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| “Same same but different” |
Why can’t a woman be more like a man? asked Henry Higgins of his protégée Eliza Doolittle in the film My Fair Lady. And I have been wondering if any satisfaction with a 50-50 split is actually quite closely related to the values underlying Higgins’ question. Is our best metric of success measuring the extent to which the girls do exactly what boys have traditionally tended to do do? Really?
Psychologist Susan Pinker addresses precisely this question in her 2009 book The Sexual Paradox. She argues that recent gender equality advances may have removed historical legal and social rules that meant women cannot behave in the ways same to men, but that this has unhelpfully led to the expectation that women should behave in the same ways as men. When they do not, this is perceived as a problem (such as women being underrepresented in Computer Science, for example). But to expect identical outcomes is to use the same as males yardstick here, which hardly sounds right. If we see things this way, Pinker argues, we are like Professor Higgins who sees male as the ‘vanilla gender’; the norm from which female deviates (in this perhaps we can learn from a parallel issue; the word coloured for skin tone is rightly now unacceptable because it makes it sound that white is the norm against which all else should be judged).
Of course we cannot interpret this to mean that we should ignore all male and female disparities. To do so might take us back to being happy with sexist stereotypes like men are doctors, women are nurses. A central issue here is whether or not women are free to make genuine choices; and the standard argument is that covert or overt discrimination means “more women study biology and education than computing and physics, or take part-time and public-sector jobs rather than work the 80-hour weeks needed to get a seat on the board or a partnership in a law firm.” (Pinker 2017).
But Pinker suggests – controversially – that discrimination may not be the whole story. To make her case, she looks to the Netherlands, where legislation enacted in 2000 allows men and women alike to move from full to part-time for any reason. With an historic tradition of women’s entrepreneurship, high levels of women’s participation in the labour market and populations that strongly support the idea of gender equality, she argues that we might expect to see men and women behave similarly. But it is not so, and the differences are stark. 75% of all women in the Netherlands work part time (and two-thirds of these women have no children at home) whereas only 25% of men so the same. Pinker presents data that says most Dutch women and men say they want something different in their working schedules; and that women in particular, value time with friends and family more highly than men. We are led to wonder if here, equality of outcome between males and females would mean taking a step forward or a step back.
Pinker’s assertion is that we can unrelentingly argue that “gender discrimination does exist and shouldn’t be allowed to persist in a just society” while simultaneously recognising that the idea that men and women have identical preferences “is not supported by the weight of the evidence.”
It’s not obvious to me that Pinker is entirely right. It’s absolutely possible – even in egalitarian Holland – that Dutch women are still subject to covert sexual discrimination/indoctrination. Perhaps these findings are more reflective of regrettable social norms more than of inherent differences. On the other hand, expecting women to adopt traditionally male-determined goals as their own feels wrong to me.
Some of my colleagues and family have suggested that all this is a bit of a red herring, for two reasons. Firstly, that though Pinker suggests that these are male goals, perhaps they are not gendered goals at all, but have been constructed as such. And secondly, that as long as we ensure equality of opportunity and challenge social norms (so that women do not have to behave like men) then we don’t need to worry about ratios. That would mean addressing our social structures which make it hugely difficult for working families to allow both parents to work full-time in professions which demand enormous time commitments (and where women all too often carry the burden). While that’s clearly right, I still wonder if we need to look at and measure what choices women actually make; that is, after all, how we’ll know if we there is any progress. In either case, a world where we are measured more on the qualities of our characters than the on details of our biology is surely a world worth fighting for (not least because it is also inclusive of non-binary folk).
I am still reflecting on the male-female split in Computer Science.
Thanks to Ellie Alchin and Kathy Wallace for guidance on this topic.
Note
(1) Iceland is a good example here. For example, the maternity/paternity arrangement (3 months for mothers, 3 months for fathers and 3 months to whomever the couple deems appropriate) says so much as a statement about equality. As well as the moral benefits, the practical benefits are enormous – this policy is one of the reasons why Iceland is one of the few developed countries in the world that isn’t struggling with a plummeting birth rate.
References
Goldman, B. (2017) “How Men’s and Women’s Brains Are Different,” Stanford Medicine
Pinker, S, 2009 The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes. New York. Scribner.
Pinker, S. (2017) His Standards or Hers? How Men and Women Define Success: Institute for Family Studies.
1 Response
We won’t be able to tell whether women and men have identical preferences until there is a more level playing field. As it is, overwhelming evidence points to gender stereotyping and bias that begins early and continues throughout life. The trouble with this piece is that it largely fails to engage with this body of research and women’s lived experiences and instead focuses almost exclusively on a single source, Pinker’s controversial book.
The question we should be focused on, is how can we work against attitudes and practices that inhibit women’s achievement in STEM, and instead encourage their success in tech and other STEM fields? Some colleges/universities graduate higher numbers of women in STEM (which points to the importance of social context). See e.g. this piece by Kim Cassidy, President of Bryn Mawr College in the US, suggesting other schools can learn from their approaches: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-09/womens-colleges-can-close-the-stem-gender-gap
All of our lives are increasingly shaped by tech. It’s critically important that more diversity enter and advance in the field and schools have an important role to play in encouraging this. Thanks for raising this important discussion.