Sexism
Sun Feb 20, 2005 at 07:20:46 PM PDT
Crossposted on my blog, but worth discussion here I think.
You know, I don't understand "empowerment" - maybe it's just my gender, but I really don't get it. If any of the female (or male) readers out there would like to give a shot at explaining it, I would be greatly appreciative, as I think it might go a long way to resolving some of the issues I'm about to engage.
For whatever synchronistic reasons, I've run across a fair number of feminism issues as of late. Part of it has to do with V-Day, whose message I support but whose tactics, on my campus at least, seem asinine. Namely, they hung up a bunch of shirts in our commons - they still haven't taken them down, either. They're just a bunch of old shirts with, I suppose, "empowering" messages painted on them. Messages that I agree with, mind you, but messages that I still think are stupid to paint on a t-shirt and hang in a university commons for a week.
For example, one shirt declared in bold purple paint that "RAPE = NOT GOOD" - a certainly true statement, but one that I could not help but find out of place on a t-shirt hung a short distance from a grill and a coffeeshop. In fact, I'm not sure such a simplistic assertion has any real appropriate place: I'm all for condemning violence and rape, but to do it in a blindly declarative manner seems to defeat the purpose of condemning it in the first place. Those who agree (who, I'd like to think, are the vast majority of people, us evil males included) will just sort of think it an odd truism, and those who disagree will just ignore it.
Which I suppose brings me back to this question of "empowerment", as that seems to be the only possible legitimate purpose of this display. It will neither dissuade rapists (or abusers or whomever) nor do anything for non-rapists , but I suppose it will just feel good for those who have been victims of such treatment. And I don't mean to trivialize or otherwise discount that possibility: it's simply something I don't understand. I suppose the response might be that I never could understand, due to my Y chromosome.
And this open question brings me to something I feel a bit more confident taking a stance on, because the stance is in and of itself an open question. Harvard recently released a transcript of the controversial comments made by President Summers regarding gender and the sciences/engineering. For those who don't know, Summers and Ivy League university presidents in general have a history of being academic gadflies. As chronicled in the amusingly slanted Yale take on the situation, presidents of Harvard, Yale, and other schools have often taken controversial stances, both (generally speaking) positive and negative. And in any case, it stirs a bit of discussion that is arguably good, even if the original stance wasn't.
Though in this situation I don't think Summer's comments were particularly positive or negative, but simply and honestly inquisitive. Granted they were stated in a manner and setting where it's rather unsurprising that they trigger controversy, and perhaps Summer didn't really expect or intend for the discussion to take the direction or scope that it has, as some even call for his ouster. Yet if you look at what he actually said, well:
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
Okay, very rational, very open, very scientific-method-esque. Granted some might find some personal distaste for the hypotheses, but as noted in the Harvard Crimson's take (oh how I wish Rochester had a decent student publication), "...the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is "offensive" even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don't get the concept of a university or free inquiry."
Summers goes on:
Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?
Again, very open. Controversial given the topic, but he ends it with an open question. He also explicitly brings up women who have competed and succeeded: something his critics seem to overlook.
The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.
Guys and girls are different, what blasphemy! Oh wait, we are different. We've got different body structures, different genes, different hardware "downstairs", different things on our torso, different traditions and roles, and more I'm sure. I'm not saying that I agree with the comments made by Summers, but as said above I do think that dismissing things simply because they rub you the wrong way is not prudent. Also worth noting from that Crimson article is this clarification of Summers controversial hypothesis:
The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of men's and women's quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical--that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than all women! That's why it would be immoral and illogical to discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some of the statistical differences were innate.
I support equal opportunity, both practically and philosophically. I also believe that both genders, as well as all races and creeds and sexual orientations, are de facto equally capable in almost all practical public societal roles (e.g. jobs and such). I very much believe that discrimination on such grounds is plainly wrong. But equal opportunity is not the same as equal results, as once insightfully pointed out by Bill Clinton. And to scream bloody murder at the suggestion of differences between the genders, somehow mandating a universal equivalence, is just counterproductive for everyone.
Summers concludes:
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.
Summers conclusion and his plea to be disproven have both been harsly met by critics. This particular analysis of the piece rejects Summers quite completely, asserting that his request to be disproven was insincere. I, however, find his request quite sincere, and quite academic as well. I'm not saying I agree with him or his conclusion (even though his conclusion is mostly a suggestion that more research be done), but I do think that it was intended to cause and resulted in a good discussion on the topic. His critics are unwittingly doing precisely what he intended, though perhaps with more vitriol than he would have wished.
Despite being forced to apologize and being criticized by the "blogosphere" (both the "Mediagirl" above and on DailyKos), the Harvard administration is standing by him on this one, and rightly so by my estimation. Granted some of the criticisms being leveled (in the DailyKos thread and elsewhere) are legitimate: Harvard is in many ways a "good old boys club", and it would be interesting to have a female president in many ways. But the conclusion - that this is cause for Summer's ouster and that there should be a female president simply for the sake of having a female president - completely miss the mark. Progress is achieved, not through unilateralism, but through the very dialogue provoked by people like Summers.
So, while sexism is still an issue to be grappled with in modern society, I really do feel that many current self-proclaimed feminists (or activists in general, and for issues besides sexism) are taking the wrong tack. The problems posed by sexism are no longer so direct as to require such direct solutions: instead, the issues are nuanced, and the responses should be as well. Rather than condemning folks like Summers and blindly promoting everything female, there should be a constructive and open dialogue that isn't afraid to really confront these questions and not just dismiss or bury them.
I realize that my saying this, as a bearer of a Y chromosome (among other things), has the potential to be seen as insensitive or perhaps even chauvinistic. I have decided to take this risk, as it were, as despite my gender I feel that I have examined this issue in a thorough and fair manner, as best I could at least. So, thank you for reading, and I really am curious and open to any response. Please do participate in exactly the dialogue I suggested...
