The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[Undertoad]

Cause it's not fucking obvious.

Almost anything has the potential for an outrageous take that seems obvious after the fact. To see it before the outrage is much more difficult. Like the hidden arrow in the Fedex logo, you can not notice it for 20 years; and then, once it's pointed out, you can't NOT see it.

I expect women helped to design this program. It's likely a woman thought of it. (IBM is a STEM company so the all chicks work in Marketing. :b ) "Did they think to run it past" of course they ran it past. Yeah, they did. It's a corporation, every single thing is vetted nine different ways. A place like that, you can't take a shit without getting a buck slip signed by two vice-presidents.

And if the question came up during vetting: is using hair dryers sexist? One would only have had to ask at the conference room table: who here uses a hair dryer? And 90% of the women would raise their hands, and 0% of the men.

And there would be jokes made around it, because half the men would be balding, and could not possibly use a hair dryer ever. And so hair dryers, anyone would conclude, are merely a simple tool that women in particular use, most of them every single day.

While 90% of the women are drying their hair every morning, are they thinking "this is a terribly sexist thing I'm doing"?

[xoxoxoBruce]

and 0% of the men

I miss the 70s.

[DanaC]

Ok. I take it back. Apparently, it is not obvious that attempting to make science more female friendly by showing them all the fun things girls can do with a hairdryer might be perpetuating the cultural link between girls and beauty and the idea that science needs to be made more girly, for girls to get it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

So much has been wrong for so long, it's easy to agree with comments that ring even possibly true. The people who are negative about everything attempted, should come up with a better way, like you suggested, and with enough online push and chatter the corporations will listen. Unfortunately there will still be some habitually negative people who will pick those ideas apart so you need numbers to fight them.

Fight them is a negative term, how about show the majority are rational.

[DanaC]

Lots of people, particularly, but not exclusively, women, have been telling the STEM industries what the problems might be and how they might be addressed, for quite a long time now. There are some really good initiatives reaching kids in schools and colleges, and they might be part of why female participation in science and tech subjects, past the primary education age, and into later study has grown substantially. There's a lot of really solid research and case study work to draw from.

It is not that people haven't been offering better ideas. It is that the STEM industry giants have only listened with one ear. They've heard and understood that women actually should be, for a more equal society, but more importantly for better industry, more equally present in their fields. They clearly want to do something about it. IBM has made progress in terms of women in management that really matters. But - they're not prepared to listen to the rest of it. They don't want to know, possibly because they are still overwhelmingly managed by men, all that boring, icky shit about sexism and stereotypes that women keep banging on about.

Here's an example of an alternative approach focused on school age children, on sparking the desire for scientific exploration and a sense of the possible. Note that the way they show and encourage girls into STEM subjects is by encouraging a bunch of kids of both genders to explore science and technology. Degendering, rather than regendering.

http://www.girlsintostem.co.uk/

[glatt]

So what's the answer? How do you get girls to be interested in STEM jobs? How do you get boys to be interested in teaching and nursing?

I've personally tried to involve my daughter in the tinkering activities I do, and she will respond in order to spend a little time with me, but as we get into whatever the project is, she wanders off to go read a book. Maybe I'm doing or saying something unconsciously that turns her away, or maybe she just has no interest in this stuff. And my boy is the opposite. He starts and finished his own projects without me. He devours this stuff.

It's a small sample size, but something is grabbing his attention and not hers.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's right, glatt, you're children are suffering your shortcomings.
Isn't that every decent parent's nightmare, true or not, because there's no way to know if you're doing the right thing for that particular child. I've heard parents say they think they did good and the kids OK, if he/she reflects some of the parents values. Is that raising clones instead of free thinking humans? Is having free thinking children worth the anguish?

[DanaC]

That may be just be two different kids with two different sets of interests and proclivities who just happen to correspond broadly with what we assume their gender will be into. I've known sibling pairs who were exact opposite.

Or it could be the influence of the wider culture in which they live, and over which you as a parent have only minimal control. It's very difficult to tell. The world is noisy with messages, and clearly some girls do get put off somewhere along the line, as boys also get put off. How many little boys are quite content to follow mum round the house 'helping' her vacuum, only to lose that the moment they walk through the school gates?

It takes a fairly strong sense of self, to forge your own way as a small child. Most of us will get pushed or pulled in some direction along the way - to lesser or greater degrees. Maybe we'll let something go that we used to find interesting - forget we ever liked it by the time we're 12. Maybe we just didn;t explore a thing that kind of intrigued us but felt vaguely transgressive, or socially dangerous. Like the little boy who really likes playing in the wendy house.

*shrugs* it's a complex soup of stuff, some of which we have it in us to change, some of which might never change, some of which should or shouldnt change.

[Undertoad]

They don't want to know, possibly because they are still overwhelmingly managed by men, all that boring, icky shit about sexism and stereotypes that women keep banging on about.

You've pictured in your head how the IBM decision-making process went, and you applied all the stereotypes you could think of, and here we are. The thing must be run by men, men must have made the decisions, they don't want to know, hence they were clueless, hence the result.

Your narrative and this entire thing comes out of stereotyping men and the IBM decision making process. What's up with that.

IBM is run by a woman. She wears a hairstyle that requires blow-drying.

[DanaC]

I was being facetious and my description of the decison-making process was meant to be humorous. But also to recognise an eseential truth about STEM companies as they are right now, which is that at a strategic and managerial level they are overwhelmingly male.

Yes - IBM is run by a woman. And yes, IBM have, partly through her pushing, increased the number of women in managerial positions. But - as a general rule, the CEO of a global tech giant, is unlikely, I'd have thought, to be micro-managing the specific editorial content of every part of a campaign like this. This advert was part of a larger initiative by the company to promote careers for women.

Even with a female CEO, IBM at a strategic and managerial level is three-quarters male. Unless she is specifically involving herself at every level of this campaign, rather than running the company, and unless IBM have specifically tasked their female management with this campaign, then there is a statistical likelihood that the majority of those making decisions about what makes the cut across the various components in this campaign are men.

And the fact that she might use a hairdryer is besides the point.

[Undertoad]

I'm now trying to find evidence of the original campaign and cannot find any.

We didn't need it anyway -- but if anyone can point to evidence of the original campaign that would be great.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Beest

I like Danas comment about unfulfilled sales guys, similar thing in reverse

It is changing I think, slowly but I think it is gathering pace. The idea of nursing as a credible and respectable career for young men to go into is becoming much more culturally accepted than it once was. I quite often see male nurses in tv shows now where they were kind of a novelty thing at one time.

The generation coming of age now seem to have a much more fluid interpretation of gender than ours in many ways. When I see my nieces and their friends together, and the way they talk about stuff just seems a lot less hung up on gender and notions of 'girl's stuff' and 'boy's stuff'. The boys seem way more comfortable and confident in talking about emotional matters than the boys of my youth, and the girls don't seem to consider that there may be any barriers in the way of them doing anything. Amelia is one of only a few girls in her cohort for her subject at university, and generally ends up in mostly male projects and she hasn't experienced any of that exclusionary behaviour that dogged a lot of the girls who went into male fields of study a few years ago (and I have heard tales of that still going on in a few areas) - the lads weren't remotely phased by having a girl in their group and just got on with working together and being friends.

These kids have grown up in an education system that really tried, consciously, to off-set some of the messages kids were being given about what was or was not for girls or boys. Hopefully, they mark the next leaps forward.

Some of the divisions are so arbitrary and ridiculous. The idea of a male nurse has only recently lost its novelty value in popular culture - yet that same popular culture assumes a paramedic is likely to be male.

It would be so nice if we could just draw and recruit the best carers and nurses and technicians and scientists from a pool of 100% of the population. Instead of shutting out, accidentally or deliberately, huge numbers of potential recruits just because we're hanging on to a narrow and reductive view of gender. Which is pretty much what Clod was saying.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I think much of the boys should, girls should, comes from parents, my little princess, my rugged lad. The manufacturers of toys and shit are playing to what has proven to sell, and kids don't buy toys, adults buy toys that fit the stereotypes they grew up with.

The original IBM ad would be of interest to see if it came from in house, or an agency. From an agency would probably get more rubber stamps and less eyeballs.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by DanaC

It is changing I think, slowly but I think it is gathering pace. The idea of nursing as a credible and respectable career for young men to go into is becoming much more culturally accepted than it once was. I quite often see male nurses in tv shows now where they were kind of a novelty thing at one time.

When I was friends with student nurses - we all worked together in a pub - there was one male nurse across the whole year.

I've just been discharged from hospital, and although the female nurses FAR outnumbered the men, within a week on one ward I had three male nurses. All younger than me, all obviously at the beginning of their careers, but I was heartened all the same. And given that the ward was mixed gastro-intestinal, albeit each individual section was gender separated, I think some of the male patients would have been pleased about this. When I walked to the Day Room I saw patients aged 20-70 (guessing). The older gents may have expected female nurses, and even been more comfortable with them. But the younger ones may have appreciated a bit of banter with their blood pressure cuffs and anal swabs.

Personally I didn't care. The only nurse I didn't like was the very brusque female senior nurse (female) who came back from two days loff and said, "Oh, you're still here then."

[xoxoxoBruce]

When I was young my peer group, which included several nurses, a dentist, and an anesthesiologist, assumed any male nurse was queer. A lot of guys were drafted right out of high school during the Vietnam War, and most had no trade when they got out. Consequentially the ones who became medics, and there were a ton of them, came out with something they could pursue, nursing. Then it became more common to see male nurses in hospitals, although schools, clinics, and doctor's offices are primarily still female domain.