The Gordian Knot of instituitionalised sexism - a stream of consciousness

[miss_s_b]

Because I am poorly and have no spoons, I got into a fight I possibly shouldn't have started last night, with someone who winds me up with his sexist behaviour at regular intervals. I'm not going to link to it, because I don't want this post to be about that specific incident, but about the generality. It ended up with him saying to me that I have no right to complain about him not linking to women's views unless I, personally, spoonfeed him women's views to link to.

Now, my instinctive reaction to that is to think fuck you! Why should I do all your work for you, you lazy git?... But that's possibly counterproductive for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, as I have discussed before, men will happily self-promote in ways that women won't. Mediocre men will shout from the rooftops about how awesome they are, and the more mediocre they are, the more they shout; awesome women, because of shyness, or socialisation that women who shout are harpies, or insecurity about their awesomeness, are much less likely to self-promote. This is made worse by the fact that very few people will look beyond what is waved in front of their faces, so the shouty men get noticed and the quiet women don't; very few people are willing to hurt somebody else (of whatever gender) by telling them they are mediocre if they are, and so the mediocre people get promotion they don't deserve, just by being shouty (Iain Dale is a PRIME example of that); and thus the cycle that to be noticed half as much as a man, a woman has to be twice as good continues in our supposedly post-feminist times.

The second reason my reaction is counter-productive is male priviledge. Male opinion aggregators are used to being spoonfed. This is unfair and annoying, but telling them to look beyond their spoonfeeding is telling them to do more work that they don't see a reason to do. Even if that were not the case, it takes a special kind of person to resist being spoonfed, why would anybody give themselves extra work to do?

This gives us two reasons why the blokosphere is self-perpetuating, and those two reasons feed into and reinforce each other. Even a completely non-sexist feminist ally man will often unconsciously perpetuate sexism under these circumstances. This is a problem I have been talking about for years, and I still don't have a suitable sword to cut this Gordian Knot. Nobody else seems to have one either.

How do we go about forging one, people?

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Comments

Does this count as mansplaining? Probably...

[andrewhickey.info]

Stephen, I don't think it's an unfair accusation at all, though it may strike you as such. Let me point the accusation (equally fairly) at myself, and see if that makes it seem fairer to you.

I regularly do a 'linkblogging' feature for my blog, where I link to (usually) about five posts I've seen recently. I *believe* when I post them that I'm linking to just the most recent five posts I think my readership will like (and that readership itself appears to be predominantly male, at least judging from the comments I get, which might itself be part of the problem).

Now, I actually *make an effort* to read as many good female blogs as I can. I would certainly list among my favourite blogs Jennie, Alix M, Debi Linton, Charlotte Gore, Caron, "Purple Pen", Laurie Penny, Emily Short, and many other women.

But when I actually look at what I've linked recently, of the last twenty-odd things I've linked to, Jennie is the only woman.

Now there are certainly reasons for this that can explain it - I try to link to a variety of *types* of blogging, and almost all those I've listed are political blogs. I know of no women who blog about comics, for example, in the way I find most interesting. (There are plenty of great women comics bloggers, but few who do the kind of posts done by, say, Colin at Too Busy Thinking About My Comics or David at Vibrational Match). There are various things like that that excuse aspects (for example my wife is one of my favourite bloggers, but because she writes about aspects of our personal life at times I never link to her blog from mine).

But the fact remains that while I do not believe I am sexist, I am clearly committing a sexist act. I have no idea what to do to rectify this, or even if it's possible for me to, short of tokenism (I try to link to the best blog posts, and I don't want to drop a great one by say Millennium or Andrew Rilstone for a less-great one by a woman) but it is something I *do* worry about.

And this kind of unconscious sexism *is* something to worry about. I work at a software development lab for an Incredibly Big Megacorporation, and of the roughly 70 people who work there, only two are women - the administrator/receptionist and a company executive. All the developers, testers, sysadmins and middle managers are men.

I know the people who do the hiring and firing there, and I am *absolutely convinced* that they are well-meaning and don't believe they are biased. But the chances of that gender balance happening without *some* form of bias somewhere in the system is 1 in 1.18059162 × 10^21. In other words, if every single person alive at the moment started a new lab of that size every year, you'd only have to wait about thirty-two times the current age of the earth before getting one with that balance, were they all to pick randomly.

So it is important that, even if we don't believe we ourselves are to blame, we acknowledge that our actions, even if controlled to an extent by outside forces, *are* sexist. Even if they can't be changed easily by our own actions, we need to be constantly on the lookout for situations where they *can* be changed...

Re: Does this count as mansplaining? Probably...

[miss_s_b]

Thank you.

* hug *