One thing I love is how across time and culture there is a rich history of trans men, women and non binary people, from nádleehi to mukhannathun to kathoeys. Not to mention homosexuality, asexuality and polyamory. The lived human experience is beautiful, varied and as complex as nature herself.
On what makes a particular person a woman, I love how personal and varied the responses can be. For me, my desire to have kids started young - I was drawn to maternity. There are beautiful essays by trans women who share that call to motherhood (and grieve their infertility). Yet I would never proclaim my experience of being drawn to motherhood as universal to all women, or something that “makes a woman”, since I know so many amazing women who have zero interest in becoming mothers.
On my own womanhood, I would also say I *love* my body. I have what some refer to as “child bearing” hips, breasts that have seen months of breastfeeding. My body is a soft body. It took work but being grounded in my body, loving my body, has been a powerful way of connecting to my womanness. Again, this is a place where there are beautiful essays by trans women who have gone on a journey to embrace their bodies. But I'd never believe (much less *say*) that a woman struggling to love her body is less a woman!
I guess part of what I'm getting at is that I don't feel a need for a universal definition of the qualities or traits or desires that 'women' share. And I don't think that universality is necessary to embrace womanhood, love and respect other's stories or celebrate shared lived experiences. ,
One so rarely sees an acknowledgement in these conversations that a woman can be a woman *without* a desire --- or ability --- for motherhood or some sort of maternal instinct toward small children. As a now-grown woman who's never been terribly fond of babies (nor they of me; looking at me almost without exception makes them cry) nor wanted marriage or motherhood for herself, and who moves in circles where the chief end of woman is usually believed to be exactly that, I've gotten used to being erased from the conversation. But that group of women is so much bigger than you'd think unless you've had reason to brush up against it, perhaps because we tend to be shamed into silence.
I am deeply uncomfortable with the language that has emerged around menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and lactation. The ability to carry a pregnancy, give birth, and feed an infant is exclusively tied to female mammals. Now women are being told we have to cede the language and space around reproduction to people whose gender identification is male. You see terms like "pregnant people," "birthing persons," and "chestfeeding."
Now that a vanishingly few number of men want to enter the female sphere of childbirth, women are expected to remake this space to make men comfortable, even though 99.95% of "pregnant people" are women! I feel like putting one of those "no boyz allowd" signs on our red tents.
I test ontological claims best by referring back to our biology explicitly. There are things I can provide my children - a womb, breastmilk - that it is physically impossible for my husband to provide. When I think about how families ought to be in an ideal sense, it typically relates to how to best support those fundamental biological realities. A turning point for me was when I realized: until the past 100 years or so, formula was unreliable. Every human being was dependent on a woman not just during his or her nine months in the womb, but for the subsequent 12-36+ months of nursing. And although we like to think formula "saves lives," it largely has brought about the complete demise of wet nursing practically. We think our modern technology has made things better, but our ancestors had already worked out a pretty good solution relying on women's biology. And on a practical level, the sheer pressure of using formula is immense. There's this idea that it's "just as good." We've had decades of data now and it's pretty obvious that formula (though it can be very helpful in certain circumstances) is inferior to breastmilk. My husband and I both have conditions that have been found to be more common when babies are breastfed for a shorter duration (as we were). I never anticipated becoming a lactivist, but the biggest shift in my thinking has been around breastfeeding.
The near disappearance of wet nursing speaks to Leah's point (from Charles Taylor) about the loss of the porous self -- which may well be associated with the scattering of extended family to far distances.
When I think of the "safety" of infant formula, I think of the boycott of Nestle for many years, for the way they marketed their formula to women regardless of whether or not the women had access to clean water for the formula or for washing bottles.
The Nestle horror was primarily in poor countries, but here in the U.S. breastfeeding has become a special privilege of the better educated and higher income woman. This comes from the dismantling of the welfare system that used to allow poor women to stay home with infants and preschool children. For poor women with at least one low-paying job, taking a baby to the employer or college child care nursery, and breast feeding on breaks? I doubt that this is common.
I can imagine neighborhood solutions to this -- women supporting each other, including wet nursing if ever needed.
Toxic purity cultures and toxic promiscuity cultures. That's an excellent way of describing the two extremes.
As a dad with four daughters, I found these essays to be much more interesting than I would have expected. I don't really have any problem making distinctions between men and women. They're all four very different personalities, but all unquestionably female.
I've been enjoying your essays, but I have to say that I honestly don't think this is a helpful question. The distinctions that I see between men and women in my life--and I'm the mother of a grown son, as well as the wife of a dear husband--are little more than physical: they're taller and stronger than I am, so they can reach the high shelves or carry the heavy groceries. Otherwise, there is very little difference between us. I may be more prone to becoming tearful, but neither of them is in any way out of touch with their emotions. They are both tender, caring human beings, as well as very intelligent ones. They're far more mathematically inclined than I am, but I've known too many women who excel in math and science to want to categorize those qualities as "male." I think the question is unhelpful because it focuses attention on what so often divides us, but men as well as women can be--and should be--caring, tender, and true, just as women are able to express all the good qualities that have been traditionally associated with men, such as courage and strength. My husband was every bit as good a parent to our son as I was; no task was beneath him, and none was ever carried out in anything but a loving way. (Actually, he was much better than I was at that--he's far more patient than I am. But I don't think that's a gender difference, just a failing of mine.) And our son, I know, will do the same for his wife and children when it's his turn. Society does make it hard to be female in many ways, but I haven't seen any inherent differences between men and women when men choose not to act as if there are.
Some ways I find it helpful think about men and women being different are the following: that women's bodies are a more profound witness to the interdependence of human life; that women embody change as they move through the phases of maiden, mother, and crone, while men embody constancy as their bodies remain relatively unchanged throughout their lives. I'm mostly happy for these ideas to live in a fuzzy space where they are justified by the fact that the bodily experiences of humans are an integral part of who we are.
I am, however, incredibly skeptical that a rule or law can ever be justified by an ontological claim about gender. In a world without perfect information, it can be necessary for a rule to reflect an average experience, such as requiring men to register for the draft and not women. But a philosophical or theological justification that hinges on such an ontological claim has a much higher bar to overcome. It cannot make an argument that the rule is right for most women: the rule must be just for *all* women, even those whose particular attributes are more similar to those of men. So I think that my Catholic friends have a much more difficult job of making ontological claims about gender, since their ontological claims must actually justify some inflexible rules about what men and women may do.
Late comment. Was reading the Wikipedia article about Jordan Peterson, whom I hadn't heard of before, and was surprised to have an involuntary smile of recognition when I read this: "Peterson holds the view that the concept of cosmic "order" is masculine, while "chaos" is characterised as feminine. He believes that these traits exist inherently and beyond any temporal constraints, not as results of societal or cultural structures.[citation needed] To Peterson, "culture" is "symbolically, archetypally, mythically male," while "chaos — the unknown — is symbolically associated with the feminine." He has expressed that while it may be considered "unfortunate" that this is the case, any attempt to change or subvert these traits would result in a loss of humanity, saying, "You know you can say, 'Well isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter because that is how it's represented. [...] And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything."
I considered my involuntary smile of recognition. Ah! It had an element of satisfaction! Perhaps because if women create chaos, this means that it's women who are the ones who shake things up, change a stagnant order into -- something better, or something worse -- but definitely instigate change.
Peterson has studied mythology a lot, and Jung -- perhaps Robert Bly and Marion Woodman -- so he may have studied the many examples of goddesses who tear everything up unless a man learns how to relate to them properly -- (e.g. Bly and Woodman: "The Maiden King : The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine"). I'm not a Jungian myself, but I do admire Robert Bly.
My reaction is "that's all very well, but put half a dozen boys and one girl into a kitchen to do dishes and see which of them imposes order". I've had years of experience with that and it's almost never the boys. Not to say it can't be, or that women are always orderly, just that Peterson's sweeping generalization is insufficient here.
Just want to say that I love this in your article, Leah: "The buffered self draws a line of his or her own choosing between the self and the world, and trusts that he or she can choose what shapes them. The porous self is open to influence, to demands, to dependence. He or she exists in horizontal relationship to others and vertical relationship to the divine."
I'm quite persuaded by Bachiochi's focus on external vs. internal reproduction. This binary is the end result of a long evolutionary process of two different reproductive strategies: there's the sex that makes lots of small gametes and so their strategy is to spread them as far and wide as possible and there's the sex that makes fewer, larger, gametes, and so this will make them more selective about when/with whom to mate. I do think this goes a long way to explain many other population-level observations that we see (preferences for certain kinds of professions, kinds of competencies, patterns in engagement etc).
But it is ALSO true that there always be exceptions to population-level patterns (i.e. there are going to be some small-gamete producers who gravitate towards working with people rather than things and those big-gamete producing helicopter pilots) and so we need not make patterns into rules or moral standards. Apparently studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that all of them divided men's work from women's work, but not always in the same way except for two cases: hunting large aquatic mammals and metallurgy. This shows both the large degree of flexibility regarding sex-based roles and the biological limits of that flexibility.
I'm a woman because I make small gametes (and so are people who used to produce them or who have an unrealized potential to). Full stop. As Bachiochi also mentions often, neither souls nor virtues are sexed, so one can be a man and be merciful, a woman and courageous etc. If this weren't the case, Joan of Arc would be neither a woman nor a Saint.
tl;dr: Women like to work with people, men like to work with things, "Women in STEM" initiatives are doomed to fail and we should stop wasting time on them. Instead, lets make sure women who want to pursue STEM careers are supported, and also think about ways to ensure women's voices are included in software development without women themselves being software engineers.
When I was about 12, in 2002, I went to a Girl Scout event. Among the crafts and games, we had a lecture about "female empowerment." The speaker led with the statistic that the most gendered career is helicopter piloting. She further reported that only 4% of helicopter pilots were female, and encouraged us to be shocked and angered at this.
I bristled at this. I did not want to be a helicopter pilot. I did not know any women who wanted to be helicopter pilots. I knew plenty of women who were doctors, teachers and professors, though. I've sometimes heard this sort of disparity explained as "women like to work with people, and men like to work with things." In my opinion, this is mostly true, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time.
Despite this, I ended up in a male-dominated field, software engineering. I wanted to get married shortly after graduating college, and software engineering was one of the few fields that promised a high salary without a graduate degree or ten years of experience.
Even this experience, though, has merely confirmed my pre-existing beliefs. The few women who work as software engineers are either there for boring, practical reasons, like me, or are quirky personality types. I DO NOT mean to imply that quirky women are not women, and that feminism should not fight to make sure that they are welcome to pursue any career they want. I do, think, though, that awknowledging that many women who are currently thriving in software engineering are somehow different from the mean women is worthwhile if you want to understand the problem.
Anecdotally, many of the male devs I know spent a huge chunk of their adolescence teaching themselves to code. They were inately attracted to software engineering. I know very, very few female devs that did this. There are some interesting gender disparities at play here - a lot of "learn to code" advice definitely centers male, not female ways of learning. But I believe that men are inherently interested in software engineering in a way women are not.
Our society has been trying very hard for a very long time to encourage more women to pursue technical fields. This makes sense from a feminist perspective - technological jobs have lots of power, and we want more women in positions of power! We bristle when we see that women are not equally represented in a particular field. But the number of female software engineers has not moved much.
I think we should assume that we will never get as many women interested in software engineering as men. Instead, lets think about new ways to center female voices in software development. There are many styles of development, but I've often worked at companies that have a product manager and a designer on every development team. PMs and Designers are more gender-balanced fields. It would not be hard to use these levers to include more female voices in the development process. Low-code solutions are becoming more powerful every day. We could encourage our female administrators, designers and managers to use these. And, of course, at every company, it is really the execs who run the show. Plenty of women aim to climb the corporate ladder. Initiatives to bring more women into these rolls will lead to more women to be involved in software engineering.
More than 37% of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 1984, that number dropped sharply (and pay rose) when computer science became considered a 'hot field'. Similarly, teachers were primarily men for much of history.
I've seen a fair amount of data to back up that bullying, harassment and other poor treatment has much more to do with why women choose 'womanly' fields and men choose 'manly' fields. I've seen far less convincing data to support innate differences.
I don't think this is always true, and they are many outliers to "women like working with people; men with things" It isn't that simple and would hurt professionally. I'm autistic, timid. I wouldn't say I like working with people, really; it creates more stress for me and often inhibits doing a good job. I can never imagine being a teacher, doctor, or nurse. I value those professions, but it would be a hard job for me. I'm an urban planner, and I like the complexities of city things and the underlying policies that make them work. And some jobs don't really deal with "things" or people—like writing, lawyers (who don't always work in a courtroom), research jobs (in any field; it can be very abstract ideas), the arts, businesses fields (which are more things, to be fair, but men and women can be equally competent accountants, financial analysts, insurance agents, CEOs/CFOs, etc.) I also think this gendered thinking can often hurt men too, who would be great teachers or nurses but are still discouraged from working in such fields (which need more workers) as it is perceived as female-dominated.
I would never want to discourage women from pursuing engineering careers, my main beef is with programs that are trying to aggressively promote engineering to women. I think it might move the needle a bit, but it's ultimately a waste of time and money.
I see what you're saying, though, about how hard "things vs. people" sounds. I agree that it's not great, but I can't think of a better way to explain this at the moment.
I would say, though, that I disagree that we should be strongly encouraging more men to pursue teaching and nursing. I think that if the qualities of a field are inherently attractive to women, we should just accept that as one of the "dividing lines" that exist between the sexes. I think that if we accept that this is true, we can get more serious about finding ways to make sure that men are more included in these important aspects of society.
For example, if we wanted to include more men in elementary education (which I think is tremendously important, kids need to be exposed to men AND women) we could pay athletic coaches better, and devote more of the school day to athletics, since this tends to be something men are more interested in. Arts and craft time could devote more lessons to traditionally "male" crafts like woodworking, ideally with a male instructor.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to me. I don't think we agree completely, but I am enjoying the conversation.
My kids were lucky enough at one point to attend a private school where the art teacher was male, every classroom was led by a team of male and female teachers (with the leadership varying across gender). The favorite teacher taught physics, Yeats, and music. Earlier, their public elementary school teachers in Chicago and Atlanta were always women, and I think my son was disadvantaged by this.
I’m a woman and a professional software engineer. In my professional career, I’ve mostly worked at companies that do pair programming; that means I spent nearly all day every day working with another person. We’re constantly talking and collaborating with each other, and considering the human needs of both our colleagues who will run and maintain the systems we build (including our future selves) and the human end users.
I vastly prefer to work with other engineers who find empathy and working with people natural. I admit pair programming isn’t the standard/default practice in software, but I feel it makes better software — and that empathetic engineers build better software. So, even if the default ways we build software today isn’t right for most women, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work in a more collaborative way that does appeal to more women.
Shades of Erik Erickson, whose classic book on stages of human development talks of observations of preschool girls choosing dolls, boys choosing to build with blocks. (For what it's worth, I wanted both, and when my nursery school teacher insisted I share the blocks with a boy, I was angry and certainly had no desire to help him. I just wanted to build by myself what I wanted to build -- with ALL the blocks.)
If you're familiar with Kohlberg's stages of moral development, a feminist researcher, you may also know Carol Gilligan's book, In a Different Voice. She presented evidence that girls and boys develop through the first three stages of moral development at a different pace and a different way than boys. One of her major findings is that as males and females mature, they tend to converge in the ways they decide what's morally right. I always found this a reassuring idea.
I can see something similar in the way men who were preoccupied with work in their first marriage, leaving the mother to take almost all responsibility for the their children -- often act totally different in a later second marriage. They've matured and learned what they missed earlier.
Another thing I want to mention -- is that from infancy, girls learn how to be female from the way they're treated and by observing the nonverbal body language of the adults around her -- not to mention the myriad other ways women introject the patriarchy and then reinforce it in each other (and in their own daughters.) This is one thing the second wave of feminism discovered: like racism, patriarchy is systemic and it's also within each oppressed person.
I don't mean that there aren't important biological differences among men and women. When it comes to traits and beliefs and feelings -- huge overlap in every normal curve. Part of this might be genetic; maybe some females are born "more feminine." But "more feminine" is always in the context of what their society and culture have decided is "feminine."
As a mechanical engineer, I appreciate your take. I was drawn to engineering because I wanted to work with roller coasters (which I suppose means I was interested in working with "things", but my main motivation was the joy it brings to people... so maybe not). I did, in fact, work as a roller coaster engineer for a number of years, though I'm currently a stay at home mom and am discerning how I want to continue using my engineering skills after we meet our second child this (!) week.
And I can't help but chuckle since a girlfriend of mine from grade school and high school is a helicopter pilot and also now a mom. I am happy to know some quirky and amazing women and hope that we can find support in our careers whether that comes from more female representation or stronger support from the males already in these types of careers.
I would for love you or others to expand more on this: "Men often find that their own moments of vulnerability are anticipated and cushioned by a society that is built to suit male norms..." How so?
Our bodies and the different experience each sex has based on our bodies' different capacities. I wondered about how you use the word "gender." Do you use it to refer to biological sex or to refer to the cultural roles of the sexes?
Late to the party here, but one thing that troubles me is the tendency in conservative Catholic circles to chastise men who are "effeminate" (without ever fully defining that term) when there is no similar pejorative term for masculinity. (Even "toxic masculinity" doesn't exactly map, because it assumes that the masculinity is warped, whereas "effeminate" seems to mean more like, "Behaving stereotypically like a woman, which is a bad thing.") At the risk of being too harsh, when I see someone use the word "effeminate," I'm thinking that the person can't have truly thought out carefully what that word actually means, but it's just a vague sense that a man is not truly a "manly man" like the rest of us manly men. (And yes, while many will despise a man who, say, stands by and allows his children to be abused, or doesn't stand up for the innocent, it's not like we don't recognize those same things as serious faults when women commit them.)
In my experience, men are more likely to have ideas of ways to improve things (for better or for worse) and visions of what the next step should be (for a family or organization), while we women are more likely to notice the details in the world around us, including sensing when someone needs some extra encouragement. Of course, this difference is not absolute! I see male-female complementarity more on a spiritual level: we can't afford to lose sight of the goal, but we also need to attend to the tasks we encounter on the way.
> How do you text claims...
One way is by broadening my knowledge of gender expression in unfamiliar cultures. If something’s going to be ontological, it’s got to be universal.
Yes! Same!
One thing I love is how across time and culture there is a rich history of trans men, women and non binary people, from nádleehi to mukhannathun to kathoeys. Not to mention homosexuality, asexuality and polyamory. The lived human experience is beautiful, varied and as complex as nature herself.
On what makes a particular person a woman, I love how personal and varied the responses can be. For me, my desire to have kids started young - I was drawn to maternity. There are beautiful essays by trans women who share that call to motherhood (and grieve their infertility). Yet I would never proclaim my experience of being drawn to motherhood as universal to all women, or something that “makes a woman”, since I know so many amazing women who have zero interest in becoming mothers.
On my own womanhood, I would also say I *love* my body. I have what some refer to as “child bearing” hips, breasts that have seen months of breastfeeding. My body is a soft body. It took work but being grounded in my body, loving my body, has been a powerful way of connecting to my womanness. Again, this is a place where there are beautiful essays by trans women who have gone on a journey to embrace their bodies. But I'd never believe (much less *say*) that a woman struggling to love her body is less a woman!
I guess part of what I'm getting at is that I don't feel a need for a universal definition of the qualities or traits or desires that 'women' share. And I don't think that universality is necessary to embrace womanhood, love and respect other's stories or celebrate shared lived experiences. ,
One so rarely sees an acknowledgement in these conversations that a woman can be a woman *without* a desire --- or ability --- for motherhood or some sort of maternal instinct toward small children. As a now-grown woman who's never been terribly fond of babies (nor they of me; looking at me almost without exception makes them cry) nor wanted marriage or motherhood for herself, and who moves in circles where the chief end of woman is usually believed to be exactly that, I've gotten used to being erased from the conversation. But that group of women is so much bigger than you'd think unless you've had reason to brush up against it, perhaps because we tend to be shamed into silence.
I am deeply uncomfortable with the language that has emerged around menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and lactation. The ability to carry a pregnancy, give birth, and feed an infant is exclusively tied to female mammals. Now women are being told we have to cede the language and space around reproduction to people whose gender identification is male. You see terms like "pregnant people," "birthing persons," and "chestfeeding."
Now that a vanishingly few number of men want to enter the female sphere of childbirth, women are expected to remake this space to make men comfortable, even though 99.95% of "pregnant people" are women! I feel like putting one of those "no boyz allowd" signs on our red tents.
I test ontological claims best by referring back to our biology explicitly. There are things I can provide my children - a womb, breastmilk - that it is physically impossible for my husband to provide. When I think about how families ought to be in an ideal sense, it typically relates to how to best support those fundamental biological realities. A turning point for me was when I realized: until the past 100 years or so, formula was unreliable. Every human being was dependent on a woman not just during his or her nine months in the womb, but for the subsequent 12-36+ months of nursing. And although we like to think formula "saves lives," it largely has brought about the complete demise of wet nursing practically. We think our modern technology has made things better, but our ancestors had already worked out a pretty good solution relying on women's biology. And on a practical level, the sheer pressure of using formula is immense. There's this idea that it's "just as good." We've had decades of data now and it's pretty obvious that formula (though it can be very helpful in certain circumstances) is inferior to breastmilk. My husband and I both have conditions that have been found to be more common when babies are breastfed for a shorter duration (as we were). I never anticipated becoming a lactivist, but the biggest shift in my thinking has been around breastfeeding.
The near disappearance of wet nursing speaks to Leah's point (from Charles Taylor) about the loss of the porous self -- which may well be associated with the scattering of extended family to far distances.
When I think of the "safety" of infant formula, I think of the boycott of Nestle for many years, for the way they marketed their formula to women regardless of whether or not the women had access to clean water for the formula or for washing bottles.
The Nestle horror was primarily in poor countries, but here in the U.S. breastfeeding has become a special privilege of the better educated and higher income woman. This comes from the dismantling of the welfare system that used to allow poor women to stay home with infants and preschool children. For poor women with at least one low-paying job, taking a baby to the employer or college child care nursery, and breast feeding on breaks? I doubt that this is common.
I can imagine neighborhood solutions to this -- women supporting each other, including wet nursing if ever needed.
Thanks! Great point.
Toxic purity cultures and toxic promiscuity cultures. That's an excellent way of describing the two extremes.
As a dad with four daughters, I found these essays to be much more interesting than I would have expected. I don't really have any problem making distinctions between men and women. They're all four very different personalities, but all unquestionably female.
I've been enjoying your essays, but I have to say that I honestly don't think this is a helpful question. The distinctions that I see between men and women in my life--and I'm the mother of a grown son, as well as the wife of a dear husband--are little more than physical: they're taller and stronger than I am, so they can reach the high shelves or carry the heavy groceries. Otherwise, there is very little difference between us. I may be more prone to becoming tearful, but neither of them is in any way out of touch with their emotions. They are both tender, caring human beings, as well as very intelligent ones. They're far more mathematically inclined than I am, but I've known too many women who excel in math and science to want to categorize those qualities as "male." I think the question is unhelpful because it focuses attention on what so often divides us, but men as well as women can be--and should be--caring, tender, and true, just as women are able to express all the good qualities that have been traditionally associated with men, such as courage and strength. My husband was every bit as good a parent to our son as I was; no task was beneath him, and none was ever carried out in anything but a loving way. (Actually, he was much better than I was at that--he's far more patient than I am. But I don't think that's a gender difference, just a failing of mine.) And our son, I know, will do the same for his wife and children when it's his turn. Society does make it hard to be female in many ways, but I haven't seen any inherent differences between men and women when men choose not to act as if there are.
Some ways I find it helpful think about men and women being different are the following: that women's bodies are a more profound witness to the interdependence of human life; that women embody change as they move through the phases of maiden, mother, and crone, while men embody constancy as their bodies remain relatively unchanged throughout their lives. I'm mostly happy for these ideas to live in a fuzzy space where they are justified by the fact that the bodily experiences of humans are an integral part of who we are.
I am, however, incredibly skeptical that a rule or law can ever be justified by an ontological claim about gender. In a world without perfect information, it can be necessary for a rule to reflect an average experience, such as requiring men to register for the draft and not women. But a philosophical or theological justification that hinges on such an ontological claim has a much higher bar to overcome. It cannot make an argument that the rule is right for most women: the rule must be just for *all* women, even those whose particular attributes are more similar to those of men. So I think that my Catholic friends have a much more difficult job of making ontological claims about gender, since their ontological claims must actually justify some inflexible rules about what men and women may do.
Late comment. Was reading the Wikipedia article about Jordan Peterson, whom I hadn't heard of before, and was surprised to have an involuntary smile of recognition when I read this: "Peterson holds the view that the concept of cosmic "order" is masculine, while "chaos" is characterised as feminine. He believes that these traits exist inherently and beyond any temporal constraints, not as results of societal or cultural structures.[citation needed] To Peterson, "culture" is "symbolically, archetypally, mythically male," while "chaos — the unknown — is symbolically associated with the feminine." He has expressed that while it may be considered "unfortunate" that this is the case, any attempt to change or subvert these traits would result in a loss of humanity, saying, "You know you can say, 'Well isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter because that is how it's represented. [...] And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything."
I considered my involuntary smile of recognition. Ah! It had an element of satisfaction! Perhaps because if women create chaos, this means that it's women who are the ones who shake things up, change a stagnant order into -- something better, or something worse -- but definitely instigate change.
Peterson has studied mythology a lot, and Jung -- perhaps Robert Bly and Marion Woodman -- so he may have studied the many examples of goddesses who tear everything up unless a man learns how to relate to them properly -- (e.g. Bly and Woodman: "The Maiden King : The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine"). I'm not a Jungian myself, but I do admire Robert Bly.
My reaction is "that's all very well, but put half a dozen boys and one girl into a kitchen to do dishes and see which of them imposes order". I've had years of experience with that and it's almost never the boys. Not to say it can't be, or that women are always orderly, just that Peterson's sweeping generalization is insufficient here.
True. I too can think of loads of counterarguments to Peterson's idea.
Just want to say that I love this in your article, Leah: "The buffered self draws a line of his or her own choosing between the self and the world, and trusts that he or she can choose what shapes them. The porous self is open to influence, to demands, to dependence. He or she exists in horizontal relationship to others and vertical relationship to the divine."
I'm quite persuaded by Bachiochi's focus on external vs. internal reproduction. This binary is the end result of a long evolutionary process of two different reproductive strategies: there's the sex that makes lots of small gametes and so their strategy is to spread them as far and wide as possible and there's the sex that makes fewer, larger, gametes, and so this will make them more selective about when/with whom to mate. I do think this goes a long way to explain many other population-level observations that we see (preferences for certain kinds of professions, kinds of competencies, patterns in engagement etc).
But it is ALSO true that there always be exceptions to population-level patterns (i.e. there are going to be some small-gamete producers who gravitate towards working with people rather than things and those big-gamete producing helicopter pilots) and so we need not make patterns into rules or moral standards. Apparently studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that all of them divided men's work from women's work, but not always in the same way except for two cases: hunting large aquatic mammals and metallurgy. This shows both the large degree of flexibility regarding sex-based roles and the biological limits of that flexibility.
I'm a woman because I make small gametes (and so are people who used to produce them or who have an unrealized potential to). Full stop. As Bachiochi also mentions often, neither souls nor virtues are sexed, so one can be a man and be merciful, a woman and courageous etc. If this weren't the case, Joan of Arc would be neither a woman nor a Saint.
tl;dr: Women like to work with people, men like to work with things, "Women in STEM" initiatives are doomed to fail and we should stop wasting time on them. Instead, lets make sure women who want to pursue STEM careers are supported, and also think about ways to ensure women's voices are included in software development without women themselves being software engineers.
When I was about 12, in 2002, I went to a Girl Scout event. Among the crafts and games, we had a lecture about "female empowerment." The speaker led with the statistic that the most gendered career is helicopter piloting. She further reported that only 4% of helicopter pilots were female, and encouraged us to be shocked and angered at this.
I bristled at this. I did not want to be a helicopter pilot. I did not know any women who wanted to be helicopter pilots. I knew plenty of women who were doctors, teachers and professors, though. I've sometimes heard this sort of disparity explained as "women like to work with people, and men like to work with things." In my opinion, this is mostly true, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time.
Despite this, I ended up in a male-dominated field, software engineering. I wanted to get married shortly after graduating college, and software engineering was one of the few fields that promised a high salary without a graduate degree or ten years of experience.
Even this experience, though, has merely confirmed my pre-existing beliefs. The few women who work as software engineers are either there for boring, practical reasons, like me, or are quirky personality types. I DO NOT mean to imply that quirky women are not women, and that feminism should not fight to make sure that they are welcome to pursue any career they want. I do, think, though, that awknowledging that many women who are currently thriving in software engineering are somehow different from the mean women is worthwhile if you want to understand the problem.
Anecdotally, many of the male devs I know spent a huge chunk of their adolescence teaching themselves to code. They were inately attracted to software engineering. I know very, very few female devs that did this. There are some interesting gender disparities at play here - a lot of "learn to code" advice definitely centers male, not female ways of learning. But I believe that men are inherently interested in software engineering in a way women are not.
Our society has been trying very hard for a very long time to encourage more women to pursue technical fields. This makes sense from a feminist perspective - technological jobs have lots of power, and we want more women in positions of power! We bristle when we see that women are not equally represented in a particular field. But the number of female software engineers has not moved much.
I think we should assume that we will never get as many women interested in software engineering as men. Instead, lets think about new ways to center female voices in software development. There are many styles of development, but I've often worked at companies that have a product manager and a designer on every development team. PMs and Designers are more gender-balanced fields. It would not be hard to use these levers to include more female voices in the development process. Low-code solutions are becoming more powerful every day. We could encourage our female administrators, designers and managers to use these. And, of course, at every company, it is really the execs who run the show. Plenty of women aim to climb the corporate ladder. Initiatives to bring more women into these rolls will lead to more women to be involved in software engineering.
More than 37% of computer science degrees were awarded to women in 1984, that number dropped sharply (and pay rose) when computer science became considered a 'hot field'. Similarly, teachers were primarily men for much of history.
I've seen a fair amount of data to back up that bullying, harassment and other poor treatment has much more to do with why women choose 'womanly' fields and men choose 'manly' fields. I've seen far less convincing data to support innate differences.
I don't think this is always true, and they are many outliers to "women like working with people; men with things" It isn't that simple and would hurt professionally. I'm autistic, timid. I wouldn't say I like working with people, really; it creates more stress for me and often inhibits doing a good job. I can never imagine being a teacher, doctor, or nurse. I value those professions, but it would be a hard job for me. I'm an urban planner, and I like the complexities of city things and the underlying policies that make them work. And some jobs don't really deal with "things" or people—like writing, lawyers (who don't always work in a courtroom), research jobs (in any field; it can be very abstract ideas), the arts, businesses fields (which are more things, to be fair, but men and women can be equally competent accountants, financial analysts, insurance agents, CEOs/CFOs, etc.) I also think this gendered thinking can often hurt men too, who would be great teachers or nurses but are still discouraged from working in such fields (which need more workers) as it is perceived as female-dominated.
I would never want to discourage women from pursuing engineering careers, my main beef is with programs that are trying to aggressively promote engineering to women. I think it might move the needle a bit, but it's ultimately a waste of time and money.
I see what you're saying, though, about how hard "things vs. people" sounds. I agree that it's not great, but I can't think of a better way to explain this at the moment.
I would say, though, that I disagree that we should be strongly encouraging more men to pursue teaching and nursing. I think that if the qualities of a field are inherently attractive to women, we should just accept that as one of the "dividing lines" that exist between the sexes. I think that if we accept that this is true, we can get more serious about finding ways to make sure that men are more included in these important aspects of society.
For example, if we wanted to include more men in elementary education (which I think is tremendously important, kids need to be exposed to men AND women) we could pay athletic coaches better, and devote more of the school day to athletics, since this tends to be something men are more interested in. Arts and craft time could devote more lessons to traditionally "male" crafts like woodworking, ideally with a male instructor.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to me. I don't think we agree completely, but I am enjoying the conversation.
My kids were lucky enough at one point to attend a private school where the art teacher was male, every classroom was led by a team of male and female teachers (with the leadership varying across gender). The favorite teacher taught physics, Yeats, and music. Earlier, their public elementary school teachers in Chicago and Atlanta were always women, and I think my son was disadvantaged by this.
I agree that STEM promotion is overall is a waste of money, and we should instead stress the importance of math and science in the classroom.
I’m a woman and a professional software engineer. In my professional career, I’ve mostly worked at companies that do pair programming; that means I spent nearly all day every day working with another person. We’re constantly talking and collaborating with each other, and considering the human needs of both our colleagues who will run and maintain the systems we build (including our future selves) and the human end users.
I vastly prefer to work with other engineers who find empathy and working with people natural. I admit pair programming isn’t the standard/default practice in software, but I feel it makes better software — and that empathetic engineers build better software. So, even if the default ways we build software today isn’t right for most women, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work in a more collaborative way that does appeal to more women.
Shades of Erik Erickson, whose classic book on stages of human development talks of observations of preschool girls choosing dolls, boys choosing to build with blocks. (For what it's worth, I wanted both, and when my nursery school teacher insisted I share the blocks with a boy, I was angry and certainly had no desire to help him. I just wanted to build by myself what I wanted to build -- with ALL the blocks.)
If you're familiar with Kohlberg's stages of moral development, a feminist researcher, you may also know Carol Gilligan's book, In a Different Voice. She presented evidence that girls and boys develop through the first three stages of moral development at a different pace and a different way than boys. One of her major findings is that as males and females mature, they tend to converge in the ways they decide what's morally right. I always found this a reassuring idea.
I can see something similar in the way men who were preoccupied with work in their first marriage, leaving the mother to take almost all responsibility for the their children -- often act totally different in a later second marriage. They've matured and learned what they missed earlier.
Another thing I want to mention -- is that from infancy, girls learn how to be female from the way they're treated and by observing the nonverbal body language of the adults around her -- not to mention the myriad other ways women introject the patriarchy and then reinforce it in each other (and in their own daughters.) This is one thing the second wave of feminism discovered: like racism, patriarchy is systemic and it's also within each oppressed person.
I don't mean that there aren't important biological differences among men and women. When it comes to traits and beliefs and feelings -- huge overlap in every normal curve. Part of this might be genetic; maybe some females are born "more feminine." But "more feminine" is always in the context of what their society and culture have decided is "feminine."
As a mechanical engineer, I appreciate your take. I was drawn to engineering because I wanted to work with roller coasters (which I suppose means I was interested in working with "things", but my main motivation was the joy it brings to people... so maybe not). I did, in fact, work as a roller coaster engineer for a number of years, though I'm currently a stay at home mom and am discerning how I want to continue using my engineering skills after we meet our second child this (!) week.
And I can't help but chuckle since a girlfriend of mine from grade school and high school is a helicopter pilot and also now a mom. I am happy to know some quirky and amazing women and hope that we can find support in our careers whether that comes from more female representation or stronger support from the males already in these types of careers.
The elusive female helicopter pilot!
Yeah, I don't think the helping aspect of engineering is discussed as much as it could be, and you could get more girls interested that way.
I would for love you or others to expand more on this: "Men often find that their own moments of vulnerability are anticipated and cushioned by a society that is built to suit male norms..." How so?
Not a complete answer but a book recommendation: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Our bodies and the different experience each sex has based on our bodies' different capacities. I wondered about how you use the word "gender." Do you use it to refer to biological sex or to refer to the cultural roles of the sexes?
Late to the party here, but one thing that troubles me is the tendency in conservative Catholic circles to chastise men who are "effeminate" (without ever fully defining that term) when there is no similar pejorative term for masculinity. (Even "toxic masculinity" doesn't exactly map, because it assumes that the masculinity is warped, whereas "effeminate" seems to mean more like, "Behaving stereotypically like a woman, which is a bad thing.") At the risk of being too harsh, when I see someone use the word "effeminate," I'm thinking that the person can't have truly thought out carefully what that word actually means, but it's just a vague sense that a man is not truly a "manly man" like the rest of us manly men. (And yes, while many will despise a man who, say, stands by and allows his children to be abused, or doesn't stand up for the innocent, it's not like we don't recognize those same things as serious faults when women commit them.)
In my experience, men are more likely to have ideas of ways to improve things (for better or for worse) and visions of what the next step should be (for a family or organization), while we women are more likely to notice the details in the world around us, including sensing when someone needs some extra encouragement. Of course, this difference is not absolute! I see male-female complementarity more on a spiritual level: we can't afford to lose sight of the goal, but we also need to attend to the tasks we encounter on the way.
All I can say is that my experience is different. :)
This is so good!