So, there's this topic I've been mulling over for a while now. The discrimination and harassment officer came to give a lecture to us TA's at our weekly meeting. The thing is, its kind of a sensitive topic, and I really don't want to ruffle any one's feathers. On the other hand, if I don't ask, I don't learn, so please try to keep an open mind and realize that I am not trying to offend. Each paragraph covers a different issue I am struggling with, and opinions/insights on any or all of them would be helpful. Here goes.The ombudsperson, who's gender will remain ambiguous for the sake of my point, and whom I will refer to as Sam(-antha or -uel), came in to speak about discrimination in the student environment. Sam started with an introduction about race, and race stereotypes, then gender and gender stereotypes. There was quite a bit of statistical data to back up Sam's claims but it was clear that these were issues of personal relevance rather than pure conclusions from the data.
The claim that really surprised me, and one that Sam enforced particularly vehemently was the distinction between girl, woman, and lady. I have never paid any attention to the difference these labels imply. In fact, I would have even said they are synonymous. Sam took great exception to this fact, stating that a girl, is a female human shy of age 18, a woman is a female human aged more than 18 years, and lady is a class distinction and social assumption. I tried asking questions, and any time I said girl, Sam fiercely interrupted me and would not let me continue until I had said woman, at which point, more often than not, I forgot what I was asking. My professor raised his hand at one point with a reply to Sam taking exception to the term lady, stating that lady was a compliment, synonymous with gentlemen. Sam replied by asking how a lady was expected to behave, and they argued back and forth for a while before Sam conceded that my professor was just from a different era. My professor is ancient. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he had witnessed the colonization of the western United States. And Sam is quite old, all grey hair at the least, but not at retirement just yet. My question is, in this day and age, with reasonable young adults such as myself and my readers, is this still a valid concern? I've always used, guys/girls, dudes/lady-dudes, bi*ches/c*cksuckers, whatever...
The second issue that I found surprising was the need for "women only" manufacturing classes. The reasoning behind these classes is that when in a class of dominantly male students, the females tend not to take initiative and therefore don't learn the machines as well as a guy would. In order to address my issue with these special classes, lets take an example: genderless people (which is the ideal in an educational environment). Student A and B go into a shop class, and student B takes hold of the machines, makes the part, and does the work, while student A stands behind B and watches. Then when both tested, student B gets a pass, and student A fails. Why? Because student B did the work. Student B took the initiative to actively learn while student A did not. So the grade seems fair? Or should we make a class where only student A can attend, and make sure student A gets the education that he/she was unwilling to apply him/herself toward? Perhaps this is the method that is used in high school, but college is voluntary, only students who want to be there pay that much money to go. If student A doesn't want to learn, fine, right? But what if student A is a girl, and student B is a guy? now all of a sudden student A should be given extra opportunities to learn? should be given "women only" classes? That tastes a little like "special privileges" doesn't it? And isn't giving special privileges to women a recognition, even a validation, of their need for such treatment? Isn't a "women only" class simply underlining the fact that people think they can't do as well and so should be treated differently? Perhaps there is another metric I'm missing here. And when I asked Sam if there was, the answer is that the school is trying to raise the number of women in attendance in the engineering program. Which I also disagree with, because if you make special compensations to raise the statistics in one group, that's equivalent to padding your data, which I find ironic for the school of engineering and applied science.Last is very similar to the previous issue, except that instead of gender, it involves race. Being half Asian, but not looking it, gives me the unique perspective of seeing both sides. I'm treated as middle-class white-America by my peers and friends, yet I am a minority, especially here in Colorado. I visited the multicultural center once, and have never gone back. I was treated with a little bit of scorn because I don't actually look Asian. So here is this middle-class white guy coming into the center looking for some help. Needless to say, not the warmest welcome one would expect to receive. My issue with this is the same as my issue with gender, and again, I suspect it arises from ignorance about all the intricacies of the issue.
The conclusion that I have come to is that compensation and special treatment are not effective means of breaking down sexual and racial barriers in an institution. In fact, I would posit that it causes the opposite of the desired effect by drawing real, tangible, boundaries between the different race and gender groups. Perhaps it makes the numbers look better, but what should we be more concerned with, attendance numbers, or segregationist thought?
The unfortunate result of all this is that I've now begun to notice. Notice the fact that some of my student teams only have 1 girl in them, notice the teams that have girls as the team leader, or notice when a girl is doing active work in the machine shop. Notice when an Asian is doing the writing, notice when a black student is giving the presentation. And worst of all, once or twice, the thought "wow, good for them" fluttered across my mind. Where once I wouldn't have noticed, I now distinguish, where once I wouldn't have cared, I now feel the differences. I once was blind, but now I see, and that is definitely not a good thing.
-Ty
first image courtesy of Wikimedia
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Interesting post. I've wrestled with similar ideas.
ReplyDeleteIt seems particularly unfortunate that a person giving lectures on harassment is emotionally invlolved with many of the concepts. "Ladies and gentlemen!" is a phrase commonly used to this day in public events and I've never heard a single person complain that he/she was referred to as either of those. It sounds more like a personal agenda meeting.
I'm not sure what to think about having separate Engineering classes for girls (oops, don't tell "Sam" - I meant women). It seems like reverse discrimination. It also seems that those women might not be entirely prepared to participate in the workforce when they graduate.
I agree with you - I think that many of these types of things cause more separation and a stronger realization of differences.
I guess my only question is: what can you do about it? If you say anything, you're racist or sexist and you end up compounding the problem.
Yes Ty, I think you are missing a component of Sam's argument about the women-only manufacturing classes. You got wrapped up in the definition of "initiative" that applys to a class-structure roles for leadership, rather than stereotypical gender-roles. Though, I think you are more right that Sam about what the University is doing to the women in the Engineering department.
ReplyDeleteWhat Same was agruing, which is true, and you already know is that: Women are socialy and unconsiously taught to allow men to run "male" gender defined roles, that men are dominate or more abled for those roles. For example just look at the Playschool line of toys little girls have plastic kitchens and boys have plastic work benches.
The idea Sam is trying to get across is that women are more apt to cross gender lines and take on "mens" roles if there are no men around to fulfill those roles. This idea is also pushed in math classes in elementary schools. This was (was) a popular educational method in 1980 and 1990s. For the most part it has fallen out of favor.
The idea behind the educational-theory is that women will be comfortable around other women. They don't have to have social worries that they are being seen has unfeminine for taking the dominate role emascualating the male (and thereby never getting a date).
Do I agree with this philisophy of teaching? No. I am sure "Sam" has a PHD in this topic that you were lectured in. However, as I am a product of the 80s and actually lived the experiment as a girl, I don't think it works. I believe to even-out precieved gender roles is the job of the parent in the Playschool-preschool-age of child-social development. (so buy your child both the kitchen and the work-bench not one or the other.)
I totally agree with you that the "seperate but equal" way of teaching has been proved not equal again and again not only in women's education but was made obvious in the civil rights movement. There is a lot of evidence (sorry I don't have my education books in front of me to give you numbers or studies) that show that women's only classes are taught in a more elementary fashion than their men only counterparts. Also, when women get out into the work force we are stuffed back in their social-gender-roles and have no idea how to interact with men in the field because men and women did not learn together.
The study that Sam was speaking of does not relate to who takes on a leadership role in classroom groups. Leadership in groups (i.e. your genderless Student A and B) is a micro-social behavior. Women deffering leadership to precieved gender-roles is a macro-social behavior.
It is important to raise the numbers of women in science and math related fields, to redefine these fields as gender ambigious. Though, this should be taught in early-childhood development and not in college to further seperate these women as being "unusual".
To further argue against Sam's idea for seperate but equal classes is that the women who are already in a math or science field obviously have been taught that no gender is better suited or able to perform math and science tasks. I think it is ridiculous that someone needs to come lecture these women about how the the University "understands" how "strange and alone" they are, and telling them they are obviously failing and need to have an all girls-class so they can grow up to be sucessful. (See what I did there, Sam's arguement that "women" are grown and that the University needs to interfere thus lowering their status to "girl")Ummm, I think by breaking through the stupid social barriers, they already did that, this is Graduate School not Kindergarten.
So the woman/girl/lady thing seems like a personal vendetta. In that particular case, I'm not sure it matters, but in a more general sense, I can see how it's important to consciously be aware at the labels you're placing on people. The kids I worked with last year would get so annoyed at being called African American. In most cases, either their family has lived in the US longer than mine has, or they were Haitian, Jamaican or Dominican. They identified as being black, but their roots were so far gone from Africa, it was insulting to insinuate they didn't belong to this half of the world. I can see how someone who believes very strongly in the pre 18/post 18 definitions of woman and girl would be offended if she believes you think of her as a little girl. Again, I don't think it's a big deal to most people.
ReplyDeleteAs for the all female classes, I think it's a good idea to have the option. Erin, above, said "to even-out precieved gender roles is the job of the parent in the Playschool-preschool-age of child-social development," which I find interesting. I imagine she and I have come from similar nurturing environments. My parents never really told me being good at math and science was not particularly girly. Other kids aren't so lucky. It's true that there are fewer girls in math and science related fields. It's true that fewer girls have operated any kind of heavy machinery prior to the machine shop class. What to do about this seems to be a bit of a difference in philosophy of the role of a university. You (both?) seem to think the university is place to weed out those too weak to make it before the real world. I see it as a place where everyone goes to get an education. In theory, everyone getting a diploma should have roughly the same education (or at least meet minimum standards). Following that theory, an educator tries to educate every kid in their class. If one comes in with lower math skills, you offer extra help, possibly in the form of a remedial math course (for credit or not). If there are too many people who want to take a class, you turn it into 2 classes, so everyone can learn. If you accept it as fact that girls are more shy about machinery than boys, as an educator, it seems natural to split it up into two classes. You're likely going to have two classes anyway, and if half that class gets a better education because of it, I say that's a really easy win. I don't understand what the problem with it is. I guess you're cottling them the same way you cottle someone with worse math skills, but I see both problems as a background handicap easily overcome. I also think that if more people are getting a better education because of it, it's worth it.
It is a bandaid, though. It's true that there are fewer girls in science. It's true that asians perform betters than whites who perfrom better than latinos who perform better than blacks. I see that as a societal problem. There are a lot of reasons they're behind, and not many of them are easy to fix. There are schools that educate blacks to perform as well as their white counterparts, but it takes some extra work. Give them, and sciencey women, a handicap for what society is putting them through in their education phase of life, and they can be just as effective in the real world as those who don't have that problem to begin with.
I hope that was somewhat coherent. We can definitely talk about this more if you wanna :-)