The “Men’s & motor” area
Gender policing? What gender policing? I can’t imagine what that could possibly be.
No science for women. Women are too pink and fluffy and frothy to be interested in science. Women are interested only in bride magazines and how to arrange your hair magazines. Everything else is over their heads.
Writing in a Facebook post seen by The Tab student newspaper, former Leeds student Sophie Anam said that the display gave a negative message to girls.
That science isn’t for them? But is that really a negative message, if you truly think about it? Women are so much happier and more content with their lot if people don’t encourage them to think they can do things like science and engineering and politics.
The supermarket sparked further controversy when it responded to Ms Anam: “this magazine has been placed under this section is that it is a generally a men’s general interest magazine.”
No. No, it really isn’t. Sarcasm aside, that’s a staggeringly insulting thing to say. Half, remember? We’re not some funny little fringe group, we’re half. No, we’re not mentally children.
The good news is that Morrisons pulled itself together and said the sign was a mistake.
The incident occurred in a climate of concern that women are underrepresented and put off from careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Stem) because of societal pressures.
Despite the constantly reiterated insistence of Christina Hoff Sommers that all that has been fixed now.
Women currently make up around 12.8 per cent of the Stem workforce, according to the campaign group Women in Science and Engineering (Wise).
The figure was compounded by a recent study which found that women are less likely to become scientists and engineers because they are taught to believe that such professions require innate intellectual brilliance rather than hard work.
So let’s do better, shall we?
I think some men as well as women are likely to be put off by the idea that intellectual brilliance is what is needed in science. It’s a misleading idea anyway, and we should not be teaching it – most advances have required a deal of hard work even if they started with a flash of brilliance. The case is made in an engaging book, How To Fly A Horse by Kevin Ashton.
Indeed. I’ve read at least one book that argues that this is a big (and harmful) difference between American education and Japanese. Here we think and teach that science and math take big obvious smarts. In Japan they teach that science and math take lots of hard work.
David Evans@1:
THIS.
Ophelian@2:
AND THIS.
The notion of the “brilliant scientist” infuriates me. I have long maintained that anyone of reasonable intelligence and drive can make useful and important advances in the sciences if they make the effort of learning the background well, and putting in the (large amount of) effort that is required. It takes years to pick up the background and years of toil to start making the advances, but almost anyone can do it. Sure, if you’re lazy, or unwilling to think, or prone towards intellectual dishonesty, or clinging to dogma, then you probably cannot do it.
The Brilliant Scientist Up On The Pedestal Of Veneration is one of the bricks in the wall that is used to keep women out. “Girls aren’t good at math”, “brilliance is beyond average people”, etc. etc. yada yada yada. It’s horseshit.
I am the very epitome of an average person. Average in talent and intelligence, that is. I’m privileged to be male and white, but I’m still average. And yet even I, through hard work (plus the cultural expectation that I’m somehow better at STEM cuz white and male) have made modest advances in my field.
People who are neither white, nor male, nor “brilliant” work just as hard, and could do just as well in their science careers, if we could knock down these ridiculous cultural preconceptions.
The Australian Womens ‘Weekly is a big seller, and is choc-a-bloc full of celebrity gossip, fashion, child-rearing etc, etc.
Nothing about technology, science, machines, cars, or other interesting stuff like that.
It sells mainly to women. But because it reflects so badly on them and their common mindsets and interests, I refuse to have it in the house.
;-)
Re “acknowledged that the sign was a mistake”
Which sign? “Men’s and Motors”? That the magazine was placed incorrectly, or that the existence of a sign merging those two categories is silly? I’m hoping the latter. It should not of course be assumed that only men are interested in motors.
Re “brilliant scientists”
I saw a review of a book recently disputing the “great man” theory. (Maybe here?) I’ll see if I can find it. I think the theory is bunk. Jared Diamond, if I recall, also speaks well against it.
I encounter a related phenomenon at work. One of the classes I teach is Environmental Science, and my Ph.D. is in Environmental Science. All the advisors tell my students when they enroll that it is “easy” and “not really science”. So the students come in unprepared for the real work of science, thinking they’ll be holding hands, singing Kumbaya, talking about recycling, and laughing at the hippie teacher. For the record, it is probably the hardest Biology class in our catalog, and it takes a lot of real work to succeed. The students come in, see a woman at the front of the room teaching this “fluff” science class (as they believe), and have not only no respect, but negative respect because I “took the easy courses” to get a faux science degree. None of that is true, of course, but students come out at the end of the semester assuming this is the “easy” science class, which just reinforces the idea that “real” scientists are brilliant.
[…] a comment by MrFancyPants on The “Men’s & motor” […]
YES to all of the comments above.
IMO the problem with the New Scientist mag placement wasn’t that it was put in the ‘Mens’ Section’, but that there is a Mens’ or Womens’ section at all. Why not group by interest? Eg. Science and Tech. Interior Decorating. Gardening. Auto.
Also, the idea of the brilliant man does double duty in excluding women from science.
As noted, girls may be put off because they may perceive/are given the messages that scientific brilliance is required and that girls and women generally aren’t scientfically brilliant compared with boys and men.
Also, though, if a female person should enter scientific training and be perceived as actually being ‘brilliant’, this can cause a whole other set of problems. Because females aren’t supposed to be brilliant at science, resulting in identity-challenges that may be experienced by both males and female people in the lab. And so this perceived attribute can be punished, as gender non-conformity usually is, by both male and female colleagues and superiors.
Following on from my #8.
I suppose the problem with grouping magazines by Interest rather than by Gender is that then an alternative title for porn mags would have to be thought of. In my recollection, these used to be grouped under ‘Mens’ Interest’ or similar at the newsagent. Under my system, they’d need to be titled ‘Heterosexual Pornography’ or similar. That mightn’t be considered to look quite right in a sububan ‘family’ newsagent (although IMO, neither do the mags themselves.)
I have noticed that the local Barnes and Noble tends to classify Science magazines under Men’s Interest some of the time, but have recently moved them to Current Events. I wonder if someone complained? I know I did mention a couple of times that I couldn’t find them, and had to be directed there. Maybe that made a difference? They were tired of paying help to direct women to the location of the science magazines? Nah, probably not.
Another side effect of gendering interests is that the girls who buck expectations and buy the science magazines and work on motors basically absorb the old stuff we found was not helpful for feminism:
“You’re different than other girls.” [You’re better than other girls because you like guy stuff.]
“I don’t really think of you as a girl.” [You’re just like one of the guys. You’re our friend. We’ve friendzoned you. Because you’re fun, but you aren’t girly.]
“You’re one of us.” [We won’t accuse you of being a fake geek girl. You are an honorary guy.]
“I really like you, you aren’t like other girls.” [This one hasn’t friendzoned you. Instead, you are his Ideal Woman. Because regular girls are stupid and shallow and play games.]
And so on. And if you are a geek and try to hang out with other girls who don’t do geek stuff, you get bored and may start thinking girl things are stupid and shallow yourself. You find a wedge forming between yourself and other members of your sex, and feel our of place and a little disgusted with what gender is supposed to mean. And you have to unlearn it as you get older and learn that Performative Femininity is a survival skill that other women were mastering while you were reading about black holes and genetic engineering. You realize they had social skills and political awareness and other things you hadn’t worked on so much– they weren’t shallow at all, they just had different interests.
You realize you grew up in a misogynistic society and had found a little niche where you weren’t hated but you absorbed the desire to judge others for their gender conformity. It is a hard thing to unlearn, but important.
Samantha @11 – or, like me, you may internalize a message that you are, in fact, some sort of grotesque mutant. Although you are too interested in “guy things” to be female, you just aren’t good enough to be male. You are weird and unnatural. My mother could never accept my interest in college or in science; women were supposed to get married at 18, have their first child at 19, and keep pushing out babies until they were worn out. That’s how her mother did it, that’s how she did it, and by god, that’s how her daughters were going to do it. Who would have thought she would have daughters capable of thinking for themselves? I wasn’t interested in that. (My sisters were, but 3 out of 4 wasn’t enough; she needed that “weird” daughter to “prove” she was female).
No matter how strong and independent I am, how well I succeed, or how much respect I get from my peers, it is still difficult to throw off those last shards of glass in my brain from that upbringing.
Agreed, Iknklast. There’s so many factors that feed how we read how we fit in, or don’t. I was lucky– my folks didn’t buy into gender roles that much, and literature tends to celebrate tomboys, so I got a lot of positive feedback, but then it also led to some internalized misogyny. No one gets through the patriarchy untouched by problematic thinking.