What this journal needs is more controversy

[liv]

This is based on several discussions I've taken part in recently, both on LJ and offline. My options are deliberately inadequate because I'm more interested in discussion in the comments than in the actual vote counts.



[Poll #1330975]

PS I don't have time for nature versus nurture arguments; it's part of human biology that we are members of societies, so it's natural that we are subject to social pressure.

PPS There are various flavours of genderqueer and trans folk reading this journal, as well as people with a whole spectrum of opinions about feminism, so try not to be more offensive than you can help.

Comments

[shreena.livejournal.com]

I'm tired and overworked today so possibly it's just that but I didn't understand what the "When deciding how to treat men and women, we should.." question and its response options meant. Having clicked onto it, it wouldn't then let me leave it blank which, since I didn't understand the question, I would rather have done!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

But I WANT to pick BOTH! I think differences between individuals are much bigger than differences between men and women, e.g. the difference between somebody stupid and somebody intelligent are bigger than the difference in average intelligence scores between men and women so that really there is not a lot of point comparing the effect of gender especially at one tail or another. But then people do IQ tests in a society that dresses them in pink and sells them stupid-looking dolls and tells them their hair is more important than their brain on the way to the test room, also I don't think IQ tests actually test much at all.

As a woman in physics, the thing that REALLY bites me in the arse is that the whole system of how people do research is set up for people with wives to follow them around the world producing babies wherever they are without complaint and build a bubble of comfort around them. Would not mind a wife but I still think the whole thing is fundamentally shit.

[ixwin.livejournal.com]

(clarification to my answer that I'm advantaged by being a woman in my personal life) As the primary carer of two young children, it's a lot easier to be a woman - the playgroups etc. I go to are overwhelmingly female-dominated, and also because it's considered the norm for a woman to be the stay-at-home parent, I don't have to be forever explaining/justifying myself as I imagine a man in the same situation would be.

[liv]

Yeah, it's annoying that you can't unselect a radio button, sorry about that. Let me try to explain the question a bit more clearly, though. Supposing you were convinced there was a major innate difference between men and women. You could either say, well, that's pretty unfair, but it's not my fault, it's just the way the world is, so I'm going to treat men and women differently and give women fewer rights politically; or you could say, I don't care if women are naturally weaker than men, they should have equal rights, and if that means positive discrimination to make sure they are just as likely to get jobs they're less good at, that's the price we pay for making things fair. Obviously those two positions are extreme, but I was deliberately writing a poll with little nuance.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I can think of not one "characteristic" that of the people I know only men or only women possess. So I think any "difference" can only by statistical in nature; there are some differences that are more significant than others for instance it is overwhelmingly likely that a person with a penis is male.

In terms of what tasks people do in the wider world I do think you have to go with what is actually possible; and that is going to mean that 99.9999999% of the porn stars with penises will be men - but I think that if you are hiring a person then you should decide based on that person's abilities, if you have met a non-op transwoman who wants to act as a man in porn (and who can look the part) then I don't think you should refuse to hire her because she is a woman but neither should you make a law that says that 50% of men in porn must be played by women. Said non-op transwoman is also going to need a range of medical services usually used by men - she should not be denied access to, eg, prostrate cancer screening on account of being a woman although the NHS probably do not need to go around advertising prostrate cancer screening services to women.

We should treat people as the people they are; not assume that they are statistically average for their gender.

[liv]

OK, I've recently read a book about eugenics, and it convinced me that IQ tests are utter, utter bullshit, regardless of what you think about gender or race or anything else. But to some extent, it is vaguely possible to tell how intelligent someone is, so your argument still applies. And yes, I agree with you that "both" would be a better answer, I wanted to make people choose so that either I'd get some results, or I'd get people arguing with me for making my poll too binary. In other words, yes, there are differences on average between men and women but huge overlaps between the two populations, and yes, it's also true that the sexist society we live in massively exaggerates those differences.

I think a lot of jobs, particularly white collar and academic jobs, are predicated on the assumption that you pay people for 40 hours a week, and actually get about 120 hours out of them. The ideal employee has a "wife", so he can afford to work 80 hour weeks or longer, because he doesn't need to spend time cooking or housekeeping or even just destressing, because someone's working at least full time if not more to look after him. I happen to think this is unfair to everyone; even men who do have devoted wives shouldn't be expected to do two people's work just to keep their heads above water. It's unfair to women because they're either expected to do the unpaid and largely unrecognized labour of wifing, or else they're just not competitive in the workplace because even the most liberated of women with the most enlightened of partners doesn't have a wife. I reckon that if a company needs three people's labour to keep going, they ought to be paying three sets of wages, not exploiting people or assuming that they are paying for a wife as well as an employee.

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see! I think the lack of nuance in your poll is fun, I wasn't complaining about it, I just really didn't follow the question..

[liv]

Yeah, that's a very good point. That's exactly why I wanted to separate society in general from individual experiences. It's perfectly possible for a situation to be unfair to women overall, but to be advantageous for a particular woman who wants to do womanly things, or who gets lots of extra support to help her overcome disadvantages in a male-dominated field.

[wychwood]

We should treat people as the people they are; not assume that they are statistically average for their gender.

I don't even think I have enough words to explain how much I agree with this statement.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

I voted, but I wasn't happy with any of the questions. In particular, the real answer for my sub-culture is "the two defined gender roles have roughly equal rights and responsibilities, but the fact that you don't get to choose between them (or forge your own synthesis) undermines this fairness".

[liv]

Yeah, definitely statistical differences rather than absolute differences. I didn't include "there is no difference at all between men and women" as an option, because that is pretty obviously stupid. But I would generally consider having male or female genitals a pretty superficial difference, it's only relevant if you are a porn star or in the specific context of your particular sexual relationships.

I totally agree with you that the fairest policy is to deal with individuals rather than imaginary "average" people, and that goes for gender as well as a lot of other characteristics. The only problem with that view is that if, say, women are discriminated against in general, you might not be able to fix that an individual level, you might need to make some changes to the whole of society.

[liv]

Mm, good point. I was trying to cover that option with different, but not obviously better or worse. But I agree with you that even if two options are truly equal in value, it's unfair if you personally are stuck with the option that doesn't suit you. On this basis, I think even highly sexist societies can be miserable places for some men, the ones who don't fit well into a male role, even if that role gives them objective advantages.

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

IQ tests are utter, utter bullshit

For what? Most knives make rubbish teapots. Binet set up the first set of IQ tests to determine which Parisian children required remedial tuition before they could easily integrate into mainstream schooling, because schools assume a certain set of background skills. And they did an excellent job. Similarly, IQ tests are still preferred as part of educational psychology assessments and job selection, because they are usually better at assessing intelligence (as defined by any given culture) than subject-based exams.

Are they culture-free? Good God, no - and making them full of Sudoku-style, non-linguistic abstract problems doesn't change that. But while tests can be bad in themselves (eg if they are unreliable), most well-developed tests (including IQ tests) are only bad when they are misused. Many tests which claim to measure either general intelligence (g), components of 'g' or other forms of 'intelligence' show stronger correlations and predictive power than can be accounted for by socioeconomic factors etc.

(My stance here is Messick's concept of consequential validity, in case you want to look up counterarguments - but it's a generally accepted stance within cognitive and educational measurement, and I'd be surprised if you found anything particularly compelling.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think there is a good argument for going for some systematic 'treatment' of discrimination; but I think it needs to be done carefully, because there is the risk of pushing for "more women" without taking the trouble to look for qualified women which mostly just causes people to be angry.

Having a penis is generally irrelevant, I had to think quite hard to drag situations out of my brain where it would be, but also didn't involve me picking a random stereotype. Plus I wanted to point out that even such "clearly male" things are not actually the sole province of men.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh, and in my social-subgroup gender is often fairly irrelevant and you get to play around with it, which does have its own pitfalls. But in the wider context of me having to go to work, talk to parents, stuff like that; women are IMO worse off.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Prostate, not prostrate. It is not cancer of lying on your front.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Sorry. My spellik iz no gud.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Thinking about some points raised in some of the comments, I believe the following:

1. It is manifestly not fair for anyone to expect someone in a paid job to work far more than the hours for which they are theoretically paid, on the understanding that there will be someone else there (who is not being paid) to look after that person. There are ways round it - I know a married couple who are both researchers and take turns being in the office and looking after their three children, taking full advantage of the flexibility to work at home - but if the underlying situation were not unfair, there wouldn't have to be workarounds to make it fair.

2. But on the other hand, if someone chooses to make a career of looking after their family, they shouldn't be looked down on for doing so... and I think this can happen sometimes. It is absolutely not something anyone should be forced into, but if they do it voluntarily, then it is a great gift to their family and to society, and they should receive - at the very least - enormous respect. This applies just as much to men as to women.

Given the right person (and the right person only), I would personally be quite happy to give up my current job in order to look after him. This is not a fashionable attitude. However, it doesn't mean that I am somehow reactionary, or anti-feminist, or think that all women ought to be prepared to act in the same way. It simply means that that is what I would be comfortable with, with a side order of lack of job satisfaction at the moment. If I were at home looking after a husband, I'd have time to a) be more creative (I get hardly any writing done at the moment) and b) do a bit of voluntary work, which wouldn't pay but would be far more satisfying.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I agree. If I wanted to find out how intelligent somebody is, the last thing I would so is make them do a timed test of fictitious, simple, isolated problems on a piece of paper. That measures the trained-dog kind of intelligence, doing tricks, not the ability to figure out actual things and decide what to do about it. Go on then, sudoku boy, build a house.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I think that the way that that question is written is unclear and also sort of loaded by your answer to the question. It seems to boil down to "should we treat people differently based upon their sex or should we treat them fairly" the implication being that the fair way to treat people is to treat them all the same and that if we treat both sexes the same it will be fair. I reject this premise.

One of the aspects of feminism which interests me is the way in which women are disadvantaged by being treated the 'same' as men, particularly as this 'same' form of treatment is not neutral but was a system designed by and for men (possibly also with the aim of keeping women down). We live in a society where the only acceptable way to be a full member is to be a man and if you're unfortunate enough to be biologically female you better be damn sure to do your best impression of a man if you want to be accepted. A case in point, whilst I think that the best system would be for there to be transferable parental leave, a system in which everyone only had one day of parental leave regardless of sex would clearly be unfair to women because being heavily pregnant and giving birth are physically different to being the father of a baby which has just been born. Similarly, the levels of various substances which one can safely be exposed to for men and women are sometimes different. The effect of delaying parenthood until ones 40s is different between men and women.

I think that these examples highlight the problem that what it means to treat men and women the same is not clear once one takes into account the different biologies of men and women. Is treating men and women the same giving them the same treatment or treatment which will have the same effect upon them. For many issues one cannot even comprehend what it would mean to give men and women equal treatment. Take abortion. If the say is given completely to the pregnant woman the man is given no say about becoming a father or the fate of his offspring. If the man is given many say the woman loses some of the control over what happens to her body. There's no way to treat man and women 'the same' in that situation.

In reality I think that when people talk about treating men and women the same they often mean treating everyone in a way which would be optimal if they were men.

[liv]

OK, IQ tests are clearly measuring something, but really it's mainly the ability to do IQ tests. I'm not that surprised to learn they have predictive power for academic performance, because a lot of the way academic performance is assessed is testing similar skills to the tests themselves. I used to think they were at least useful for distinguishing between dyslexia, deficient educational background, and intellectual disabilities, (but not for comparing populations, or for distinguishing between normal intelligence and high intelligence / genius). But when I discovered that the tests were marked by comparing everyone to an arbitrary standard that was average for a particular population of schoolkids, and assigning testees a "mental age" or "IQ point score" in relation to that, I lost hope in the tests even as a diagnostic tool.

I think an analogy is the body mass index of a way of determining whether someone is a "healthy" weight. Clearly, it does measure something, because a person's height and weight exist in objective, measurable reality. And there is some correlation between being over- or underweight and poor health outcomes. But comparing everybody to some random group of undernourished post-war Europeans, and telling them they're bad and unhealthy if they're not close to the average for that population, is more destructive than useful. Also, using that scalar number as a way of ranking how healthy everyone is, without taking into account individual variations, the differences between causes and symptoms or anything else, is just wrong.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

I can't really indicate what I actually think with the poll, and some of my answers might be marginally surprising considering my history.

Still, despite the extensive amount of discussion I've had with people of all gender variations I believe that many stereotypes hold and that there are, on average, differences between 'men' and 'women'. The cause of this is not especially relevant in the short to medium term.

As a general principle I dislike the binary gender that society tries to enforce and believe a whole lot of people would be less unhappy with their gender or sex if they only realised how much variance there is with happy, well adjusted cisgender (same gender as the sex you were born) people.

It's therefore reasonable to try and treat men and women according to some of the (less offensive) stereotypes, then adjust to the individual person. My perception is that despite the stereotype there are still many exceptions to the rule, and also that people who do follow the stereotype not infrequently preferred to be treated stereotypically rather than being exposed to different treatment and therefore theoretically having to examine their own gender role.

I'm not entirely certain if my own personal life is particularly affected by my sex (there are advantages/disadvantages for both in my social situation), overall in general society I expect it probably is.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Just to give you an example to the ridiculous extremes this women having t adapt to being treated like men can reach, I was listening to Women's Hour last week on which there was a female scientist. The conversation came around to the lack of women in academic science and it was noted that one of the things stopping women entering the higher echelons of science was that if a woman wanted to have children it would usually involve her being away from the lab for a longish period of time and it was very difficult for women to get back into research science after the break. The interviewee said that things were looking to get better for female scientists. Was her answer better childcare for academics, or more part time jobs in science or efforts by labs to keep women in the loop even when they are on maternity leave? No, she was talking about how the science of freezing human eggs was improving so soon female scientists would be able to have their eggs harvested and frozen so that they could continue working on their career and delay motherhood until after the menopause when pregnancy is much more dangerous.

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think I see our cross-purpose. Intelligence tests can be marked in a variety of ways, according to the purpose they are being used for. (Hence my question: what for?) I'd be interested in any examples you've come across where IQ numbers as you define them are used for decision-making, because as far as I know that particular practice is, as you note, thoroughly discredited.

Academic performance and IQ tests correlate for two reasons:
(1) extraneous factors which are not culturally valued (these usually fall under 'exam strategies')
(2) factors which are part of the culturally-constructed notion of intelligence (which, conflating a bunch of cultures into some sort of post-Enlightenment Western amalgamation, include thinking speed, geometric pattern-spotting, a classically derived vocabulary and juggling multiple explicit variables).

[liv]

I'm really glad you wrote this comment, thanks! I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. I wasn't meaning to imply that just treatment means the same treatment. I just wanted to know whether people thought that we should try to get round, ignore or change reality in the interests of fairness, or whether we should adjust our politics and attitude to reflect the status quo.

It goes the other way too; if you thought men and women were basically the same, you could either choose to judge job applicants strictly on merit, and find you ended up with few female engineers because you had few well qualified female applicants (base decisions on the way things are, unfairly), or you could make efforts to encourage more women to train as engineers, because that would eventually lead to fairer outcomes, even if that went against your view that men and women are equal.

I really like your examples here, of cases where the same treatment would be entirely unjust. And I think your last paragraph makes a very good point. Society is still in transition from thinking that you have to be male to be a real person, and now that we have acknowledged that women are real people, we're liable to fall into the trap of assuming that means women are actually a kind of (more or less effective) men.