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Govt. 166 Women and Politics in Contemporary America

OK, so this is an old page, but the 2009 syllabus is here. A new one is coming soon!

Here is a great example of media reporting that is biased against women. The story is about Katie Couric's ambition to host the nightly news. The reporter makes amazingly blatant sexist assumptions apparently without realizing it, or at least without shame about it.

Here is the article about Phyllis Schlafly that we discussed

The White House Project has an update to the "look who's talking" study you read on women on political talk shows. See it here.

Here is a link to the radio show I was telling you about - look for the episode on testosterone. It is from 2002 - you can just scroll down and search for "testosterone" on the left. www.thislife.org

Researchers at Harvard and other institutions have come up with a test of "implicit association" which, if done correctly, measures how embedded stereotypes are in your psyche. Try it here. First try the "gender-career IAT", then do any others. Read the instructions carefully and try to complete the test itself as quickly as you can. Tell me what you come up with.

The New York Times has recently published some articles relevant to our discussion of sex roles and the balancing of work and family. The first is about Ivy League student's choices, next are the letters written in reaction to that article, and last is a man's take on it all.

Final study guide ( this is from 2004)

Project #1 Assignment sheet

Here is a good resource for documents for project #1

Project #2 Assignment Sheet

Project #3 Interview Assignment Sheet

Articles on Women and Politics:

Articles on Women in Afghanistan and Iraq here

Web Sources for news and opinion with some women and politics sites as well

A website devoted to women's leadership in politics here.

Do female voters get annoyed when candidates won't admit mistakes? Article here

U.S. not signing international agreement on women, article here

New report on the status of women in the states here

Struggles of men in traditional women's roles here.

Women as soldiers in the U.S. Army face special issues here.

Do men prefer to marry women with lower status than themselves? Maureen Dowd asserts just that here.

Larry Summers of Harvard started a firestorm when he said that women are under-represented in the sciences because of an inherent genetic inferiority. Here's an article about the actual research on that topic.