Observable Trends of Race, Age and Gender

Observable Trends of Race, Age, and Gender

Over the past week I have been observing many things around NC State’s campus. I paid close attention to the types of people doing work in relation to race, gender, and age. The types of jobs I observed were the wolf-line bus drivers, Raleigh city bus drivers, construction workers on campus, and food service employees at University Towers. On average, the wolf-line bus drivers were middle aged Caucasian woman. However, the bus drivers for Raleigh were on average, middle aged African American woman. I found this very interesting that city bus drivers were mostly minorities and that campus bus drivers were all Caucasian. The construction workers I observed had a clear separation of race. Sometimes I would see Hispanic male workers, who seemed to be in their early to mid twenties. Other times I saw middle aged Caucasian male workers, mostly working on plumbing and sewage on roads. The Hispanic workers seemed to be handling the tougher, manual labor. Throughout the entire week I was unable to find a single female construction worker on campus. This observation contributes to the stereotyping of gender roles for careers. The males were performing harder, manual labor, and the females performed the less physical labor, such as driving a bus. At University Towers there didn’t seem to be any observable trend of age or gender. There was a wide variation of ages and sex working with food services. However, one extreme trend was very noticeable; every worker in the dining hall was of a minority status. There are African American, Indian, and Hispanic workers at University Towers serving and preparing food. These trends contribute to many stereotypes in today’s society. Males are seen to be superior to females in a physical aspect, so are seen to have more physically strenuous jobs. Also, many minorities are performing jobs such as construction or food services. This plays into the stereotype of the working class as well.