androcentrism

I realise that my last lot of posts have really concentrated on the food side of things, and not so much on the thought - so I'll try and remedy that today.

Yesterday I taught an undergraduate class as part of a course I run on gender and psychology. This class is designed to examine the way in which science and politics intersect when studying gender - the way in which gender differences in status, our expectations and steroetypes about gender, and our own identities as men and women affect the way in which do science. As part of this discussion I got the class discussing examples of androcentrism in the 'real world' (as opposed to the 'fake' world of science) - this is the idea that men or the masculine point of view is prioritised and seen to represent people in general.

There are some simple examples that I raised. My favourite is quite an innocuous one: If you look at toilet signs it is clear what symbol represents men and which represents women - but if you look at 'neutral' signs, like emergency exit, elevator, or the person crossing the road, these are all represented by male symbols. The other, more widely known example is androcentric speech - the use of fireman, policeman, or chairman to refer to genderless positions.

It was interesting to see my students' reactions. Most of them are women and the most verabal of them in particular really weren't bothered about this at all - they argued that if they were a police officer or a fire fighter they wouldn't care about being referred to as a man - and that anyone that did was just being too precious and politically correct. I must say, I wasquite stunned by this sort of reaction - I am not sure whether it is just one of these cross-cultural differences, or whether it is a generational thing - but I can not imaging a single women in any of my classes as an undergraduate in Australia being OK with this sort of androcentric language... It will be interesting to see how they cope with the nature nurture debate next week.

Hormones

I had to give a talk last week about my research on gender discrimination. The audience was made up of business leaders from the region and academics from my university. The topic is always a bit controversial, especially because you run the risk of alienating people if they think you are accusing them of being sexist.

But, by the end of it, I thought I was doing OK – achieving that balance between being political (and feminist) and being an objective scientist. I made all the arguments about how subtle discrimination can be, and demonstrated the role of stereotypes and gendered expectations.

There was lots of head nodding – so I thought I had made my point. That was until the end when people came to chat to me afterwards. One guy, a business leader, came up to me and said that he found my talk all very interesting, but that I had left out the main reason why women weren’t achieving leadership positions – hormones. He argued – straight faced – that women were never going to be successful, because they were so unpredictable – you just talk to them one day and they snap at you.

My instant reaction, even though it wasn’t ‘that time of the month’, was to snap at him. But instead I reminded him that this was an argument that had been made for a long time (remember the old cold war argument that a women could never be president as she might launch the bomb in a fit of PMT). I also asked him if he was worried about men’s hormones (that testosterone has been linked to aggression and sexual drive, you know). He wasn’t too convinced (I was only a women after all) – but it made me realise how far we have to go to convince some people that women deserve to be treated as equals. I wonder whether this guy realises that the reason that women keep snapping at him is not because of their hormones – but because he is a bit of an idiot.