Aspects of gender gap overlooked in column
To the editor:
As I am sure you will receive many responses to the recent column “Questioning the gender gap,” I hope that the lack of a title like “Hey, jackass” or “You’re right and women should pay attention” signifies that I’m trying to remain fair.
In their 2013 study, “Attitudinal Differences Toward Women Managers by Students at Different Stages of their Business Education,” Tope Adeyemi-Bello and Joseph Tomkiewicz discovered that male students in the early stages of their college business education (sophomores and juniors) feel negatively towards female managers. That may seem normal, as they are still working on their social skills at this point. But when compared to male business students recently graduated, the negativity towards female managers remains the same.
I’m not suggesting that the so-called “gender gap” as it’s understood in popular studies is fully valid. What I am claiming is that the writer should have taken his own advice and avoided writing his column at all.
It is possible that Donna McAleer and Kara Luke are just a couple of women with “personal agendas” that pushed them to blame men for all their problems. But whether or not that is true, the writer is not innocent. He claims, “I’m sure many of you feel the same” about Utah’s gender discrepancies and wage gap being so wide. He seems to be trying to explain his way out of accepting that Utah (as an example of the world at large) may very well engender institutional sexism.
Take for example an essay by Melodi Oliver in last year’s issue of Voices. Oliver tells us she was the only female out of 51 total in her computer science undergraduate seminar. She claims, “Research suggests that the cause lies in the effects of stereotypes and lack of exposure to the subject, and that the solution involves introducing computer science to students earlier in their academic career.” Oliver’s experience is the same as many others who choose to enter a major outside of their gender expectations only to find a wide gap between their desires and cultural expectations.
In the same way that boys receive plastic hardware sets and girls receive plastic ovens, men and women are pushed towards different careers from a young age. The way out of believing these basic arguments is: maybe this is all just a response to my childhood trauma of being forced to be the female partner during swing dancing lessons when there weren’t enough women to fulfill the role. But rest easy, I’m just another one of these personal agenda crazies, like Donna McAleer whose agenda in calling her state an “embarrassment” was to (in a surprising twist) actually not get elected. (Allow me to point out that the previous sentiment is sarcastic, if that was unclear.)
But, if others fully decided on the topic plan to continue reading, let’s look at the research. In “Dilemmas of girls and women in engineering: a study in Portugal,” a study of over 100 girls and women interested or employed in engineering, the authors found that the relationship between male and female students and engineers was complicated, some women claiming that they only became interested because of their tomboyish nature and associated better with men while others claimed that they quickly clustered with other women in the programs.
These “double-binds” for women in science and technology are, according to the authors, “mainly due to discourses that conceive of female and male genders as opposite poles.” It may not be outside of the bounds of reality for me to suggest that the “gender gap,” regardless of how it has previously been defined, is as real as the difference between pink and blue curtains in a baby’s room. While I do not promote the asexualization of our culture, I do suggest the degendering of the work force.
Women should feel as open as men in their choice of career, and that starts at the university level.
On the other side of things, there’s the so-called “reverse gender gap.” As a student in the Humanities I’ve faced the opposite of Oliver’s experience. All of my major courses have been unbalanced, women making up the bulk of the classroom. I could talk about how often I felt threatened by “feminist agendas,” how I felt “ganged up on” when we discussed Kate Chopin or Emily Dickinson. But the fact is, women in the Humanities can speak more freely than their STE2M counterparts. What I felt most threatened by was the resistance of a masculine culture against the feminine classroom.
Might it be wiser, and I speak to everyone here, to focus on the long-term solutions of degendering education instead of on whether or not the gap exists. The fact is, it does. This is clear. Shouting about it or shouting it down fixes nothing, whether it’s Kara Clarke ignorantly advertising her personal disgust as universal or Levi Henrie advertising his disapproval by claiming, “Feminists and lovers of equality everywhere should be offended that some people would damage the credibility of valid issues, like workplace discrimination and equal pay for equal work,” there are two issues of the “gender gap” being overlooked. What will fix it is an acceptance of women as viable candidates for any STE2M career and of men as candidates for traditionally female careers.
This sort of solution requires work from the ground up, reevaluating how the university advertises itself and how education on the state level can reflect a desire to close the gap. If that sounds like a lot of work, rest easy. My argument is invalid. After all, I’m just some guy wanting to feel safe in a Jane Austen discussion.
— Kendall Pack