A difference of degrees
Published by Kyso Kisaen September 22nd, 2007 in For the ladies, Feminism, What Patriarchy?, book larnin'When someone starts railing against ‘gender neutral education’ it’s time to put your hand over your wallet and back slowly out of the room. Amanda sent me this patriarchy-blaming Livescience article at about the same time I came across this charmer on the importance of edumakating girls to be girls, just like the Bible says.
Livescience covers five myths about girls and science, and concludes that social bias works against girls achieving in science to the best of their potential, starting as early as elementary school. Also, shock of shock, programs designed to encourage young girls in science actually encourage boys as well, so there are really no losers when you reach out to everyone. Doesn’t that just make you want to hold hands in a giant circle and sing “Free to Be You and Me”?
No? Well you’re not alone, because it doesn’t take a smarty-pants scientist to see what happens when you run around giving girls the same educational opportunities as boys. They get ideas. Sometimes even ideas of their own. And that ain’t no good.
Because we believe the Scriptures have thoroughly laid out the roles of men and women, we are not left wondering how we should educate our daughters. It is clear that they are to be visionary helpers in their father’s home, in preparation to one day be their husband’s helpmeet. Therefore, in the education of our daughters, we are mindful to filter everything through the lens of who she is in Christ and what He has made her for. It is a beautiful picture of Biblical womanhood and one that is vehemently attacked by the feminists.
So what is the curriculum of a young ladies destined to be their husband’s helpmeet?
It is imperative that we train our daughters to be eloquent, bold and firm in their faith yet with a gentle and meek spirit…
There is an absolute necessity for young Christian women to understand history. They need to understand the feminist ideology and agenda and how it is at war with Scripture…
ur daughters need to have an understanding of the life and faith of Godly women found in the Bible, as well as in history. The story of Ruth and Esther are excellent starting places as well as memorizing the well-known, but often misunderstood passage of scripture Proverbs 31…
Our daughters need to be well versed in the arts and sciences of homemaking. Here are a few lost arts that women of the past were educated in: home management, organization, bread making, preparedness, hand work, hospitality, basic understanding of large family logistics, skilled in home economy aspects. Our daughters need to possess a practical, well-rounded knowledge of home arts. A home is revived, busy, aromatic, flourishing, productive and blessed when a hard working woman joyfully serves her father or husband. It is a beautiful picture!
I like that weird joining of “history” and “feminist ideology and agenda” as though secular history courses below the university level are hotbeds of feminist indoctrination that require neutralizing (”In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. His wife was at home at the time. Where she belonged and was very happy.”), but it was the last point that struck me. The lost art of bread-making? Don’t get me wrong, I looovvvveee homemade bread, but like calligraphy and the ability to operate a reel-to-reel tape machine, we as a society only need so many people devoted to the art, and I think Bernard Clayton has it covered for this generation. Seriously girls, don’t re-invent the wheel, just buy his book.
It strikes me that a thinking woman knowledgeable about “home management” and “large family logistics” would immediately dismiss the “art of bread making” from her list of daily activities. I read somewhere once that one of the best things people did was switch from everyone making their own bread daily in small batches to having a village baker do most of it. Not only does it save a lot of time for individual housewives, but making bread in small batches is apparently uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly.
So we’re not looking at a very intellectually rigorous female curriculum here. In fact, it seems to have confused browbeating girls into submissiveness for education. And the job the girls are prepared for seems to rely heavily on busywork to keep them occupied. But these are just some crazy Christian homeschoolers, right? Fringe elements. No one we need to be concerned with. Except…
The mentality of needing to “weed out” weaker students in college majors–especially in the more quantitative disciplines–disproportionately weeds out women. This is not necessarily because women are failing. Rather, women often perceive “Bs” as inadequate grades and drop out, while men with “Cs” will persist with the class.
When us in the mainstream don’t take care to shake the biases out of education, we’re basically doing the same thing to our girls, except we don’t pay them the courtesy of at least brainwashing them beforehand so they don’t know what they’re missing. Much ado has been made over how girls kick ass and take names when it comes to making the grades in high school and college. But we still reward girls for their adherence to the 50’s style feminine ideal while feeding them a diet of water-down Empowerful-brand Feminism Lite. The result is by the time they get to college, they’re a perfect-girl, starving-daughter neurotic mess.
The stereotypes about scientists (math is too hard for girls, female scientists are dour, you have to be perfect and super-smart anyway) combine with the stereotype of the loveable girl (pretty, smart, and popular, and most importantly, everything comes easy to her) combine with the institutional sexism that is still totally there to drive girls away from rigorous programs in droves. And we still provide them with an out that we don’t give to men - they’re supposed to want kids and a family, so of course it’s natural when highly driven women who originally gravitate towards incredibly ambitious programs would see that they’d really wanted to major in marketing and get a pink collar PR job the whole time. Biology is destiny, after all. Why struggle to be a doctor when you can easily take that energy and be a stellar personnel manager AND the perfect soccer mom at the same time? It’s a little easier and it gets your family off of your back.
But you can’t plunk a woman who was going to be a Senator into the suburbs with three kids and no trace of the career that was so close without a few bad feelings, so you’re going to have to throw her a bone. Secular humanist douchebag and Christian douchebag alike realize that since it’s no longer assumed the girls stay home, they have to market it better. So we end up with upper-middle class housewives and fringe Christian alike arguing that managing a middle-class household is a complex, dangerous task that requires super-human focus and dedication to the exclusion of all other learning. And women who succumb to the backlash often find it’s easier to just drink that Kool-aid. It’s what makes a school offer, with a straight face, a homemaking degree to give housewifery the required patina of professionalism while on national TV a woman can actually argue that her job as a mother makes her too busy to know that the earth is a sphere.
Why the fuck would a woman pay the Southern Baptist Seminary perfectly good money for credentials to do a job that can apparently be done just as well by a woman to stupid to remember the shape of a globe? Probably for the same reason an woman skilled in the art of household efficiency seems to insist on making her own bread, and why a girl who would have been an engineer decides to be a science teacher instead: when you’re operating in the patriarchy, sometimes it seems better to compromise even when ‘they’ are totally wrong.
Wow. I feel like a traitor to the feminist cause for leaving Biology for History of Science.
I talked the the rest of the feminist police, and we all agreed you could make it up to us if you write a couple of pop science books about female scientists.
damn, i feel really bad after reading this article. I gave up going to medical school to instead take a year course and become a registered nurse(i already had my biology degree). And the reason, I thought that going to medical school and being a resident would leave little time for skiing. And it would. But I still feel like a traitor. But I get to go to Copper and Vail alot:)
I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad here. I just wanted to point out that we make it easier for women to quit difficult things then men, and in fact we encourage it, and maybe we shouldn’t do that. Would a guy be as comfortable admitting that he became a nurse instead of a doctor because he wanted more time for skiing? Not that that’s a bad thing- realizing that you don’t want to marry your work is perfectly OK, and many of the STEM jobs involve marrying your job, but we encourage men to marry their jobs, an encourage women to marry those men, when we all know that there’s probably an equal number of couples who would like to reverse that situation but were sabotaged before they even got to high school.
The point is, ditching bio for history of science or doctor for nurse should be a perfectly free choice that you don’t have to defend, but until we get rid of these strong social biases that are tripping up girls, women should be encouraged take an extra long look at those kinds of decisions and at least be encouraged to look at them more honestly. If you quit being a doctor to go skiing, and you still regularly enjoy the skiing, you’re probably OK. If you said, I’m going to be a nurse because it will leave me extra time for skiing and then never went skiing again, then you were full of shit.
Plenty of women out there are full of shit. We see them interviewed in the NYT all the time and they are not helping the rest of us one iota.
What Kisaen said.
And don’t go pretending it’s your free choice when you’ve, in fact, been oppressed into doing it.
If it is your free choice, fine. But take that good hard look: was it?
I don’t recall who recently posted on women taking their fellas last names when they married — was it Amanda, over at Pandagon? — and then pretending it was b/c it was “easier” or whatever, not that the patriarchy had oppressed them into it. Well, sometimes this is the same thing. I don’t say we should blame the women who shift into the easier path, b/c no, we should not: the oppressed are never who we should blame for being oppressed. But it helps nothing if you claim, fiercely, that you aren’t, either, being oppressed. (I likes these chains, massa!)
Well, I quit physics grad school after my MS to have kids and become a teacher. Partly because it is much more flexible and, as a part time university instructor and full time substitute teacher, i don’t have to be married to my job, and partly because I really do enjoy teaching much more than doing research and writing grant proposals, but mostly because I wanted to have kids and I don’t know a single female physics PhD with kids who also manages to sleep and have some semblance of a family life (even with a supportive husband who will take up a lot of the slack–and mine would and does even now). Not one. So yeah, I succumbed to the the patriarchy. I wouldn’t do it differently if I could do it over again, because I have a good life and I very much enjoy myself most of the time, but I’m not going to pretend my decision was something it wasn’t, either.
I don’t believe feminism is about telling women they need to all become scientists, lawyers and CEO’s. I don’t believe a woman should feel guilty about getting a degree in fine arts or music or history(which I have a degree in too), if thats what she loves. And if a woman decides to choose a job that will give her more time to have a life, I think thats great. I went into nursing because its interesting, challenging enough so I don’t get bored, but I don’t have to “marry” my job. I can live my life, have friends, I get to go on vacation a lot, and I may not be rich, but I live quite well. And by the way, I am not married and I did not choose my life because I just figured I would marry a successful career minded man. In fact, I think most women (especially on this blog) would hate that atypical, stressed out, patriarchal kind of man. I know many men who are married to their jobs because they have this insane desire to be the wealthiest, most successful and powerful person in their place of business. I’m glad that I don’t have that desire. If you only have one life to live, who wants to waste it by working sixty hours a week? And I have a hard time believing that this attitude is whats holding women back. I think teaching, nursing, social work, or any other “female” occupations are important and noble. Teenage girls should not be encouraged to these fields based on gender, but, when you argue that women need to question their decisions not to go into STEM jobs, you make these jobs sound unimportant and useless. I know thats not the intent, but that is how it comes off.
By the way, Kyso is my all time favorite blogger:) So please don’t be mad:)!!
I know thats not the intent, but that is how it comes off.
We need a standard disclaimer for this sort of shit, honestly. This is one of about five or six topics where everyone’s knee jerk defensive reaction comes out to play.
Of course not all women are going to get STEM jobs. Not all men get STEM jobs. Men wash out of engineering problems like mad - but women wash out disproportionately, and according to livescience alot of them are doing it to themselves with their unrealistic standards about how they should always be getting good grades and that’s the problem here. If 10 men and 3 women start an engineering program and 4 men and 2 women high tail it over to information systems management after the third semester, we’ve lost 40% of our guys and 2/3s of our women. At that rate, we’d still be losing even if 10 men and 10 women started the same program at the same time.
So yeah, even if I made every girl in high school today at least try to major in chemistry for a semester, the vast vast vast vast majority would say screw that and quit. That’s fine. But we’re losing girls who want to do STEM, who by all measure should be able to do STEM, but who are not only not prepared the way boys are but also are encouraged from childhood to self-select out at the first sign of trouble and in fact are amply rewarded by friends and family for opting out using the socially-approved set of excuses.
And arguing that women who start and then quit STEM programs need to examine their choices does not make teaching or nursing sound unimportant. That’s your defensiveness talking. And the more we couch female-dominated careers like teaching and social work as inherently noble the more we buy into this idea that women work for love and not cash. Things like social work are only praised as noble because you’re doing a difficult and important job for crap pay. All of those professions are underpaid in comparison to what similarly credentialed professionals in other markets make precisely because they’re full of women, who of course are the nobler, more self-effacing sex and who have a man at home to take care of them so they don’t need the cash. If teaching were a male dominated profession, you wouldn’t see men’s noble interest in educating the young used as an excuse to jerk them around. Instead of patting yourself on the back for being so valiant, you should be screaming for change.
This post is amazing, Kyso.
I don’t know a single female physics PhD with kids who also manages to sleep and have some semblance of a family life
I know one. One. In addition to the fact that she must be solar powered because she never runs out of energy, she relies fairly heavily on nannies and babysitters (even though her kids are pretty old and it’s clear that half or more of the ‘babysitter’s’ duties are housekeeping ones). In addition to that, she’s married to another physicist, and a fairly prominent one at that, which means any time she lost career-wise to the kids can be at least partially made up for by his requesting that any department that hires him helps him find a job suitable for her as well, which is a fairly common demand from in-demand scientists who would like to solve what she calls the “two body problem” of trying to get two science jobs within driving distance of each other. The number of scientist-scientist couples who spend months or years separated by their jobs is astonishing, as it takes years if not decades to reach the point where you can demand that kind of consideration, if you ever do.
Reading this put a lump in my throat and made me feel like my whole life hurt. Because it wasn’t a choice. I knew at the time, but just had to keep going, one day at a time, and get to the best place I could.
I know of a few couples who have had to do that. We have one couple here in our physics department–she’s the co-chair and he’s a prof, and they’re of course both tenured. They both do pretty high caliber research in their field (both are astronomy–he’s hot stars and she’s something with cosmology but I don’t remember exactly what) and I’m sure they could easily land tenure at much more prestigious universities that here, but probably not both at the same place. So they stay together here at the mid sized Ohio state school that isn’t so terribly known for its wonderful physics program. They are, however, about the coolest people I’ve ever met, and they both are really great with students (they were both really helpful to me as a new grad student and as a new instructor).
I didn’t feel like I was patting myself on the back. In fact, I thought I made it clear that I chose my job to support the lifestyle I wanted(ie..work three days a week, and enjoy myself for the rest). Unfortunately, there will always be jobs that have to be done, that are going to be paid less. For example, becoming a teacher. You work great hours, have summers off, but end up making 40k-50k a year. In other words, you make a decent salary and get to have a life. I agree that academic minded women need to stop agonizing over getting a C and dropping a class. I can admit that I was one of those girls, it would send me into a funk for days if I got a C. It took a while to get over that. I don’t know why as a woman you feel like you have to be the best at something, and if you’re not, you need to get out of it. I wish women didn’t “opt” out of things because of pressure to have a job where you can “take care” of a family. And I have found that male science teachers tend to be more patronizing to females, especially high school science teachers. I am sorry if you thought I was defensive. Its just that I want all women to be feminists, but many women are put off if they do want to have a family, or be teachers, or just not go to school. I’ve argued to many of my girlfriends that feminism is not just for “brainy” women, but for every woman. But you are right, its complete bullshit to expect women to give up their career expectations cause one day they might have kids, or that their little brains just can’t handle the complexity of science.
I switched from pre-vet to plain old biology in undergrad because I’m too lazy to compete with those “perfect girls, starving daughters”. I have no drive or desire to get an A in every class or to spend all my free time volunteering or working or doing any of the myriad things necessary to win a spot in a vet school. So I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I started this Ph.D.
I’ve often wondered if I could have gone into science. Clearly, I find it interesting, and my math and science grades were as good as my English grades. But it just wasn’t presented as an option in any realistic sense to me. I’m happy I went with my strengths, but who knows if, in another world, science wouldn’t have been a strength?
Interestingly, I was educated in the Lost Art of Bread Making in high school. I guess that doesn’t count, though, what with my being male and all.
You made bread in high school? Damn. Block schedule?
The number of scientist-scientist couples who spend months or years separated by their jobs is astonishing, as it takes years if not decades to reach the point where you can demand that kind of consideration, if you ever do.
As a grad student that became single during my grad program, I found the pressure to date one of my fellow graduate students shocking, and especially loathesome once everyone started talking about the two-body-problem.
‘Why did you let me into this school? Oh, to date one of your socially inept boy geniuses? Wait, what happens when we graduate and get post-docs at different places? Oh yeah, I get it, I’m the girl, I’m not supposed to graduate! Right! Got it, I’ll keep slaving away at this education then.’
“Is that the same Amanda Marcotte who was fired by John Edwards earlier this year?
Isn’t she a barista or mixologist these days? That’s kinda like a job in science, so it’s good that her math and science background are so strong.”
Chris, trying to be an asshole? Or just succeeding as one in spite of yourself?…
Of course not all women are going to get STEM jobs. Not all men get STEM jobs. Men wash out of engineering problems like mad - but women wash out disproportionately, and according to livescience alot of them are doing it to themselves with their unrealistic standards about how they should always be getting good grades and that’s the problem here.
Are unrealistic standards women put on themselves, or are different standards applied to men and women? I know I have personally felt the pressure to be a perfectionist, but I’ve been in plenty of situations where male ‘B’ students have received departmental and faculty support where ‘A’ female students get largely marginalized and ignored.
My first reading of the livescience article I felt like they were trying to place all of the blame on women’s ‘perfectionism’ in a system where women have to perform significantly better than men for the same amount of recognition.
Yes, I am a little bitter about this subject, because a STEM career/job is something I’ve worked hard for, but I still get told ‘you don’t have the skills, but you’re cute and we’d love it if you answer our phones!’
Well — I’m a prof, but in English, not science.
I don’t feel in the least guilty for spending my days explicating plays instead of sequencing DNA. Nor is writing books and articles ‘easier’ than doing bench work. Same game, different cards.
I’m concerned about the pressure to push women into low-achieving positions, particularly when it’s so they can do a “Woman’s Real Job” which is be a prop to a male ego.
But I”m also concerned about the tendency to see intellectual challenges as residing only in numbers and memorization: it narrows the scope of the wider world for everyone. Most of my students sleepwalk through writing and thinking on the grounds that it must be easy, because English (or History, or Philosophy) is for the stupid.
Jesus fucking Christ, I am not implying that science is superior to humanities, and we all know that Other Things Are Hard Too. But STEM is still, unlike most humanities, a goddamn sausage fest and that’s what we’re trying to talk about here. I’ll bet, just a crazy hunch, that if you encouraged girls to explore science with any amount of confidence, a bunch would say no thanks to the science but keep the confidence and you’d start seeing the results of such an education over in the English department.
And most of the American physics professors I’ve had are not into memorization, either. They would prefer you remember the few foundational equations and be able to derive what you need from them. Basic science, especially for kids, shouldn’t be about memorization anyway. That’s the place to give them the Oh, ah! science and ask them to really think about what’s happening. They can memorize F=ma in high school.
Oh hell, yeah! Physics is the Anti-Memorization - that’s why I love it so much. I remember an E&M exam where half the 3-hour exam was deriving everything we could from the given charge distribution. Yes, I am enough of a geek that I get nostalgic for really good exams or problem sets.
I left academia (physics undergrad, astro PhD, a couple of postdocs) 10 years ago this month. I used to feel guilty about letting the side down, but I really appreciate the more reasonable working hours (a life outside my job!) and the relative lack of sexism in IT versus academia.
relative lack of sexism in IT
Now there’s a phrase you don’t see too often.
Okay, done stewing now; am I the only girl in the world whose education, during teenage years, was wildly disadvantaged by that ‘helpers in their father’s home’ bit you quoted near the top? Studying physics and maths is a certain kind of hard work, and I found it incompatible with the father’s-helper thing ( the being-too-miserable-to-sleep thing, its close relation). It was an unusual situation, but I wonder if there’s enough of that thing around to make it not some individual anomaly, but merely a statistic.