Back when I wrote about the gender balance in SF&F I pointed to a wealth of research showing that many men simply won’t read a book that they think is written by a woman. Often this isn’t a deliberate, conscious action: it is just something they are trained from birth to do by the cultural environment they live in.
Well, it isn’t just SF&F, by a long way. Today Kate Heartfield tweeted about this research which purports to show that male journalists on Twitter have 3 times as many followers as female journalists (the methodology looks a little shoddy, but they may be right anyway).
What got me blogging, however, was this post from Canada about a study that shows that women lawyers with androgynous or male-sounding names do better in their careers that women with obviously female names.
Subconscious gender discrimination runs very, very deep.
Yes, this is all depressingly familiar. I keep up with the studies on gender in relation to film and theatre too and they show that women have not been advancing – economically or otherwise – in these realms, for the past number of years.
The bias against women is deeply embedded in the culture. In fact, I would go so far as to say that women are distrusted on an unconscious level. It’s insidious, and worse still women are not immune from this response.
This is why I go by Val. I’ve considered legally changing my name, but then I’d have to get a new passport. *wry*
Originally I chose to use my gender-neutral middle name online, in order to avoid discrimination, but I’m beginning to regret the decision – something of a betrayal on my part, or cowardice, I now feel.
About eight years ago I heard this story from a friend in the software business: he’d just interviewed a woman who was doing all her interviews in a men’s suit. She said it was because she’d sent out resumes with her full name and got no interviews. Then she sent out resumes with her initials only and got, like, five interviews – from the same companies. Crazy. I busted my friend on it but he claims he didn’t remember seeing her resume the first time … yeah, right. (Though he is a good guy and probably not very sexist.)
Julia Serrano writes about this in her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. (Just reading the title I was immediately embarrassed that I hadn’t already connected the backlash against trans women with our general societal attitudes about women.) Unfortunately, femininity and weakness are strongly associated for me too … working on that.
erink:
Julia Serano is wonderful. I love that book.
Why I am not surprised? On the other hand, there are at least two names I can think of that have gone from male to female — Morgan and Meredith (Maredudd). Both are Welsh and originally exclusively male — I had an Uncle Morgan, indeed. But many folks outside Wales seem to think they are girl-only names these days.
Kari:
I think there’s a difference between a name going from male to female within a culture and choosing a male name from outside your culture to use for females inside your own. Indeed, I can quite see how the latter might be seen as indicating that the males of the external culture are somehow a bunch of girlymen and therefore inferior. That’s pretty standard dominance behavior.
“Subconscious gender discrimination runs very, very deep.”
Discrimination of every kind runs deep, to whatever degree, in everyone’s subconscious. It’s inescapable. The question is how much each of us works to examine ourselves for it, and try to catch ourselves whenever we notice it manifesting in something we do or say, and how hard we try to not do it again.
It’s a lifelong battle, no matter how much one can approve. I was raised in a liberal household, with feminist and anti-racist ideas, and from my earliest years on my own was surrounded by highly active feminists, and I still catch myself occasionally referring, without thinking, to an unknown person as “he,” and otherwise catching myself making discriminatory assumptions in one area or another.
This is what drives me crazy when people claim to be free of racism or sexism or any ism: no one is, since no one is, so far as I know, from Mars, and unaffected by societal assumptions and subconscious programing/influence. It’s just a matter of degree, and how much we lack of awareness of our unconscious assumptions or habits.
I last blogged a bit on this here, but have written about it in innumerable blog comments, particularly at Obsidian Wings (non-sf, mostly political, blog), over the years, and before that on Usenet, and before that in talk….
Isms/ists aren’t, for the most part, identities, save in the more extreme folks, but things we do. It’s the totality of subconscious assumptions and habits that end up hurting more people, in contemporary societies, more than people full of overt conscious hatred.
Regardless of whether we’re talking cisgendered/anti-transgender discrimination, sexist discrimination, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, etc.
Gary: yes, thank you.
I come from a part of the world where gender bias is as old as the history of the country. Not only is being a woman an economical hindrance, the fact is that even men with girlish sounding names find there going tough.