Gender balance
Jun. 28th, 2010 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livWhen 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 showjack 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-28 10:59 pm (UTC)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!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-29 08:02 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-29 10:57 am (UTC)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.