Guest post: Far too early to rule out socialization
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Are you now or have you ever been a diversity statement?
If you do think that the different men/women ratios in roles such as primary-school teaching and nursing, versus, say, construction work, being a lumberjack and computer coding, are all about socialisation and very little to do with biological differences, then, well, I think you’re wrong.
It would help things immensly if we were looking at this in an environment where socialization was neutral, but we’re not. I think it’s far too early to rule out socialization. Horribly naive in fact. Even without the subtle (and not so subtle) coaching and influence of even the most well-meaning and enlightened parents, there’s still the rest of the world to deal with outside the small bubble of progressive parenting. The classroom, the schoolyard, the shopping mall, the internet, all have their lessons to pass on, some overt, others less so. You can’t prevent children from seeing and absorbing these influences, however good and non-sexist a parent you are. You can teach your kids how to swim, but they’re still going to get wet. The values, attitudes, and expectations are out there, and will have to be countered and reacted to; even if resisted successfully, it’s still a strain, a burden and yes, an influence all the same. It’s all “socialization,” even if you do not adopt the unacceptable mores in which you find yourself immersed. It’s still a current you have to swim against, one that requires effort, focus, and energy that could have been directed elsewhere had they not been pushing against you. Sure struggle can “build character,” but needless, pointless, bloody-minded idiocy can be a fucking drain, too. The current is wide, and it is constant, and it is strong. Pink Lego is is not value neutral. It’s a physical manifestation of the cultures demands and expectations, coded into a toy. But sure, let’s just dismiss socialization as a factor that has an impact on the sex ratios in jobs and careers.
Women haven’t caught up with men in so many ways in the “developed world” and if you look at the situation from a global perspective, things are even more tenuous for women. Until women get equal pay, equal access to and possession of property and wealth, reproductive choice, supportive childcare, and girls get equal access and provision for education, nobody will be able to run the experiment. We still have cultures where some adults would rather let girls die rather than escape a burning building without modestly covering their heads, that would kill their own daughters if they “dishonour” their families, that will let women die before aborting a doomed fetus, where the police put more effort into prosecuting tweets and limericks than rape. What messages does this send to girls and women in these socities? When do we level this playing field? How free are women in any of these cultures? Maybe we should work out this kind of life and death calculus before we decide that we can safely disregard the influence of socialization in a woman’s decision to become a teacher rather than a lumberjack?
But wait, ther’s more. now women are having to fight a rearguard action against the encroachments of trans activists before they’ve achieved parity with men generally. Another current to fight against, another drain on time energy, and attention. The very word “women” has been declared up for grabs by men claiming it as their own and huge swathes of government, media, and industry are helping them. Children are lured into life long medicalization, stunted development and sterility, again with the enabling hand of powerful, influencial institutions paving the way. Telling kids they can change sex is “socialization” too. Too many kids, and their parents are falling for these blatant lies before we’ve even stopped telling the more subtle and pervasive lies of sexist, patriarchal sex roles that start with pink or blue baby booties. We haven’t acheived justice yet, but are all too eager to swallow madness. These are sex roles with a vengeance. Again, girls are learning lessons in real time about their worth and value as human beings from school boards, universities, sporting bodies, the media and more, who all allow and encourage male invasion of female sports and facilities. It’s a wonder there aren’t more girls trying to flee femaleness when they can see that their rights are so easily violated and cast aside in the interests of male feelings. And if they dare to say “No?” Welcome to pariahhood, Karen. Who wouldn’t rather be special and lionized than worthless and vilified? Not everyone has the strength to fight this kind of battle, to swim against this current. Children shouldn’t have to. But sure Coel, let’s pretend that we can just say that it’s all down to underlying, biological, sex-based preferences, and stop worrying about the the wrongheaded belief that occupational outcomes have anything at all to do with the influence of the cultures that kids are brought up in.
Note: YNnB followed up that comment with “Rereading my post above, I’d like to apologize in advance to Coel for my rhetorical excess in ascribing to him an all or nothing, either/or nature/nurture argument which he has not. I still think he’s far too dismissive of cultural influence, and I think we’re a lot farther from having any sort of control group than he thinks.”
I put myself on a list from Medium.com a few years ago to understand the TRA perspective. This article:
https://medium.com/@immanentmemer/male-socialization-a-harmful-colonial-myth-7af19612baac
“Male Socialization: A Harmful Colonial Myth”
… showed up in my inbox recently. I started it but didn’t bother to finish it. Seeing this guest post I decided to finish it. It’s all over the place. Some of what is said is true but of limited applicability. [Such as how an autistic young man doesn’t measure up to Western society’s notions of proper male behaviour.] A lot of it is assertions based on unproven assertions of various scholars. Some snippets:
“Imagine a guy that finds himself attracted to other guys. Because of his sexual queerness, he has close intimate relationships with other men and makes himself more vulnerable while interacting with them. He tends to be seen as more ‘soft’ around other guys, rather than aggressive and competitive like a lot of his straight peers, and express himself in more ‘feminine’ ways”
The insight (I presume) is that “effiminate” males don’t get validated by our society. How this cancels the theory of socialization rather than affirming it isn’t clear.
“Imagine someone who was assigned male at birth and lived as a cis man throughout most of their early life, but later started identifying as a trans woman. Even before she started identifying as a trans woman, she already felt at odds with the gender she got assigned and displayed a lot of gender non conforming behavior. This frequently caused her both internal and external stress about her identity.”
The term “gender” is never defined so it’s hard to say what’s going on.
“A lot of feminist discourses and arguments about male socialization simply center their analysis on ‘the patriarchy’ to understand gender: A binary ahistorical model of gender relations based on male supremacy. Lugones criticizes such a view by pointing out that it not only naturalizes and universalizes (binary) gender and heteronormativity, but also fails to account for the ways gender, race, sexuality and capitalism are impossible to understand separately from each other.
Furthermore, it erases the violence of coloniality that was necessary to create and establish the binary gender system on different parts of the world (which often had fairly different ways of living together and organizing society) by simply treating those gender configurations as a given.”
More of the crap about how non-European people supposedly didn’t know what men or women were until white imperialist overlords imposed these invented categories over them.
Personally I don’t think such things as male violence are based as much on traditional male socialization as I think some people are arguing. There has to be some biological component to the vast difference between male and female behaviour on this and other issues.
At the same time, I have found out (to my surprise) that in my usual social circles I’m considered one of the most stereotypical “male” people they know. Yet I don’t get into fights. I don’t watch sports. I don’t care about cars. I can’t fix things.
Most men I know don’t get into fist-fights and they don’t want to.
Great post, not Bruce. I would add that socialization becomes an even stronger argument if you pay attention to space and time. If women can’t do math as well as men in the US, why can they in Japan? And given the fact that women are now exceeding men at math in many places, what evolutionary change in our brains made that possible, and how did it happen so quickly? Women’s brains were unsuited for math in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s…but nearly instantaneous evolution turned that around?
At one point, almost all secretaries were male. Almost all teachers…primary on up…were male. It’s astonishing to think things changed so quickly in less than a century. Also cf Harvard computers. Role of women in creating the computer. Etc etc etc. These may seem like isolated cases, but in reality we find women pretty much everywhere if we’re willing to look and see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about nature vs. nurture with respect to sex and gender.
It’s widely known that there’s a paradox with respect to sex equality in law and sex disparity in the workforce, specifically STEM fields. The Middle East and North Africa rank among the worst countries in the world for sex equality, and they paradoxically have some of the highest rates of women pursuing careers in engineering, math, and science, while the reverse is true for Nordic/Scandinavian countries.
As Olga Khazan put it in The Atlantic a few years ago, “It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.”
But there’s still the question of why women in freer countries show less interest in pursuing STEM careers. This is often cited as proof that that’s the “natural” order of things. But I don’t think it’s that simple.
It’s by now indisputably true that males and females have on average different skills and interests. This has been shown countless times in studies; it’s true across cultures and times; and it’s true in other closely-related species; and it’s even true in terms of gender nonconforming males and females within our species: females who exhibit very masculine behaviours from early childhood also show spatial reasoning and math skills more in line with typical males; very feminine males show reading, communication and social skills more in line with typical females. We even know the regions of the brain involved in some of these differences, and we’ve come a long way to identifying the genetic and biological processes (and perhaps the evolutionary causes) that underlie them. But those averages aren’t as broad as the disparities in career choices we’re seeing in sexually egalitarian countries. This is a sign that average innate sex differences only go partway toward explaining the paradox. There has to be another factor at play here.
I have a theory that it’s got something to do with what I call “tiers.” Equality doesn’t march steadily forward; the landscape shifts like a tectonic plate: pressure builds up until a sudden big change breaks through, creating an upheaval that takes a while for society to settle into. Each of these shifts sets off a new era; a new reshuffling of the order of things, which can actually lead to short-term increases in inequality while the long-term trend is moving towards a much more even landscape.
One big “tier shift” would be the establishment of legal sexual equality. Countries where sex inequality is still legally enforced are operating on a different tier than countries where sex equality in law has been established.
The next “tier shift” would be something like true cultural equality. (I’m just making up terms here; this is my pet theory after all.) Countries where the sexes are legally equal but there remain cultural pressures to conform to sex stereotypes haven’t yet reached that next “tier.”
Here’s how my “tier theory” model explains both the glut of women in STEM in the Middle East/North Africa, and the dearth of women in STEM in the Nordic nations:
The glut of women entering STEM in M.E./N.A. is likely a direct reaction against their legally unequal status: they’re seeking financial independence by the best means they can achieve it within their environment: high-salary STEM employment.
If there were to be a sudden cultural shift in that region (imagine if the Arab Spring succeeded) and it made the “tier shift” to an environment more like today’s Nordic nations, you might expect the factors that influence women’s career choices to suddenly shift in the wake of that kind of revolution: suddenly the primary motivator in career choice is not escaping legal oppression (resolved by entering STEM) but the “softer” but equally influential factor of pursuing social status within the cultural expectations of being a woman. This would give women a large incentive to pursue stereotypically feminine roles, as there would be less social penalty for breaking the still-inflential order of social sex stereotypes.
So suddenly you’d paradoxically see a sharp reduction in women entering STEM fields, as we’ve seen in Iceland, Finland, and Sweden.
But I would argue that this is temporary, because if we achieve the next “tier” of equality — the “true cultural equality” that eliminates sex stereotypes both legally and socially, we’d see yet another shift, this time more women moving towards STEM fields as the soft social stereotypes break down.
Ultimately I imagine there will never be true 50/50 sex representation in all fields — there are indeed innate but minor sex differences between men’s and women’s brains after all — but we’ve still got social factors in the way of women’s true freedom to have the careers they want.
There’s a strange parallel in all of this with equality in terms of sexual orientation and gender nonconformity.
You’d think, now that the Euro-American “West” has established gay rights in law, that we’d see more freedom for people to express their homosexuality and gender nonconformity freely, but paradoxically we’re seeing young people flock back to gender stereotypes and try to “identify” out of being tomboy girls and lesbian women and femme boys and gay men by grasping at pronouns and hormones and surgeries. I suspect this is the “shuffling/re-settling” period after the big “tier shift” from legal discrimination to social influence against gender nonconformity and same-sex attraction.
To paraphraze Olga Khazan, “It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from being masculine or lesbian. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.”
When you put it that way it suddenly becomes much clearer how much sexism still influences girls’ interests.
Arty, I’ve also heard that. I only partially buy it. Here’s why.
Women in STEM fields face pressures not faced by women in more traditional fields. They get less microscope/telescope time. They get less lab time. The sexist pressure by men in the field to leave is much stronger than pressure in, say, a day care center. There are more men in STEM fields than in the more caring fields, and more unwanted sexual attention. Most day care centers don’t have males on staff, so you can avoid that.
Plus, women being told they’re not good at math? I believed that…until I discovered I was good at math. It took until I was 35 to discover that my As in Algebra were not just a fluke.
Women outnumber men in several disciplines in the colleges, but are woefully outnumbered by men in the work force. It isn’t that women are uninterested in those fields (whether culturally taught or innate). It’s two things: (1) hiring committees and (2) being forced out by above items.
For the first five years at the job I just left, I had to deal with extreme sexism. It was obvious some of the males, especially those teaching in the trades, were trying to push me out. I finally dealt with it by saying “fuck them” and staying. Many women did the opposite; they left. Maybe I did get some good from growing up in a toxic family. I had to learn how to cope with sexist expectations (and bruises, but that’s a different story).
@iknklast
I appreciate your comment, but it rings to me like more agreement than disagreement with mine.
Your statement that “Women in STEM fields face pressures not faced by women in more traditional fields” would to me be a good example of the social disadvantages women face, despite there being no longer any legal ones, when they pursue fields that are perceived as outside sex stereotypes.
An environment where women face legal oppression would motivate them to endure even that kind of sexism in the workplace, in order to secure the financial independence such salaires offer. So you’d see more women in hypersexist countries sticking with STEM jobs even in the face of extreme sexism.
An environment like Sweden, where the laws are relaxed but cultural sexism is still pervasive in the ways you highlight — less microscope/telescope time, etc — might lead women to pursue other fields that don’t come with so many obstacles. This would lead some casual observers to believe that women just naturally aren’t into STEM because of brain differences, when in fact sexism is still the larger factor.
(Though I firmly believe brain differences aren’t entirely nonexistent, and I believe we need to concede that there’s something to the brain difference part, or we all end up stuck talking in circles about James Damore’s stupid Google Memo forever and ever.)
I must say, I haven’t seen anything in the brain differences to convince me, especially with the enormous overlap. I do imagine there ARE brain differences, because women’s brains have to deal with pregnancy, etc, but I don’t think those differences lead to the cultural/social differences people see, just physical differences. Since studies that show brain differences show that fewer than half of all women have the so-called “woman’s brain”, I would say it is a non-thing.
As many of the fields currently dominated by women, which are not all “care” fields, used to be dominated by men, and it seems prima facie reasonable that women entering those fields experienced sexism no less intense than that currently present in STEM, one must ask: What accounts for the difference? That is, why did women take over those fields but not others? Was there a concerted effort to funnel women into professions that men were willing to lose in order to protect male dominance in other areas? Did the visible presence of women in certain realms serve to teach girls “you belong here” rather than “you belong wherever”? Does the existence of female-dominated fields itself lead to a concentration of women? If those fields were not predominantly composed of women, would more young women opt to pursue things like STEM?
Seems like a really rich area of study to me.
Dr. Gina Rippon, neurologist, says that her studies reveal that there is a great deal of plasticity in brain structure. Features that are more pronounced in women than men, and associated with feminine traits, are likely due to the fact that they are used more often in women than in men. So, the roles make the brain, rather than the brain determining the roles. Other than that, the only real differences between the male and female brains are slight size differences (bimodally) that are proportionate to size differences overall between men and women.
Another thing about brain differences being a thing — or perhaps a non-thing, in this case: STEM careers aren’t even a great proxy for brain differences. Jobs and careers involve all parts of the brain. I mean, yes, an engineer probably uses a bit more of the “mathiness” in her grey matter than a pediatrician does. But both of their jobs involve interpersonal relationships, communication, empathy, and all the rest.
I was a very successful computer programmer for over a decade. I don’t think I have a particularly STEMmy or mathy brain (though I am drawn to the logical thinking bits when I read about philosophy, so, I dunno). In fact I think it was my communication and empathy skills that helped me stand out from my colleagues and excel at software: when coding, I felt like I was trying to “speak to” computers in an empathetic way; also, I was listening and communicating with clients and managers to outline projects and solve problems. Programming computers is probably the STEMmiest career there is (after maybe literal mathematician, if that’s an actual career?), but it felt a lot like a social-brain kind of job to me.
So I guess I’m sympathetic to the “brain differences” hypothesis because I am a gay gender nonconforming man who has felt keenly since childhood the ways I don’t think the same as my male peers. As a coder, I felt I was riffing off of that, and “beating the boys at their own game”, in a sense. In other words: I still felt that it was a sexed environment.
But I also feel strongly that, when people deploy brain differences in arguments about careers and sex discrepancies, it’s a small part of a much bigger puzzle.
I’m not sure one necessarily has to accept the existence of biologically influenced capacities in order to have a plausible source for statistically significant effects on professional choices. Differences in the distribution of predisposition to personality traits, even very slight, could reasonably have significant impacts on the development of likes and dislikes. Like how an MOA difference in aim is insignificant at 10 feet but +/- 10 inches at 1000 yards, a small difference in predisposition at birth could have a huge effect over the course of 18-25 years.
NiV:
Let’s consider a situation in which those differences in predisposition are spread equally across the population, regardless of sex. Now introduce all babies to a society where they are influenced, subtly in some ways, overtly or even forcefully in others, to consider certain predispositions to be ‘wrong’ for people like them. How could you possibly deduce by the age of eighteen or twenty-five whether those predispositions were indeed evenly spread to start with?
Another factor which seems to have been missed in this conversation so far is the effect of single-sex schooling on career choice. Every student at the secondary school I attended had to take English Language, English Literature, French, Maths and Biology ‘O’-Level exams. Our other four subject choices, made at the end of the third form (at age thirteen to fourteen) had to include another foreign language, a science, and a humanity at minimum. The actual subject choices were dependent on timetabling considerations and the requests made by a particular cohort. My particular year group was unusual in that so many girls wanted to take three sciences that the school felt obliged to change the usual option groups. In addition to the compulsory subjects, I ended up taking chemistry, physics, Latin and Spanish, and was able to drop history and geography altogether. Not that I disliked the subjects; on the contrary, I liked to study them in my own time. I disliked the way they were being taught by the particular teachers I happened to get.
It can be entirely arbitrary life experiences which set us on one course or another, and the societal pressures on women in particular to prioritise child-rearing over any other consideration can lead to many of us having employment in a wide variety of unrelated jobs during the course of our lives.
In my case, those were:
Saturday job, aged 17, as an assistant in a shoe shop
Evening job as a veterinary nursing assistant
Full-time Laboratory assistant in medical research
Full-time Accounts clerk in an insurance company
Full-time stay-at-home mum
Part-time shop assistant in a gift shop
Part-time job as a veterinary nursing assistant
Part-time shop assistant in a supermarket
Full-time night shift taxi driver
Full-time taxi business owner and driver
Part-time motorcycle mechanic, whilst designing and supervising the build of our house
Full-time postie (delivering mail on a motorbike in Adelaide)
Retirement at 48 from all outside work due to ill-health.
I’ve also, amongst other things (not the least of which is raise five children and foster several), in no particular order, been the treasurer of the village playgroup, played the organ in church, sung in several choirs, rung various bells in a peal, played alto recorder in a county recorder ensemble, played timpani in a concert band, been in a cosplay group (and won a prize for my Davros costume), learned to ride horses (in my late thirties), knitted, crocheted, embroidered, sewn, drawn, painted in oils and watercolours, gardened, cycled, been the secretary in a motorcycle club (and won a prize for the longest ride to a rally).
I bet that if you ask many women my age, their career will be an eclectic series of unrelated jobs, because that’s what society makes us do.