I am an identical twin: my sister and I are alike (physically) in every way. Our thought processes, personalities, and beliefs, however, could not be more different. Recently, we were driving back to school together and trapped in a car, had an argument about feminism.
I am a (very) feminist engineering major who truly believes that there are no "male" or "female" ways of thinking or being. She is a philosophy major who thinks that men and women are fundamentally different and should be treated as such. We got into a discussion about gender ratios in our respective majors: apparently, the philosophy department at our school is almost entirely male. She postulated that the discrepancy was due to the "fact" that men think in a more philosophical or abstract way, and women are more focused on people, relationships, and emotions. She also used this thought process to explain why more men are engineers than women, even though I have explained the sexism that females in science can face. I disagreed with her, although I am unable to explain the gender discrepancy in philosophy.
My sister then brought up evolutionary biology as proof of gendered thinking; she claims that no one should be discriminated against due to their gender, but that some jobs are better for men, and some for women, and overcoming this biology is "impossible". That is where the fighting started. To me, the idea of gendered thinking, in addition to being incorrect, breeds discrimination.
What do you, the readers of feministing, think about gendered thinking? How can I explain to my sister (who is a much better arguer than I am, and is much more eloquent) that sexism, in any form, is detrimental and wrong? And on a personal level, does anyone have any advice for dealing with non-feminist or sexist family members? Because we have had this conversation more than once, and it is starting to take a toll on our already strained relationship.
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Men think more philosophically and abstract? I may not be a scientist, but I believe this couldn't be further from the truth. It's just as bad as saying that boys are better at math. My daughter is 11 and she fell within the top percentile in the nation's top math scores for elementary schools, which I think is part of the reason she won the "lottery" for one of the top year round schools in the state.
I am in a relationship with a guy who would fit all of the stereotypical female gender traits. He loves to shop, I hate it. He is a great cook, I suck. He loves teaching and spending time with children. We often argue, because he is more down to earth with issues concerning my current court battle, bills, school, etc. I dread discussing these things, but bring up a topic about astronomy, poetry, world events, evolution, etc. and I am whipped up into a verbal frenzy with a ton of hypothesese(?).
I can think in very abstract ways, I know this, but even with that aside, one does not need to think abstract to be scientific; as a matter of fact, attention to details is important in science. I am sorry, but I do not believe that there is any hardwiring that determines specific gender differences in how people think. I think that unfortunately some people do not know enough, and get sucked into a culturally biased way of perceiving things. They become conditioned. The whole baby gender, and pink and blue, are perfect examples of this.
Hi, I am also a philosophy student, and the amount of discrimination and prejudice that can happen in philosophy is really just stunning. I wrote a community post about it a while ago here -- be sure to send that Haslanger article to your sister, hopefully it will help to open her eyes.
Last night, I went over to my sister-in-law's house to get some math help from her husband. He'd helped my husband a long time ago on the math for the ACT, and he is helping me on the math for the GRE. He said he could tell that I was a lot more logical than my husband, that I sought to understand while my husband could just look at something and memorize it.
But it's really hard to tell someone that if they are already convinced that our thinking is gendered. I would suggest pointing out that 1) we see what we want to see, so if we expect men to be analytical and women to be emotional, those are the kind of men and women we will take notice of and be close to, and 2) most of the studies on the differences between men's and women's brains are done on the bodies of full-grown people, people who have been socialized as one gender or another. There was an article I saw recently (unfortunately, I can't remember where) that said researchers had discovered that the brains of male and female mice were the same at birth. Maybe you could even use the example of someone who ends up blind or deaf partway through his/her life developing the other 4 senses to remind her that biology is not permanent or fixed by any means and can be influenced by experiences.
I am double majoring in philosophy and global studies, and your sister is correct that philosophy departments tend to be mostly male still. I actually read somewhere that it is one of the only liberal arts majors that is still male-dominated. I am lucky to attend a school where I have had several philosophy professors who were women, so I haven't noticed a great deal of discrimination. However, doesn't your sister see a problem with essentializing gender thinking when both you and her, by her own definition, are suceeding in a type of thinking you should not be biologically capable of as women??
I would bring up that her argument about women not being capable of abstract reasoning is the same kind of idea that was used to claim women weren't capable of higher education. Today more women than men attend college. I think you will see the same trend of an increasing representation of women in philosophy and engineering over time. Her mistake is in assuming that there is something "natural" about people's choice of major, when a lot of constructed social ideas influence such decisions.
You might ask her why ancient philosophy is a sub-branch of philosophy with a much higher proportion of women. The best explanation that I've encountered is that there's a lot of interaction and overlap between ancient philosophy and classics, and in recent decades classics made a major effort to reinvent itself and be more inclusive. The classicists successfully managed to find ways to appeal to women, and ancient philosophy seems to have benefited indirectly from that progress in classics. Other theories really don't suggest themselves; certainly I'd laugh at anyone who suggested it was because Plato and Aristotle are less "philosophical and abstract" than subsequent philosophers.
"History of Philosophy" in general has a higher proportion of women than other, contemporary areas. It has been suggested (in many places, including the article that I linked to above) that women who do go into philosophy are encouraged either intentionally or unintentionally to pursue a historical specialty, because that is seen as both a less difficult and more subservient position than e.g. cutting-edge epistemology. Needless to say, there are a whole bunch of problematic notions to unpack in there.
And you have to have a giant ego and be totally socially awkward to go into M&E. OK, that was kind of mean albeit accurate. The thing that's so often overlooked is that many of us who are in philosophy are perfectly capable of the "rigor" (i.e. mutual mental masturbation) of areas like M&E, but are simply more interested in things that actually apply to the real world and that could actually bring about some change in it. Imagine that.
You say mutual mental masturbation, I say intersubjectivity! ;D
Well, in the hardcore analytic departments I've been in, intersubjectivity is a dirty word. Granted, my experience only extends to three different departments, but they do tend to be fairly exclusive, uninterested in any new ways of approaching the questions they're interested in (like a Wittgensteinian approach, for example), and totally condescending and dismissive of other approaches and backgrounds. I always thought there was a good reason why "Analytic" starts with "anal"...
That's a shame, and I think often true in the U.S., although my impression is that there are some people who are slowly coming around to the possible usefulness of certain ideas coming out of the continental tradition (there are several prominent philosophers of mind who are known to be interested in what phenomenology might have to offer, for example). Weirdly enough, I am actually currently working on a paper that, among other things, implicitly suggests that some of what Wittgenstein says in the P.I. (particularly notions about language being something co-operative) sits pretty well with what a phenomenological view of the problem would be (although it uses entirely different terms, of course).
Don't even get me started on Wittgenstien. I think that much of what W says (especially in P.I. and in On Certainty) can be used to demonstrate that so many of the "problems" that analytic philosophers are obsessed with result from a strange way of viewing the problem/asking the question, and that if they would take a step back a rethink the framing of the issue, they would realize that they're running on a hamster wheel of their own making (or the fly, stuck in the fly bottle...). But you get some very hostile reactions to this suggestion. I suspect they want to stay on the hamster wheel, as that is where they're comfortable. This makes W's characterization of philosophy as therapy seem so ironic to me. They need Wittgensteinian philosophy as therapy to help them recover from their own version of philosophy. =)
Did someone say intersubjectivity? I'm currently doing a summer research scholarship on the contributions of G.H. Mead to that area and it's still exciting to see the term used. Ah, new academic loves...
If you actually get into philosophy beyond the 100/200-level courses (and beyond the pompous fools of all genders who wear black berets and carry Nietzsche around because it's "cool"), philosophy is math.
Thus, there's an over-representation of men in philosophy for exactly the same reason as in math. Basically, because they are, at root, the same subject, the same sexism issues come into play.
Philosophy may be even worse than math, though, now that I think about it. In all the math classes I took, we rarely if ever discussed the person who came up with the math. However, in philosophy, who said something is often important if for no other reason than it's a convenient shorthand for summing something up succinctly - and generally, it's because there's a whole school of thought/discourse named after the person. So while in math you have Calclus, Trig, Topology, Differential Equations, Algebra, and such, in philosophy, you have Platonism, Aristotlian or Augustinian or Cartesian or Rawlsian schools of thought. All important, all drilled into your head, and all men.
If you actually get into philosophy beyond the 100/200-level courses (and beyond the pompous fools of all genders who wear black berets and carry Nietzsche around because it's "cool"), philosophy is math.
Well... sort of. It depends on what sub-areas you're working on -- of course, one should expect a high amount of rigor anywhere, and perhaps that was what you were referring to. I'd just point out that not all philosophy is as directly mathy as e.g. formal epistemology (and really, shouldn't philosophy be prior to "math" anyway, as its justification)?
Agreed on the pompous Nietzsche-carriers, though. I made a giant mistake and signed up for a course on Nietzsche last semester, and I had to drop it after just one class because it was just painfully obvious that most of the other students in there were completely and utterly unfamiliar with any Greek philosophy or literature. I can't imagine why anyone would think that they can read Nietzsche without that background, ugh.
/OT nerd rant
(I would like to put in a tiny little bit of support for us continental philosophy lovers who are not giant jerkwads, though -- we do exist and I promise we're not as crazy as some would have you believe, especially the phenomenology people :) Ok, sorry for the minor hijack, and now back to your regularly scheduled programming).
And in my experience continental philosophy is what more of the women in philosophy are interested in (what with it's being actually pertinent to the real world, and concerned with social justice...), but just by focusing on continental you marginalize yourself and become almost unhireable in the U.S.-U.K. job market...
That's mostly true, although there are a few small enclaves of continental phil (some better than others...) and my impression is that continental phil people do okay (well, as much as anyone else) when it comes to getting hired at small liberal arts colleges and such, where the emphasis is more on teaching undergrads than research. But yeah, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
(Warning: more OT nerd rant) I'm in a sort of weird position myself, because ultimately I'm interested in Phil of Mind / Epistemology stuff, which is both typically extremely analytic as well as male-dominated -- but I believe Husserl when it comes to the primacy of the subjective, and can't get on board with the bizarre pseudo-"scientific" way that analytic philosophy deals with things a lot of the time. So basically that means that no one wants me, because the analytic people will think I'm crazy or an intellectual weakling (like they do for most continental types) but the continental people are either sort of scared of me or get bored if we go too long without some implicit Marxist commentary or something. Ugh. (/OT rant)
ANYWAY, I think surely someone somewhere has written some stuff about the analytic/continental divide in a feminist context, but probably a lot of that stuff would be the kind of flimsy polemics that you get when people want to be controversial :/
Yeah, I've never actually looked for any writings on the analytic/continental gender divide, but it would be interesting. If you're interested in a department that is fairly well-balanced between the two and includes a number of pretty big names, UC Riverside is fairly highly ranked. However, in my experience female grad students who attend there have mixed results, and you have to be fairly aggressive to progress through the program at a decent rate.
Is that where you went? I am actually seriously considering applying to their PhD program for Fall of '10 (and by "seriously considering" I mean "I would probably jump around with glee for a solid half hour at least if they accepted me," heh). On paper at least, their faculty seems to have a decent variety of research interests but also an unusually strong showing for the kind of stuff I'm interested in (Kant, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, while not alienating analytic stuff... eek) which is really exciting.
I got my MA there, and actually chose it over Stanford (where I was offered the same funding package), because the people I was interested in working with at Stanford were all on sabbatical, and UCR had an impressive faculty. I would recommend it academically, with the caveat that you have to be fairly aggressive to progress through the doctoral program on a good time frame as a female student. Nobody can really explain why, but female grad students tend to sort of fall through the cracks there, and the factulty is trying to find a way to counter this.
I have to agree with the irony of your sister saying what she said while you both apparently succeed in male-dominated arenas.
That said, what your sister is talking about is usually called 'biological determinism' in academia, meaning the idea that, as your sister said, we cannot overcome biology. Feminist theory, meanwhile often focuses on socialization, on people growing up to be what society expects them to be. Inherent in that principle is that biology really doesn't matter that much.
I think that it's important to make the point that there are far far more differences AMONG women or men than between them. And the idea that men are too good at philosophy... there's a definite hipocrasy in saying that men are naturally good at philosophy and naturally good at engineering. By that standard, gee, aren't men naturally just good at everything? I mean, have you heard that women are good at arts and stuff? I've heard that too. But I've also heard that men are the ones who are more artistic. Basically these stereotypes can be whatever someone wants them to be, and they may well have seen examples of them, but examples do not a biological deterministic theory prove.
let's see. My high school introduced VCE philosophy classes for the first time with my year 11 class, I continued with it into year 12 and I loved it. Funnily enough our teacher was a woman (she kicked ass) and our class was predominantly female.
oh empirical evidence you slippery thing you...
Interesting that you ended up in Engineering and she ended up in Philosophy. Do you think there's any chance you are mirror twins? (Look it up if you haven't heard of it, its pretty interesting even if it doesn't apply to you)
idiolect is right - the reason the Philosophy department is mostly male is because of deep and subtle systemic discrimination. It's well-documented in a number of places.
Incidentally, I started out as an Engineering major for three years before switching to Philosphy, in which I earned a BA, MA, and PhD. Ha!