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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Date: 2005-02-23 09:14 pm (UTC)And a study of the converse, giving boys nothing but dolls to play and so on with would be quite interesting, though many people would probably draw altogether different conclusions from that...
...which is yet another social problem; girls playing at being boys is looked upon completely differently than boys playing at being girls. If Summers had given his boy-children girl-toys, people would have considered his actions in a completely different light.
We're far from a gender-neutral society, here.
Here's a tangentially-related link discussing a gender-related "issue" among women in technical/well-paying professions.
XD That's priceless. I never thought of advanced degrees as being a hindrance in the marital marketplace. But the social custom of the male being the primary breadwinner is yet another facet of the situation...
Little do we know that kittenscribble is actually the ghostwriter of the next Pixar film,
Now that makes me unreasonably happy.