{"id":5369,"date":"2017-09-11T19:24:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T18:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=5369"},"modified":"2017-09-11T19:24:50","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T18:24:50","slug":"marital-high-jinks-and-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2017\/09\/11\/marital-high-jinks-and-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Marital High Jinks and Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am quite sure I have never previously had occasion to write the name Wayne Rooney<\/a> in any situation, but he does seem relevant to the topic of gendered sentences. Hadley Freeman wrote a withering piece<\/a> last week about how this footballer\u2019s conjugal incontinence is described \u2013 and his wife Colleen\u2019s presumed state of mind in the face of it \u2013 versus the language used regarding a footballer\u2019s wife (Louise Redknapp<\/a>) who has walked away from her husband Jamie.\u00a0 As Freeman puts it, the media want to spin this story as<\/p>\n

\u2018Coleen is humiliated, Jamie carries on. Louise is having a\u00a0midlife crisis, Wayne is just being Wayne\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One doesn\u2019t have to care one iota about who is behaving well or badly to spot the difference in the way the media choose to describe marital hiccoughs as acted out by the male and female partners, in these footballer\u2019s marriages and much more generally. Always women need to be fitted into some box where they can only be seen in relation to their partner (yes, I know, I\u2019m sticking with heterosexuals here for simplicity); or, as Freeman put it \u2018men do, women feel<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

The context may be different. Few academics are judged on their marital high jinks when it comes to progression these days, but presuming the academic world is male by default and actions are defined within a male framework is still all but ubiquitous.\u00a0 If we are to see equality finally be achieved, all of us need to clear out these stale frameworks for thinking about individuals\u2019 abilities and start afresh. Let me give you some examples of \u2018male by default\u2019 thinking I have observed in recent years in different situations. Every reader is likely to be able to come up with their own variants without expending too much time or effort.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Until recently, members of Cambridge University committees were listed as Professors\/Drs A, B, C\u2026but where there was a woman a discreet (f) was added after her name to ram home the fact that the establishment had sought long and hard before finding a rare female to stick on the committee; a woman who was so unusual she had to be labelled as such. I had a quiet word with the then head of HR, who responded with exactly the phrase I use above \u2018oh you mean we\u2019re assuming male-by-default\u00a0 by doing this\u2019, and the habit was (to the best of my knowledge) amended to (m) and (f) appropriately. No doubt, now we should amend that binary split again, but that\u2019s a different fight for a different person to take on.<\/li>\n
  2. Letters of reference have formed the basis of a recent blogpost<\/a> of mine, so I won\u2019t repeat that story at length, but letters are so disappointingly often full of \u2018men do, women feel\u2019 type phrases. Or, if women dare to do, they are tarred with negative connotations: feisty or in-your-face. Here is a sentence I came across just recently in a reference \u2018This was a bit brash, but I couldn\u2019t help but be captivated by her ambitions and confidence<\/em>\u2019. Could I imagine that being written about a man? Would he admit to being \u2018captivated\u2019 by a man, brash or not? It would be hard, I think, to imagine it could have been written about another male. Another writer about the same person came up with \u2018She is not afraid to ruffle feathers\u2026<\/em>\u2019 Doesn\u2019t that just smack of as a gentle woman she has no business ruffling feathers, that isn\u2019t what women should do? When do I read about men in the same terms? The nearest equivalent would be said with some approbation, as in \u2018a hot-blooded and dynamic scientist with an incredible amount of energy<\/em>\u2019. The phrase perhaps amounts to the same thing but with a positive spin (it of course describes a man in the same competition).<\/li>\n
  3. \u00a0But it doesn\u2019t have to be in formal letters of reference that we see this polarisation of phraseology. It occurs around the committee table too, or rather describing how people perform there. If Professor John Smith gets cross, he is all too often allowed to go red in the face, interrupt others or simply never, never stop talking. He may even thump the table in his irritation. Professor Joanna Smith will usually be afforded far less slack: any sign of irritation and she is \u2018feisty\u2019 or \u2018not a shrinking violet\u2019. And any sign of tearing up and, oh dear she\u2019s emotional. Unforgiveable! That men can shout and women can\u2019t show their own stereotypical form of emotion without it being held against them is one of the dualities I find particularly galling and damaging. The very word \u2018emotional\u2019 always implies a negative response, as in \u2018Athene, I can hear you\u2019re getting emotional<\/em>\u2019 as a way to shut down an argument that my interlocutor was losing, said to me only a few years ago. Despite failing to respond swiftly to that challenge (\u2018Bloggs, I can hear you\u2019re getting angry<\/em>\u2019 should have been my reply, but I thought of it far too late) he did not, I\u2019m pleased to say, win the argument.<\/li>\n
  4. Finally, it seems that too often men are given the benefit of the doubt and judged on potential rather than hard outcomes, in order to succeed. If we are moving into a world of \u2018responsible metrics\u2019 is there any way we can ensure a more uniform way of scoring actual outcomes versus potential when it comes to appointments to fellowships or lectureships? To give a specific example I observed for an engineering field where a man and a woman, both with patents to their name, were being compared.\u00a0 The woman was scrutinised to see if her patents had translated into commercial cash or at least a spin-out company; for a moment it looked like the man was simply going to be credited with the patents without any further inspection. On that occasion a man around the table spoke up to point out this inconsistency and the rest of the committee shuffled their feet and looked embarrassed that they hadn\u2019t spotted this too. (I should point out, on this occasion I was a silent observer in the room, not an active participant.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That final sketch illustrates what is needed. People \u2013 whatever their gender \u2013 have to be alert to the different parsing of men and women\u2019s abilities and the use of different language to describe a woman with exactly the same strengths admired in a man but derided because it isn\u2019t expected in a woman. If everyone around a table were more awake to what can happen \u2013 innocently but far from innocuously \u2013 then we might move faster towards a truly level playing field. But, we are so steeped in a culture operating within that framework which amounts to \u2018men do, women feel\u2019 that for each and every one of us it is difficult to escape its clutches, to spot what is going on and to progress to genuine objectivity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I am quite sure I have never previously had occasion to write the name Wayne Rooney in any situation, but he does seem relevant to the topic of gendered sentences. Hadley Freeman wrote a withering piece last week about how … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[1174,1172,887,1173],"class_list":["post-5369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality","category-science-culture","tag-feisty","tag-hadley-freeman","tag-letters-of-reference","tag-wayne-rooney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}