topic to look at both from a
normal standpoint and also from a sociological perspective. They were pretty
much the same ideas, with the exception of the examples used. They both
followed the idea that if a man and a women are working in a group together or
even if they are working at completely different time periods, the man is generally
given the credit for the work done even if they were not the originally ones or
the only ones to complete.
On the Everyday Sociology Blog, They talk about the idea of
double consciousness. This is the idea that some people have more than one “person”
that they are supposed to be. An example of this is an African American. They
have the sense that they are an African, as well as having to act like an
American. The two “people” sometime conflict in how they are supposed to act.
From what we knew, W.E.B. DuBois was the first person to write about this
topic. That is not the case however. Going back in time, we see that Anna Julia
Cooper actually wrote about the same thing (but not calling it double consciousness)
many years earlier and before that, Sojourner Truth also talked about that
idea. This is also seen in other articles that are about sociology.
Looking into different articles, I found on the effects of
men and women working in groups together at work. According to this article, Women
are less likely to take credit for their work or contributions to the group if
even one man is in it. They did a study on 34 men and 36 women. They had them
work individually on a project but that their work would be combined with a
partners work for a final group score. They were given their score and in
survey after, women who thought they were working with a male tending to discredit
themselves and make their “partner” sounds better. Going against this, the ones
who thought they were working with a women tended to talk about their own work
and accomplishments.
Both of these sources show that men are given more credit
than women are. Why is it that both in a sociology blog and in a normal
article, men are shown as receiving more credit than women? According to the Everyday
Sociology Blog, this has to do with power. Historically men have been given
more power than women and it shows in how much credit both genders receive. Men
are seen as more influential than women so going off of that, it makes sense
that their contributions are raised up higher than a woman’s.
I can understand how
they came to these conclusions, but as a woman myself; I can’t help think about
the fairness of this idea. I would to
think that if I were to make a big impact on the world someday that it would
stay under my name, unlike Anna Julia Cooper who lost it to W.E.B DuBois. This
is important to society as a whole because as Americans we pride ourselves with
the idea of equality. After reading these, it seems like women do not think of
themselves as equals to men and are willing to step down to let the men have
the spotlight. As a whole, this is something that we have to work on. It was
very interesting to me to see that the same issue was discussed in two
different locations using two different sets of examples, but still talking
about the same thing basically.
Sources Used
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