Delusions of Gender (16 page)

Whether this would rescue their souls, I cannot say. But one
thing is certain. It would better enable these men, in stark contrast with Mabel Ulrich’s husband, to do the laundry. And laundry
is
important. As Gloria Steinem recently reminded a journalist, ‘The idea of having it all never meant doing it all. Men are parents, too, and actually women will never be equal outside the home until men are equal inside the home.’
³⁴

I
s it time to crack open the champagne in celebration of the successful completion of Gender Equality 2.0, a revised version of equality in which men and women are not equal, but equally free to express their essentially different natures? Western women have contraception, equal opportunity laws and the economic freedom to pursue fulfilment rather than the dollar. And yet women’s and men’s choices and paths in life still diverge. ‘But’, asks
Sexual Paradox
author Susan Pinker, ‘is this a problem that should be fixed?’
¹
Is it time to stop assuming that women and men should live similar lives?

I do have sympathy for this concern. Sometimes, just for fun, my building contractor husband and I briefly imagine what it would be like if we were forced to swap jobs. My husband, who can take up to an hour to compose an email message that reads like a missive from a ten-year-old French pen pal (
Dear Michael. How are you? Today it was very hot
.), visibly blanches at the idea of writing a book. And were my husband to suffer a fatal accident at the beginning of a renovation project that I would then have to complete, he would most likely expend his dying breaths in the ambulance dictating a memo along the lines of:
Cordelia: Don’t forget, sewerage and electrical wiring before walls go up! I love … [gurgle, clunk]
. Society would not be a better and happier place were more people like my husband to write books, and more people like me to renovate houses. Perhaps women are simply intrinsically less able at, or less interested in, the male-dominated fields of science, technology,
engineering and maths because these occupations are less suitable and rewarding for a brain that inclines towards empathising. And if the majority of women are wired to nurture civilisation rather than advance it, then it should be no surprise that relatively few take on the demands of the most prestigious and greedy careers, and rise to the top. If male and female nature pushes men and women, on average, towards both horizontal segregation (the clustering of sexes in different occupational fields) and vertical segregation (the greater number of men at the top levels of all occupational fields), then there does seem something rather pointless and counterproductive, I agree, about a target of perfect equality.

However, we should not throw up our hands in defeat too quickly. Gender Equality 2.0 justifies a status quo in which politics, wealth, science, technology and artistic achievement continue to lie primarily in the hands of (white) men. This is not by any means to denigrate the importance and value of the work women traditionally do, or feminine qualities of character. But it’s worth considering philosopher Neil Levy’s argument that the idea that women are predominantly hardwired for empathising while men are hardwired for systemising ‘is no basis for equality. It is not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included.’
²
When a child clings on to a highly desirable toy and claims that his companion ‘doesn’t want to play with it’, I have found that it is wise to be suspicious. The same scepticism can be usefully applied here.

In a
New Yorker
cartoon that for many years enjoyed pride of place in my office, a rat in a business suit is at his desk, talking on the phone. On the wall behind him is a lever and a light. With his feet perched comfortably upon his desk, the rat-businessman is saying, ‘Oh, not bad. The light comes on, I press the bar, they write me a cheque. How about you?’
³
The basic psychological principle that people find it rewarding to be rewarded – whether it be through sincere praise, status, money, a new opportunity, a promotion, a round of applause or a really nice review in a newspaper – should not be forgotten. Everyone, after all, knows the thrill of
pride that accompanies acknowledgement of a talent or a job well done. As children we demand it. (
Look at me, Mummy. Look
… at … ME!). And as adults, although we’re rather more discreet about our need for appreciation, we nonetheless lap it up wherever it’s available. (I don’t
think
it’s just me.) On coaching mornings at my local tennis club, everyone edges towards Simon, a coach of such endless invention and generosity that he can think of something genuinely enthusiastic to say (
But nice footwork, Cordelia
) even as the ball sails over the fence into the windshield of a passing car.

The general idea that ‘people’s preferences are not created
ex nihilo
: they are formed by the society they live in’
⁴
is an important one to apply to our thinking about the reasons behind continuing vertical segregation, for example. Despite the great gains of the past century, men’s and women’s experiences at work and home are not the same, for reasons that often stem from either unconscious or intentional discrimination. If we rewarded one group of rats with bigger and better food pellets as they pulled a well-oiled lever in the spacious and enviable corner Skinner box, would we think them more intrinsically interested in lever-pulling than a less privileged, perhaps even harassed, group of rats? The managers who don’t get the promotions or salaries they deserve, the saleswomen and investment bankers who determinedly network at topless bars and lap-dancing clubs, and the corporate scientists who endure locker-room culture deserve proper acknowledgement of barriers that still have not fallen.

And this includes barriers at home. Women with children who decide
not
to adapt their careers to family life can look forward to paying a gender deviance tax that takes the form of extra housework, extra child care, and a psychological pussyfooting around his ego. Who knows what goes on in any individual relationship. Of course, there are exceptions. But the data from a study of faculty at the University of California are telling.
⁵
Female faculty with children report working fifty-one hours a week at their jobs and another fifty-one hours a week doing housework
and child care – truly the second shift. That’s a 102-hour workweek, accounting for more than fourteen hours per day. Add to this eight hours per day for sleeping, an hour for eating and basic hygiene, and by my calculations that leaves these women the grand total of twenty-six minutes a day for themselves. Faculty fathers, by contrast, put in only thirty-two unpaid work hours a week. This substantially lighter load not only enables them to put in an extra five hours a week at work, but to also enjoy a spare
two hours a day
to spend doing – well, who knows – while faculty mothers continue to launder, cook, test spelling, wash grubby faces and read bedtime stories. Behind every great academic man there is a woman, but behind every great academic woman is an unpeeled potato and a child who needs some attention. And women who climb the academic ladder don’t just forfeit their leisure. They are much less likely to be married with children than male faculty (41 versus 69 percent, respectively) and, poignantly, twice as likely once in their postreproductive years to say that they would have liked more children. Put simply, the same career entails greater sacrifices for her than for him. So when a female academic who would like to have more than a few minutes for herself every day, as well as a family, jumps off the academic ladder and into a more flexible but dead-end second-tier research position, is it because she’s intrinsically less interested in a demanding academic career or because there are only twenty-four hours in a day?

Likewise, our societies also offer a surprisingly poor test of the naturalness of horizontal segregation. Picture, if you can, a society in which men expect to find happiness not from work but from their family and friends. Imagine a place in which equal numbers of women and men, sitting attentively in the lecture halls of the computer science department, set themselves up for a financially secure future. This society is no feminist fantasy of the future. It is the Republic of Armenia. In the 1980s and ’90s, the percentage of women in the largest computer science department in the country did not fall below 75 percent. Today, thanks to its increasing popularity among men (rather than declining popularity among
women), Armenian women still make up close to half of computer science majors (and, anecdotally, their numbers appear to be high in many other former Soviet Republics
⁶
) – compared to about 15 percent in America. Hasmik Gharibyan, a professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University, attributes the disparity to important cultural differences between the two countries. In Armenia ‘[t]here is no cultural emphasis on having a job that one loves’. In every one of her interviews, the young Armenians ‘emphasized that the source of happiness for Armenians undoubtedly is their family and friendships, rather than their work’. Instead, for women and men alike, ‘there is a determination to have a profession that will guarantee a good living and financial stability.’
⁷

The strong representation of Armenian women in computer science is just one example of what is a rather surprising general pattern: there is
more
, not less, gender segregation of occupational interests in rich, advanced industrial societies than in developing or transitional ones. For example, a recent survey of forty-four countries found that as economic prosperity increases within developing and transitional countries, women are increasingly likely to turn away from degrees in engineering, maths and natural science (that lead to potentially more lucrative careers) and instead choose more feminine degrees in the humanities, social sciences and health. But in prosperous countries it is not economic prosperity that tracks sex segregation in degree choices, but differences in adolescent boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards maths and science. In richer countries, the greater the difference between boys’ and girls’ interest in science and maths, the greater the sex segregation.
⁸
Maria Charles and Karen Bradley, the survey authors, argue that a combination of an adequate baseline of material security (for most), together with a Western cultural emphasis on individual choice and self-expression, means that self-realisation in education is a culturally legitimate goal. This is especially true for people who might reasonably anticipate that their partner will take on the primary breadwinning role – namely, heterosexual women. (In
fact it is interesting that, in the absence of the luxury of a male breadwinner, the occupational decision making of lesbians looks very similar to that of heterosexual men.)
⁹

Susan Pinker interprets the occupational sex segregation in countries like the United States, Australia and Sweden as reflecting women’s true preferences, unforced by financial concerns, family pressure or even governmental control. But as we’ve seen, occupational interests cannot be safely carried around inside the head, impervious to outside influence. We’ve
seen
the cultural cues that can so readily alter young people’s interest in maths, science and other masculine pursuits. As Charles and Bradley argue, once males and females no longer have to chase the dollar as a top priority, they can ‘seek to realize and express their true “selves”’
¹⁰
– but as you, I, and Charles and Bradley are aware, the boundary between the desires of that self and the gender beliefs and structure of the culture in which it develops and functions is permeable. Contrary to what you might expect, people from more gender-egalitarian countries are often
less
egalitarian when it comes to the gender stereotypes they typically endorse.
¹¹
Charles and Bradley suggest that we in the developed West are ‘indulging our gendered selves’, and we’ve seen here a glimpse of how those selves become gendered. Cultural realities and beliefs about females and males – represented in existing inequalities; in commercials; in conversations; in the minds, expectations or behaviour of others; or primed in our own minds by the environment – alter our self-perception, interests and behaviour. These laboratory experiments are designed to simulate, in a controlled and tidy way, the far messier influences taking place in the real world. A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing that only exists in social psychology labs. Don’t look now, but you’re in one right this moment.

Several researchers have suggested that the continual drip, drip, drip of gender stereotypes will, over time, really add up. For example, having observed the feminising effect of gender priming on women’s interests, Steele and Ambady wonder whether ‘our culture creates a situation of repeated priming of stereotypes and
their related identities, which eventually help to define a person’s long-term attitude towards specific domains.’
¹²
Likewise, sociologists Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll argue: