Gender roles in reality

[Student of Trinity]

If current gender roles are strongly supported by instincts ingrained in most individuals, rather than by institutional rules directly, then this has concrete implications for strategy in how to improve society, whether the ingraining is biological or social.

 

What difference does it make for strategy, whether or not individual instinctive preferences are a big factor? I think it's this. Institutions have no personalities, and changing them or not is simply a matter of power. Changing people is harder. For one thing, they outnumber us.

 

It's also less clear how right it is to change people. Take just about anything any group of men or women is currently doing. You could decide that they shouldn't be doing that, but rather something else instead, and so try to change society to make them stop the one and start the other. Alternatively you could decide that they should keep on doing just what they are doing, because it's a legitimate and valuable thing, and instead try to change society to better support and reward the thing they do. Both attitudes have been taken to just about every profession, from soldier to sex worker.

 

If people's own voluntary choices, conditioned or not, are playing a major role in determining the current structure of society, then I think that has to shift your strategy at least somewhat towards the second kind of strategy, of adapting to gender differences rather than trying to suppress them.

 

Behind the spoiler tag is a truly immense wall of text, in which for the sake of concreteness I mention some of the issues I personally know. My department has applied for a really big multi-year grant, and as is the case for all such things nowadays, the section of our proposal about measures to improve gender balance in science was brief but will be heavily weighted in the evaluation, to the point of being a decisive criterion. I wrote this section, in consultation with our two female faculty members, and after doing some research online. The spoiler text is what I learned from this.

 

The TLDR version: it's not about letting facile notions of biological determinism justify the status quo. It's about not letting facile notions of political correctness get in the way of changing the status quo.

 

 

Fortunately there have been a couple of major studies on this stuff done just recently, and their reports are easy to find. Beyond them, though, the availability of data drops off rapidly, and you're left either scrolling through long tables of inconveniently organized figures, or looking at badly outdated summaries. I tried to dig around a bit, but I confess I didn't get very far, so my proposal was essentially based on just two studies, by the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, respectively.

 

Firstly, women are still woefully underrepresented among university faculty in the natural sciences, across the board and around the world. It's especially bad in the senior ranks.

 

Secondly, though, universities and departments really have been working hard for quite a few years to try and correct this. It has reached the point by now where if a woman actually applies for an academic position, her odds of ultimately being offered it are slightly higher than they would be for a male applicant. At every successive stage on the career track of academic science, though, a much smaller proportion of qualified women than of qualified men attempts to continue.

 

The question, of course, is why this is so. Like virtually everyone else in the business, I assume that the reasons must be good in the sense that the women dropping out of science are making rational decisions under the circumstances, because they are intelligent people, but bad in the sense that those circumstances should not be so, because women ought to be great for science, and science ought to be great for women. But just what circumstances are they, then, that are still turning women away from academic science?

 

Big commissions have asked the women, and tabulated the results. The big factor that isn't going away is children. If you want to be a science professor, you're not going to finish your education until your late twenties, and you'll be doing really well if you get tenure much before age 40. The years in between are very demanding. You will probably have to move all over the world several times, and work very long hours. This is not a good time to have children. Once you have tenure, that's a great time, if you're a man. But if you're a woman, and you're nearly forty, you probably can't.

 

And it's not just pregnancy. Children take time. On this I don't know any solid statistics, but in one department I visited once, I heard that the local consensus estimate was that you lose two publications per year per child. I'm not sure it's been quite that high for me, but maybe it has. At that rate, one child is a major career liability, and two are probably fatal.

 

That's an obvious factor that is definitely biological. The only really effective way of dealing with it will be to hammer out some kind of legally binding way of making search committees and tenure review boards cut parents some slack. But that's a big can of worms, and raises a lot of questions about exactly what the whole academic institution is supposed to be for.

 

So for the present we put stuff into our proposal about paying for extra child care for parents attending conferences, and setting up some workstations in a room in the university daycare, so that parents can work near their toddlers. And we'll set aside some money to hire post-docs who have been out of science raising children for a few years, to give them a chance to re-enter the game. The serious question is whether we'll find any takers.

 

The NAS study looked at getting more women to apply for academic jobs. Everybody does things to try to drum up more female applicants, because everybody is under pressure to hire more women (and generally everybody also wants to do so). The study concluded that none of the things people try actually works.

 

Except for one thing: to have a woman chair the search committee. That doesn't actually make women who apply do any better at getting the job, but it raises the number of women who apply. So at first I wrote that into our proposal: we'd have women chair all our searches (and we'll have several to do if we win our funding). My two female colleagues, however, declined to undertake all that extra administrative work, since they went into science to do science themselves, not just to pull more X chromosomes into science. I had recognized this issue, and proposed letting them off some other duties in compensation for the extra committee work, but the problem was that their other duties are all things they want to do, and chairing committees is not.

 

After thinking it through, though, one of them came up with the hypothesis that what must matter is not the chairing of the committee per se, but the woman's name on the job ad, as the person to contact for more information. If a male candidate is unsure whether his chances of getting a given job are high enough to bother applying, he normally just sends in his application anyway, because if he sends out enough applications, one of them may get through. I've done that myself. I guess even a PhD doesn't quite stop a man from thinking like a sperm. My colleague's hypothesis, however, based on her own experience, is that a woman would rather ask first whether the department would really be interested in someone like her, and that she would be more comfortable asking that of a woman than of a man.

 

I thought that made sense, and just replying to curious applicants with encouraging e-mails isn't such a big burden to place on our two women, so I re-wrote the proposal with the plan to have them as contact names. Maybe we'll get more female applicants. If we do, we will very probably get some more female professors.

 

The point of all this is that it's not enough just to demand identical treatment for men and women, and rail against patriarchal society if we don't get it. We need to figure out what's really going on, if we can, and act on the information. If we can't figure out what's really going on, we need to be prepared to act on our best guesses, rather than just let things slide along. The possibility that men and women do act and choose in significantly different ways, for whatever reasons, cannot be ignored.

 

Edited February 12, 2015 by nikki.
fixed spoiler box

[Randomizer]

Back in 1979 one of the two women taking an introductory Civil Engineering class was telling us how when she arrived for the first lecture the professor repeatedly glared at her and kept repeating the class name and to make sure you weren't in the wrong class.

 

Before you can get women academics, you have to have a greater number of women as students going through to get degrees. I could usually count on one hand the number of women in any science and/or engineering degree program. There were so few that they never had trouble getting help because all us sexist guys didn't want to see them drop out. One was in my graduate physics class only because her boyfriend was taking it.

 

From what I've seen in the American Physical Society newsletters the situation has improved some, but it's no where near the ratio in other fields. Women are still discouraged at an early age not to even consider hard sciences and engineering except for the medical fields.

 

Good luck getting more women academics since there aren't that many women out there to get.

[ex post slarto]

To connect that to SoT's question, then, we should ask: how are women being discouraged from those fields at an early age?

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

 

I'm a physicist instead of a biologist, so I don't necessarily look for decisive evidence first. I'm willing to propose an idea based on theory, try it, and see how it turns out.

The problem is you can't really do that with biology (or psychology, for that matter), because confirmation bias is huge when it comes to interpreting animal behavior. That's part of the reason it was Jane Goodall, with her limited education and experience, who made so many discoveries about common chimpanzee behavior and society and not the scientists who studied chimps before her. That's why scientists were able to miss animals engaging in homosexual and bisexual behavior for so long only to suddenly discover that everything from beetles to bonobos do it. (I'm oversimplifying like crazy here, of course.) So it's bad science, because scientists get so caught up in their ideas about how biology should work that they completely miss how biology does work.

Well, of course I agree that it's bad science to let your hypothesis blind you to the facts. But that's doing it wrong, and there's no method so effective that it will produce good science if you do it wrong. I think it's more dangerous to pretend that you're not following any hypothesis, but are simply recording raw facts. There are always far too many raw facts to record, and you always have to choose which ones to examine, and how. However you decide, that's an element of implicit hypothesis. If you make it explicit, there's more chance that you or someone else will be able to improve it.

 

Before Goodall recorded chimpanzee murder and cannibalism, most people thought chimpanzees were much nicer than humans. I heard Goodall speak, once, and she explained that she had thought that way, too, and been horrified by what she found. But if we hadn't been wrong about that, or the prevalence of animal homosexuality, we would just have been wrong about other things, instead. In fact we surely have been wrong about many other things, and still are. It's not that a bunch of enlightened non-hypothesizing scientists are going to save us from error. We are bound to make errors, whatever we do. Making hypotheses and testing them is, in the long run, the best way to correct our errors faster.

 

And it's bad morals, because these ideas generally end up supporting racism, sexism, and all the other bigoted social norms of the day.

 

That is also doing it wrong. Scientific hypotheses are tentative even just in science. Basing social policy on them as though they were facts is simply idiotic. But although science can afford to work out in the long run, in the long run we are all dead. Sometimes it's better to try something, based on the best guess you have, than to do nothing. That's the use of hypotheses in social engineering — to change things in the best way you can, not to justify the norms of the day.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

 

Good luck getting more women academics since there [aren't] that many women out there to get.

 

The problem is that we are getting a smaller fraction of the qualified pool of women than we get of men. Women are discouraged from science at an early age, but it's not even the case that this small initial pool of female science students hangs on to become full professors in the same proportions as men. Women also keep on getting discouraged from science, more than men, at every later stage, as well.

 

This effect is not quite as bad as it may look at first glance, because there's a several year time lag between each stage (high school to undergrad to doctorate to post-doc to assistant professor, and so on). So you have to compare the number of female assistant professors now to the number of female post-docs five years ago, not to the number today. The numbers at all levels were even lower in the past, so the time lag makes the 'leaky pipeline' look even leakier than it is. But even when you correct for this, there is still an ongoing problem.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: SOT

 

My two female colleagues, however, declined to undertake all that extra administrative work, since they went into science to do science themselves, not just to pull more X chromosomes into science.

 

This. This is absolutely the idea I see reflected in my female colleagues. They went into my field for the same reason that my male colleagues and I went into it: to get a job in something they found interesting in order to make money, not because they felt the gender imbalance in it was a point of concern.

 

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that affirmative action in hiring for jobs or admissions to engineering schools is too little, too late, and may actually be harmful to the women already in the field: It's not that women aren't going into the field because they are discouraged by the lack of other women in it, it's because by the time they enter first grade, they've already been convinced, by their parents, peers, or by society, that they don't want to be engineers, and frankly, if you don't want to be an engineer, you aren't going to be able to succeed as one. The real problem lies squarely with parents and early educations for instilling into women that science and math are things that people with X chromosomes Do Not Do, not with college admissions and jobs.

[Student of Trinity]

An alternative possibility is that women are not brainwashed enough, the way men are, into believing that science and math are things they are supposed to do. Science and math may actually be dumb career moves, where you have to do too much work for too little reward.

 

I read that in an article posted on a (real life) bulletin board once. I have no idea whether there's any evidence for it. But maybe we shouldn't rule out the possibility that it's the over-represented scientific men who are being exploited. So we need to spread the exploitation more fairly, by conditioning women more to go and suffer for science.

[Randomizer]

Of course men are exploited into poor paying academic jobs when the big bucks are out there in the real world creating quantitative models for hedge fund trading and internet start ups. But that starts at an early age when boys are encouraged to learn how to use tools to fix things and blow things up. Only the hard core will fight all that discouragement to do something they love when everyone around them is telling them they are wrong.

 

Society encourages women to look pretty and only go into certain fields. When was the last time you saw an ad encouraging a woman to work late at night in front of a computer or lab bench on the next scientific break through.

[ex post slarto]

When was the last time you saw an ad encouraging anyone to do that?

[Randomizer]

There use to be some for technology, but then the Internet stock bubble popped.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Regarding women being discouraged and Affirmative Action, etc:

In the Baltimore/DC region, there is a big annual event specifically for women interested in STEM careers. I'm always disappointed because it's the single greatest opportunity for my age range, and I'm excluded because of my sex. I wouldn't say that I'm discouraged from STEM fields, but more that I'm left to my own while women are getting extra incentives.

 

This is, however, from a high school age range. I wasn't aware enough when I was younger to look for gender preferences in STEM pushes, but I don't really recall any big skew one way or the other. Ideally, I think that we should present STEM as an option for everyone and let those who are interested go into the field. If we actively increase the demand for female workers, we could very well see an increase in the number of females taking the jobs. However, this could come at the expense of quality. If we lower the standard for women to enter the fields, we dilute the integrity of the field and don't help anyone.

 

Of course, there are good ways to promote gender neutrality in STEM without lowering standards. The key word, though, is neutrality. Stop pushing women to enter the field; let them be the same as men. Maybe there are fundamental physio-psychological differences between men and women that lend themselves towards a default skew in the gender ratio. When we keep forcing the issue one way, we may reach the equilibrium faster, but we're also at a significant risk of over-shooting that natural ratio. Rather than forcing an oscillation, let logistics growth do its work.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

 

If people's own voluntary choices, conditioned or not, are playing a major role in determining the current structure of society, then I think that has to shift your strategy at least somewhat towards the second kind of strategy, of adapting to gender differences rather than trying to suppress them.

 

A big part of why I think this topic is unlikely to lead to any kind of productive discussion is that I don't believe it even makes sense to speak of voluntary choice when we're talking about gender roles in present society. All such choices are made in a context of enormous coercion, especially for women. Defying gender roles -- really defying them, not just adding on some mostly-culturally-approved frills around the edges -- is a voluntary choice to the extent that jumping off a cliff is a voluntary choice: it may be physically possible to do it, but it's definitely going to hurt, there's a chance it will literally get you killed, and most people will blame you if it does.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Master1

Regarding women being discouraged and Affirmative Action, etc:
In the Baltimore/DC region, there is a big annual event specifically for women interested in STEM careers. I'm always disappointed because it's the single greatest opportunity for my age range, and I'm excluded because of my sex. I wouldn't say that I'm discouraged from STEM fields, but more that I'm left to my own while women are getting extra incentives.

If you're not discouraged, you're already ahead of most women. That's why the program targets them: if it didn't, it would be full of men.

Quote:

f we lower the standard for women to enter the fields, we dilute the integrity of the field and don't help anyone.

Of course, there are good ways to promote gender neutrality in STEM without lowering standards. The key word, though, is neutrality. Stop pushing women to enter the field; let them be the same as men. Maybe there are fundamental physio-psychological differences between men and women that lend themselves towards a default skew in the gender ratio. When we keep forcing the issue one way, we may reach the equilibrium faster, but we're also at a significant risk of over-shooting that natural ratio. Rather than forcing an oscillation, let logistics growth do its work.

There is no lowering of standards. Instead, there's an aggressive push to get girls interested in STEM, keep them in STEM classes, and retain them through the long road to STEM careers. The problem with equality is that it's been tried for a long time, and the result is gender imbalance. And it's not a "physio-psychological difference" or not clearly so; instead, our culture, overtly and tacitly, pushes women away from math and science, and it takes seriously effort to counterbalance that.

And an overshoot? There is no risk. Look at the gender ratios in classes. Women now outnumber men at colleges, but men still heavily outnumber women in math, engineering, chemistry, and physics. Only life sciences have reached parity. If women start predominating, I'm sure the programs will back off, but there's no risk of that in the near future.

—Alroael, who doesn't even see the problem as more gender equality in STEM fields being good per se. It may be that, but more importantly the field needs more people, period, and it looks like there are women who are capable and who might be lured into it. More men are needed too, but the pool of men with the talent and nascent interest who aren't already brought into the voracious STEM machine are fewer is smaller.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Truths to let go

There is no lowering of standards. Instead, there's an aggressive push to get girls interested in STEM, keep them in STEM classes, and retain them through the long road to STEM careers. The problem with equality is that it's been tried for a long time, and the result is gender imbalance. And it's not a "physio-psychological difference" or not clearly so; instead, our culture, overtly and tacitly, pushes women away from math and science, and it takes seriously effort to counterbalance that.

To expand on this point: overt sexual harassment of women within the sciences is still a huge problem, and controlled studies have demonstrated that reviewers will, on average, judge the exact same scientific paper more harshly if there's a woman's name on it as lead author.

[ex post slarto]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Defying gender roles -- really defying them, not just adding on some mostly-culturally-approved frills around the edges -- is a voluntary choice to the extent that jumping off a cliff is a voluntary choice: it may be physically possible to do it, but it's definitely going to hurt, there's a chance it will literally get you killed, and most people will blame you if it does.

This, by the way, is one of the big clues that gender roles are a social issue and not a biological one. Nobody minds when somebody defies restrictions that are purely biological. Disabled people who do things you wouldn't expect possible with their disability are hailed as heroes, or at the very least, the subject of feel-good human interest news stories. Defy social restrictions that are deeply embedded enough, however, and you will be met with all kinds of hatred and violence. You will be thrown into Exile, as it were.

[nikki.]

I try to stay away from big debate threads like this one, mainly through fear of causing offence or discomfort, but I thought I'd briefly drop in here to quote some Butler, or rather, to post a paraphrasing of Butler (if you get the chance, though, and haven't already, Gender Trouble is well-worth a read. I had difficulty taking some of the same leaps Butler seems to, but it's a pretty sound text otherwise, and certainly thought-provoking).

 

'Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold (i.e. they have come to seem natural in our culture as it presently is) - but, she suggests, it doesn't have to be that way. Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble', or, the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders -- and therefore identity.

 

Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity.'

 

(from here. Not the most reputable source, but it saves me ripping chunks from the text itself)

 

I don't think I have much to add on that. The theory is fine, but the practice is another case altogether. Thoughts?

[Kreador]

So we should all be David Bowie circa 1972? ;-)

[Dintiradan]

In the CompSci department at my university, female enrolment is relatively high for first year courses (still well below parity, but higher than say engineering if I recall correctly). It steadily drops as undergrad goes on. However, female enrolment jumps up again at the graduate level (again, still below parity). I don't have any numbers on hand, and this is all anecdotal evidence anyway, just limited to one university.

 

I TA for an introductory CompSci course, and this past semester the curriculum was switched up a bit. A bunch of unrelated changes: Python instead of Java (the other intro course is taught in Python), pair programming (matches what's done in industry better, and we want to start on group work earlier), and a greater focus on the software engineering aspect rather than just testing coding ability. We also shifted to a discovery learning approach, as opposed to "teach concept in lecture, then test concept in lab with contrived examples" approach. Pairs worked on making games in their labs, often duplicating the minigames you see in AAA titles.

 

One of the explicit (but non-public) goals the professor had was seeing if this shift would increase the engagement and performance of female students, and reduce their drop-out rate. There's been a study (studies) that show that while women play less computer games than men, they're equally engaged when creating computer games. I think this was done at a high-school level, but I'm not sure; haven't read the paper(s) myself. I could get the links if anyone's interested.

 

Like all other times the curriculum gets swapped, there were a few bumps. I haven't seen the final results yet, nor have I received my end-of-term feedback. Judging by the middle-of-term feedback, the big issues were course load and poorly matched students. I hope all the problems remain with the implementation, rather than the course philosophy.

 

Engagement seemed higher with everyone, not just the women. And while this semester was a lot more stressful to teach, it was rewarding to see students make their own versions of password guessing from Fallout 3 and circuit bypassing from Mass Effect 2 while students in the other course were still struggling with iterating over a list.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Truths to let go

There is no lowering of standards. Instead, there's an aggressive push to get girls interested in STEM, keep them in STEM classes, and retain them through the long road to STEM careers. The problem with equality is that it's been tried for a long time, and the result is gender imbalance. And it's not a "physio-psychological difference" or not clearly so; instead, our culture, overtly and tacitly, pushes women away from math and science, and it takes seriously effort to counterbalance that.

To expand on this point: overt sexual harassment of women within the sciences is still a huge problem, and controlled studies have demonstrated that reviewers will, on average, judge the exact same scientific paper more harshly if there's a woman's name on it as lead author.

As I mentioned, I'm still a high school student. My experience is pretty much anecdotal and idealistic. That said, my AP Physics C class is 3/4 male. I don't see this particular instance as bad, though, because everyone in the class is really interested and there are plenty of intelligent females who took the class, not because they were pressured out, but because they preferred other topics.

Originally Posted By: Alorael

The problem with equality is that it's been tried for a long time, and the result is gender imbalance.

How can you say that equality has been tried when also saying that there is huge inequality. As far as I can tell, there have never been truly equal opportunities. We may claim to provide them, but, as has been mentioned, that is not the case.


Looking at the big picture as it currently stands, though, I do see why suddenly removing all discussion of gender would not yield equality. In four years of high school, every science/technology teacher that I've had has been male. My math teachers have been female, but teaching math and STEM aren't really the same. Currently, every AP Science teacher in my school is male. While they actively push for women students not to feel discouraged and to take the class, I can see how the male-dominated department provides an implicit push away from the class. Perhaps my reference to logistics growth would work if gender were suddenly not to be mentioned, but the initial rate of change in logistics growth is quite small. A jump start is needed. I just tend to be wary of creating reverse-discrimination.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Master1

How can you say that equality has been tried when also saying that there is huge inequality. As far as I can tell, there have never been truly equal opportunities. We may claim to provide them, but, as has been mentioned, that is not the case.

I think the stumbling block here is that "equality" means different things to different people in different context. But I think everyone in this thread is on the same page that de jure equality, simply having the same laws apply to everyone on paper, isn't enough to ensure actual equal treatment.

[Kelandon]

I didn't know this until I came to law school, but this is a problem in law, too. The traditional gold standard (which is problematic for a number of reasons and is changing) is to go to a big law firm after you graduate and eventually make partner. In a studies of grads from my school, women, who on average had done better than men in college, on average did worse in law school, were hired at firms less often, and made partner less often and slower when they did go to firms. If I remember the results right, women went into some kinds of public interest work in about the same numbers as men, and public interest work (while socially valuable) pays a lot less than firms do, with the result that the income gap between men and women, which we see in many professions, is extremely pronounced in law.

 

Disentangling the factors causing this is a nightmare. Whether it's even a bad thing is a little unclear, since big firm work is definitely not the only path in law, but the gender gap in other legal careers also exists, so it's not just firms. Firms are the main reason for the massive income gender gap among law grads, though.

 

It's clear that the gender gap comes from some combination of:

 

* Overt discrimination and harassment (I'm not sure exactly how common it is, but it clearly occurs with distressing frequency)

* Disparate impact discrimination (people who are not explicitly trying to discriminate against women nonetheless adopt procedures that disadvantage women or that allow for subconscious biases to affect decisions)

* Personal choice (a desire for children, etc., which isn't very compatible with the 70-80 hour weeks that firms usually require)

* Historical factors (e.g. my law school didn't admit women at all until 1950 and didn't admit more than 6 or 7 per year until I think the 1980's)

* Lack of female role models, mentors, and peers (because firms are so male-dominated, they have a tendency to stay that way)

 

and probably a whole bunch of other things.

 

I'm not really sure what we do about it. People have lots of suggestions. The discussion parallels the problem in science, with a few differences.

[Soul of Wit]

Has anyone considered that male and female brains are simply not wired the same way? I'm not limiting this just to the ability to think like a <your favorite career here>. I'm also looking at communication among peers. Oral communication shows a pronounced difference between the sexes. Women tend to use less nouns and to rely more upon earlier conversation to get a point across. Men tend to be more explicit and to repeat nouns to get a point across.

 

This has obvious ramifications in social interaction. Women perceive men as not listening. Men perceive women as being illogical. The reality, in my opinion, is that men listen as well as women and that women are as logical as men. The difference is in speech patterns.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

Has anyone considered that male and female brains are simply not wired the same way? I'm not limiting this just to the ability to think like a <your favorite career here>. I'm also looking at communication among peers. Oral communication shows a pronounced difference between the sexes. Women tend to use less nouns and to rely more upon earlier conversation to get a point across. Men tend to be more explicit and to repeat nouns to get a point across.

This has obvious ramifications in social interaction. Women perceive men as not listening. Men perceive women as being illogical. The reality, in my opinion, is that men listen as well as women and that women are as logical as men. The difference is in speech patterns.

Even if you could find a study unambiguously demonstrating that all of this were the case, I have no idea at all how you would separate the effects of biology from those of culture.

[Kreador]

SoW, First, source your data. That evidence sounds like the usual kind of sociological anecdotal research biased by preexisting beliefs of the researchers and a strong desire to find something to write a paper about so the researcher can get tenure. Also, even assuming that's true, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with cognitive structure as it can be as easily explained by social norms and pressures. Those same social norms and pressures then explain the perceptions, as women are taught from childhood that men don't listen, and men are taught that women are emotional, not logical. So people fit their perceptions to their preconceived notions.

 

It reminds me of an episode of CSI when four Buddhist monks are found shot in the head. Grissom in the end asked the killer why he shot them all in the 6th Charka, and the killer replies that he shot them between the eyes.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: nikki.

Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble', or, the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders -- and therefore identity.

In other words, Judith Butler's constructive suggestion is that everybody be more like Judith Butler.

[Enraged Slith]

If I could hazard a guess, I think the primary contributor to this discrepancy would be that women do not benefit anywhere near as much as men for all the effort it takes to succeed in STEM fields. Their interest in this kind of work would have to lie in an intense passion for the material, rather than a desire for challenging or lucrative work.

 

As SoT pointed out in the opening post, while the 35-45 age range might be a great time for men to start a family, it's not the same for women. While men tend to be valued for security and stability (which a competitive degree + job provides), women are sought for their fertility, and all that education cuts deeply into their most valuable years. I'm not saying that some men aren't attracted to power and intelligence, but I think those things are more accessory to the ultimate goal of raising a family. I wonder how many women pursuing STEM degrees get hitched and stop their education at Graduate school or lower in order to pursue that goal.

[Kelandon]

If all of this stuff about tenure, etc., is actually true, why is it different in the humanities? I don't know about the social sciences, so I can't speak to that, but my impression — totally anecdotally — is that there's nothing like the same disparities in the humanities, and the pressure to publish, etc., is the same.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

I wonder how many women pursuing STEM degrees get hitched and stop their education at Graduate school or lower in order to pursue that goal.

The grad school attenuation rate for women is, anecdotally, large. The problem isn't marriage; plenty of students get married. The real problem is babies. A substantial number have children while fully intending to finish their degrees, and then they drop out (usually with a master's) when there's a baby to take care of. Or they finish the PhD and then don't seek a job. Or they do seek a job, but not a high-power, tenure track position.

Men don't do this nearly as much, and I think that's very much a cultural thing: they don't have to because they can rely on their wives to pick up the slack.

—Alorael, who thinks the real difference is in the requirements. You can do much of your humanities research and writing at home, at all hours of the night if you have to. When you're reliant on laboratories, on post-docs and grad students (or post-docs and principal investigators if you are a grad student), and have to be around to run the equipment, carry out the experiments, and manage everyone, it's much harder. And, also anecdotally, while the humanities and social sciences require research and hard work, they simply don't require it to the same degree, or with the same level of time put in, as physical sciences.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Kelandon

If all of this stuff about tenure, etc., is actually true, why is it different in the humanities? I don't know about the social sciences, so I can't speak to that, but my impression — totally anecdotally — is that there's nothing like the same disparities in the humanities, and the pressure to publish, etc., is the same.

That's a good question and I don't know a good answer. I'm willing to stipulate that the pressure to publish in the humanities is about as high as in science, but publication is different. In the humanities you normally need to publish books, and it's okay to take several years to write a book. You can get a job by publishing your thesis as a book, and then get tenure by writing another good book as a follow-up (though I think two would be safer, unless you've got a real humdinger). Also the career path is a bit different. A PhD normally takes a couple of years longer, but there isn't much money for post-docs in the humanities, so you can normally expect to land a tenure-track faculty job right out of grad school, if you're going to land one at all.

I'm not sure this is enough to account for the difference, but I think it must be a factor: in the humanities the time scales are longer, so you can in principle get to the top of the greasy pole with a few years of intense effort that compensate for a few years of less productivity. In the sciences you need more consistent productivity to stay in the game.

Another factor, probably, is that humanities academia is an exploited ghetto. It's accepted, somehow, by all concerned, that you might spend ten years getting your doctorate, during which time you teach a lot of classes for very little pay, and then spend several more years doing poorly paid adjunct work before finally getting your foot in the tenure track door. In the sciences people that don't land a decent post-doc just bail, and go do something more profitable. Somewhat fewer men than women put up with the level of exploitation typical in the humanities (for reasons that are of course another question), so these fields end up with more women.

Apart from those factors, though, it's possible that the humanities are doing some things right, that the sciences should learn. I'd love to hear what those things might be.

[ex post slarto]

Do humanities PhD programs actually have more women than men?

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Originally Posted By: nikki.

Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in the present: 'gender trouble', or, the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders -- and therefore identity.

In other words, Judith Butler's constructive suggestion is that everybody be more like Judith Butler.

And this is why I don't feel comfortable contributing to discussion threads here.

I mean, what we're talking about here, and in other threads, is gender roles - roles that are a product of a patriarchal society. It's no good saying that there needs to be more equality in the field of science, for example, because that's still creating/fueling a binary split; coaxing or enticing more women into specific fields is still playing on gender stereotypes, just not in a conventional way. What's wrong with suggesting what Butler is, in that case? (And I will concur that Butler goes too far with it at times, but that's because I'm not an existentialist.)

Anyway, I'll let you get back to your discussion now.

[Alorael at Large]

Whether the existence of gender per se is a good or bad thing is well beyond me, but I'll contend that it's an existing thing, and far more intractable than gender ratios. Racism wasn't fought in the US by abolishing race; it has been slowly pushed back by legislation of equality and efforts to turn that legal status into a practical reality. I think gender is the same: making men and women societally interchangeable is an impossible task on any reasonable time scale. Getting them true equal and not separate treatment isn't.

 

—Alorael, who notes that most social engineering plans differ from real engineering in that there's overemphasis of ideology and underemphasis on practicability.

[Student of Trinity]

Gender roles may in some sense be a product of patriarchal society, but what is society? Society is us. For a small religious or ethnic minority in a much larger culture, I can understand how the larger culture would indeed function as a distinct entity, some of whose dictates the smaller group might be forced to accept. But women are not a minority. To presume from the beginning that women have powerlessly acceded to the dictates of a patriarchal society seems to me to be prima facie absurd.

 

Originally Posted By: nikki.

It's no good saying that there needs to be more equality in the field of science, for example, because that's still creating/fueling a binary split; coaxing or enticing more women into specific fields is still playing on gender stereotypes, just not in a conventional way.

 

Here I exactly disagree. What exactly is wrong with a binary split? I want society to be fair, and I want endeavors like science to be able to fully exploit the entire human talent pool. I see no reason why we have to eliminate binary gender in order to achieve those things. And given that binary gender at least exists right now, it seems to me like a darn good idea to play on gender stereotypes in order to coax or entice more women into science. I'll play on the trombone if I have to; I'm prepared to coax by any means necessary.

 

My snide one-line dismissal of Butler may be mean, but it's simply the obvious criticism of all academic theorizing about gender: That it's not serious about affecting the real world, but only about entertaining a few like-minded souls with an ideological pole-dance. That's the standard charge against all academic political theory, after all.

 

There may be many possible defenses against the charge, but it's not enough just to have one. If you don't also declare it prominently on page one, you've betrayed the fact that you don't take the issue seriously enough, that you take your moral high ground for granted. On this charge, that's a prima facie admission of guilt.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Here I exactly disagree. What exactly is wrong with a binary split?

Has "separate but equal" ever actually worked out that way in practice for any group at all in human history?

I mean, if we're going to speculate about what human nature does and doesn't allow based on what's happened in the past, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

[Student of Trinity]

Space travel and lasers haven't worked out very well for any group in history before, either, until very recently. We can look to history for suggestions about possible obstacles, but not for proof of what's feasible.

 

I've lived through a bit of history by now. I heard exactly these same philosophical spiels about patriarchal society and the arbitrary tyranny of imposed gender identity back when I was an undergrad, twenty-five years ago. What I've learned from this little quarter-century slice of history is, that stuff hasn't gotten us very far. So I'm a lot more interested in pragmatic engineering approaches, which might possibly actually do something by the time my daughters are undergrads.

 

It's not like I'm committed to upholding Archie Bunker by making a few token concessions. It's the other way around: I'm willing to concede as many sops to tradition as we have to, in order to get more women into the laboratory and behind the podium. It's a simple military strategy: give us that nice hill, and we'll keep our cannon, and you can keep your whole walled city, no problem. We might want to talk again once the guns are in place.

 

Other than that, I suppose I do have a problem with people like Butler. At some point in my little sojourn through history, some little perceptual switch tripped in my brain, like with those ambiguous pictures of faces and vases, or the dancer who spins left or right. Academic railing about how powerless women are in the face of patriarchal society somehow started sounding to me just like the old dinosaurs puffing smoke in their clubs about how women can never understand politics enough to vote. Radical calls for abolishing gender started sounding like just another excuse for inaction.

[nikki.]

Umhmm, it wasn't so much that you dismissed my post with a one-liner (well, okay, partly that).

 

Quote:

What exactly is wrong with a binary split? I want society to be fair, and I want endeavors like science to be able to fully exploit the entire human talent pool. I see no reason why we have to eliminate binary gender in order to achieve those things.

 

I know Butler is suggesting the absolute break down of gender, and thus gender stereotypes. As I said, though, I think that goes too far, and yet I get the impression the baby is being chucked out with the bathwater here. I don't think it's enough to pander to women in order to get them into the sciences (or whether they are under-represented), because that's doing nothing to address gendered stereotypes that currently exist which state that science is the domain of men. Nor will it do anything to combat things like sexism in the workplace. To do that we have to get a position where, culturally, "being sciency" stops becoming an attribute that is viewed as overwhelming male. Now, as I said, we can do that by trumpeting, or cajoling, and waiting until enough women are in a particular field (and hoping the sexism leaves as a result (though, ha! people being reasonable?!), or we can try to challenge, and remove the notion that's so far prevented women from being represented in that field (i suppose i should add "ha! people being reasonable?! again).

 

I'm not saying everybody should run around acting like Butler (or Bowie, which somebody mentioned earlier), but maybe it's time we take the frankly outdated ideas we as a society seem to hold about gender, and start breaking down some of the perceptions we have about both genders.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm happy with these goals, but I just think it's getting it backwards to think that we have to first stop people from viewing 'being sciency' as masculine, and then later (if at all) actually get women into science. Social attitudes like thinking of scientists as male by default are, on the one hand, not things in themselves, but simply ideas that lots of people have. On the other hand, though, people have those ideas for reasons. In this case the main one is that most scientists are, in fact, male.

 

The only effective way to challenge people's notions, or break down their perceptions, is to change the facts they're based on. Do that, and the perceptions will change like the wind.

[Lilith]

Isn't that just another version of the tired old "stereotypes exist because they're true" argument? If you said "what we need to do to stop racists from seeing black people as innately criminal is to get black people to stop committing crimes", I think that would pretty obviously not be OK. How is "what we need to do to stop sexists from seeing women as innately unsuited for science is to get more women to become scientists" any different?

[ShieTar]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Here I exactly disagree. What exactly is wrong with a binary split?

The important question here would be, what is the importance and relevance of a binary split? And why is it so important for gender, but not for other criteria? Why is there no protest about the under-representation of introverted personalities in tenure and upper managment positions? Or about the fact that only a negligible part of these positions are held by persons that grew up in low-income households, even though that group represents a significant part of the population? What about people afflicted with religion or other superstitions? The are surely massively underrepresented in the fields of Science and Engineering.

Equality does not need to result in equity. Women in general do not need to become more interested in STEM careers any more than men need to become more interested in wearing skirts. The gender sepparation may be arbitrary and pointless, but the same can be said about most of our cultural and social agreements.

That being said, I can not help but get the feeling that one of the main reasons why qualified female students of a STEM fields (OR rather STE here in germany, where math is slowly but surely becoming considered as a "typically female" field) refuse to continue on a path to tenure are the constant reminders that this path is supposed to be more difficult for them. If I were a young female graduate, considering between the academical and an industry career, or even if I am considering between a career and raising children, the constant reminders about the difficulties that I can expect would surely help me decide against an academical career.

Considering that you can apparently lower a blonde persons IQ by 5 to 10 points just by reminding them (not even convincing them) of the "Blondes are less intelligent" prejeduice, it seems to me that one of the most critical steps of any program towards equality is to convince everybody of it's success, in order to give the formerly discriminated group the confidence they need to participate in the desired change of society. What happens in most cases is the exact opposite in my experience, with the media "informing" us that we just should not expect those laws that promise and demand equality to fully work in reality, that there still are obsticles and difficulties that make it more difficult for a woman to achieve a certain goal than it is for a man of the same qualifications.

In that sense, ignoring the existing discrepancy and just telling any young girl that asks that it is merely a relict of ancient times and that her chances in the field are exactly the same than those of a boy of her age would seem the best course of action to me.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: ShieTar

Considering that you can apparently lower a blonde persons IQ by 5 to 10 points just by reminding them (not even convincing them) of the "Blondes are less intelligent" prejeduice, it seems to me that one of the most critical steps of any program towards equality is to convince everybody of it's success, in order to give the formerly discriminated group the confidence they need to participate in the desired change of society. What happens in most cases is the exact opposite in my experience, with the media "informing" us that we just should not expect those laws that promise and demand equality to fully work in reality, that there still are obsticles and difficulties that make it more difficult for a woman to achieve a certain goal than it is for a man of the same qualifications.

In that sense, ignoring the existing discrepancy and just telling any young girl that asks that it is merely a relict of ancient times and that her chances in the field are exactly the same than those of a boy of her age would seem the best course of action to me.

Even if it could be shown to work, is systematically lying to people an ethical or sustainable thing to do? How far do we go with that? Do we deny women access to research on income statistics, lest they learn the horrible truth? Is there really no better way?

Those aren't even rhetorical questions. Well, okay, the third one is.

[Alorael at Large]

There's a push-pull problem. To some degree women are actively discouraged from going into science by the people in the field. To some degree they're welcomed, but social pressures and learned behaviors keep them away. One of the most powerful ways to fix the latter is to fix women's perception of science as a hostile or unrewarding field, and one of the best ways to do that is to get women into science. Chicken and egg, yes, but if you get a few women in, they'll bring a few more, and so on, or so the hope goes.

 

And as more women are in science, discrimination from within the field should both be reduced by experience and diluted, for lack of a better word, by the presence of unbiased scientists, notably those women.

 

—Alorael, who still thinks there's a real, and important, difference between separate but equal and different but equal. No one's advocating keeping men and women in different institutions or different labs. There are definite pitfalls, but it's probably easier to arrive at non-difference by eroding perceptions by creating equality than it is to break down the gender differentiations in order to create equality.

[ShieTar]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Even if it could be shown to work, is systematically lying to people an ethical or sustainable thing to do?

No, see, my theory here is that the common interpretation of the statistical numbers may very well be the actual lie, so I rather propose to tell the truth, which just isn't reflected by reality yet. My theory is that today (not 30 years ago, but today) achieving tenure in a science or engineering field is as a matter of fact exactly as difficult for women as it is for men, but that a lot of qualified women will decide against even applying for it. Many will rather go for other options based only on the public conception that this path would be more difficult for them.

On the anecdotal evidence side (feel free to ignore this of course), I did read in a recent article on female math Professors in germany that the one point almost all (95%) of them have in common is this: They found in the early stages of their career a mentor who would regularly encourage to them that they should follow a career path in their field. All of the interviewed women agreed that this was a mandatory condition for them, whithout which they would probably not have considered applying for a teaching position.

Sadly the article did not note if male professors report the same, neither did it interview any potential female candidates which decided not to apply, or applied without success. So it is admittedly not very conclusive.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

How far do we go with that? Do we deny women access to research on income statistics, lest they learn the horrible truth?

Deny access? No. But stop reducing those numbers to unhelpfull simplifications of live, maybe?

For example, people that get their income statistics mostly from television news may be convinced to live in a horrible patriarchic society where women become 75% of the pay that men get, for exactly the same work !!! (Exclamation mark intentionally trippled). This is a very famous number that is often repeated, and is, technically, a fact.

Very few person will use their access to dig a little deeper and find out that the average payment of a young woman without children is about 95% of that of a young man with no children. Those people also might find out that the reason of discrepancy is not a different pay for the same position, but rather the fact that there are lower income industries whith predominantly female employees and higher income industries with predominantly male employees.

So "Women on average earn 75% of what men do" is a version of the truth, "If you get the same job as a man, and take off the same time he does for breeding purposes, you will earn the same amount as him" is also a version of the truth.

Which one of these two versions a woman knows and believes, both conciously or subconciously, will affect her live decisions, like career trade-offs.

This is maybe best documented in the medicinical literature as the placebo and nocebo effects. If you communicate to a patient that he will heal because you give him some pills, or homeopathic drink, or you stick needles in his chakras or just because you pray for him, he is more likely to heal indeed. If you tell him that you cannot do anything for him, his illness is more likely to degrade.

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Is there really no better way?

Nope, I am a certified genius, just trust me on everything I suggest.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Isn't that just another version of the tired old "stereotypes exist because they're true" argument? If you said "what we need to do to stop racists from seeing black people as innately criminal is to get black people to stop committing crimes", I think that would pretty obviously not be OK. How is "what we need to do to stop sexists from seeing women as innately unsuited for science is to get more women to become scientists" any different?

I don't believe there are too many black people out committing crimes just because they themselves believe the stereotype.

[ShieTar]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I don't believe there are too many black people out committing crimes just because they themselves believe the stereotype.

You make it sound silly, but maybe you should not dismiss it so easily. There have been several studies about self-fulfilling prejeduices lately, and all of them show that there is no need to actively believe a stereotype in order to be effected by it. As an example, one study did car driving tests with three groups of people. The first group consisted of men , the second of women, and both these groups achieved basically the same results in the driving test. The third group also consisted of women, but this group was taken aside for an hour before the test to discuss with the scientist the old "Women can't drive" stereotype. Most of the women strongly disagreed with the stereotype, either correctly dismissing any diference between the genders or proposing that women actually drive better. Still, in the test that followed this discussion, these women scored significantly worse than any of the first two groups.

Even more fundamental are the "Women are more romantic" and "Men are more sex-driven" stereotypes which we invented in the 16th or 17th century. I don't know about you, but I personally knew several teenagers while I grew up who were downright comically commited to believe in and comply to these stereotypes.

Now, you are obviously correct to assume that nobody will be driven to comit a crime just because of a stereotype. But they may very well fail to resist the temptation to break the law for economical reasons if the feel that society expects them to be predispositioned for crime.

The main drive for a person not to commit a crime she would profit from is the instinctive fear of alienating herself from her social group. This is why laws like those against the consumption of Alcohol in the last century in the US, or against breaking copyright protections these days, or just against speeding and false parking with your car are generally quiet ineffective. As there is in most cases no expected social impact of breaking any of those laws, people will find ways to justify breaking them, even with no existentially driving need to do so.

Now if a black person does grow up as a part of a black minority in a region of the world in which there are negative prejeduices about her being innately criminal, her fear of risking her social standing by commiting a crime is greatly reduced.

In general, every persons actions are impacted by societies (real or perceived) expectations in them, and thus as a society we can indeed impact reality if we somehow get people to forget their negative stereotypes.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Swords into linear accelerators

t's probably easier to arrive at non-difference by eroding perceptions by creating equality than it is to break down the gender differentiations in order to create equality.

I see what you're saying here, and I do think it has some merit, but we're still left with what is essentially a binary split even if every profession in the world had an equal split of genders. In order to tackle stereotypes and inequalities, it's not enough to just push for comparable representation; you're not actually changing the commonly held view of female scientists or male homekeepers if you push for equality in those areas, you're just pushing up numbers in order to say "look, we're all equal!"

I mean, considering that exhibiting behaviours or traits that are not conventionally associated with the gender one is born into tends to get you rapidly marginalised (at the very best), it's clear that society's ideas about gender behaviour are mired in ideas of sex. In order to get anywhere, we need to examine what terms like "masculine" and "feminine" actually mean; we need to challenge stereotypes, and perceived gender differences, and then equality will come. I want to make it clear that I'm not calling for the immediate abolition of those terms, but not everybody falls into one of those two groups, and if you don't, or if you fall into the one society says you are not, then god help you.

I think that's what's wrong with binary splits; you cannot categorize people as either/or, and I think it's a point that is too easy to overlook.

[Alorael at Large]

And here's my problem: when you say "we need to challenge stereotypes, and perceived gender differences," who is we? How do we do that? There's no open international mic for addressing these issues. But I'll argue that creating equality in numbers (and that has to substantial increases in the number of women in science, the number of women in the high-level and prestigious positions in science, the number of women receiving awards, income, and all the rest), and equality in perception will come. Or rather, push to get more women, and gradually, grudgingly, the women will get more respect, and better positions. That will bring in yet more women, and the cycle will move towards equality, as long as someone keeps pushing to make sure ground isn't lost until the new equality is stabilized.

 

—Alorael, who also thinks this is the best way to make gender stop mattering. If men and women are acknowledged to be somehow different, but in a way that doesn't matter with regards to X, and someone isn't clearly male or female in X, it's not going to matter to anyone because X is gender-independent. The more things get there, the less gender matters.

[Goldengirl]

Originally Posted By: thursday

In order to get anywhere, we need to examine what terms like "masculine" and "feminine" actually mean; we need to challenge stereotypes, and perceived gender differences, and then equality will come.

This, I believe, gets at the heart of the matter far more than a numbers game of equality in the STEM fields, as these notions of masculinity and femininity are what fuel the disparity in those fields in the first place. The societal, cultural norms that discourage women from participating in STEM surely must be gender norms in the first place.

The problem with the question of meaning, though, is that these terms are in a state of flux. Judith Butler may say that gender is a performance, but what that performance is is by no means static. Across cultural lines and over time, gender norms differ, such that any attempt to essentialize them will fail. This is my concern with Butler; how can we prevent "gender trouble" from being subverted into a new form of gender norms by patriarchal culture?

I don't know the answers, but I think language deserves continued critical investigation in that matter. On a lighter note, perhaps science fiction holds the answer.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Pedipalps of our fathers

And here's my problem: when you say "we need to challenge stereotypes, and perceived gender differences," who is we? How do we do that? There's no open international mic for addressing these issues.

Exactly. Just what could we do to change perceptions and stereotypes, if we don't change the facts on the ground first? Orbital mind control lasers?

[keira]

Orbital Friendship Beams, actually.

 

I'm really just posting to ask, what does "uote" mean?

[ShieTar]

Originally Posted By: Goldenking

This is my concern with Butler; how can we prevent "gender trouble" from being subverted into a new form of gender norms by patriarchal culture?

You might help the process by stopping to spread the idea of a "patriarchal culture" exiting somewhere in the western civilizations.