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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-18 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-19 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-19 08:09 am (UTC)And, oh yeah - I took Organic Chem and Neurophysiology over at Harvard during summer school for the easy A's.
Summers is a nitwit.
(no subject)
From:um....
Date: 2005-02-20 08:53 pm (UTC)The only possible use I could think of for such knowledge, by the way, is to explain a part of the numerical differences which exist between male and female engineers. As in, in the perfect society, where there is no gener bias whatsoever, men might still outnumber women in engineering jobs withough making the society any less perfect. (If there were innate differences in potential, the person in charge of said perfect society wouldn't worry about a gender disparity in engineering, because he or she would realize that the disparity was to be expected.)
If the innate disparity were true, it wouldn't justify denying women jobs for which they were qualified. You'd still have to judge people as individuals and measure their abilities fairly. You just might not suspect a nefarious bias if the ratio of men to women hovered around 21:19 instead of 1:1.
Of course, there's probably no way to measure potential anyway, and, even if we could, the the results of the study -- however they turned out -- might not help get rid of a gender bias (by which I mean unfairly dismissing a qualified individual because of gender). So maybe it's not something we need to know.
The only way I can think Summers suggestion bad is if it provides ammunition to people who want to keep women out of the sciences. (I don't think anyone would argue that Summers wants to.) Otherwise, he's presenting a theory to explain a gender imbalance. If it's wrong, it's wrong. But we shouldn't call it bad unless it leads to bad results.
Re: um....
From:Re: um....
From:Re: um....
From:no subject
Date: 2005-02-23 01:52 pm (UTC)Here's a tangentially-related link discussing a gender-related "issue" among women in technical/well-paying professions.
Okay enough serious comments:
>rather personally, I'm afraid. Yes, there's quite a bit of societal
>pressure going on, but... genetic? (Is he calling me unnatural?)
Not that there would be anything wrong with being a little unnatural. In fact, maybe inclinations toward things technical are just the beginning... not merely unnatural, but a mutation, and next come the psychic abilities, adamantium claws, and/or ability to borrow the powers of others.
>This story eventually spawned a star, the low-class rebel car who
>rose defiantly through the ranks by being the fastest.
Little do we know that kittenscribble is actually the ghostwriter of the next Pixar film, and these childhood memories are her inspiration ;-)
(no subject)
From:Hot Wheels = awesome! Harvard prez = asshole
Date: 2005-03-14 07:45 pm (UTC)And to add something - even if Mr. Summers doesn't make his point to purposefully hold back women in scientific fields, isn't it possible that he and those that hold his perspective (and positions of power), might in their patronizing and condescending manner, create a negative environment for women working and studying in "a man's world", and therefore hamper their ability to improve and grow? Wouldn't they be in the wrong for even holding that position so firmly when it has such obvious negative repercussions for resulting female performance in such a dampening environment? And shouldn't the president of such a prestigious university priding itself on being on the forefront of modern science have a slightly less sexist view?
To even suggest that there might be some genetic disability of sorts bred inherently into womens' genetics codes is tantamount to a complete and horrifying new breed of sexism. To hypothesize that women are less qualified for certain fields or positions because of their upbringing has some merit to it, as the nature+nurture theory goes, but it's downright wrong to suggest that our genes would decide ability to that extent.
But who am I to contest the Harvard president? I'm just a lowly state university grad, and dropped out of the sciences to boot. I guess I got the memo that I just wasn't born to be a doctor after all.
-Karen (kitten's kid sis)
ha.
Date: 2005-05-17 07:43 am (UTC)