A myth is “a popular belief that is false or unsupported by facts,” according to Plymouth Plantation (http://www.plimoth.org/learn/history/glossary.asp) an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. False ideas about women are alive and well and frequently accepted as fact. Those of us who live with these fallacies roll our eye, ignore them and/or debunk them when we think it’ll make a difference. Here’s our latest attempt at debunking.
Myth: Gender bias has largely been eradicated. If women don’t succeed in the workplace, it’s because they don’t want to.
Reality: While women are one-third of business school graduates, they remain stuck in middle management. Only 3 percent of top executives at Fortune 500 companies are women. Women are still woefully underrepresented in skilled trades.
See: www.feminist.org/research/business/ewb_myths.html
Myth: Most women work for extra spending money or to provide “perks” for their families.
Reality: Conservatives like James Dobson like to perpetuate this one to encourage women to stay at home by choosing “driving older cars (and) eating out less often.” In fact, most women work to support themselves and/or their families. More than one-third of households headed by women live in poverty.
See: www.troubledwith.com
Myth: Women who aren’t married and mothers by 35 stand little chance of either and will eventually be bitter about it.
Reality: The “old maid” in new clothes doesn’t exist. Delayed age of marriage, increase in cohabitation (an 800 percent increase since 1970) and more options for single women mean women unmarried at 35 lead perfectly happy lives. While fertility does decline after 35, it doesn’t disappear, and technology and adoption provide avenues for motherhood if a woman chooses it. Many don’t.
See: Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and www2.duq.edu/familyinstitute
Myth: Women leave the workforce to have babies, costing companies too much.
Reality: More than half of women who leave a job to have a baby return within a year; 60 percent do so within three years. Health problems more commonly associated with men, including alcohol abuse and heart attacks, are likely far more costly to corporate America than maternity leave.
See: www.work4women.org
Myth: Children in day care don’t bond well with mothers and show more undesirable behavior.
Reality: This is a distortion of a National Institute of Health study that found slight differences in very young children and did not account for economic or social factors. In fact, “the levels of behavior reported were well within the normal range” and quality of childcare and dynamics of the family are considered more important than simply hours spent away from the mother. (Note the lack of mention of fathers.)
See: www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/Child_care.cfm
Myth: Women’s brains are genetically programmed to make them less suitable for careers in science and engineering.
Reality: In fact, science makes use of traditional “female” skills like communication, creativity and ability to work in groups. Cultural stereotypes reinforced at all levels of schooling and the way science careers are structured do more to keep women underrepresented than their DNA.
See: www.mentornet.net/news/2005/junenews2.aspx
Myth: Stay-at-home moms are morally superior and mentally inferior to women in the workforce.
Reality: Women who care for their own children full-time have as much and as little education, as many or as few “work” skills and as much or as little civic involvement as their counterparts in the workplace, and their children do as well and as poorly. They’re neither empty-headed “desperate housewives” nor noble madonnas. They are women who have made a life choice that suits them and their families.
See: For the myth, anything by Focus on the Family; for the anti-myth, read Backlash by Susan Faludi (published in 1992 but, alas, not outdated.)
This article appears in May 10-16, 2006.
