Since this post is about stereotypes about gender and feminism what I’m going to say first is going to sound a little out of the blue… but it’s absolutely incredibly relevant. According to my intro to physics professor when Albert Einstein first published his theory of relativity there were only a handful of people in the world with advanced enough mathematics to understand his proofs. But, he said, by the 1980s the math had become well-enough understood that college physics professors were expected to teach it… and college physics students could be expected to learn it.
I mention this because Razib Khan of Discover Blogs has a really, really important guess about why women with advanced degrees are starting to have children at rates similar to women without such degrees.
The context is a post with charts by Matthew Yglesias that shows the following graph
Image from Yglesias’s blog at ThinkProgress.org
Khan says
I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the general population. In other words, as more women attain advanced degrees the pool of those women become less atypical vis-a-vis the general population
In other words, the largely-feminist, largely hugely focused and committed women who pioneered academia, law, and business in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s might have fit some of the earlier stereotypes about feminists. But as Khan points out they even more-closely fit the more-accurate stereotypes about pioneers!
Which gets me back to my physics professor’s lecture: Einstein was a excellent physicist and a very good mathematician, and when he first pioneered his theories only a few others were qualified to follow him right away. But once he created the path it became a lot easier for others to follow, and for still others to build social and educational infrastructure so that even more could follow.
And here’s the point my professor wanted to make: First, thanks to the work of pioneers, in feminism as in physics, the once-unthinkable is now accessible to wonderfully ordinary people. But second, there’s a tendency after the fact to wonder if those pioneers really were such hot stuff since undergraduates can now blithely sign up for courses in special relativity or for internships in areas that were once the exclusive domain of men. Um, yeah, they were. It’s a best of both worlds thing.
