The Egg And The Sperm Emily Martin

Letter #1

Dear Wondering about gendered eggs,

It is in fact the case that researchers and scientists use gendered language when discussing eggs and sperm. Emily Martin has researched this phenomenon and discussed the implications that can occur. In her paper, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”, Martin shed light on the way eggs and sperm are discussed in the science field. She described sperm being discussed as dominant, forceful, and active while eggs were labeled passive, submissive and a damsel in distress. New research has discovered that contrary to popular belief, sperm’s thrust in the egg is actually weak. Rather than forcefully penetrating the egg, the sperm moves

Research explains this pay gap in three different accounts: job segregation, discrimination against women and practice and ideology of parenting. Job segregation affects the pay gap because most of the high earning jobs are men’s positions. For instance, CEO’s, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, etc. Women jobs are mostly service type jobs, which don’t make as much money as men’s jobs seem to.

Another account is discrimination against women. Women aren’t seen as respectable leaders like men are. Many women face the glass ceiling and glass cliff in the workforce. The glass ceiling is the fact that it’s difficult for women to be in a higher up position like manager or CEO, regardless if they have the same skill set and education level. It’s the way the economic work place works, men are more likely to be hired in top earning positions over women. The glass cliff is when women do get promoted, but only because the company is facing a crisis. It sets women up for failure essentially, because it’s hard to save a company from going

In Wade and Ferree’s book, “Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions”, they describe hostile sexism taking form in different ways such as isolation or carelessness. Women placed in men’s work are in a double bind, because they either do men’s work and get risk of getting hurt or decline doing that type of work and get accused of special treatment. Benevolent sexism takes form when men co-workers “compliment” a woman by degrading her as a piece of meat and when she doesn’t reciprocate or show any affection, he lashes out and can turn quickly into hostile