I have a three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend–I am teaching two sections this semester–and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal with student writing so I am going to procrastinate by telling you briefly about a discussion I had Monday with the section that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assignment they will be handing in to me next week. I am using a textbook called Elements of Technical Writing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chapters of which deal with the technical writing process. Each chapter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incremental assignment into the sequence of chapters: Students are to imagine that they work for a start-up company that is thinking about investing in groupware so that employees can work remotely. They have been asked by their supervisor to do some research and write a report on groupware that she can use to persuade management to spend the money. The first two steps in the writing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a description of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be completed. On Monday, we were talking about the audience analysis section of the work plan, and I was asking my students to list what they knew about their supervisor that might be relevant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvious things about being a manager, and then someone said, “She’s a woman.”
“Is that relevant to the writing of your report?” I asked.
“Of course,” someone else answered.
“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.
“Because women are more skeptical than men.”
“Because women over analyze everything”
“They pay too much attention to details.”
“Women ask too many questions.”
“Because women never forget when you make a mistake.”
“Because women in the workplace always feel they have something to prove; she’s probably going to be really pushy.”
There were a couple of more that I don’t remember clearly, but all of them–with the exception perhaps of the last one–were such unambiguous instances of sexist stereotyping that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard anyone anywhere assert those stereotypes as if they were simple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assumptions?” I asked. “Remember, she’s your supervisor.” A few of my students laughed; a couple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and predictable conversation about sexist stereotyping; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in general, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base workplace behavior on those kinds of assumptions.
Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfortunately, class was over and so I couldn’t pursue precisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is wisdom in what that student said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in having to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to wonder about how to structure a lesson, or lessons, around the problems of sexism in the workplace and ethical behavior in the workplace, that would remain true to the course description but also go a little deeper than some version of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s something I will be thinking about, since it looks like I will be teaching technical writing for the foreseeable future.
Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.”
FWIW, I’m a tradeswoman with over twenty years in the building trades. It has never been my experience that the men are reluctant “to talk like this.” Your students who are already in the workforce in male-dominated environments can and are talking like this in front of women, and those who are not yet in the workforce soon will be. It’s a bonding experience for them.
If this is an attitude you want to challenge in the classroom (and if so, Bravo! and if not, trust me…I understand what a
Sisypheandifficult task it is), next time…..play dumb. I mean, dumber than a box of rocks. As if you were from another planet and had never encountered sexist attitudes. “Really? Why? Tha’s been your experience? Tell me about it. Huh. Why do you think that is?”And these examples: “They pay too much attention to details.” “Women ask too many questions.”—-just slay me!! Since when are details irrelevant to technical information of all things? IME, asking questions and illuminating details is the difference between a good/excellent finished product, and a crappy/mediocre end product.
La Lubu–
I don’t think the person who said it was good no women were in the class meant that they would not have been able to express their opinions about women; I think–though I might be wrong–that he meant we would not have gotten to the discussion of stereotyping that we had–which I led using precisely the strategy you suggested–and that, at least for some of the students, illuminated why the attitudes they were expressing were inappropriate in the workplace. I should also add that my students are overwhelmingly in their late teens and early twenties.
I notice that, in imagining what women might have brought to your class, you specific “women’s anger” and not, for instance, women’s logic, or reason or even, more generally, women’s experience.
The fact that you went straight to anger seems indicative of the ways in which women’s objections to sexism are often framed as inherently emotional (and thus unreasonable and outsized and extreme) while men’s objections (such as your own) are framed as reasonable and rooted in fact and truth.
Within this paradigm, there is no room for women to object to sexism, nor any language we can use that doesn’t read as (to use your students’ words) “pushy” or excessive.
What intrigues me is that many of your students’ other characterizations focus on women as intellectually rigorous, rather than emotional, and seem driven by their own insecurity (the belief that their hypothetical supervisor will find them inept.)
That might be a good place to start dismantling, perhaps by asking whether skepticism, analysis, attention to detail, inquiry, and memory are valuable to technical writers.
Miriam:
Two things:
1. I was not clear. In talking about women’s anger in the phrase you quote, I was referring to what the men in my class were imagining that women would bring to the discussion, and I think there would be value in the men having to confront the anger that they imagine.
2. I don’t personally see anger as “inherently emotional (and thus unreasonable and outsized and extreme).” Anger can inform the most logical and reasoned response; and it can make the recounting of experience far more persuasive than it might otherwise be. Anger in that form, too, would be something it would have been valuable for my students to have to confront.
This is interesting and it’s something I hadn’t noticed, though I think my students intent in what they were saying was to characterize the skepticism, etc. as rooted in women’s “emotional nature,” their inability to see logic and reason. This is not clear from the way I wrote the post, but it was clear to me in the class.
Richard:
I just have to say thank you. I’m a woman in a technology field, and before that I was in technical theatre. It’s a double-edged sword; once you prove yourself, everyone holds you in pretty high regard but it’s the proving yourself that gets hard at times. If you’re even having discussions like this in a classroom setting of all males, it gets the ball rolling on not just stereotyping the women they see (or work for.)
You have always struck me as deeply thoughtful and open, someone who is compassionate in all things. I appreciate the chance to get to read what you write here. (Sorry if this is the wrong place to express all this, but I think about it every time I read your writings.)
I have to say I’m surprised. While I can conceive of individual men thinking and talking like this I honestly would not have thought that a group of young men especially in this day and age would hold such views.
Although I should hasten to add that it does make more sense to me that a group of highly technically-oriented guys would. Technical types (of which I am one) aren’t always the most socially integrated folks ….
Simple Truth:
Thanks for the kinds words! I am smiling ear to ear.
RonF’s comment has irritated me enough that I am driven to do one of my occasional delurkings so I can say that I am beyond tired of hearing the excuse that the social klutziness of some technical-minded men explains their being classist/racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/fat-phobic/etc.
It’s just sheer bs. There’s no causal link between a social skills and social justice. The ability to make small talk at a party does make someone a bastion of enlightenment and open-mindedness. And is the inability to do so is not a cheap seats ticket for prejudice and bigotry.
It’s just a stupid, lazy excuse for not having to care and beyond that, it’s also ignores all those techie guys out there who make a damn fine effort at owning their privilege and treating every human being as a human being. I’ve worked in and with male-dominated technical companies for over 30 years and I am being pissed in honor of all those men I”ve worked with who have refused to accept that their shyness or social ineptitude is an excuse for not having to make an effort to treat other people fairly and equally.
/rant
AndiF – good points. And I have heard the same kind of casual, broad sexist statements from college-aged men who were *not* geeky/brainy/socially awkward, but just average dudes who have been brought up to see women as difficult, vexing “others.” The vision of women as a separate, frustrating, not-quite-human species goes a long way to explaining campus rape culture, unfortunately, and there is no evidence I’m aware of that suggests most rapes are committed by engineering majors.
I’ve worked in scientific and engineering jobs ever since I started in the working world. I spent 4 years at MIT, about the most concentrated group of technically oriented people you’re going to ever see. And I spent 3 years in graduate school getting an M.S. in Biochemistry. I stand by my statement that such folks tend to be more socially awkward and disoriented than the average person. Explanation of the reason why is a different matter. But don’t confuse reporting an observation with offering an excuse.
Richard,
Thanks for clarifying that. When I read the list of comments, the first few struck me as sexist only in the way that anything that generalizes about men or women as a group is sexist but not as sexist in the sense of holding women in low esteem. Like Miriam and La Lubu, the comments struck me as evidence of insecurity that could not meet (perfectly reasonable) high standards.
Whereas the idea that women are “pushy,” even if it’s because they have “something to prove,” struck me as more sexist in the negative sense.
Chingona: I think it would have been a lot clearer if I’d written that the subtext of almost everything they said was that they were complaining about their girlfriends, or about their idea of what it would mean to have a girlfriend, and the fact that women are just so emotional and therefore always “read too much” into everything, etc. and so on. This subtext was so obvious to me in their tone of voice and in the way almost all the guys in the class “yeah-yeah’d” after each statement that I guess I heard it that way when I wrote it and so I didn’t think it required any explanation.
To claim that social awkwardness is the same as sexism or results in sexism is beyond absurd.
You know who else, other than tech geeks like myself – or so RonF claims, are sexist? Salesmen. I’ve been around them as a tech geek for 20 years now and they’re incredibly sexist and socially capable. Therefore social aptitude is the cause of sexism in salesmen.
It’s a ridiculous claim & I wish you’d stop making it. IT folks are no more socially awkward, generally speaking, than the population at large. Or so my anecdata tells me.
Well RonF, I’ve worked with engineers, programmers, system analysts, and dba’s for over 30 years in both the United States and Europe so I’d say my unscientific non-random sample is as good as your unscientific non-random sample.
At any rate, I didn’t dispute your observation that techies are more “more socially awkward and disoriented” than other people* so reiterating that isn’t an argument against my point.. You made one observation, you implied but didn’t directly state another (that techies are sexist) and then imputed a necessary connection between them. So my point, as so concisely stated by Jake Squid, is that your “claim that social awkwardness is the same as sexism or results in sexism is asburd”.
* I might, however. I think you’ve taken the reasonable observation that more people who are socially awkward can be found in technical fields to the unsupported position that all people in technical fields are more socially awkward than other fields.
RonF wrote:
I’m astounded at your surprise. I work in a socially pretty liberal part of the country, and some of my younger co-workers in law enforcement express misogynist crap like this pretty routinely. A female officer is not a go-getter, she is a ball-buster. If she goes for advancement, everyone worries about the unfairness of it all, because everyone knows, though administration has never provided evidence for this belief, that administration is inclined to favor her because they could then point to her as evidence of their progressiveness. I think it’s been about three weeks since I heard someone say, “Women shouldn’t be cops”, or some equivalent variation on that theme.
My job also brings me into contact with pretty much every segment of society at one time or another (we can discuss sampling bias if you like), and I hear comments like this occasionally from most segments. The incidence gets lower as you get more academic, but not completely; the business school types make up for it.
Frankly, the place I tend to hear it least is among local LARPers, people at the local Farmer’s Market, and in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, which scores the only incidence of zero in my personal experience.
But yeah, in many circles it’s pretty prevalent, and even the default. I think it’s great that you’re hanging with people who don’t say things like these when you’re around, but (a) that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist all over the place anyway and (b) don’t assume that they’re never saying things like this when you’re not around. Being older, and a Scout master, and whatnot, you are an authority figure, and they’ll misbehave less when they know you’re listening.
Grace
RonF’s attempt to link a geeky/techie character in some men with not being clued in might have a shred of legitimacy for high-school aged or perhaps early college-aged men, as they’re less likely to have many female friends or have much of a life outside of a boys’ world. By the time you share dorms with women, though, have a number of female professors, coworkers, bosses, etc., and are generally exposed to information and experiences that challenge your naive sexism, the whole “well, what do you expect from techies” shtick doesn’t cut it anymore.
I read recently a study looking for bias in the science peer review process. They sent the same manuscript with different names on it to reviewers and compared how apparent gender, race, etc. influenced the criticism. The only effect they were able to measure was that reviews from female post-docs were much more critical than any other group.
For those not familiar with science, the post-doc stage is often where the females drop off severely. Those who make it to that stage are generally very successful, but very few women make it past that stage.
I took the result as evidence of the double standard. Women have been held to a higher standard all along the way. This is reflected when they hold others to the standard that they have been held to, but others experience this as harsh. It’s like, welcome to our world baby.