“‘Literal people may ask, Why, then, does not woman have the right of suffrage?’ it stated. ‘The answer is easy. She does not want it. Of course, it must be admitted that women, or some women, think they want the ballot. But they do not really want it.’”
The arguments have also been made that women naturally want to be housewives, that they don't want positions of authority, that they are not motivated to be creative or to work really hard, or that women prefer a small number of intimate relationships while men prefer "larger networks of shallower relationships," and that, through these larger networks, men single-handedly created civilization (looking at you, Roy Baumeister).
When I wrote that post five years ago, I had unwittingly bought into the underlying mindset of these ideas without even being consciously aware of them. I thought that my views on gender roles were unconventional because I grew up in a world where I largely took women's rights for granted. Looking at it now, I realize that my views were about as mainstream as any. I, like many other people who grapple with the question of gender differences, saw stark contrasts in the behaviors of men and women (and girls and boys), so I began to chalk this up largely to innate, genetic differences between the sexes.
That does not mean that I was entirely wrong or that there are no innate behavioral differences between the sexes—there are, and most people who have really looked at the research admit this. Elizabeth Spelke, in her debate with Steven Pinker on why there are so few female professors in math and science, insisted on this: “There really are biological sex differences. They are real, they are important, they are not cultural constructions, they are not something we impose on people.” She did, however, insist that some perceived differences between men and women are not real (in the biological sense), and that socialization and discrimination are solely to blame for the lack of women scientists and mathematicians. She does not think that the evidence supports the idea that men have superior cognitive abilities in these fields. Spelke did acknowledge the possibility that men and women have (on average) innately different priorities or motivations, just like I posited in my early blog post, but she asserted that we cannot accurately evaluate that issue at this time, with the limited research we have. Pinker, in his segment of the debate, also corroborated my earlier assertion that current research indicates that men (on average) are more aggressive and competitive than women.
In some ways, then, my views on gender/sex differences are not all that different now than they were five years ago. What embarrasses me about my previous post, however, is how blindly I insisted that that there is a fundamental difference in what men and women want, despite lack of knowledge or evidence on that issue, and, above all, my naïve belief that it’s okay if there are always “more men than women in prominent positions of power.” I wish to retract that statement, right here, right now, thanks in large part to the presidential election of 2016 and the tidal wave of sexual harassment allegations that began with the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
After sitting through an election in which one of the most qualified presidential candidates in history lost to the least qualified presidential candidate in history, it's hard to believe that women are taken seriously in our country: doubly so when the winning candidate made statements like, “I think the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else going. And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get five per cent of the vote.”
It is not okay for men to retain positions of power far in excess of their proportion of the population. Women do have special interests, the most obvious being pregnancy, maternity, and sexual harassment, and those special interests make it both more difficult for us to get into positions of power and especially necessary for us to do so. We cannot expect a government full of men to represent our interests fairly. Conservative Tea Party women can't represent our interests fairly either, since they got to where they are, in part, by appealing to a conservative, patriarchal base.
Even more than that, power is a privilege, and when one group of people overwhelming holds the reigns of power, it is far too easy for them to be oblivious to their privilege and oblivious to the situation and needs of other people. As Louis C.K. admitted just today:
“But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. […] I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it.”
This system is broken, not just because of the electoral college or gerrymandering or electoral gimmicks, but it is broken because our perceptions our broken. Too many people and too many needs are simply not heard in our society, and the simplest way that I can see to remedy that is by working towards equal representation. It’s about time that women started wielding political clout commensurate with our skill and with our percent of the population.
After last November, women started running for office in unprecedented numbers. According to an article on CNN, only 920 women had contacted the feminist, pro-choice PAC, Emily’s List, to run for office during the 2016 election cycle, but 19,000 have done so since; likewise, the advocacy group She Should Run normally receives 1,800 inquiries per year, but that number has jumped to 15,000 since Trump’s election. Some of these women have already won elections:
- Jennifer Carroll Foy, recently elected as House Delegate of Virginia
- Nikuyah Walker became the first person to win a place on the Charlottesville City Council by running as an Independent
- Danica Roem will become the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature in the history of the United States
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sources of inspiration for this post:
- Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements by Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry
A must-read for anyone who cares about the history
of feminism. The authors reveal that
feminism has taken many different forms since women got the vote in 1920, and
much of that feminist history is virtually forgotten today. The sexual harassment allegations of today
remind me of one passage about the women’s lib movement of the ‘70s:
“Women's liberation founders realized that many women considered their problems to be personal and that this misconception isolated them; as in Katz and Allport's concept of pluralistic ignorance, many a woman tended to feel that she was the only one who didn't like her looks, her body, her sexual activity, her housework, and so on. Enunciating their discomforts, consciousness-raising group members soon recognized that those feelings were widespread and reclassified them as social, not personal.” (p. 85)
- Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
A brilliant look at how women raised in a
hyper-patriarchal society struggled to cope with the abrupt departure of their
men, and how many of them were torn between a desperate desire to do something
and the fear that anything they could do would bring shame upon them for stepping
outside the bounds of a proper lady. The conflicted feelings of these
women—some desperately wishing they could be useful or important, then loathing
themselves for not being self-sacrificing enough, some wishing they could go
fight like the men, and others wishing just as fervently that everything could
go back to the way it was—will stay with me for a long time.
It’s refreshing to hear a rational, respectful, and
scientific debate about differences between the sexes. Although the central question of this debate
is quite specific—why are there so few women professors in math and science?—Pinker
and Spelke’s arguments cover many topics about biological differences, socialization,
and discrimination, and they both back up their points with mountains of
research. Even better, Pinker and Spelke
are long-time friends, and they make their arguments with respect and good
humor.
Great post!
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