ENGL 680M: New Media

Yes, women can be secretaries and professors with enough education; you need three education units to be a secretary and four to be a professor. The opportunities for men, however, are greater in number and you don't need as much education to get them: If you buy a bicycle (only 350 dollars), men can be construction workers, while women cannot. With only two education units, men can be mechanics or mechanic assistants. It takes the same amount of education units for men to become professors as it does for women. Of course, uneducated women can work in the market and men can't. So overall, there are different opportunities for women and for men, and it's not so unbalanced that I would argue women don't have any opportunities at all.

At the same time, though, after hours of playing this game, it does seem like more of an advantage to educate the eldest son and father, since just some education can get them jobs as mechanics; on the other hand, it requires more education (and therefore more time and money) to get the daughter and mother to the level where they can get non-manual jobs, and those jobs (the secretary job especially) aren't offered as often as the mechanic or construction jobs. Overall, if the goal is to keep all the people alive and out of debt, it seems like a better strategy to educate the men. I haven't empirically tested this or anything, but this is just my sense of the game after playing it quite a bit over the weekend.

I shared this observation because it was something I noticed very gradually as I was playing, and I wondered if the game makers had constructed the game like this on purpose. It seems to me that if they did, it was a brilliant strategy on their part to show how gender inequality gets played out. It would be one thing to simply have different jobs for men and women. This would show something that most people (even kids) already realize: that men and women have different opportunities. To actually have the gender inequalities play out in the strategy of the game, though, is more complicated and, I think, more persuasive. What seems to happen (again, just my observation after playing the game for a few hours) is that it serves the family better financially to educate the men instead of the women. What this does is give a reason and context for how gender inequalities are subtly "performed." While no one is necessarily blamed for the inequality, it becomes obvious how inequality is preserved by the family's need to survive within the culture they live in (the culture in which there is one skilled position for women (other than professor)--secretary--that requires more education than the three skilled positions for men(again, other than professor)--mechanic, mechanical assistant, and construction worker).