We got a nifty link from reader Hill Rat yesterday (thanks, brah) that’s right in my wheelhouse: its about a research project focusing on gender bias, particularly as it relates to the academy.
First, check out this Gender Bias Bingo Card. Not funny, like the original Anti-Feminist Bingo Card, but worth a gander. The card sums up the four major patterns of bias that this Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California at Hastings has identified: Prove it Again, Gender Wars, Double Binds, and the Maternal Wall, which are all blurbed here.
We’ve certainly talked about all of these things here–Double Binds seem evergreen, but Gender Wars seem to have come up quite a bit in our most recent topics. They also tip their hat toward intersectionality with their “Double Jeopardy” category, but they limit it to race, rather than include sexuality, ability, age, weight, and all those other minefields.
If you wander around the site, you can see concepts explained, watch role-plays, take a quiz, and watch short clips of women offering “strategies” of varying helpfulness. My unfavorite? Mary Ann Mason (Esq.)’s advice to “soften” your message by smiling. She also suggests women play by the boy’s rules by regulating your tone of voice. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah. It’s that old “cope or change?” thing. Even though I know we have to pick our battles, I want a revolution. I don’t want to fucking smile.
It seems a leetle 101 to me (especially for what appear to be women a generation older than I), but I suppose that’s still necessary, even at the university, which I like to think of as something of a haven from the wall-to-wall sexism you might find in a less (generally speaking) liberal working environment. One of the contributors made a good point that the university tenure system actually works against women, because sexist dinosaurs will stick around until they’re forced to leave,and their attitudes can set the tone for an entire department. At another link, though, I found that more than half of tenured faculty are already over 55, so eventually, they will leave, even if it’s feet first.
I know we have some dorkidemics amongst our readers, and more than a few lawyers. How do those terms feel to you? Helpful? Reductive? One big DURRRRR? What about for our corporate sisters?
I just know I’ll be lying about any family situation I may have when I go on the job market. (I don’t have anything to speak of right now, but who knows what the future brings?) And drink just enough where people will know I’m not pregnant. Interestingly, I got these tips in a workshop taught by two thirtysomething men, I think because they see what the older search committee members are saying even if it didn’t apply to them. On the plus side, I’m not in the habit of talking about my personal life at work anyway–people didn’t know I had a boyfriend until he showed up for my dissertation defense, for example–but one can’t easily hide a pregnancy, and I do intend to have kids eventually.
I hate that advice on how to be more like men to succeed. There may be some grains of truth in it, but it’s insulting and unhelpful because women who act too “masculine” in the work place are also punished. You can’t win.
I just try to be competent and keep discussions of controversial topics to a minimum.
I agree with JennyK about the double bind–it’s the one thing on that grid that makes me gnash my teeth harder than anything else.
In the female-dominated company where I work, it comes down to age. Women who are a generation older than me really run the table on those four major bias patterns. They hit all the double binds and maternal wall issues, and hit them HARD. I think for women who were making their way in our industry in the 1960s and 70s, there was absolutely no room for anything other than “act like a man”, so they did. They made it work, but now they have very little empathy for those of us who came of age professionally in the 90s and 00s. We have more and better options now and want to exercise them, but our female bosses tend to actively discourage that and they favor of all the old chauvinist patterns they had to conform to. It’s discouraging, to say the least.
I wonder who they are writing this for. PhDork I agree with you this is all very basic and not just in a, basic for feminist/gender study scholars way but in a basic for any woman who’s had a job out of college way. So…undergrad students? I guess it could be helpful for women about to enter the workforce in that it would let them know what sort of obstacles they’ll be facing. I don’t know, I really didn’t get much out of it.
Each time I was pregnant (early 90′s) I hid that fact at work as long as I could. I had vague ideas that it was not good for my career. Lately I had an evening out with my coworkers from that time, and the topic came up. I couldn’t even say why I hide it so long very coherently anymore.
I’m a university admin, not a prof, but man, we’ve got one asshole on our faculty whom tenure is definitely helping, much to the department’s detriment. He is currently married to the SECOND former student he’s wedded, he is a horrible teacher when he bothers to show up or doesn’t bring the world’s most obnoxious 5 year old with him, and though the chair tried to get his tenure revoked, the provost refused to back him, so we’re stuck with this jerk. He’s so ridiculously manipulative that I swear he wakes up each day wondering how to make others’ lives miserable. I wish he could be fired.
I have also witnessed a pretty crappy situation with an adjunct who just had a baby. She never came in to talk about needing a schedule change (her husband is also an adjunct with us) before the arrival of the baby, and so was assigned the same schedule she’d had the previous few semesters. When she finally did come in to demand a different schedule, two weeks before registration opened, she was told that it wasn’t possible. The whole thing has now turned into a crazy stink and I’m left wondering why she didn’t just come in and talk about getting a new schedule months ago.
As a corporate lady, oh my. I honestly don’t even know where to start. It’s everything, every day. Try working in an uber conservative private company that is a military college-filled good ol boys club. And yes, I get crap ALL THE TIME for acting too manly/bitchy/assertive even though guys are just doing the same thing and having it be seen as normal or even something that should be applauded. And lots of guy-only events.
This is why I can’t talk about it, I just start raging incoherently. And it’s not just people you don’t get along with, it’s people you can get along with and then they pull total ‘WTF?’ moves and that’s the worst.
BeckySharper – That’s the worst of the worst. When the women you wish would mentor and be supportive — because really, they were in the trenches and have achieved so much and are generally awesome at their jobs — have this “I went through it, what’s the big deal?” attitude towards sexism in the workplace. They had to “man up” or whatever, and now they see it almost as hazing, like going through it proves you deserve to be there or make partner or whatever the case may be. Pardon me, I’ve tapped into an incoherent shouty inner monologue, I’ll stop now.
It is basic, but that doesn’t make it useless — just because a woman has graduated from college does not mean she had a complete feminist education, and even if she did, she may not easily see how those concepts apply to her personally.
And, it would be useful for people (maybe especially men of a certain age) who are running departments, and want to be supportive of their women employees — my dad for example, is chief of his department and has done several things to support the women who work with him. I think he’s great on women’s issues — when I point them out to him. He never took any women’s studies classes and I’m not sure he gets all of feminism 101, even though I know he wants to be supportive and helpful. I’m going to send him the link.
@veganmarcy: Guy only event s? Isn’t that illegal?
@BeckyS: I know it happens, but it just astounds me when I hear of women my age and older screwing over younger ones because history didn’t move fast enough for them. So let’s see, should a doctor who had chicken pox as a kid refuse to inoculate her patients because she had to go through it?
We have got to see that what we did and suffered through and accomplished was and is part of the process of achieving the sexism-free world that we all want. Taking your bitterness out on women who had nothing to do with the frustrations you experienced is really undercutting your struggle in a serious way, and letting The Man win. Every time a woman *doesn’t* have to go through the garbage that you did is a tribute to you, and I hope older women can come to see it that way.
I work at a “historically” women’s university, last year one of my co-workers had a stalker and the administrators response was: Don’t talk about it at work at all, it will just scare the students.
It was amazing, because if we can’t get this shit right here amond the women and were women are in charge (historically), where will it ever be fixed?
I agree with pedimd. Maybe to women who frequent feminist websites this stuff is pretty 101. But I think there are a lot of young women who are aware of things like gender bias, but may lack a more precise language and understanding with which to talk about and attack the problem. I am someone who managed to emerge from school without having taken a women’s studies, or other similar course. Having watched my mom get chewed up and spit out by the patriarchy over and over, I had a sense of the challenges and a desire to fight, but it was a learn-as-you-go process. It’s just been within the last few years that I’ve started learning the actual language of feminism via sites like this. Having a basic framework like the one presented on that gender bias website would have been helpful to me, especially when I first started working at a law firm.
I also agree that it’s a helpful framework for men who, because of their privileged status, may not have thought much about these issues.
Lastly, IMO, many law firms are still at 101 (if they’ve even gotten that far) so this project is pretty much on target for that demographic.