Then do check out “The Trouble with Women” column at the Times. (V. grateful to S, and also S’s mother, who probably didn’t mean for the helpful tips she was sending S to end up on some feminist blog.)
A Tricky Tactical Issue for Feminists March 31, 2010
System justification theory examines the mechanisms by which people tend to justify the status quo, even when it is detrimental to them. One key system-justifying belief is that “the system as a whole is fair, balanced, and legitimate.” (Jost and Kay 499) A recent study (Jost and Kay) began from the thought that the belief
“that every group in society possesses some advantages and some disadvantages” (Jost and Kay 499) could help to support this idea, and therefore acceptance of the status quo. Complementary or “benevolent” sexist stereotypes fit nicely with this. There’s been a lot of work on these stereotypes in psychology, but they’ll be familiar to all feminist scholars (this is also Jost and Kay 499):
Men are generally stereotyped as competent, assertive, independent, and achievement oriented—and women are not, whereas women are generally stereotyped as warm, sociable, interdependent, and relationship oriented—and men are not (Deaux & Lewis, 1984; Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Langford & MacKinnon, 2000; Williams & Best, 1982). Masculine and feminine stereotypes are complementary in the sense that each gender group is seen as possessing a set of strengths that balances out its own weaknesses and supplements the assumed strengths of the other group (see also Kay & Jost, 2003).
What the study found is remarkable, and troubling: Mere exposure to these ‘benevolent sexist’ stereotypes– even in the form of proof-reading sentences expressing them– increased acceptance of the status quo as just and fair.
Why do I find this so troubling? Well, because the feminist literature often contains sentences that fit very nicely with the “benevolent sexist” stereotypes– think of much of the ethics of care literature, or think of discussions of the maleness of philosophy which involve claims that women may be uncomfortable with the aggressiveness of the field. If merely being exposed to these ideas means that one will tend to endorse the status quo as just and fair, this gives feminist philosophers a reason to be very careful what views they discuss. But that would seem like a huge mistake as far as intellectual integrity goes– surely we should discuss all views that seem worth discussing.
What do you think?
Moscow: Dozens killed March 29, 2010
Our hearts go out to those affected by these terrible explosions. Please let us know how you are doing, if you or friends of yours are among those affected.
We can add “suicide bombers” as another group we do not want more women in.
What it’s really about March 29, 2010
As Frank Rich says, all the anger isn’t really about health care.
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
Thanks, Mr Jender.
Eureka! Why women are excluded from philosophy! March 28, 2010
(Preliminary note: when I was involved in faculty governance, I used to joke that women thought that if someone didn’t have relevant personal experience of a problem, they didn’t think he/she was competent to make judgments about it, while men, on the other hand, think that if you have personal experience of a problem, then your judgment is invalid.
I deeply do believe that if particularly we older women cannot appeal to our experience of issues, we impoverish the discourse. That said, I do realize that for some people that could invalidate a discussion. So please notice that what follows isn’t really an argument from a single case: it uses a single case to raise a question about a possibility that highlights, among other things, how we need to work on networking for women.)
Let me be more modest than the title suggests. I’ll move beyond the sense of discovery and ask more modestly: is this sort of gatekeeping (see below) one reason why women are not faring well in philosophy? And could it connect with the fact that women tend to be small minorities at conferences, or absent entirely?
Unfortunately, the source of insight came at my own expense. I submitted a paper to a society and it was rejected. The referee’s comments really blew the paper off. Well, no surprise there, but there’s more to the story. And I hope no one thinks they have to assume the paper was really good. The ideas about exclusion should be independent of the quality of one paper, but obviously I wouldn’t have even started to look for the explanation I found unless I had had it accepted somewhere very good.
First of all, the central ideas of my paper have been accepted without comments or revisions by a very prestiguous publications. Secondly, the referee’s comments had three features that set me thinking:
1. There was no indication that he (as I assume) saw any of my arguments. I had a very formal and explicit argument, in the form of a classic dilemma, against the central thesis of a text. The referee’s comment? “This won’t bother the author.” Then he remarks that I decided against a promising strategy, not registering, it seems, that I argued the strategy was not promising.
2. He spent quite a bit of time outlining what I should have done to construct a rival to the text’s theory. I was in fact not interested in doing that, so he didn’t seem to notice what I did do. (I think there are deeply serious problems with assumptions behind all the theories, which was what I was discussing.) He in fact seemed to think the points he recognized were all right, but since, again, he didn’t think they’d bother the author, he didn’t think that they were worth making even though they put paid to two prominant approaches.
3. Quite possibly as requested, he closed by saying why he was competent to judge and basically it’s because he works in the area.
So here’s my hypothesis: The area is one in which a lot of youngish guys are communicating with one another and are engaged in the quest for arguing for or against roughly 3 competing theories in the area. And I think I see a kind of gatekeeping. Since “the text” in question has just come out and it does have a very new thesis, there isn’t an established literature in this area. That’s just starting to form. But there are groups of guys outlining what they think are the important issues, on blogs and at conferences. And if you are not part of that, you may not be passed in any refereeing process, I now suspect. Not because you aren’t known, precisely, but because it doesn’t count as what they think is the right kind of move.
And I’m inclined to think that the fact that the arguments were disregarded shows how central the familiarity of the discussion is. It it’s too different, you can just toss it.
So how does this speak to women’s situation in philosophy? Quite simply, if we’re not networking and getting our ideas out there in an informal way, we’re very seriously handicapped, I am hypothesizing. But doing that supposes that informal groups are as open and congenial for us as they are for the guys. And they are not, for many of us. And if conferences stay very male oriented, they won’t be.
I think we can hope: a lot of younger women seem to have some access to some of the clusters of discussions. Of course, that’s what makes a recent account of a woman getting cut out because she turned down sexual advances so very serious.
And then there’s the chicken-and-egg problem: why aren’t we networking? Is there an even more foundational problem there? Well, let’s all discuss this.
When women live on $11k a year, now that’s a crisis March 28, 2010
An interesting post on OurFuture.org suggests that the New York Times didn’t have it quite right when reports suggested that Social Security is in crisis. The more urgent problem, author Stacy Sanders suggests, is not the solvency of the program:
On the contrary, there is real data that shows its beneficiaries, particularly older women, are in crisis. Though never intended to be the only source of income in retirement, many find themselves solely reliant upon Social Security as they age. In fact, Social Security provides more than 90 percent of income to three out of ten retired elders. And, due to time spent out of the workforce for caregiving and lower lifetime wages, women are even more dependent on Social Security.
Last year, the average annual Social Security payment was only $11,316 for an older woman.
Does Miscommunication Lead to Rape? March 28, 2010
It’s very popular to suppose that rape is often the result of miscommunication. There are at least two versions of this, with different emphases– those who are less sympathetic to the victims say that rapes result from women giving unclear signals; some anti-porn feminists (e.g. Langton) suggest that porn may have so warped men’s thinking about sex that they don’t recognise women’s attempts to refuse sex.
C has pointed me to some fascinating empirical research involving interviews with men. These interviews make it clear that the men are sensitive to subtle and non-direct refusals from women, which they also indicate would be their own preferred method of refusing sex. But then once the word ‘rape’ is introduced the men start playing up the potential for miscommunication, insisting that even ‘no’ isn’t really an unambiguous refusal.
This is where things fall off the rails. Suddenly, men don’t deal with “subtleties,” even though the men have previously reported that they would turn down sex in the same way they’d expect women to—subtly. Suddenly, a person misinterpreting lack of consent is completely understandable if “she fails to say ‘no’ clearly,” even though the men had previously never invoked direct refusal as a way they know if women don’t want to have sex with them. Suddenly, a woman is required to engage in a very specific behavior—looking her sex partner in the eye and saying “no”—in order to not be responsible for her own rape.
(Actually, there may be some interesting connections between this and the cognitive dissonance post below.)
Cognitive dissonance and tea parties March 28, 2010
From the NY Times:
When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.
Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.
In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care.
Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.
The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.
These people don’t necessarily have contradictory beliefs (one can still believe that X is wrong while doing X, and one can still believe that it shouldn’t be possible to do X while doing X). But there is certainly a tension between their actions and their beliefs. I find myself thinking there’s got to be a philosophical literature on this. Do any of you know it? (One gets structurally similar cases with weakness of will– thinking X is wrong while still doing X. But that seems like the wrong analysis for these cases– it’s not like these people are thinking “I wish I could stop myself from collecting these benefits, but I just can’t resist!” Among other disanalogies, they don’t seem to see the problem.)
The Sunday cat sees that babies are nearly as cute as kittens March 28, 2010
but in this cuteness contest, she thinks the kitten clearly wins.
Is she being a speciest?
Many thanks for F&JS
The Pacific APA and USF March 27, 2010
As most of you know, the APA has been asked by the relevant hotel workers union to boycott the hotel where the meetings has been scheduled. The decision was made to not try to move the conference, but the University of San Francisco, with striking generosity, has offer to organize and host sessions on their campus for people who want to move out of the hotel.
Here is the alternative schedule, along with other very useful information.
The SWIP sessions will be over there, along with other good ones!
On not seeing what is right before your eyes March 27, 2010
When Jenny Lloyd published The Man of Reason, in 1984, she encapsulated a picture of reason well loved by many philosophers. This is the highly rational and effectively disembodied reason. That picture has been under fairly constant for about 3 decades; one of the most recent attacks will be released on May 18. It’s The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris.
It has a web page now and on it one can find links to videos. So I’m going to put up a couple of videos, but first a party political broadcast. There seem to me to be two important issues for feminist philosophers to consider:
1. Given the current deconstruction of philosophy’s ideal of reason, what continues to serve and support feminist aims, and what doesn’t? One thing we might notice is that the project includes examining the biases that we do not and sometimes cannot be aware of. One startling thing vision research is uncovering is that valences (such as rewards and punishment) can affect our basic visual experience.
2. When the deconstruction takes down with it an important facet of our culture, should feminists work on a reconstruction of it? Presumably this answer could vary with the facet. For example, lots in our cognition excels at getting the gist of things, and is not very good at getting and retaining the precise details. Contrary to what many believe, vision and memory are good at gists, and not so good at details. We might celebrate a realization that eye witness testimony is often faulty, but how about the narratives of a life, including those of abused children?
I know of Sue Campbell’s stellar work on memory, but not a great deal more. So suggestions are really welcome.
Now, for some videos: The first is a version of the very famous experiment about what we may not notice. The second is of an experiment about which it was thought by many that women would do better than men. They didn’t, according to Dan (he was in my home town recently and so I had a chance to chat a bit). The third is from a different experimenters and just illustrates how little we may notice.
If you are wondering why this sensory stuff is being said to be an attack on disembodied reason, it’s because attention has been thought of as a mental action or process and not subject to the quirks of our bodies.
On Seeming Smart (and race, gender, age and class) March 26, 2010
Eric has a great post up on The Splintered Mind about the phenomenon of what he calls “seeming smart” in philosophy– and its relationship to race, gender, age and class. (I’m sure there are similar things to be said about its relationship to disability issues, and although Eric doesn’t mention that I’m sure he’d be friendly to the suggestion.)
Let’s All Move to Iceland! March 26, 2010
The “World’s Most Feminist Country” apparently – discuss!
I wonder why there is such a strong consensus behind the country’s decision to ban all strip clubs – even among men. Or are there good reasons to be suspicious about the accuracy of the 2007 poll results? Can any Icelandic readers help the rest of us understand the secret of your country’s success?
It would also be interesting to hear from those mentioned in the article who believe that strip clubs are ‘empowering’. Is there anything to this argument?
Stuff Republicans believe March 24, 2010
People over here in the UK often ask me how Americans could possibly oppose universal healthcare. It seems to me one of the key answers is that those who are opposing it believe lots of false things about. But not just about healthcare. Check out this poll on things Republicans believe.
67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”*
Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
*Actually, this one is clearly true, if one includes breathing, eating, talking to friends, running a country, etc. But that’s also clearly not what they’re thinking of.
Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day March 24, 2010
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.
Who was Ada?
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented. Ada had been taught mathematics from a very young age by her mother and met Babbage in 1833. Ten years later she translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine – the first computer programme. The calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.
Understanding that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers, Ada suggested that the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” She never had the chance to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage’s inventions or her own understanding of computing. She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852, of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.
You can find out more about Ada Lovelace Day here. A great video for children about Ada is here. An illustrated brief biography is here.
And you can read a very recent piece in the New York Times with the shocking (not really) headline “Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences” here.
Another view on complaints about sexual harassment March 23, 2010
Tony Judt is a respected historian who has quite fearlessly taken up some controversial causes. He is now very ill, paralyzed from the neck down with ALS. Not the sort of person one wants to attack, but I suppose it is condescending to refrain. So here goes.
Judt has an article in the NY Review of Books, part of which is repeated on the journal’s blog. It gives one a different (from ours) perspective on sexual harassment, one from a senior scholar (born in 1948, first degree from Cambridge in 1969), and currently a director of an institute at NYU.
It’s title is, “Girls! Girls! Girls!” Consider that a warning:
On how he acquired his third wife:
In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University—where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university’s Sexual Harassment Center. … Shortly after I took office, a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to [a play].
….To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing.
His views on current decorum:
Our successors—liberated from old-style constraints—have imposed new restrictions upon themselves. Since the 1970s, Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation. Like men of an earlier decade—though for very different reasons—they are preternaturally wary of missteps. I find this depressing. The Puritans had a sound theological basis for restricting their desires and those of others. But today’s conformists have no such story to tell.
His example of comic relief (yes, truly, he so describes it):
When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
It is well to know that if you get cornered in a supply closet and go to the chair or dean rather than the official office this is the sort of attitude you may encounter. Don’t think that even if you are a professor, this is going to help your career at all.
I’ve quoted a sizable part of the piece on the blog, but there is more. And there’s some discussion of this on the blog with a lot of good points being made, along with others supporting him.
CFP: Gendered Ways of Knowing March 23, 2010
The conference is in Trento, and the deadline for papers is 30 April. For more, go here.
(Wealthy, irritating and stunningly unreflective) Mothers March 23, 2010
The first episode of the BBC series Women was well worth watching– because it interviewed a fascinating and engaging collection of important 2nd Wave feminists. (Though it’s been rightly criticised for neglecting black and minority ethnic women). Mothers was clearly designed to be a demonstration of how little has changed in the domestic division of labour. But for such a demonstration to be effective, one really needs a sample with some claim to representativeness. Instead, we got palatial house after palatial house, posh accent after posh accent– all climaxing, to my mind, with the couple who declared that their last row was over “lighting the AGA”. (It’s hard to explain the cultural significance of an AGA to non-UK people. But a British Martha Stewart would love one, and few of her fans would be able to afford one.) Moreover, they were all truly stunningly unreflective– to the point where one looks at the unjust division of labour and eventually thinks “well, you kind of deserve it for being so unreflective about your life. I mean, it’s not like you lack the resources to improve things.” (The worst division of labour, by the way, was in the one family where the mother was the breadwinner. She, unlike the male breadwinners, was totally unappreciative of the work her partner put in. Just shows that anyone can devalue traditional women’s work.) If you watch it, you’ll find yourself wondering where they found these people, and why they chose them. But only for a minute, because then you’ll realise they’re nearly all from the London media world the film-makers clearly move in. Plus a surgeon they must have met a party, and a random academic couple from Lancaster. (Their presence actually was a a bit mysterious. They were also much more reflective. Unfortunately most of their reflections concerned why they chose one form of detergent rather than another.)
Thanks, Mr Jender, for insisting that I “eviscerate this”. If I haven’t done it well enough, do feel free to contribute in comments.
Consciousness-Raising at Newsweek March 23, 2010
There’s a really awesome article calling out sexism in the workplace, and especially at Newsweek. And it’s in Newsweek– which impressively went ahead and published it. There SO much that’s excellent in it. But one thing I found particularly interesting was the epistemic situation that the authors found themselves in regarding sexism.
In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn’t identify those feelings as gender-related. It seemed like a cop-out, a weakness, to suggest that the problem was anybody’s fault but our own…
In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn’t identify those feelings as gender-related. It seemed like a cop-out, a weakness, to suggest that the problem was anybody’s fault but our own…
Somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.
One thing that really hits me is how much this all sounds like the consciousness-raising groups that finally named and began to fight sexual harassment, as discussed in (among other places) Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. Women who each thought they were dealing with individual problems start talking to each other, seeing commonalities, and finding they need a new vocabulary to talk about them. (The lack of such a vocabulary is what Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’.)
A Ticket For Rush March 23, 2010
Rush Limbaugh has famously said that if health care reform passes he’ll move to Costa Rica. And now there’s a way for you to help that dream come true, thanks to the good folks at A Ticket For Rush. Here’s their plan:
1. We’re accepting 1 dollar PayPal donations to buy Rush a one-way ticket to Costa Rica. We are currently accepting donations.
2. At the end of the donation period*, we will attempt to personally contact Rush, and offer to buy him a first-class plane ticket from Palm Beach International Airport to San Jose International Airport, Costa Rica.
3. If Rush does get cold feet**, and refuses to move to Costa Rica, we will instead donate all of the money to the Planned Parenthood Action Center.
4. Additionally, if we make more money than the cost of a ticket, or if we don’t make enough money for a ticket, everything will still go to Planned Parenthood.
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