Feminism

1 Feminism in global context

I feel weird that this notebook is mostly about the context that I operate in: privileged western workplaces. Globally, the situation is a lot grimmer for women, and in absolute terms the stakes are much higher for women in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia than in the west. For that matter, I suspect the calculus is complicated outside the white-collar workplaces I exist in even inside Australia. Acknowledging that, but also that I am even less an expert in the broader context, I move on in silence about where real, urgent, life-critical action is taking place to engage in the feminism of my own, chattering, western classes, which is also important (But realistically, less important).

2 Social accomplishment of gender roles

A resonant model IMO for the accomplishment of gender categories is David R. MacIver’s Gendering. Possibly related, Cailin O’Connor’s The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.

3 Gender identities

Social categorisation, gender dysphoria etc. See gender identities.

4 Gender and language

See gender and language.

5 Gender in career

• Rachel Thomas, If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention

• This Is How Everyday Sexism Could Stop You From Getting That Promotion

• Not empirically valid IMO; Linked so I can critically engage with:

  • 7 Pieces of Bad Career Advice Women Should Ignore
  • How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership
  • Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome

• From Visibility to Representation

• 5 Things Allies Can Do to Sponsor Coworkers from Underrepresented Groups. I dislike and avoid the term allies in its current usage for a variety of reasons I will get into eventually, but the ideas in here all seem like good ones.

• Sexual harassment links needed

Elizabeth Meckes, a mathematician whose work has heavily influenced me, wrote an interesting note:

I met Karen Uhlenbeck once. It was at the program “Women and Mathematics” at the Institute for Advanced Study. Every year, they run a two-week workshop on a current research topic for female students and postdocs, with four senior women giving a week’s worth of lectures each. In 2014 I was invited to be one of the lecturers. I felt that I didn’t need a support group because of my gender, but I did recognize that maybe it did matter to at least some young women, seeing people who looked like them at the front of the room, and maybe that could be me. So I went and it was wonderful. And as much as I’d seen it as a vaguely altruistic gesture on my part, having the opportunity to meet and talk to the senior women organizers affected me in ways I didn’t expect. I remember in particular talking to Karen and to Dusa McDuff, another towering figure of current mathematics. I never would have believed it, and my younger self would have been incensed at the very idea, but interacting with them propped up a little part of my self-image that I hadn’t realized was sagging.

6 Models of gender inequity

See models of inequity for some broadly applicable models of inequity which might be useful for understanding gender too.

7 The manosphere

There seem to be as many flavours of Men’s Rights Activism as there are feminisms now.

TODO: document some.

TODO: Devise a knockout tournament between well-matched sub-movements?

I do not have deep anthropological analysis of the various sub-flavours of MRA. The card-carrying Men’s Rights Activists that I do know (MGOTW-flavoured, PUA-flavoured) seem generally have had bad experiences and not had anyone else who would be a support network for them apart from other angry men who find it convenient to blame women. How to do better for these blokes?

I think we all know at least one young heterosexual man with poor social skills who probably could attain greater satisfaction if he learned a few conversational skills, but instead chose a path of blaming a shadowy conspiratorial gynocracy for ruining his life, when he was offered that explanation by some self-help guru. How representative of the dynamics of the movement is this Young Man X? Movements radicalising dissatisfied people by mobilising them against conspiracies are a staple of early-stage authoritarianism, nothing surprising there.

TBD: de-escalation.

• Dispatches from the Manosphere
• To follow up: The “manosphere” is getting more toxic as angry men join the incels. Did this pan out?

8 Statistics of gender

A discussion that can be had at a multitude of levels. Do Men \(A\)? Are Women More Prone to \(B\)? etc.

I am generally reluctant to touch questions like these because there is so much work to do in disambiguating the vocabulary, as with many arguments, that once we have identified what we are saying it often turns out we are saying too little to bother expending breath. TBC.

A pet peeve is the problem of trying to address the basic statistics of a binary flag (gender according to census, or hormone level over some threshold, or possession of a penis now, or possession of a penis at birth, or whatever) and the coupling of that binary flag to complicated multidimensional distributions over other noisily-measured traits we claim to care about but are also not very good at identifying and hoping to get a simple prescription.

There is surely stuff going on with hormones and DNA and socialisation and social construction and fashion and power and economics and political machinations and the intersection of these factors with other non-gender related ones etc, but it does not seem especially likely to generate short and unambiguous instruction manuals for social relations, at least on the first try.

That said, there are surely some interesting things here; TBC.

9 Rage-toxoplasmic arguments about gender

So how do we talk past each other gender stuff in particular?

An exemplary incident was the 2017 Awkward Google James Damore Memo. It is a good example of the crowd dynamics and talking-past that happens in these public furore. The reason I would recommend reading it is the interesting meta-phenomenon: a lot of the excerpts and quotes circulating are not actually from the document, or at least not the notional final version. I do not care enough to check earlier versions myself, because I am not a journalist reporting on this as a story but that should obviously be done if one were such.¹

Which is to say, a mediocre argument was met by an off-point response, and that is how we engage with the negotiation of our complicated trajectories as a society now I guess?

The content of the memo is, IMO … meh e.g. I think it weak-mans diversity arguments, or at least the ones that I am exposed to — e.g the notion of what psychological safety is presumed to be could have done with some non-anecdote-based development, if the argument was to lean on research, which is a point that it advocates for. For a more sympathetic reading of the Damore memo which includes some extra supporting evidence see Why so few women in CS which attempts to decompose, among other things, the sexism-versus-preference bias in gender split in computer science. It is a good idea to do that, but I do not think that it gets at the workplace dynamic that I presume spawned this memo.

Maybe the flaws are precisely what helped it get traction? Certainly it seems the usual suspects were triggered.

This dynamic is tiring to witness. Beware, memetic hazards!

This next one is a hard read that did itself no favours by leaving the invective dial set way too high (reads like Michel Foucault off the meds after you have just reversed over his cat) but check out The Last Psychiatrist: No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up for some interesting arguments about where the power comes from, that I think it is important to engage (TODO). I do not agree with his analysis of which norms and movements are sustainable and how responsibility for those falls, but… yeah. It does serve as a tour of the contradictions inherent in unilaterally enacting change. C&C The Guilty Feminist, which covers the same thing, but with self-deprecating humour rather than nihilistic trolling.

10 Incoming

Some of these provoking-but-lightly-inspected social psychology papers should be treated skeptically; one should wait for replication before assuming they mean much. Still, some fun ideas.

A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology (Moreno-Domínguez, Raposo, and Elipe 2019) explored the impact of body image on sexual satisfaction in heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women. While the three groups of women reported similar levels of body dissatisfaction, lesbian women uniquely showed no significant impact of body image on sexual satisfaction..

Women are 15 hours practice away from mentally rotating objects like men (Sorby and Baartmans 1996, 2000) There is a lot to unpack there, especially as I am myself a person notoriously bad at shape rotation.

The web without male content is a ghost town, with certain intriguing exceptions.

Jacob Putanumonit did a survey on “dating assholes” and the results are entertaining and counterintuitive (are they externally valid though, or purely entertaining?)

• Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter
• Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80%
• Stanford researchers find that male over-confidence might be costing the tech industry billions, David Sumpter
• That’s How It Works When You’re a Woman on the Internet
• A promotion can help guarantee a pay rise, but what if the system advantages men over women?

Louise Perry, Women and Children First:

You can see already that the scorecard is getting messy. It turns out that assessing the “fairness” of how “society” treats one half of the population compared with the other is difficult to judge, since there are so many different metrics one might use. […] most of us will be forced to concede that men are not, always and everywhere, treated “more fairly than women” in an empirical sense. According to this definition, I am not a feminist.

And yet I persist in describing myself as such[…]. I believe that there is some merit in using a looser definition of feminism that incorporates the recognition of substantial differences between the sexes. I assert that there are important ways in which men and women differ from one another, both physically and psychologically, and that these differences mean that the interests of the sexes are sometimes in tension.

Women are less likely to be found in positions of power. This is true for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that it is women who give birth to babies, and women who tend to experience the strongest emotional pull towards being in close proximity to their young children. This basic biological fact means that all mothers will have to spend a short period of time out of the labour force when they give birth, and many mothers will want to extend that time further in order to care for their children. That’s a completely legitimate desire, but it inevitably impairs a woman’s career progression. Combine this with women’s higher average agreeableness (that is, the urge to put the interests of other people before one’s own), and we end up with an important problem: the interests of women, particularly mothers, are less likely to be given voice in the corridors of power. Feminism—specifically, a feminism orientated towards maternity—is, I posit, the political movement that exists in order to counteract this problem.

She seems to run a school of pro-natalist radical-esque feminism; see also Modernity is making you sterile.

• The Patrilocal Trap - by Alice Evans

  In Western Europe, patrilocality was crushed by the Church. From 300-1300 CE, the Roman Catholic Church and Carolingian Empire stamped out cousin marriage and polygamy. English peasants disregarded lineage and rarely exchanged work with extended kin. Young men and women often worked in service until they saved enough to establish nuclear households. Precociously deep wage labour markets and urbanisation accelerated exogamy.

11 References