Gender balance

[liv]

When I went to university, I left an almost exclusively female environment for a male-dominated environment. The differences I noticed were very small, and all positive. But this weekend I returned to my old college for a reunion, and there were several things that started me thinking.

From the age of 8 until A Levels, I attended an all-girls school where nearly all the teachers were female. It took me a couple of years to reach the point where I was considered acceptably feminine by my peers, and even after that I was sometimes a bit of an outsider. That said, the general attitude at school was that academic achievement mattered, and girls who were perceived as caring more about clothes, fashion, makeup, appearance etc were looked down on much more than I was for never quite being girly enough. And the school environment really reinforced the attitude I had from my family, that I could do anything I wanted, that academic success and assertiveness were rewarded, and that science was king.

Though on the down-side, school was often intensely homophobic (I have the impression this is not typical for girls' private schools of the era), and there was some associated gender-policing. Computer literacy and domestic skills were actively discouraged, on the grounds that we should aspire to something "better" than mere pink collar secretarial or clerical work, and not even think of devoting effort to becoming good home-makers. I remember our headmistress refusing to pass on an advert offering pocket money jobs as note-takers for Cambridge students with disabilities, because that was too much like being a secretary. (I found out about said job via other channels and took it anyway, and I'm very glad I did!) I think on the whole it was better to be encouraged to learn lots of maths and science and discouraged from learning to cook and sew than the other way round, but there were definitely some prejudices there. (And the IT thing was at least partly just failure to predict the future.)

I did quite a lot of research into where I should apply for university, though not as extensive as a motivated school-leaver these days, as I didn't really have access to the internet. School kind of pushed the most academically able towards Oxbridge; in my case this was good advice anyway. When I chose a college, I was aware that my first choice had been the last of the former men's colleges to go mixed, and had the smallest proportion of female students in Oxford. This didn't bother me at all. My college might have had a ratio of 2 men to 1 woman at undergraduate level, and a tiny fraction of female faculty, but it had recently appointed the first woman in history to head a mixed sex college. My college tutor was to be a female professor, a rarity within the whole university and the whole of science academia, not just in my particularly male-dominated college. And I was applying to read Biochemistry, the one subject with a 50/50 gender balance, not just in student numbers but in distribution of grades.

Unlike a lot of my class-mates, I had plenty of male peers as a teenager, partly through the Jewish community, and partly because I have two brothers close in age and their friends were often part of my circle. (Not, I should add, in a "hot sister" way since I had the good fortune of not being at all hot, which meant that the most obnoxious teenaged boys didn't deign to notice my existence, and the slightly less obnoxious never tried to see how far they could push minor sexual assault in order to impress me or their mates.) Also, I had the confidence instilled by both home and school that I could succeed, that there was no reason to believe that boys were any more capable than me because of gender. The not being hot thing also meant that I completely screened out any advice I might have picked up from the surrounding media about needing to pretend to be stupid or demure in order to "get a boyfriend"; I just assumed that such a thing as a boyfriend was completely unattainable.

Anyway, I turned up at university and took to it like a duck to water. I never felt outnumbered, though of course I was! (To be fair, I think science students tend to socialize more in subject groups than in colleges, and in the biochem department I was not outnumbered at all.) I enjoyed the academically competitive atmosphere of college, and never had a problem speaking up in tutorials. In this respect I had advantages over many female students, who found that a heavily gender-skewed environment did not at all suit their learning styles, who found it hard to get attention from tutors and all the other stuff that makes equally able women do less well than their male peers. I also found that the burden of trying to live up to a gender I didn't understand was completely lifted; I was allowed to just be me, and nobody cared whether I was feminine "enough". In addition I got into the LGBT scene, being, in fact, bi, and that gave me lots of tools for looking critically at gender. There was essentially no direct sexism, and I was too thick-skinned to even notice the institutional kind. I made male and female friends, both in college and out.

Anyway, the thing is that this reunion was partly in honour of this first ever female head of college, who is retiring this year. Since I'm a great fan of hers, I decided to attend. She has her portrait up in the dining hall, which captures her sardonic smile and doesn't particularly draw attention to the fact that she's the only woman among old white men spanning three quarters of a millennium.

As part of the event, there was a talk from some guy high up in the FSA about the financial crisis and whether it could have been foreseen or prevented. During the questions afterwards, I noticed that question after question was coming from the men in the audience. And then I realized that, well, it's mostly older people who bother coming to college reunions, and that meant that nearly all the women in the audience were spouses rather than alumni. And then I thought I'd better ask a question just to balance things a bit. It wasn't a very brilliant question, but lots of the questions from men were similarly just demonstrating general intelligence and a bit of bluster, not particularly detailed knowledge of banking and finance.

A few more of my generation showed up for the farewell lunch. Not a huge sample, certainly, but it was universally true that every woman I spoke to of around my age is currently taking a career break to raise a family, and no man I spoke to is. There are quite a lot of intra-college marriages, actually, so this isn't about alumni versus spouses. It doesn't prove anything at all, it just struck me how completely one-sided the situation is.

The speeches after the lunch were a little cringey, too; they kept referring to the retiring head's "feminine" qualities of compassion and the "feminine" touch she brought to the college. I kind of felt, look, it's 15 years since this whole female head thing was a novelty, haven't you got over it yet? Honestly I wouldn't describe her as a particularly "feminine" person, but what I do I know? Certainly she deserves praise for improving the pastoral support available to students, but this hardly takes a uniquely feminine understanding of student problems!

Anyway, I had a lovely time, revisiting some of the fun relaxing things you can do in an Oxford summer, without any of the intense academic pressure parts of being a student. College even thoughtfully put me in the same house where I had a room in first year, to really underline the nostalgia! It was lovely to be able to show jack some of my past, and show him off to some of my former fellow students. And conversation at lunch was great fun as usual at these college occasions, just throw a bunch of highly intelligent and socially confident people together and watch them play around with ideas while eating tasty food and drinking really good wine.

There was also a heat-wave, which made me wilt a bit but certainly showed the city at its best. Apart from the college events, we ate at Al-Shami (its more down-market but friendlier daughter restaurant, Restaurant du Liban, very sadly no longer exists), and wandered about Jericho and along the canal to Port Meadow, and had a pint in the Turf and consumed lots and lots of G&Ds icecream.

I don't think I'll make a habit of attending college reunions every year, but it was nice to drop in for one occasion, anyway.

Comments

[nanaya]

Yeah, I found all-girls' environments more homophobic than stereotype would have one believe, but I found most schools homophobic tbh.

The 'career-break' thing bothers me a lot.

[liv]

When I first went to university, a lot of people remarked to me that my school was weird for not having a "lesbian mafia" like, apparently, most girls' schools. I think the 90s was a pretty homophobic time in general, and teenagers are more prone to that sort of thing than most; I really don't know if it would have been easier to be bi in a co-ed environment. University was definitely much much nicer in that respect, but that's probably because adults are generally nicer than teenagers, and because gay rights were starting to reach general consciousness at the time I turned 20, not because of the gender mixing.

I think for most of these women, the career break will be an actual break, not a permanent retirement from public life. We're talking about a very skewed subset of women who have really fancy degrees from one of the most competitive colleges at one of the most competitive universities in the world. But still, they are going to come out with 2 to 4 years less work experience than their male peers, and probably do more of the admittedly less time-devouring childcare for the next decade or so too. It just doesn't happen in Sweden, not in the equivalent social stratum anyway, which is one of the things that made me notice it really starkly. That and the complete lack of exceptions!

[lavendersparkle]

Stopping paid employment to spend time caring for children isn't withdrawing from public life. You've made it sound like they've entered into purdah.

It doesn't happen so much in Sweden because Sweden have much longer, better paid parental leave, which is transferable between parents and which fathers have to take a chunk of. They also have much more subsidised childcare, greater rights for parents to take time off work, better care for the elderly and shorter working hours. All of these make both parents engaging in paid employment much more compatible with parenting. It also may have had the effect that the gender pay gap has narrowed as employers can't rationalise their sexism by complaining that women go on maternity leave. There's an article about it in the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

[liv]

Yeah, I know Sweden has all those differences; which are you calling a bad thing? The only downside I can see is a higher rate of income tax, but to me the Swedish system is better for mothers, better for women who are not mothers, better for fathers, and definitely better for children. (It's only worse for single men in the sense that they don't have a huge advantage over everybody else, but I think that's compensated by the benefits of living in a more equal society.)

And I agree that the women I met had not withdrawn from public life entirely; I met them in public after all! I really have nothing at all against women taking time out of their careers to devote themselves to young children. It was just surprising to me that all the women I met have made this choice, and none of the men have. If it were really a neutral thing, surely I would have encountered at least one man who was at home with young kids rather than working full-time!

Mind you, I don't have a problem with women who keep Purdah either; conservative Muslim women have enough to deal with without being a metaphor for ultimate sexism!

[lavendersparkle]

I think I reacted a bit oddly to your post because very much want to spend a significant chunk of my life primarily engaged in child rearing and I read what you wrote as "Look at all these silly women jeopardizing their Big Important Careers to do something as pointless as look after Stinky Old Babies. They are clearly just failing at being good liberated feminists." I realise that it wasn't quite what you were saying.

It wasn't clear from what you were saying that you were aware of why the situation is so different between Sweden and the UK. I have friends who want the man in the couple to be the primary care giver to the children and between: maternity leave not being transferable, gender pay gap, stigma surrounding male parenting and practical difficulties with come from that (for example baby changing facilities in women's toilets) it's really rather a difficult thing to manage in the UK system. I sounded a bit like you thought the British women were letting the team down, rather than the difference being a completely predictable consequence of the UK's employment, legal and cultural environment.

I wasn't using Purdah as a metaphor for ultimate sexism, just as an example of something which is much more like 'retirement from public life' than withdrawing from paid employment to engage in unpaid caring. Most carers are still very much engaged in public life, whether as consumers, activists, community organisers etc. Apart from anything else the public life/private life dichotomy is just a patriarchal construction to privilege the experience of white, middle-class, men.

To put this into context, over the last few days I've been reading bell hooks and stuff about The Farm.

[liv]

Oh, I didn't in the least intend any criticism of the women. I was criticizing UK society for not implementing the relatively simple changes that Sweden has accomplished in order to provide a vastly broader range of options for people who want to be parents. Raising children is a feminist thing to do and not at all pointless, absolutely! I don't at all think the women I met were silly, and I doubt they're jeopardizing their careers. They're putting themselves at a major disadvantage compared to their male peers, but they're bright enough and driven enough to overcome that.

I was complaining about the fact that we in the UK put so much effort into artificially creating and maintaining a system where just about the only rational thing to do is for a woman to have a first child between the ages of 29 and 31, and a second child within a couple of years if she wants more than one. To do so in the context of a marriage-like relationship, preferably with a man. And for the mother to leave the workplace entirely for a minimum of 2 years, perhaps up to five, and return to part-time for several years after that. I'm not complaining that lots of women I met at the weekend made this entirely rational choice, I'm complaining that it's so stigmatized and in many cases impossible to do parenting in any other configuration.

In Sweden, a lot more women (including middle-class, highly qualified women) would choose to have kids in their 20s and it wouldn't ruin their lives. Many men would choose to do an equal or majority share of the caring labour, and nobody would be unpaid and unsupported doing it. Women would be much more easily able to raise kids on their own, or with other women, or co-parent with an ex-partner. So you wouldn't meet a bunch of 30-year-old women who were all on exactly the same life path, because that one isn't so unjustly favoured by the social and legal system. I don't think Swedish women are better feminists or more liberated (though Swedish men probably are, in some ways), I think they have a lot more freedom than their English counterparts. To me, this is an extremely desirable thing. There is another way, and I think a lot of people in this country aren't even aware that anything but the woeful system we have is even possible.

[ajnabieh]

Ugh, this reminds me of all the time I spent doing queer alumni organizing. It was something I really believed it, but meant I had to try to schmooze rich white gay men who were really uninterested in listening to a young woman who wanted to get them to be political and care about queer youth and queer studies. Eventually I was like, yeah, I'm not getting anywhere. You need a hot jailbait boy to do this work.

Also this is why I prefer to go to my wife's college reunions, at her uber-feminist uber-queer women's college (that also happens to be in an awesome town in the mountains, and reunions are usually during the perfect-weather period of May: A++++ vacation material, in other words).

Weird that such a high percentage of the women you saw were out of the marker right now. I find that my wife and I (out of undergrad 7 and 6 years, respectively) are just about the only people we went to college with who already have kids. It's more common in our alumni/ae circles to wait until at least a decade out. (We did it now because it's easiest for my career, and because she wanted to have her first before thirty--but if I were in a different field, we might have waited a few more years ourselves.)

[liv]

Well, that's the thing, I'm nine years out of college, and I'm just reaching the age where nearly all my peers are starting families. It's really noticeable that two years ago the only parents I knew of my generation were a couple where she accidentally got pregnant aged 19 and they decided to go ahead and raise the baby while finishing their first degrees. Now it seems I hear of a marriage, pregnancy announcement or baby just about every week.

I haven't kept in touch with the Queer scene as much as I ought to have. Partly it's moving around a lot, partly it's that I already have a community that needs a lot of input from me. And partly it's just that I haven't managed to keep up my involvement. (My university experience was almost stereotypical in that the women were very political and the men were only interested in clubbing and finding boyfriends. But those Queer women were a huge, huge influence on me, especially the Jewish segment of the scene. And it would be good to give something back if I could. I think it may be more possible to get involved now that I live within reach of Manchester, and I'm in a country where I know the culture well enough to find worthwhile Queer orgs.)

[karen2205]

Interestingly male:female ratio was something I didn't consider when looking at Colleges, beyond knowing that I did not want to go to St Hilda's [whether I'd have accepted a place there if they'd offered rather than another College I don't know - probably, but it wouldn't have been my preference.] I was much more concerned about (a) location in relation to the law faculty, (b) relative wealth of different colleges and availability of book grants/accommodation charges etc. Given the size of each year's intake, I didn't think there was much to be gained from looking at the male:female ratio as it could change so dramatically from year to year. I didn't know the college had been one of the last to admit women until after I started there. My year of lawyers was very female dominated - 7 women to 2 men, with two female law tutors (though that wasn't something that entered my mind at all as a consideration).

I wonder whether there's a discrepancy between the average graduate of our generation and those that choose to go to college reunions in terms of career break/not career break. I'd hazard an unscientific guess that college reunions are more appealing as events to those out of the workplace for a while, in need of some good conversation at a family friendly event (IIRC there was provision for children for the farewell lunch and the afternoon).

[liv]

Gender ratio was by no means a big deal for me. I was aware of it, but it didn't really affect my decision in the end. I didn't care about location much, but I definitely did want a rich college that had accommodation for the whole four years.

Don't worry, I'm under no illusions that the people I happened to meet yesterday are a representative sample of alumni! I agree it's very likely that women in the middle of maternity leave were over-represented, as they're likely to have some free time and less social contact than women who are being career ambitious at the moment. And yes, college were good about including children in the event.

Parenting career breaks

[rmc28]

When Tony and I got married, nearly all my colleagues asked me at one point or other "so when are you having children". Not one of his did (different departments in the same university).

When we did have Charles, and we both worked reduced hours for a year or so, I actually had people say "I didn't know fathers could do that" even though they worked for the same employer and had access to the same documentation (online!) that made it very clear they could.

Mildly encouraging is that many of them followed with "... what a good idea". I think that maybe fatherhood is beginning to be valued - and I admit to happiness at hearing the prime minister and deputy prime minister have shifted a daily meeting back 30 minutes so they can take their respective children to school. Depressingly, I think childcare is one of those "women's work" things that is only starting to get valued because men are starting to do it more. However, if it means we can reach a point where employers can't assume a man isn't going to take time out for his children and therefore has to actually treat male and female employees equally, I welcome it.

[liv]

Yes, I do definitely know people who are raising children in ways other than the default. I know egalitarian couples and male-female couples where men do the majority of the parenting. And of course not everybody starts having babies within a few months of their 30^th birthday! I think you're probably right that parenting is becoming more valued as more men start doing it, but overall I think that's a trend in the right direction. And you're quite right that the assumptions about how parenting works have knock-on effects for all employees, whether or not they personally have children.

[verazea]

I get the impression from my brothers, who are either going though the same all-boys school I did or left it last year, that homophobia there really was worse in the 90s. I remember several people being completely ostracized for a bit and feeling completely powerless to do anything about it because others thought they might be gay, in most cases just because they were a bit different. One person apparently did sort of admit to being worried about it and his previous friends basically completely disowned him and taunted him mercilessly for about a year. Things did improve by 6th form, where those who were staying somehow suddenly obtained large amounts of maturity but I certainly wasn't going to risk saying anything about my sexuality.

My brothers' friends by contrast didn't appear to mind that someone might possibly be gay at a much earlier age. There might be some teasing but friendships remain and no one seems upset. It's a shame that the school has changed for the worse in other ways, a new head is more controlling causing friction with staff and impacting academic standards, and insisting they stick to Church teaching rather then allowing in class discussion. But this is another topic.