gender and toys
Feb. 18th, 2005 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittenscribbleA bit ago, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cheetahmaster posted a link to the speech made by the president of Harvard at a recent conference. It was made particularly notable for his implications that women in science and technology are not only socially hampered, but are by their very nature indisposed to those fields.
No points for guessing how I feel about that, considering my gender and my chosen field. Took it all rather personally, I'm afraid. Yes, there's quite a bit of societal pressure going on, but... genetic? (Is he calling me unnatural?)
The bit that struck me was Mr Summers's use of his children as illustration: So I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.
It struck a chord because I had a truck, too. My parents, perhaps in a bid to avoid gender-training me, offered my baby self a selection of toys suited to both genders. My favorites were a stuffed sheep and a large red dump truck. I used the dump truck to cart around the sheep. I remember particularly liking the dumping motion: tilt, slide. Later, when I was about eight or ten, the dump truck became the focus of an almost religious worship from my Hot Wheels cars. The cars were members of a restrictive society with rigid castes based upon make, model, and paint job. This story eventually spawned a star, the low-class rebel car who rose defiantly through the ranks by being the fastest. Admittedly, I stacked the deck in its favor; I sought out textures that suited its wheels, arranged it and its fellows carefully, then tilted the surface and let them run. The protagonist, carefully positioned in the center of the board, was sometimes the only one that made it to the finish line and earned an audience with the dump truck. (Goodness knows what my parents thought of that. I guess they were glad that I kept myself occupied.)
Poor Mr Summers; after carefully not giving dolls to his daughters, he finds them mothering their trucks instead. So girls anthropomorphosize objects; so what? In what possible way does the girls' mothering instinct imply anything about their technical aptitude? The traits have nothing to do with one another. They could overlap, I suppose; I've been known to find onboard components "cute." Makes me a bit odd, perhaps, but it doesn't impact on my technical ability.
cheetahmaster posted a link to the speech made by the president of Harvard at a recent conference. It was made particularly notable for his implications that women in science and technology are not only socially hampered, but are by their very nature indisposed to those fields.No points for guessing how I feel about that, considering my gender and my chosen field. Took it all rather personally, I'm afraid. Yes, there's quite a bit of societal pressure going on, but... genetic? (Is he calling me unnatural?)
The bit that struck me was Mr Summers's use of his children as illustration: So I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.
It struck a chord because I had a truck, too. My parents, perhaps in a bid to avoid gender-training me, offered my baby self a selection of toys suited to both genders. My favorites were a stuffed sheep and a large red dump truck. I used the dump truck to cart around the sheep. I remember particularly liking the dumping motion: tilt, slide. Later, when I was about eight or ten, the dump truck became the focus of an almost religious worship from my Hot Wheels cars. The cars were members of a restrictive society with rigid castes based upon make, model, and paint job. This story eventually spawned a star, the low-class rebel car who rose defiantly through the ranks by being the fastest. Admittedly, I stacked the deck in its favor; I sought out textures that suited its wheels, arranged it and its fellows carefully, then tilted the surface and let them run. The protagonist, carefully positioned in the center of the board, was sometimes the only one that made it to the finish line and earned an audience with the dump truck. (Goodness knows what my parents thought of that. I guess they were glad that I kept myself occupied.)
Poor Mr Summers; after carefully not giving dolls to his daughters, he finds them mothering their trucks instead. So girls anthropomorphosize objects; so what? In what possible way does the girls' mothering instinct imply anything about their technical aptitude? The traits have nothing to do with one another. They could overlap, I suppose; I've been known to find onboard components "cute." Makes me a bit odd, perhaps, but it doesn't impact on my technical ability.
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Re: um....
Date: 2005-02-21 06:08 pm (UTC)And as far as "what can you do:" I think he was just saying that if you do everything you can possibly do to encourage women to go into the sciences if they are so inclined, and you _still_ have a discrepancy, then it's time to start thinking that maybe no matter what you do, it just won't work. If you can't change people in that way, then you might as well say that the particular trait is innate. We're nowhere near that point yet, but if you look fifty years down the line, and men still get more tenured positions, then it might not reflect bias; it might reflect "innate abilites."
I think he can get away with the sexism because people know he's not a sexist. In our society, raceism is more of a problem than sexism, especially since to fix the gender imbalance, a male physicist can encouage his daugher to follow in his footsteps. But if there are not black physicists, there's not footstep-following to be done. Women are a part of every social class, so they can break into the club more easily. Besides, if you want to get all genetic, races can mix, which means that even if one race were better at quantum chemisty than another, it wouldn't generally stay that way. Genders don't much mix.
Re: um....
Date: 2005-02-23 06:09 pm (UTC)But if scientific inclination/ability were to any degree sex-linked (if we could indeed find out at all), then what would that change? Boys are better at spatial relations but we don't stop teaching girls geometry, and we don't teach them any differently. And when girls are bad at geometry, we don't let them use "but I'm a girl!" as an excuse.
People may not think he's sexist, and he doesn't think of himself as sexist, but to me, the statement "that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination" is inescapably sexist, even if he didn't mean it that way. He presents that "intrinsic aptitude" bit as fact, not theory to be debated, which is where the sexism lies.
And although I agree with most of his statements re: social factors in the way of women's advancement, I definitely disagree with what he calls "lesser factors." If my own (relatively pampered) experience is any guide, then there's a lot of work to be done re: socialization and continuing discrimination, not just for professionals in those fields, but for the common population as well.
Seems to me Summers is being a bit hasty in his assessment of current data. He assumes that the proportion of women who graduated 20, 25 years ago, should have the same proportion in management and professional positions today. Which would be nice, but unfortunately untrue. Social pressure must be fought off at every step of the way.
And since we're not even close to having done everything we can possibly do to promote the cause, then of what possible use was this comment of his? It doesn't help the PR campaign at all. Except insofar as any attention is good attention.