Final Paper and Finalizing Survey

After speaking with Yen from the YWCA she approved the survey. Our group translated the survey into spanish and uploaded both the english and spanish versions online so it is more accessible. We will also be handing out a revised survey at a private school. The survey was reworded so that the questions were presented in a more positive manner. We still feel that this revised survey will give us the same quality of data we are trying to find. As a group we will be looking more at the qualitative data then quantitative.  We are planning to pass out the survey at the catholic school before the end of this year. Yen plans on having her case workers give them out at the beginning of next year. Attached below is our paper. We look forward to our presentation tomorrow. 

Conceptualizing the Problem:

Addressing the Issue of Self-Esteem Among Women and Girls in our Community

Alexa Carr, Stephanie Caya, Emily Donaldson & Leslie Jensen

University of Utah

When beginning the process of finding a community initiative to collaborate on with the YWCA, the first thing our group wanted to do was meet with someone that talked to community members every day. We met with Yen Nguyen, the volunteer coordinator at the YWCA. She told us the story of how two women had approached her about the same issues in the few days before we met with her: body image and self-esteem. The first woman told a story of while she and another mother had been walking their daughters to school, they ran into some classmates. After they had walked past them, the daughter’s friend turned to her and said, “They are so pretty. We’ll never be that pretty. We’re ugly.” The woman described to Yen how aghast she was at the situation, but how she didn’t feel able to say anything since it was not her child and the other mother did not say anything about it.

The other situation that Yen described was a woman involved with the National Charity League, an organization that collaborates with the YWCA on projects, and she described how difficult it was to talk to her teenage daughter about self-esteem and body image. They agreed in their meeting that something needed to be done to empower young women and girls. Also, someone needed to empower adult women both for their own sake and to step in when they see situations where their daughters, mentees or students are not able to navigate difficult environments filled with factors that could impact self-esteem. After Yen shared these stories, our group determined that an event on self-esteem, during the YWCA’s women’s week, would be an appropriate project.

We have started gathering information on self-esteem and developed a survey to determine topics of interest and format for the presentation. Though we don’t have the results of the survey yet, this paper is an outline of the issue on a broader scale as gleaned from peer-reviewed journals. Our hope is that having this background information will inform the planning of the event on self-esteem in collaboration with the needs and desires of the women in the community that YWCA serves, namely both the women and girls residing in the YWCA shelter and the women and girls in the larger community surrounding the YWCA.  For the purpose of this project and paper, we have defined self-esteem as the ability of an individual to be confident in herself and to view herself in a positive way. We will be focusing primarily on the causes and impact of low self-esteem among women and girls since they are the population we are designing our project for in order to stay true to the population the YWCA generally serves.

There is not just one mechanism that causes low self-esteem among women and girls; it happens in a variety of ways. Peers, primary caregivers, and the media reinforce traditional gender roles that tell women and girls to behave a certain way. Popular media and peers enforce the standards of what society and culture considers “beautiful.” Western media portrays the idea that the thinner you are the more beautiful and desirable you are. Models and actresses that are pictured in billboards, magazines and movies that seem to have achieved this thin ideal are constantly being photo shopped to appear thinner than they really are. The pursuit to look more like those models is unrealistic and unreachable, because the models themselves don’t really look like that. This can cause a lot of women and girls to feel dissatisfied with their own bodies, which can negatively affect their self-esteem. It has been observed that this thin ideal is pursued in girls as young as six years old, with some of these girls already attempting their first diet (Phares, Steinberg, & Thompson, 2004).  Female role models, primarily mothers, also influence young girls and their development of body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem. A young girl whose mother demonstrates consistent love and acceptance will have higher self-esteem than those who do not have a secure mother-daughter attachment (Barber, Ball & Armistead, 2003).

Bullying is another cause of low esteem among girls, especially when it is done by other girls. Girl on girl bullying may be harder to detect because it is often not physical bullying, but instead it can be the spreading of rumors, gossip, teasing and excluding others. Girls are more likely to bully in groups, making it less likely that someone will stop it because of fear that they themselves will be bullied next. Only 15% percent of girls will speak up about being bullied (National Crime Prevention Council, 2010). Victims of bullying are also targeted through social media, which faster and reaches a greater audience. Parents often do not know it is happening and it can affect the way a girl feels about herself, cause her grades to drop and increase chances of depression (National Crime Prevention Council, 2010).

Furthermore, women in physically and/or emotionally abusive relationships are more likely to experience low self-esteem, therefore be less empowered to leave an abusive relationship (Lynch, 2013). High self-esteem cannot prevent domestic violence but women who have low self-esteem may blame themselves for their partner’s behavior and feel that they provoked the abuse. Society can be very victim blaming and cause a woman to feel that she is the reason that she was abused or shame that she didn’t leave sooner, further compounding her initial self-assessment.

A variety of things have caused the issue of low self-esteem among women and the effects of a low self-esteem in women are just as broad, ranging from promoting the objectification of women to an increase in mental illness. Some studies have found a relationship between sexism and self-esteem. Oswald, Franzoi, and Frost stated that when women were to endorse benevolent sexism it was positively related to their sexual attractiveness body esteem. Oswald et al. also explains that women who are striving to attain an ultra-thin body ideal are reinforced for their efforts, which in turn can make the women more susceptible to self-judgments, which can have a negative effect on their self-esteem (2012). This shows how low self-esteem can have a spiraling effect. When a woman is endorsed for her efforts to be thin, she becomes more self-judgmental, which in turn lowers her self-esteem, which then can make her desire to become thin even greater, and then the cycle starts all over again.

In relation to sexism, self-esteem can have an effect on coping with the big issue of the objectification of women. One study found that having a higher body-esteem and self-esteem can help be a protective factor against the objectification of women. This research also explains that if a woman thinks more positively about herself the less likely she is to judge herself and to seek approval from others about her appearance (Gregus, Rummell, Rankin & Levant, 2014). This shows that on the opposite side, if a woman has a lower self-esteem she is more susceptible to sexual attention and objectification. If a woman has a lower self-esteem she is more likely to seek out sexual attention to increase her self-esteem, which actually in turn decreases her self-esteem.

Violence in relationships has also been found to correlate with self-esteem. When a woman is in a violent relationship she will stop thinking about her own needs and only think about her partner’s needs, which will result in a shift of their sense of self and self-schemas (Lynch, 2013). This shows that when a woman is only able to see herself as her partner sees her, which is negatively, her self-esteem is significantly lowered while in a violent relationship. Lynch states that “Researchers have also noted a relationship between self-efficacy and the ability to leave a violent partner” (2013, p. 220). This can be a major consequence of low self-esteem. In an abusive relationship, because the woman relies on her partner for any type of identity of self-esteem, it makes it very difficult for her to leave a horrible situation. This is another cycle of self-esteem, because the more the woman stays in the relationship, the more her self-esteem will lower, which will make it even harder to leave.

Lastly, low self-esteem has been found to have a correlation with depression. Sowislo and Orth (2013) explain:

Laboratory experiments have repeatedly shown that high self-esteem facilitates more adaptive persistence behavior: Individuals with high self-esteem persist longer in the face of failure (e.g., Perez, 1973; Shrauger & Sorman, 1977), but whenever persistence is maladaptive (e.g., when confronted with unsolvable tasks), they persist less than individuals with low self-esteem. (215)

This shows that when someone has a lower self-esteem they are not able to face failure or trials as easily, which can explain why lower self-esteem can correlate with depression. Seeing such a great effect in something as important and valuable as appropriate persistence or admission of failure really shows just how impactful low self-esteem can be. In this case, it is taking away potentially important tools for a successful life.

 One study also suggested that people with low self-esteem are constantly seeking reassurance from their friends, which can push their friends away leading to social isolation (Sowislo & Orth, 2013). Being socially isolated can increase the likelihood of depression. The effects of a low self-esteem on depression alone is reason enough to bring this issue to the attention of communities. 

Considering all of the effects of self-esteem is important, especially since low self-esteem and body image issues affect many populations. Research has shown that one of the populations who is most affected by these issues are women; more specifically, adolescent women are deeply affected.  A study by Derkintienė found, “adolescent girls tend to be more dissatisfied with their body image” and “it has been estimated that seven out of ten girls express their dissatisfaction with their body image by pursing an idea of a thinner body” (2012, p. 30). Adolescent women seem to be one of the populations most affected by low self-esteem, especially in regard to body image.

Within the population of women there are several subpopulations that are affected by these issues. One study found that women that are devalued by their partners are more likely to have low self-esteem (Maestas, 2008). In another research article they found that the homeless population have high rates of low self-esteem due to an “inability to secure basic needs and sometimes safety and by the isolation and alienation of homelessness” (Cohen, Putnam, & Sullivan, 1984).

When speaking to the YWCA and the supervisor at a school we are doing the survey at, they expressed that the populations they saw most affected by low self-esteem did seem to fit with the research we found. A social worker at the school we will be surveying said that low self-esteem was extremely common in girls who are going through puberty. Girls that mature before their peers are more likely to have low self-esteem and body image issues. She also said that girls whose mothers had low self-esteem or expressed negative body image were more likely going to experience low self-esteem and have body image issues. She said that this was due to modeling their mother’s behavior so in turn they saw having low self-esteem and negative body image as a norm.

Throughout our research we found the populations who were most affected by low self-esteem and negative body image were women. Within the population of women we found that adolescent women, homeless women, women who are devalued by their partners, pubescent, and girls with female role-models with low self-esteem were the populations we saw high rates of low self-esteem and negative body image. The added information from those groups we are surveying has already proved valuable. It will be very important to consider the results of our survey of the community women and girls in relation to the information we have already found.

Though we have focused throughout this paper on women and girls as the primary stakeholders in this issue, self-esteem and even women’s self-esteem is an issue that affects everyone. Most obviously, it affects men and boys that interact with women who struggle with the impacts of self-esteem. Men are also impacted by the same gender roles that can affect women’s self-esteem. Men can be instrumental in changing some of the factors that impact women’s self-esteem such as standing up against sexism and promoting the end of violence against women. Eric Jessup Anger notes that “in order to build learning environments free from prejudice, we [men and women] all have an obligation to education and understand the challenges of both genders (2005, p. 27).

“Research has shown that women struggle to maintain a positive sense of belonging in STEM class environments, and that this lower sense of belonging in STEM is associated with their loss of interests” (Thoman, Arizaga, Smith, Story & Soncuya, 2014, p. 247). The effect on women’s self-esteem from being in the STEM fields may seem like just a women’s issue, however, the social pressures on them may be affecting their male counterparts in primarily feminized spheres of work. One research study looked at the adherence of male engineers versus male school counselors to gender norms using ideologies of masculinity and toughness to measure this. Those in the engineering field valued male type careers more over prestige type careers while the elementary school counselors preferred the opposite (Dodson & Borders, 2006). The engineers valued the masculinity of their career over measures of prestige, showing the impact of gender socialization on life choices and potentially self-esteem. Though the study acknowledges that it cannot conclusively determine the actual effects of being in a gender conforming or gender non-traditional job, they did say their “results suggest that at least some men would benefit from interventions designed to help them explore non-traditional occupations” (Dodson & Borders, 2006, p. 293). The same factors that are telling women they are not good enough if they enter traditional male dominated fields are telling men they are not good enough if they enter traditional female dominated fields. Though gender role issues tend to be discussed in the context of women, it certainly appears from this research that they are also affecting the self-esteem of men in non-traditional positions.

Another study examining society expectations on male work shows that men judge their “gender status” more harshly after a job loss than women do (Michniewicz, Vandello & Bosson, 2014). In fact, “men overestimated the reduction in their manhood status that un-employment would bring” compared to other respondents (Michniewicz, et al., 2014, p.95). This is another example of the forces that are usually discussed in terms of women’s self-esteem that also impact men’s self-esteem.

The mission of the YWCA is to empower women and end racism. With such a broad mission statement it was hard, at first, to know what project to move forward with. However, after finding this research indicating what an issue self-esteem was among women and girls and Yen’s anecdotal evidence that it is an issue in the community; it makes complete sense to move forward with self-esteem in women and girls as a theme. Moving forward, our next steps will be to collect surveys and look at the data that comes in. After that, based on the results of survey, we will begin designing an event with a format (presentation, dialogues, activity, etc.) that best fits the desires of the community. We will also, hopefully, have the opportunity to create different formats for children, adolescents, and adults to best fit learning styles and the topics that the age groups most expressed interest in on the survey. We are excited to move forward with this project and look forward to implementing change with the YWCA and its community.

References

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Oswald, D. L., Franzoi, S. L. & Frost, K. A. (2012). Experiencing sexism and young women’s body esteem.  Journal of social and clinical psychology, 31(10), 1112-1137.

Phares, V., Steinberg, A.R., Thompson, J.K. (2004). Gender differences in peer and parental influences: Body image disturbance, self-worth, and psychological functioning in preadolescent children. Journal of youth and adolescence 33(5), 421-429.

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