Gender policing and the nature, and nurture, of the beasts

I'm not a feminist.

What I am is a You-ist.

For example.  I don't give a flying fig if the world never gets many more female engineers.  The profession can stay 90 per cent male or whatever it is right now and that's fine with me, as long it allows one more in.  You.

If You have the brains and the talent and the diligence and the pluck and the complete and total disinterest in beauty and an innate ability to ignore what human beings enjoy about public spaces and need from them and can focus entirely on what makes a structure function most efficiently, well, then, by God or by Darwin, I want You to have the chance to be an engineer and I want all the male engineers to step aside and make room and let You do Your job as an engineer, as one of them.

But I don't believe the world will be a better place because You get to be the engineer You were designed to be.  It will be a fairer place.  It is unfair that even still today half the population of the world doesn't get to put their brains and talents to use in the way that would best suit them and make them happy---and by half the population I mean the many men as well as many women who, because of the ideas and strictures concerning gender roles the societies they happen to have been born into enforce, are directed away from pursuing work they would do well and thrive at.

But the world won't be better, necessarily, because You and more women like You are doing the work you were born to do.

We might have a few more better-built bridges.

But they will still be ugly bridges.

Anyone who thinks that letting more women into any given profession will naturally have a more humanizing effect on that profession is as much a sexist as the men who are bent on keeping them out of it.

If You become an engineer, You probably already have a temperamental bent that makes You suited to the work and open to the training, and by the time You get done with your training, You will think like an engineer.

And to adapt Garrison Keillor's definition of engineers to a more gender-neutral profession that includes You, engineers are "merciless men and women bent on the eradication of beauty."

Kidding aside, I have great respect for engineers, but there is a reason why we shouldn't let engineers rule the world.  We shouldn't let career military types, clergymen and women, lawyers, cops, or, for that matter, scientists or bloggers rule it either.

Specialized training tends to create specialized thinking.  People tend to imagine utopias as places where they personally will be most happy and, usually, the ones in charge.

By the time You are done with Your training, You will think like an engineer.

Women engineers think like engineers.  Women lawyers think like lawyers.  Women politicians think like politicians, especially, apparently, and sadly, ones running for President of the United States.  Women doctors think like doctors.  Women bankers think like bankers---try telling the woman running the loan department at your bank that you can't make this month's car payment.  The only difference between her reaction and that of the man at the next desk is that it will take her a half an hour to say what he'd have said in five minutes.  "You're screwed."

But she'll be more sympathetic.

Kindergarten teachers think like kindergarten teachers, nurses like nurses, and strippers like strippers.

Housewives think like housewives and mothers think like mothers.

What looks like nature is almost always the result of training and habit and necessity.

This undeniable and daily observable fact, that the work people do makes them think and act in certain ways, ought to tell us all we need to know in the debate over whether gender differences are biologically determined.

Nurture, which does not stop when we leave our parents' homes, plays such a gigantic part that it's almost not even worth wondering what part nature plays.

I want You to be the great engineer You were meant to be.  For that to happen we probably have to change the thinking of a whole lot of people all around You, including, sadly, too often, Your mother and sisters and the woman who is teaching You math in high school.  I believe people's thinking can be changed though.  We can nurture differently.

Two big differences between feminists and me are that feminists want to change everybody's thinking all at once and as fast as possible while I am only interested in changing the thinking of people around You at the moment and I have no faith in the ability of feminists to decide what people's thinking is and how it ought to be changed and what it ought to be changed to.

At any rate, by the time You are a full-fledged engineer You will think like an engineer.  At least on the job.  At other times You will think like a woman...a woman in love...a woman with a house to run...a woman with a family (and I don't necessarily mean husband and kids)...all of that disparate thinking has to be integrated or You will fracture and crumble.

That integration is, in fact, You.

Not a woman.

You.

By the way, I have no interest in whether or not You have a more male or more female brain.  Tests like this one, no matter how much scientific rigor they've been designed with are suspect because it's nearly impossible to find a useful control group.  You---and I mean the collective you now, readers of blogs, male and female---are far from a good control group because you know how to take tests.  Consciously or unconsciously you will fudge your answers so that the results will be flattering to your current self-image.

The women among you will try not to answer in ways that will make them appear too traditionally girlish to themselves, and the men among you, Sensitive New Age Guys that most of you are, know better than to let their inner macho show.

I'm assuming most of you are good liberals.  Over on the Right side of the bandwidth, I'll bet the results skew much closer to traditional gender stereotypes, with the biggest chickenhawk males scoring as having the most male brains.

Our Right Brained counterparts' results would be just as compromised as ours.

(I always get that Right Brian/Left Brain thing mixed up.  Is it possible that Right Wingers are actually more Left Brained?)

How Your brain is configured is Your business.  That it was configured that way by genetics, by hormonal infusions, by experience, by training, by mental discipline, by divine inspiration, makes no nevermind to me, but I think Greta Christina gets right to the heart of the question with this observation:

No matter what, nurture is definitely part of the picture. A big part. If nothing else, the fact that gender roles have been changing and are different in different cultures and historical periods is proof enough of that. What's more, I've seen research showing that people treat infants they think are male and infants they think are female significantly differently -- in ways they're not even aware of, and will even deny. (Specifically, people encourage physicality and assertiveness in infants they think are boys, sweetness and sociability in infants they think are female.) So when people say, "Of course gender is hard-wired, look how different my five-year-old boy and my six-year-old girl act," my reaction is, "Well, yes -- they've been getting intensive gender-role training for five/six years. That proves exactly nothing."

Yep.  I see this all the time.  But, but probably because I'm the father of two boys and consequently am more on the lookout and because being the father of boys has had me spending more time observing other little boys and those little boys' parents, I tend to see it from a male point of view.  That is, I see this happening not to little girls but to little boys.

My own observations is that parents of baby girls tend to treat them as babies, while parents of little boys tend to treat them as future football players.  Even more importantly, parents of little girls tend to treat them as grown-ups in the making and parents of little boys tend to treat them as...well...football players in the making.

In other words, it seems to me that many of the traits people tend to identify as typically feminine in children are actually simply evidence that their parents taught them compassion, manners, and a decent sense of proportion regarding their own place in the universe, while much of what is called typically masculine behavior is simply the result of unchecked aggression, rudeness, ego, and id.

We raise little girls to be people, and we raise little boys to be jerks.

Since people not jerks thrive in civilized societies, it's no wonder that girls are outperforming boys in so many fields these days.

There's a flip side to this.  I've seen plenty of parents who let their little girls run riot because they're so cute and adorable while their little boys get all the spunk and vinegar beaten out of them at every turn.  And I know there are plenty of adults, teachers and bosses among them, who see a boy's natural rambunctiousness and energy as threats to their authority and to the general order, while they indulge the worst traits in their female students and employees because those traits include a conformity, obsequiousness, sycophancy, and a tendency to believe that what teacher says is always right, traits that aren't exclusively feminine but which aren't tolerated in boys as much because of more positive gender expectations.  Boys aren't supposed to be cringing courtiers.  (I know, tell that to the Washington Press Corps.  But that explains a lot about their obsession with manly-man manliness, doesn't it?) but they are traits authorities love in the people they want authority over.

Greta Christina would like to see more young women taking up careers in engineering, and she believes we can change society---that is, all the ways we nurture girls---in a way that will make that more likely.

She would also like to see more young men become teachers.

As I said, I'm not much interested in whether the world gets many more women engineers.  I don't think it will be a better place because there are now a lot of women who think that an overpass is a thing of beauty and a joy forever no matter how many trees had to be cut down to build it, how many streams rechannelled or drained.

But I would like to see more young men become teachers.  I'm sure this is just personal bias, but I think the world would be a better place if we had more male teachers because it would be a better place if we had more good teachers.

Not that men make better teachers.  I'm not saying that at all. But there are an awful lot of good brains that are busy at work making the men whose heads those brains are inside mediocre engineers when they could be at work making those men excellent teachers.

And, I think, the world would be improved by there being more men standing at the fronts of grade school and junior high school classrooms, in a way it won't be improved by having more women in hardhats surveying construction sites.

Those men will show the boys in their classes (and the girls who also need to know it so they can make good judgments about future romantic partners and about raising their own children) that education, sensitivity, intelligence, and gentleness are not exclusively feminine qualities.

They will help us raise more male adults and fewer big jerks.

But there are a few reasons why fewer young men than young women become teachers, reasons besides issues of nature and nurture.

Money.

Status.

Influence.

These are reasons, by the way, why many feminists are far more obsessed with there being more women engineers---and doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs---than they are with whether or not more men go into teaching or, for that matter, decent pay and working conditions for women in more traditionally women-dominated jobs and careers.

Ask a typical college department secretary who'd she'd rather work for, the male professors over in computer science or the women in the English department.

She's going to think long and hard before answering.

On the other hand, I wonder what nurses think about the differences between working with a female physician and a male one.

There are societies in which teaching is a male-dominated profession.  But in those societies teachers are revered.

Feminists might say that teaching isn't revered here in America because it's seen as women's work and we look down on women's work.

That's true.  To a degree.

The bigger factor, though, is that we don't revere teachers because we don't revere what they're teaching.  Americans hate education.

It hurts our brains.

Not to mention what it does to the authority of authoritarian figures.

If we revered learning, we would revere the people who help us learn, then we would pay them better and grant them more status in the community and give them more influence in the running of it.

If those things happened, I am sure we'd see a lot more young men taking on the job.

Of course, men being men, after a while they would do what they do whenever they start feeling like they own the clubhouse.

Chase the girls out.

In a few generations we'd be talking about how to open up the teaching profession to women.

That's the way men are.

We're hardwired that way.

It's just the nature of the beast.

_________________________________

I'm sure I'm having no trouble convincing anyone of this, but I am serious.  I'm not a feminist.  Mr Shakes is one though, and back in April he wrote a post explaining how "Feminism Benefits Us All."

And speaking of great American feminists, today is somebody's birthday!

Comments

[grasshopper]

I don't know, Lance. Much of what you saying is inarguable, and some of it is entirely speculative.
Occasionally (and I'm not sure if it happens too often or not often enough), I fall into a realm of thinking that: "Anything is possible."
Considered from one perspective, "Anything is possible," is patently preposterous. From another, it may be a powerful and extremely useful point of view, whether true or not. My head still aches (protracted migraine) or perhaps I could relate my neither-here-nor-there observation to your post. Now, I can only admit it's merely my immediate response.
But to anyone not susceptible to such fleeting emotional reactions, I say: why not try it? Because managing to entertain, even for an interval, the idea that "anything is possible," always feels like freedom.

[Melissa McEwan]

But I don't believe the world will be a better place because You get to be the engineer You were designed to be. It will be a fairer place.

Maybe it won't be a better place for You, but it might damn well be a better place for other female engineers.

The assertion that there's no difference for women when there are more women in their work environment is, quite frankly, dead wrong. It makes a difference. I've worked in an environment when, for most of my tenure, I was the only woman on an entire floor full of men (most of whom I managed). For a short time, there were other women on the floor, too. I can't begin to describe the difference in how the men behaved when I wasn't the only woman (and they weren't particularly badly behaved when I was). The point is that the mere presence of other women made a difference in how I was treated. Call it "respect in numbers."

Anyone who thinks that letting more women into any given profession will have a more humanizing effect on that profession is as much a sexist as the men who are bent on keeping them out of it.

Maybe so, but "humanization" (a vague word for which I'm not totally sure I know your definition) of a profession isn't the only conceivable affect adding more women can have. More women in a workplace, for example, generally means more family-friendly company policies (which is good for other humans--like dads and sons--too, ahem). That's not because women are intrinsically better people, but because women who work full-time are usually still the primary childcare providers, so they need and demand more flexible work policies.

Also consider: "Yale economist Ebonya Washington compared the voting records of fathers in Congress to scorecards maintained by NOW and the American Association of University Women. And regardless of party affiliation, the more daughters they have, the higher their voting record score on issues like flexibility for working families, pay equity, abortion rights and violence against women. Legislators with all daughters have scores that are 12 points higher than those with all sons."

The presence of women in all sorts of places--even in the homes of legislators--makes a difference.

Two big differences between feminists and me are that feminists want to change everybody's thinking all at once and as fast as possible while I am only interested in changing the thinking of people around You at the moment and I have no faith in the ability of feminists to decide what people's thinking is and how it ought to be changed and what it ought to be changed to.

Always nice to see feminists spoken about like a monolithic group with a singular goal and a shared action plan. What was that you were saying about Me again? Or was I not the You to whom you were speaking...?

Come on, Mannion. You're making me crabby. And I know you're better than that lazy (and mean) paragraph.

[Melissa McEwan]

I should clarify this: "More women in a workplace, for example, generally means more family-friendly company policies." - N/A for the working class. Sigh.

[Ken Muldrew]

This is the worst example of engineerist drivel I have seen in ages. Probably the last time I saw such egregious engineerism was from your friend Keillor. The two of you should be ashamed.

[burritoboy]

Lance,

Let's make this shorter.

Reducing the impact of unfair gender norms may not decrease the impact of other unfair norms (economic, professional, etc). Occasionally reducing unfair gender norms can actually increase the impact of other unfair norms.

Conclusion: A critique of the patriarchy without an equivalent critique of capitalism merely reinforces capitalism with only a small reduction in patriarchy.

[Jim Tourtelott]

Not to change the subject too greatly, but speaking of the birthdays of Great Americans--last Tuesday was the 70th birthday of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., the greatest American prose stylist to come out of Oyster Bay. (And yes, Teddy, I'm looking at you.) We should all raise a glass to the creator of Tyrone Slothrop.

[KarenMcL]

I Disagree, Lance...completely. I think - really THINK...if Women ran the world and Men agreed to be at-home-daddies...the world WOULD be much better place. Tis not an absurd sexist notion that women are intrinsically more verbal; better negotiators; and wiling compromisers than most men. Men have had their 5000 yrs to Rule and Run things and it ain't hat much better of a place, not any less violent...but yes perhaps better engineered than 5000 yrs ago - But I think tis high to give it cance for women to RUN (notice I didn't say *Rule*) the World!

[Maria]

Thank you kindly for the link, Lance. :) Your musing about female nurses with female doctors has a multitude of answers. As you noted above, though, female doctors receive training as doctors--and doctors can be incredibly jerky or incredibly kind.

[sfmike]

Though I agree with everything you wrote (especially about a preference for thinking about YOU rather than the abstract ALL OF YOU), yesterday I experienced a powerful example of what makes a profesional setting different when it's a female rather than male dominated setting. It was at a university dermatology surgery clinic in San Francisco where I was having cancer cells rather delicately scraped off of my nose and then having the bloody mess put back together again for seven straight hours. Unusually, among the 30 workers at the clinic, ranging from head doctors to new doctors to student residents to nurses to instant pathology lab people, there were only two men.

As brutalizing as the experience was, I loved the energy at the clinic. What impressed me most were how empowered the lowly administrative staff seemed to be. They ran the joint, beautifully, and openly cracked black-humor jokes with the patients in a way that I've rarely seen in a hospital-type setting. The doctors/residents/nurses also worked collaboratively in a way I've never experienced before, without the grotesque Me-Male-Doctor/You-Female-Nurse dichotomy that we're all used to in a health-care setting. It was genuinely interesting and new. So, Melissa McEwan, you've got a great point.

I also totally agree about the need for more male elementary school teachers. In a civilized world, the entire teaching profession (male and female) would have the status and compensation of, say, a brain surgeon today. Until that utopian moment in the future, just having more male teachers will raise everyone's payscale and consciousness (just as the entry of male nurses has raised the payscale and working conditions for female nurses).

[greg in ak]

having worked in social services and the mental health field, both tending to have more females then males, working with women is great. the work enviroment is different, as melissa points out, with women in the work place. i often prefer working with women. that being said, women are, as we psychology types like to call, people. people can be vain, selfish, short sited, dumb as a bag full of hammers, and not give a crap about people. The worst, and best, bosses i have had have been women.

the feminist critique has merit but it is often overplayed. there is so much to all of us that just looking at gender as making a person this or that is close to meaningless.

Karenmcl- without getting all statistical on a friday night the data about how women are so different from men is often misinterpreted. the differences withen the genders are far , far more the differences between the genders. and those differences are part and parcel of our culture, not inate. men can be just as verbal, etc as women.

greg

[Bianca Reagan]

Lance,

Why do you call yourself "not a feminist"? Do you want women and men to have different rights in society? If you do want women and men to have equal rights in our society, then you are a feminist. It's that simple.

Lucky for you, you have the privilege to be naive enough to think that more women aren't becoming engineers because they don't have the talent or desire to do so. Having the right skills for a job doesn't guarantee that someone will hire you for that job, even if you are the most qualified person applying. Especially if you are working in a male-dominated field.

It's almost precious that you think kindergarten teachers think like kindergarten teachers and strippers think like strippers; therefore those are the professions they chose. It's kind of hard to become a kindergarten teacher when you don't have the money to go to college to get a teaching degree. There is no such barrier for entry with regard to becoming a stripper. Even less-than-attractive people can make money taking off their clothes.

What's insulting is the following passage:

Women bankers think like bankers---try telling the woman running the loan department at your bank that you can't make this month's car payment. The only difference between her reaction and that of the man at the next desk is that it will take her a half an hour to say what he'd have said in five minutes. "You're screwed."

I am a woman who gets to the point. My lady-parts don't cause me to be superfluous. There are lots of male windbags out there. Maybe you just haven't met any in the banking profession.

Furthermore, I would make a great teacher. I love kids, I love learning, and I love influencing young minds. However, I chose not to become a teacher, not because of the lack of status, but because our government does not respect our educational system. Teachers remain overworked and underpaid, and things are only getting worse. It's not solely a female/male thing. I'm sure more qualified women would become teachers, in addition to more qualified men, if teachers' hard work was respected and renumerated in a fair manner.

I also chose not to become a teacher because I want to be the CEO of a cable network. I have extreme talent, ability, experience and desire to excel in this field. I know that if there were more women leaders running the entertainment industry, my climb up the ladder would be much easier. Alas, there aren't, so it is extremely difficult. Even moreso than if I were a white male, and I've seen many of them struggling in this industry, too.

And ditto what Melissa said: maybe equalizing the playing field for women who want to be engineers won't necessarily make it a better place for You, "but it might damn well be a better place for other female engineers."

[Matt T.]

If You have the brains and the talent and the diligence and the pluck and the complete... [a lot of nonsense about engineers, I swear, I must be the only layman on the planet that doesn't hold engineers in total contempt, even just "jokingly"]... well, then, by God or by Darwin, I want You to have the chance to be an engineer and I want all the male engineers to step aside and make room and let You do Your job as an engineer, as one of them.

Dude. That's feminism in a nutshell. I'm with you on the teacher stuff - and I was lucky to have some extremely killer bee male teachers all through my schooling - this "I want everyone to succeed, not just women" stuff is just weak. I know, I know, you didn't mean it that way, but do you really think all feminists hold to that particular straw for their homunculus construction.

As for this:

We're hardwired that way.

It's just the nature of the beast.

Bullshit. I refuse to believe that men have no option inre: being a total asshole because our genetics demand it. It's too easy a dodge. Whether it's genetics or tradition, it's all just a way of saying "forgive us, for we know not what we do". It denies the use logic and reason as tools to deal with the world, and infantalizes us all. It's insulting to women because it tells 'em, hey tough shit, missy, that's just the way things are and we can't change 'em, so quit yer bellyaching and make me some pie. It's insulting to men because it insinuates we're all assholes by default.

I fully agree such attitudes are encouraged by society. I grew up redneck, so believe you me, I've seen it and still see it in how my cousins raise their kids. Frankly, though, I don't understand how anyone can at once say that society all but brutally penalizes any devience from these norms when it comes to gender roles (hey, try being a young redneck boy who loves books and learning) and say we're "hardwired" for that same behavior that's beaten into our heads from the womb on. Hell, even if it were true, even if we males were hopelessly cursed by our very genes, it's a weak and cowardly dodge.

We don't have to be assholes. We just are because it's easy, we're lazy, and there's plenty of us benefiting from it. Many of the same people are benefiting hugely from the results of having a culture that equates education with social disease, so it's probably no wonder most of us are so easily suckered into the worldview that there's just nothing we can do about it, gosh dawgit, because of genetics/tradition/diety of choice/badly misunderstood and poorly applied "science" lifted from a wholly unrelated source.

There may be a point here I'm missing, and I apologise if there is, but this has been a sore point of mine as of late for reason wholly unrelated to gender represenation in the workplace. But, hey...I'm a man. Can't help being an asshole, can I?

[Deep Thought]

I hate to nitpick, but which Americans, exactly, hate learning? Sure, I hear all the time that 'public schools are Teh Sux0r' and that 'Americans are soooooo dumb', but does that make it true?

American adults have the highest average number of years of schooling in the world; America is in the top 1/3rd of OECD nations by percentage of populace who completed high school [secondary ed] and #2 in percentage that complete college [tertiary ed]; The vast majority of the top 100 universities in the world are in the US. The good thing is that US rates for high school completion are up, as are general literacy.

Does the US education system have issues/ yes, and very serious issues. But to claim that "Americans hate education" may be a bit more projection than analysis!

[Deep Thought]

I hate to nitpick, but which Americans, exactly, hate learning? Sure, I hear all the time that 'public schools are Teh Sux0r' and that 'Americans are soooooo dumb', but does that make it true?

American adults have the highest average number of years of schooling in the world; America is in the top 1/3rd of OECD nations by percentage of populace who completed high school [secondary ed] and #2 in percentage that complete college [tertiary ed]; The vast majority of the top 100 universities in the world are in the US. The good thing is that US rates for high school completion are up, as are general literacy.

Does the US education system have issues? yes, and very serious issues. But to claim that "Americans hate education" may be a bit more projection than analysis!

[Deep Thought]

weird! Sorry for the double post.

[burritoboy]

Deep Thought,

Americans like to get certificates from educational institutions that get them higher pay. That's not really learning in any fundamental sense. In fact, learning has comparatively little to do with formal education - learning implies a self-generated internal desire for knowing or wisdom.