A riddle...

I heard this riddle as a kid (sorry that it is not a very happy riddle):

“A man and his son are in a terrible car accident. The father is killed instantly, and the boy is rushed to the hospital. When the boy arrives in the operating room, the surgeon looks at him and says ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son!’ Who is the surgeon?”

I’ll give you a few hints:

-the surgeon is not the boy’s step-father

-the surgeon is also not a ghost

-there is nothing unusual about the surgeon’s relationship with the boy

ANSWER: (stop reading if you want to figure it out yourself!)

The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Why is this a riddle, and not just a sad story? We all know that women (moms, even) can be surgeons, but somehow we forget this important detail when confronted with a surgeon of unknown gender. The male pronouns for the son probably further bias us (would we be better able to remember that women can be surgeons if we had just heard “I can’t operate on this girl. She is my daughter!”?), but I can’t test it on myself now that I know the answer. However, there is another great (and repeatable!) way to test our implicit biases. By taking a short (approx 10 min total) test online, you can evaluate your own implicit bias regarding women in science.

Just go to: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Continue as a guest, click through the disclaimer, then select the “Gender – Science” test. (There are several other interesting bias tests you can take, so try a few of them!) The tests work by measuring your response time while categorizing a list of words, so you have to work as quickly as possible. The website will ask you to answer some questions about yourself (this is research, after all), then will finally display your score.

The first time I took the test, I felt fairly good about myself because I scored only “slight automatic association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.” However, I took it again in preparation for this blog post, and this time got “strong automatic association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.” I am nearly certain that I got the lists of items in different orders in the two times I took the test (this is hard to explain unless you took the test – go take the test if you don’t understand what I am talking about), so according to the FAQs, my true score is actually the category in between, “moderate automatic association” This puts me with the largest group of web respondents (28%).

As a woman in science, I would like to imagine that I am not biased against women as scientists, but that does not appear to be the case. My own experiences back this observation of my bias. I have found myself on several occasions using male pronouns for scientists, doctors, or professors of unknown gender (which is quite embarrassing when I have assumed wrong). It is easy to assume that scientists are males because the assumption is often correct. The gender gap is the subject of a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which is, by the way, where I heard about the implicit bias test.  The report is titled “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”

http://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/

I don’t have space here to fully explore the full set of issues surrounding the gender gap in the sciences, or even really of implicit bias against women in science, but I hope that taking the implicit bias test can be an opportunity to think about our own biases and how they shape our daily interactions.

Did you take the bias test? Were you surprised by your score? Tell me in the comments!

Why Feminism Matters to Men

For decades feminists have been telling us that gender is not a biological fact, but a socially constructed reality. In other words, gender is not determined by whether or not you have ovaries, gonads, breasts, a penis, a vagina, or an x or y chromosome. I mean, to be frank, there exist very few people in this world who really know what biological “hardware” I have, but people still look at me and see a woman. When I walk by people on the street, I don’t see what’s underneath their clothing and I sure can’t look into their genetic coding, but I still see men and women. How is this possible if gender is strictly biological? Well, according to many feminists, it is not. Rather, gender is a performance that we put on everyday. It is performed through daily rituals like putting on make-up (or not), wearing gender-specific clothing (pink vs. blue), speaking in certain tones (high pitched vs. deep), sitting in certain positions (legs crossed vs. open). As we repeat these acts throughout our life, we perpetuate the idea that certain ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are feminine  while others are masculine, but this is not an objective reality; this is an act, a farce, a performance that we repeat and pass along to others. Over time these performances change as commonly held beliefs and norms about gender and other social issues become disrupted, by social movements for example. Sometimes these changes make space for more gender diversity and sometimes they don’t, but the point is that gender as we know it now is not inevitable; it can (and will) change. 

Often when feminists talk about the social construction of gender, they are implicitly referring to the ways in which femininity has changed over time. There is very little work that asks how changes in masculinity happen over time and place. This is an important area of study for people who do work on gender, though. If we show how femininity and masculinity are constructed in ways that affect the lives of both men and women, we can establish a platform for collaborative efforts that work toward gender diversity and equality. In short, more attention to the social construction of masculinity would show how and why feminism is not just for women.

With that in mind, I stumbled upon an article the other day that discusses how intimacy between men has become socially unacceptable as ideas about masculinity have changed overtime. In the article, authors Brett and Kate McKay feature photographs of men in the 19^th and early 20^th century who demonstrate a physical closeness or intimacy, by holding hands and embracing for example. According to the authors, some of these photographs predate the idea of homosexuality and it is impossible to state with certainty their sexual orientations (and furthermore, do we really need to know?). However, it is probably safe to assume that many of these men were simply taking photographs with their friends and that certain levels of comfort and familiarity were more socially acceptable between men at some points in history than others. Nowadays we live in a world where men feel the need to withhold from being intimate with others, lest their sexuality come into question, like when a man compliments another man and justifies this act by saying “no homo.” Is it possible to talk about this loss of intimacy and connection with other human beings as a form of oppression? What are the broader consequences of this loss on society? What do you think?

LINK TO- "Bossom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection" by Brett and Kate McKay