gender discrimination

Restructure's Dad's Institutional Sexism Almost "Protected" Her Right Out of a Career in Computer Science

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2010-10-26 07:53

Restructure! of Geek Feminism Blog talks about how the social messages her father got about the internet (it’s all online stalkers, it’s all porn) made her entry into computer science (at which she excelled) far more difficult.

I was such an Internet noob in my first year of university, that I spammed other students I wanted to befriend with useless e-mail chain letters. I’m bitter that I still didn’t understand the intricacies of using a web browser, that a fellow student from a CS course had to tell me that I could right-click on a link and choose “Save As…”. I’m bitter that I probably made women in CS look bad. My programming assignments in my intro programming course were still perfect, but people usually don’t understand that someone can be an Internet noob who knows how to code. It’s not that I was technically incompetent because of female brain hard-wiring. It’s that I was technically incompetent because of sexism; because of the patriarchal structure of my household where my father’s opinion overrides the majority vote; and because my father is a special kind of luddite.

Male geeks often say that the geek community is a meritocracy, and that there are no barriers to girls learning technology except for our choices (or our brains), but I faced extra hurdles because of my gender. Not everyone has the same access to technology, because technology does not exist in the ether; it has physical and social components that grant and deny access. I was privileged, because I had a shared family computer before most of my peers. I was also disadvantaged, because I was a girl.

Source: Geek Feminism Blog.

This sounds like a classic case of best intentions gone awry. Her mom had internet access through work and felt her daughters should have access. She and her sisters wanted it as well. By adamantly vetoing all requests her dad, though with no doubt the very best intentions, stunted her development in much the same way another parent might “protect” their children by restricting access to books or school.

My father did not work in an office then, so he heard more about “the Internet” through his coworkers. One male coworker basically explained to my father that The Internet Is For Porn. My father came home and told us that he was never going to let us have Internet access, because girls especially should be protected from exposure to pornography.

I just wince hearing about that. In my house growing up it was the same way only it was about television. Both my parents were adamant that we not be exposed to advertisements. The downsides, though, of never having any idea what our friends were talking about was… awkward. Especially since they also constrained who’s houses we could visit with the eternal question “do they have a television, and will it be turned on?” I

n my family’s case the concerns were mainly anti-consumerism and it only made us parochial social outcasts. In Restructure’s case it directly affected her education and career opportunities!

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Andrew Serwer's Excellent Reinterpreation of Paycheck Fairness Support Poll Results

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-06-11 05:32

Best sentence I’ve read all week, check it out: A. Serwer of TAPPED takes mild exception to a recently-released poll touted by the ACLU as showing specific support for the Paycheck Fairness Act. Serwer says that while the questions in the poll probably weren’t specific enough to show support for one particular piece of legislation. Which is fine because he says what it does show is even cooler.

What the poll does show is that Americans, broadly speaking, think the freedom of getting paid for your work regardless of your gender is more important than the freedom to pay people less money for the same work because of their gender.

Read the quote in context here.

That’s a great sentence! If you follow the link to his post the embedded graphic shows a bit over 60% of Republicans answered “strongly support!” Nearly 80% of Republican answers indicated some kind of support. Of course the 20% of Republicans who didn’t answer in support are members of the hard core that’s been dominating in primaries lately. So if they win big in November (and that’s possible but not too likely) they may be able to block progress for a few more years. But Serwer’s point stands.

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Mary Daly's Essential Transphobia

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-01-06 15:39

Well that was pretty quick. Melissa McEwen at Shakesville posted the late Mary Daly’s popular “origin of the word sin” quote by way of eulogy an early feminist icon. And, despite multiple apologies, promptly got threadjacked by accusations of transphobia. Enough so that another blogger at the site closed comments on the post.

The bone of contention being Daly’s evident transphobia. Which isn’t terribly widely know — little-known enough, for instance, to have caught the generally hyper-inclusive McEwen off guard.

If I have the main 70’s era categories of feminism that would have been current in Daly’s ascendancy she was a gender essentialist and not a gender equalitarian. That essentialism was a pretty big deal and one that, I’m pretty sure, is pretty incompatible with sympathy for the transsexual and transgendered.

Yes, you might argue, perfectly reasonably as many trans people do, that the real “essence” of one’s sex is determined by identity and not chromosomes. But that’s not going to carry a lot of weight with anyone who believes that, say, by its very nature the Y chromosome is irretrievably degenerate or that the planet needs to be “decontaminated” of individuals with that defect.

With that understanding transphobia is 100% consistent with gender essentialism. Racism and genocide would be consistent with antagonism towards gender equalitarianism. To an essentialist like Daly a man using plastic surgery and testosterone suppressing drugs to “pass” as a woman would be as viscerally offensive as a person of color using plastic surgery and melanin-suppressing drugs to “pass” as white would be to David Duke

That said, regardless of her motivation for analyzing the gendered status quo one can still learn from her analysis of its structure and flaws. Enough so to say she was a significant figure in gender politics independent of her essentialism. You might not want to touch most of her proposed solutions with a 10-foot pole, but one can learn from her analysis. And draw one’s own, non-essentialist, non-exclusivist conclusions.

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Copyblogger Author Practicing What She Preaches about Compelling Post Titles: "Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-12-14 12:15

The author known as James Chartrand of Copyblogger explains why it’s still not a “post-feminist” world.

You know me as James Chartrand of Men with Pens, a regular Copyblogger contributor for just shy of two years.

And yet, I’m a woman.

This is not a joke or an angle or an analogy — I’m literally a woman.

This is my story.

Read the quote in context here.

James was out of work, with two young children, out of savings, out of luck. She began doing freelance copywriting and struggled her ass off. Then something happened.

One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn’t want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.
My life changed that day

Instantly, jobs became easier to get.

There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.

Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.

I was still bringing in work with the other business, the one I ran under my real name. I was still marketing it. I was still applying for jobs — sometimes for the same jobs that I applied for using my pen name.

I landed clients and got work under both names. But it was much easier to do when I used my pen name.

Understand, I hadn’t advertised more effectively or used social media — I hadn’t figured that part out yet. I was applying in the same places. I was using the same methods. Even the work was the same.

In fact, everything was the same.

Except for the name.

The blog she started as James, Men with Pens, is a well-respected resource for professional bloggers.

Pretty wild when you think about it. Discouraging too.

She doesn’t mention it but my peripheral experience in the publishing world makes me pretty confident the new work wasn’t all coming in from men who preferred to hire (what they believed to be) male writers.

This isn’t the only time we’ve seen this sort of discrimination based on name only. It’s a fairly common academic and investigative-journalist exercise to pair individuals who are evenly matched except for, say, age, sex, or race, and send them out to apply for work. I’m pretty sure there’s even a study demonstrating that academics are likely to rank submitted papers more favorably when everything else is identical except for a single letter change in the purported author’s first name — e.g. a submission will get a higher rating just by substituting the single letter “a” for “h” in the name “Joan Smith” to make it “John Smith.”

But that’s all fairly academic. James Chartrand’s story is real as houses.

Something to think about next time you imagine there’s nothing left to be done because everything’s already just hunky-dory.

[See also Blue Gal’s take on assumptions about gender and pen names. —fl]

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Infirmative Action on Behalf of Men

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2008-01-27 15:48

Debauchette talks about life in France where, evidently, only prostitutes walk alone and where, evidently, men actively punish women who walk in public alone for not being prostitutes… by grabbing their breasts and groins, fondling their asses, and otherwise sexually humiliating them. Preferably when their hands are full, as with bags of groceries.

As for the tit-grab problem, nothing really works, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s an irritant, it’s something that comes with the cross-cultural territory, and it’s not a life-threatening situation. But I remember one good friend who decided to leave Lyon after she was hassled by two kids, around age nine or ten, who caught her while her arms were full of packages. They grabbed at her breasts with both hands in some kind juvenile tag team, and it did her in. She broke down in the street, and by the time she got home, she decided she was leaving for good. A few of us tried to talk her out of it, we stressed that it’s just kids, it’s just stupidity and nonsense. They don’t know how to deal with women, they’re curious and they’re socially awkward and they’re probably not being told by their parents to keep their grubby hands to themselves when they see boobies. “But they think we’re whores,” she said. “And they’re just kids.”

Read about it here.

I have to admit that my first response isn’t exactly admiration the manliness of such behavior as it seems more cowardly and disempowered than, um, gallant. And I’m reminded further that whomever capital-p Patriarchy is supposed to benefit it most certainly isn’t the empty-lived Lads (or their French equivalents) who dare practice their “privilege” only on the defenseless. Which, in turn, I’m sure, only makes it easier for men to later get dates.

I dunno. Leaving aside whether it’s ethical, moral, just, or even fair, organizing a social order that’s designed to protect one segment of society (women) from… the segment that’s enforcing the social order (men) in order to protect one segment (women) just isn’t at all efficient! One could organize a society in almost any other fashion and produce greater individual and overall happiness.

Any gallant justification along the lines of “hey, at least we don’t practice Female Genital Mutilation” isn’t sufficient.

Not that we here in North America should get too comfortable on our “at least we don’t grocery shoppers by the tits when we outnumber them” laurels. Louise Livesey of The F-Word Blog says

According to a story in the Jan 18th edition [of New Scientist] female scientists are less likely to be published if the peer reviewers know they are female.

Read the quote in context here.

If that seems too subtle there’s still that chanting business at Giants Stadium and other venues to contend with.

Point being, though, that all such behavior, from slashing off girl’s clitorises as insurance against women’s libidos overwhelming men’s, to gender-role-enforcing man-handling assaults in France and Giants Stadium, to men-benefiting name-based affirmative action in the North American academic press, there’s nothing there that — when discussed objectively — suggests men are in any way actually better than women. In fact, not to adopt the language of social conservatives, anti-feminists, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, quite the opposite: such preferential treatment reveals not exercises based on a belief in men’s strength, dignity, or superiority but betrayals of a belief in men’s weakness, insecurity, and desperate need of mollycoddling of our “self-esteem.” (Scare-quotes for the word self-esteem courtesy of Instapundit.)

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When even a broken clock is right: men, discrimination, and its consequences

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2007-12-02 19:16

While Googling around for a link for this post about young women in certain urban areas having higher local income than comparable young men I ran across a fairly provocative (ok, mostly provoking) op-ed by arch Men’s Rights Activist (and former National Organization for Women Warren Farrell. I’m not going to provide a link but it appeared on May 12, 2006, on Forbes.com.

Being an MRA, Farrell, of course, was writing to claim that women earn seventy-five to eighty-five cents on the dollar (up, by the way, from fifty-nine cents when he was with N.O.W.) because you don’t have as much work ethic as men… at least as measured by willingness to work outrageous hours, relocate, and seek work in the most lucrative (but also most grueling) industries. But stifle your irritation for a moment (I’ve got a post brewing on the misconceptions in that outlook) and let me get to a quote from the column that really leapt out at me.

Is there discrimination against women? Yes. There’s no denying that the old boys’ network is alive and well. But there’s also discrimination against men. For example, try getting hired as a male dental hygienist, nursery school teacher or cocktail waiter, or try selling clothing at Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT – news – people ). (Even the employees in the men’s wear department are 93% women.)

Sounds pretty petty, right? Women get a glass ceiling they can’t rise up through, and men get a glass floor through which, often try as they might, they can’t descend through. Wah, right? Sort of like that “the law forbids anyone from sleeping under railway bridges which is just as unfair to millionaires as it is to bums.

Except…

Well, check out Norby’s comment to my post about “And the opposite of misogyny is…”

My husband works in the housing dept of a state university-he (we’re separated) lives in the dorm because he’s the hall director, responsible for overseeing the running of the building and making sure that everything is going smoothly.

You know what? He’s really, really good at it. The students really like him, his staff adore him. He’s older than than the average hall director, so when people find out what he does for a living and where he lives-they usually get a strange look on their faces. Like maybe he hasn’t grown up yet, or there’s something missing somewhere.

The guy has two master’s degrees, and there were many times when we were out that former residents and staff members would come talk to him because they had fond memories of him, so the judging that goes on between men, I don’t get it. Because the respect that he gets from those kids is a lot more important.

Summary: Older-than-usual man chooses a job where his advanced degrees “over-qualify” him to oversee the care and feeding of college students even though he likes the work and is liked in return. And is viewed with a gimlet eye for “letting his (financial) figure go.” (Compare this, by the way, to a banquet companion of Kochanie’s who was drilled so thoroughly by senior staff who were also in attendance that she had to remind them that ““X is not here for an interview. He came to enjoy the evening with me!”

So so what? Especially in the face of a mainstream feminist thrust for higher economic and social achievement for women why get upset that men face discrimination in traditional high-responsibility, low-wage, often traditionally women’s-role jobs like nurses, early-education teachers, and college housing supervisors?

Well, specifically in Norby’s partner’s case I’m pretty sure it was 90’s men’s role activist (quite different from an MRA) Robert Bly who pointed out how few proximal older male role models young men have, how few non-parental/non-creepy-partner male models young women have to form their own expectations of male responsibility.

The point being that yeah, with a double-degree and a little gumption Norby’s partner could bring in more income but — when multiplied across all college campuses, across high schools, across neighborhoods and churches and fraternities and (a reluctant nod to Farrell) even men’s clothing departments — at what social cost in the development of young people’s expectations of male adulthood?

So “glass floor” discrimination against men does matter, if not quite as bitterly and prominently as genuinely egregious “glass ceiling” discrimination against women then no less socially stunting to endure or culturally import to overcome.

[Note: My strong impression of where MRAs like Farrell have gone astray is in making legitimate claims to the unfairness of the dominant paradigm of women as the “no-sex” class without a) acknowledging that it’s the dominant male paradigm and, especially, b) while trying to keep all proposed solutions firmly entrenched inside that paradigm. The irony being that even if they did get their way their alienation and misery would increase rather than decrease. Something the more introspective MRAs grasp but inside their fear and resentment can’t see their way out of. —fl]

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