Lurid writes: Having said that, iirc, the study in Nature that Saturn's Nod mentioned didn't show a marked difference between the evaluation by women and that by men of women. This hints at *something* about the way sexism operates which isn't about saying that sexism causes less harm, but it isn't a stereotypically straightforward situation of a woman being denied a job by a ghastly old boys network, if you see what I mean?
I certainly agree that sexism is more complex than just "bad men getting together to intentionally help bad men and hurt good women." That would be a much easier problem to solve than the one that faces us. Feminists have been trying to explain this for years, and it's very frustrating that our message is so often oversimplified and misunderstood--that's why our work is regularly dismissed simply as "male bashing."
Which I think, if I understand where you're coming from Lurid, is kind of similar to what frustrates you about the way non-scientists approach critiques of science--i.e., oversimplifying, distorting, and misunderstanding? I believe we can both commit to trying hard not to do that to one another.
And I know that we're definitely on the same page here, mostly, I think: In my experience, when women do bring up potential instances of sexism or other problems, one of the first responses is often: "oh but there was a woman on the search committee and she agreed." Or "The editor/ director of our office is a woman so there couldn't possibly be sexism in this document/office." The idea that women can participate in and do benefit from sexism is a long-standing feminist idea; it's one of the strengths of the system and why tokenizing women and "minorities" is so frustrating and effective at slowing change. The point of most feminist/anti-racist research into the way sexism/racism functions in social environments is to try to unpack these complexities.
There is an a wealth of information about how sexism operates in academic settings, mostly focused on US settings. Here's an excellent if incomplete resourse on the chilly climate for women in academe that covers a whole slew of issues. Women professors are reviewed more harshly by both women and men, by colleagues and students, and this affects them at every level. (At least some research on teaching evaluations, women students tend to judge women professors less harshly than male students do, overall, but women still often are unfairly judged by both males and females. Most of that research is older, but my experience jibes with it.)
As to stereotype threat, here's an excellent blog, with footnotes, by a male scientist in the cognitive science field, on stereotype threat, gender, testosterone and math skills. And here's an interview with Claude Steele that focuses a bit more on race and testing.
Anecdotally, the past semester has given me a great deal of food for thought about the climate for women on my own university campus. The campus newspaper (which has traditionally been a really bad paper) had finally just gone over the edge in terms of sexist junk being passed off as "humor," and I wrote a letter explaining why one proposed article was particularly problematic and in fact potentially dangerous, as it would have targeted individual students as "ho"s, only to have the next edition--the "April Fool's" edition--come out and attack a couple of my female colleagues, and one in a very sexualized way, as a "joke." (The whole issue was beer and sex jokes of the most stereotypical/ "animal house" style. And the editor, and the advisor, were both women.)
While some good things came out of the ensuing controversy, and many colleagues were wonderfully supportive, there are colleagues who behaved in ways that were so appalling sexist--colleagues who had been my friends for my whole career here (which has been almost 10 years!). These are essentially "good guys"--guys who I'd have said, like Red Concrete, would never be overtly sexist, guys who kept claiming that of course they know sexism is a bad thing and whom I know to have actively supported women. I'm still quite simply dismayed and demoralized at some level.
The biggest problem that I feel for women on many campuses is still simply not being "heard," particularly if we're challenging the status quo in any way. I regularly feel that when a woman is talking, and this is at its most acute if she's addressing sexism in the workplace, nobody's really listening, or feels obliged to listen, to what she says. There's an acute defensiveness that arises at her critiques (again, please see Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own for an excellent discussion of this effect!)
In practice, this means It's totally okay to not really hear her argument, to introduce a red herring, to deflect the conversation and change the terms of it. Or for a male voice to repeat her idea, and suddenly have the idea be heard, and no need to actually give her any public credit for her work. Or to hear the critique made by a group of women, but then not involve the women in solving the problem or changing the system.
At its worst, this reveals itself in a kind of assumption that the listener, male or female, knows in advance what a woman's going to say, and that it's not going to be anything worth taking really seriously and learning from; there's a sense that she must be confused or too emotional or over-sensitive or . . . And then, to add insult to injury, in that context, men will sometimes publicly respond to a woman who has become frustrated or angry at an institutional problem, in such a way get to be kind of heroic or chivalrous for even deigning to do so, still without ever having to examine or address their own behaviors.
On my campus, the women in the natural sciences are mostly either essentially absent or virtually silent at our faculty meetings. And when questions of sexism and the climate for women arise, they are very loathe to talk. Even ones who I know care and have thoughts about these issues. Many (but not all) women in the social sciences and the humanities will take on these issues publicly, where we are more numerous at all ranks, but that activism of course has a kind of cost.
I don't know what to make of this divide--I am not sure if it's peculiar to my campus or not. But on my campus I do know that women are not promoted to full professor at the rates that men are, particularly in the natural sciences, and that it's a statistically significant difference, but we don't know why it is that way. |
