Status update on patriarchy / Feminism in a standstill

Ann Gallagher and James C. Kaufmann conclude in their book “Gender differences in mathematics” [1] that It has simply never been established that there is any meaningful and substantial sex differences in mathematics ability that is not massively confounded with factors related to individual experience. Therefore researchers whose goals are to are to understand the biological basis of behaviour still need even to produce data that suggest that there is that there is any sex difference that can be even partly explained by biological factors.

There is a huge amount of research on the subtleties of differences between female and male cognition, but all research indicates that whatever differences there are (for example in problem solving strategies) based on the current data, it is practically impossible to unambiguously separate biological factors from what is caused by gender roles and individuals' personal histories of learning. There seems to be more variance in intellectual performance within a group consisting solely of men than a group of women. In other words the Gaussian distribution seems to be more spread out of a fully male group in terms all types of intellectual performance (not just mathematical) than with a fully female group. But this too, could be just a reaction to how the school systems and teachers have reflected to gender role based behaviours and expectations [2].

The history of science and philosophy has truly been “His Story” since other than a very few exceptions, women have been banned to participate higher education up until about 100 years ago. The most courageous and eager of women did however make themselves heard in science, but they had to usually do it either anonymously or using their husbands name to be able to get their thoughts published.

For exemple Marie-Sophie Germain, who was the first woman to get a seat in the French academy of science, had to first pretend to be man, “monsier LeBlanc”, in order to be taken seriously and to establish the correspondence with her first mentor Friedrich Gauss, the most prominent mathematician of the time. Here is how she eventually revealed herself to Gauss in 1807 [4]:

But how to describe to you my admiration and astonishment at seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur Le Blanc metamorphose himself into this illustrious personage who gives such a brilliant example of what I would find it difficult to believe. A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius. Indeed nothing could prove to me in so flattering and less equivocal manner that the attractions of this science, which has enriched my life with so many joys, are not chimerical, [than] the predilection with which you have honored it.

There are many sad stories during the 19th centuries how brilliant women were simply prohibited attending universities, especially in mathematics and philosophy, but that was then. Today the situation is of course different at least in western societies…or is it?

Namely there are still amazingly few women in science and technology and even philosophy, much less than you would expect now that there should not be any more legal restrictions for women doing science (in western world). I claim that it is largely because the old gender role based patriarchy is still there between our ears. I think such strong cultural traditions don’t completely disappear in 100 years, in just a few generations.

From my own personal experience I can say that I have several times run into attitudes and heard many men claim that women are somehow less capable to succeed in mathematics, philosophy, technology or Information technology, because their problem solving strategies are somehow more “conservative” or “less creative” or whatever. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. There are a lot of studies showing that in IT business and engineering, exactly similar job applications get a less favourable review, if the applicant has a female name than a male name [5]. Interestingly I remember reading a study that showed that if a male job application reviewer had a women engineer in his family, he would rate female engineering job applicants more favourably than men who have no experience about woman engineers…The prejudices seem to go away with experience.

In fact I have met some young male “hero” SW developers that have been quite convinced that women are up to no good particularly as programmers. Well I myself am not up to any good...that's true... but I wonder if these guys are aware that many of the modern programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are based on the theoretical findings of this year’s Turing price winner (most esteemed recognition in computing) Barbara Liskov’s work on data abstraction and programming language development [6] (thanks Strider). So dear boys before you judge all the woman programmers beforehand, remember that the tools you use might have a solid female touch in them ;-)

During the 10 years I have hung out in the internet participating philosophy discussions I have met even admitted misogynists, who think that women just make too much noise about themselves. I don’t agree they do since I dare to suspect that practically every women over the age of 35 has some experiences how the patriarchy's attitudes have surfaced in some instance in a way that it has had a disruptive effect in some serious work at hand, whether it be in business or academia. Glass ceilings are still there in many places! When you are younger, you don’t care so much about individual incidents, at least if they don’t occur everyday, or if you are of the more naive sort, you might not even understand some of the underlying innuendos to connect the dots. But when you start approaching middle age, at some point you will start to notice that patriarchy and sexism are still alive and an undercurrent in many places that matter.

And in fact the patriarchy is not in the business of going away at the moment. The statistics show that women’s share of the traditionally male dominated businesses has not increased significantly during the last 20-30 years in the western countries and women still earn smaller salaries with same ratio that they did a few decades back. I think this is a major failure for the feministic movement.

I will not accuse men…or let me take that back... yes I do accuse some men. The kind of men who have made a hasty conclusion that all feminism in general is useless or unnecessary, without acknowledging that our western societies are still far from being equal, or men who think the equality has just come automatically, without knowing all the work that was done by feminist movements before women got to vote, go to school or even go to work in any society today. Or the kind of men who use constantly sexist argumentation just out of mean sexist attitudes (disguised sometimes as humor), fear of women or plain stupidity, or the men who outright hate women and see it acceptable to spread hatred. Of course there can be man hating women too and they would be equally harmful, but according to my experience these men (or women) are just the-not-so-smart people among us, who are afraid of loosing their identity if they do not maintain an illusion being superior just because of their sex. I personally believe that with proper understanding of gender roles and how they work in a society, the reasons to be afraid would in general diminish in the long run. There would be less reasons to be afraid of loosing "manhood" (or womanhood for that matter).

But I think discussing how feminism and feministic theory should evolve is important. I suspect that feministic or gender theories are in a standstill, because they seem not being able to analyse the gender questions further in a way that would explain satisfactorily why equality among sexes does not seem to be making progress at the moment.

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My original plan was to write more about the gender theories, especially refer to Judith Butler and Karen Barad, since I think they have very original ideas that could open new ways by challenging the traditional dichotomies... but I ran out of time now :-( I hope to be able to continue soon, since I already had a cool title for that writing: Quantum gender !!!
- of course :D

Q

[1] Gallagher, A. and Kaufmann, J. “Gender differences in mathematics”, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[2] McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. and De Lisi R. Biology, “Society and Behavior, The Development of Sex differences in cognition”, Ablex publishing, 2002
[3] http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/germain.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
[5] Wilson, F.M. “Organizational behaviour and gender”, Ashgate publishing, 2003
[6] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/