All Posts Tagged With: "gender"

Okay, the media isn’t all bad:

From Hillary Clinton’s speech last night (which I thought was quite good):

In 2008, [McCain] still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work.

Ramesh Ponnuru responds:

Right: Opposing the Lily Ledbetter Act means approving of unequal pay for women. What a disgusting comment.

To which Matthew Yglesias responds:

And of course it’s true. It’s perfectly possible to think that it’s wrong to discriminate against women in your pay practices but just also oppose any effort to make it feasible to redress that right…But at some point politics is about policy. If your opposition to pay discrimination doesn’t extend to favoring measures to halt pay discrimination, then what’s it worth? To people suffering from illegal discrimination, it’s worth nothing. To people who want to engage in illegal discrimination, it’s worth quite a lot.

Which is true, but it’s conceding too much. Sure, McCain probably isn’t some kind of stone-age sexist who thinks women deserve less pay for equal work. But it’s verifiably true that he does think it’s okay for women to receive less pay for equal work. Right now, women do not get equal pay for equal work. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would be a dramatic step in correcting that problem. John McCain opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. He is, therefore, apparently just fine with women getting less pay for equal work. If he found that condition unacceptable, he would have voted for the piece of legislation necessary to do something about it. But he didn’t.

And maybe that’s defensible. Maybe women receiving less pay for equal work is preferable to passing federal legislation that would solve that problem. But that necessarily entails believing that women getting less pay for equal work is an acceptable consequence of not passing the legislation. Thus, in 2008, John McCain still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work. Some readers, I’m sure, agree with him. I, for one, think it’s – what’s a good word? – disgusting.

So Harvard University recently enacted a policy in which its gym is open exclusively to women for six hours a week in order to accommodate the religious customs of Muslim women that make it difficult for some of them to work out in the presence of men.

What follows is a spectacular encapsulation of all the danger and promise that the blogosphere offers.

First, Glenn Reynolds asks whether the Harvard policy violates the Massachusetts anti-discrimination law.

Eugene Volokh then puts together a thoughtful if somewhat technical post responding to this question. Volokh first quotes a press release from Professor John Banzhaf saying that the policy probably is a violation. But then Volokh suggests that the relevant statute wouldn’t apply to Harvard, and so it isn’t a violation.

Andrew Sullivan, in a post titled “Sharia at Harvard,” makes my ugh-o-meter go off the charts by responding to the policy thusly:

They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What’s next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.

Matthew Yglesias, in response to Sullivan, points out that Harvard and every other institute of higher education, as well as every elementary and high school in the country, shuts down and creates a holiday that just happens to coincide with Christmas, whereas no such holiday is created for Passover. He adds that when he was a student at Harvard there was a policy against starting any kind of fire in dorm rooms and that there was a movement to create an exemption for Jewish students to light Hannukah candles, arguing that such an exemption “certainly wouldn’t constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university.”

Noah Millman at the American Scene then takes the whole thing up a notch and asks, “Does anyone think Harvard would have made allowances to male Muslim students who didn’t want to exercise around women?”

Phew!

Honestly, I don’t know what to think about the Harvard policy. I would have to know more about how much of a burden such a policy places on the men who want to work out at the gym. In the end, I doubt that I would find it objectionable.

But what this whole thing does illustrate is what the blogosphere is good and bad at doing. On the one hand, the post by Volokh shows how much easier it is now for a casual observer to get a more detailed, expert analysis of the questions surrounding a particular issue. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan’s post shows how easy it is for bloggers to shoot off emotion-driven posts that oversimplify the issues in order to advance a sexier, culture-warrior sort of argument. On the third hand (we’re bloggers, we have lots of hands), Yglesias’s post shows how easy it is to smack somebody down who says something stupid. And on the fourth hand, Millman’s post shows how the blogosphere creates an atmosphere in which quirky, original ideas and questions can come forth and bubble up to the top if they pique people’s interest.

On the whole I feel pretty good about it.

There are moments when it becomes acutely irritating that Urbanagora is populated almost entirely by white men, even while acknowledging that certain members of this particular group of white men still constitute “the other” in certain areas (religion, sexual orientation, marital status). I had such a moment after watching this diavlog between Ezra Klein of the American Prospect and Christopher Hayes of the Nation, which covers a wide range of topics but tends to focus on identity politics and the Democratic primary.

The whole thing is a pretty illuminating discussion, but here’s a snippet I found particularly interesting. It’s about 8 minutes long, but for those who don’t have that much time to spare, it basically begins with Chris Hayes talking about this editorial by Gloria Steinem that ran just before the New Hampshire primary, which basically weighed how hard women in our society have had it vs. African Americans and coming down on the side of women having it worse.

Hayes responds to this by saying that if you look at the progress that African Americans have made materially, it’s very minimal (they continue to have high rates of incarceration, poverty, joblessness, lack of education, etc.). At the same time, if you look at the progress they’ve made culturally, it’s been much more significant in terms of what sorts of things can be said in polite company and what social and cultural consequences there are for being a racist or saying things that are racist. And when you take that same approach looking at the progress of women, it’s pretty much the exact opposite: materially, women have made great strides in terms of access to education and closing the wage gap and breaking through various glass ceilings; whereas culturally, our society seems to have taken dramatic steps backwards (think Maxim, the Man Show, etc.).

Ezra Klein then adds a little to this point by pointing out how much easier it has been for Barack Obama to kind of step outside of his “box” merely by being “out of the ordinary” in terms of the stereotype of black men: he’s well-educated, articulate, and all the rest; and therefore society at large embraces him as a symbol of progress and hope. For Hillary Clinton, it’s much more difficult for her to step outside of her gender and therefore critics of Clinton can say things in a sexist way that a critic of Obama could absolutely never say in the equivalent racist way. Klein attributes this in part to the point Hayes made earlier: because women have been much more successful at ingraining themselves in the power structure of our society, they present much more of a threat to the traditional order. To put it crudely, Hillary Clinton reminds white men of their female supervisor whom they feel uncomfortable with. Whereas the privilege that white men enjoy is not particularly threatened by black men, who continue to suffer the material effects of institutionalized racism. It’s therefore much easier and even compelling to embrace a black man like Obama than a white woman like Clinton.

After typing all this, I realize that I’ve pretty much done nothing but sum up the discussion between Klein and Hayes rather than contribute much in the way of my own thoughts, but I guess I’d just say that this is a big part of why, even though I’m an Obama supporter, I wouldn’t be saddened if Hillary managed to win the nomination: a big portion of the progress that women have yet to make in this country deals much more with cultural attitudes than material benefits, and the opposite is true of African Americans. And while electing a woman as President will help to make progress on the cultural sexism front, electing a black man as President will do little to make progress on the material racism front (and quite likely would even hurt that progress to some extent, as white people will congratulate themselves for electing a black man and start thinking the civil rights movement has come much further than it really has).

I’m dreading the onslaught of attacks on this post from the more conservative-minded contributors to this blog who will find this whole discussion either boring or irritating, placing far too much focus on race and sex than on practical policy considerations. But to head that argument off at least a little, I would point out that the policy distinctions between Hillary and Obama are rather minimal, which allows for these sorts of consideration to come much more to the forefront. They are also just genuinely important considerations, I think, but particularly so given that this is a primary contest between two candidates who largely agree on policy.

Also, not that I think anybody will listen to this, but I would again say that the entire discussion between Klein and Hayes is quite interesting, and if you’ve got an hour to kill (as I do, thanks to a wonderful faculty retreat at Georgetown which has given me a really long weekend), you should check it out.

There is a mildly irritating sentiment in our society which (though I have no evidence of this) seems to be growing healthily among even liberal members of my generation that stereotyping social groups is okay because most stereotypes generally hold some truth to them. “They are stereotypes for a reason,” after all. A new study coming out of the University of Chicago goes some way toward refuting that mentality.

Psychologists at the university gave female students a math test followed by a non-mathematical test. Some of the female students were casually reminded before they took the test that men consistently do better than women at standardized math tests, while some of the female students were not given such a reminder. The female students who were given the reminder did more poorly on not only the math test, but the non-math-related test afterward. This led the psychologists to some interesting conclusions about brain power, as they determined that the stereotype reminder didn’t simply reduce the women’s expectations for themselves, but rather took up valuable space in their brains that could have otherwise been used to process the test questions. Even women who did not buy into stereotypes performed more poorly because they were thinking too much about how they didn’t want to be one of the women to perform poorly and thus grant support to the stereotype.

This is another in a long line of studies which demonstrate that reminding students of negative stereotypes of groups to which they belong makes them perform more poorly on tests. Even just being asked to fill in a bubble saying what your race or gender is (which pretty much every standardized test on the planet does) causes blacks and women to perform more poorly. Another study asked students seemingly benign questions like whether they lived in co-ed or single-sex dorms, and even this triggered thoughts of gender stereotypes and affected the students’ performances. The principle can work the other way, too, as when students were asked why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college, activating what one psychologist called the students’ “snob schema,” making them think about how smart they are and thus causing them to perform better on the test.

None of this, of course, proves that there is no truth to stereotypes (though in many of these cases the performance gaps normally cited between genders or races are almost entirely eliminated by not triggering thoughts of stereotypes). It does, however, go a long way in demonstrating the way in which stereotypes are often times self-fulfilling prophecies, that whether they are accurate or not may not have all that much to do with the natural abilities of a given gender or race but rather with the way the stereotypes themselves have disadvantaged women and minorities. And this, of course, would lend support to the position that while stereotypes do not hold any great degree of truth, those who believe they do are in fact contributing to their damaging effects.

I think most people would agree with this conclusion when it comes to racism (I don’t know of many people who still argue that whites are the naturally superior race), though I suspect many do not adhere to it when it comes to gender. There are, of course, at least some minimal natural differences between men and women due to genetics and hormones, but I personally am of the belief that the wide gulf that has been created between the genders is almost entirely socially constructed. These studies are another reason to maintain that belief.