Accepting the social responsibility for women’s affairs: what’s with the ignorance and the stalled revolution?
This is the first article in the series “Taking down barriers to career advancement of women in STEM and beyond”
Foreword
For years I have been dedicating a major part of my spare time to activism such as educating women (including myself) and tearing down at least some of their/mine inner obstacles to leadership. As I was diving into courses, books and trainings in the area of “self-development”, I discovered patterns that were common in members of communities that I’ve worked with, as well as compelling explanations for their existence. It occurred to me that there is a lack of awareness of the notions of perfectionism and self-sabotage, their origin and of the tools to combat them, yet tackling them could completely revolutionize the way women see themselves, whether they reach for what they truly desire, and to what they dare to aspire. I wrote this series of articles to reach high-achieving female STEM professionals and to give them a proven blueprint for killing the so-called “leadership ambition gap”. Anxiety and fear will be triggered by what we deeply care about and want to achieve or change in the world but there is no fun or benefit in giving in. If you see the potential I see in this content, reach out — I am open to giving workshops and lectures on this worldwide. Forward out of error, Alex
Other articles in the series:
Education on women’s affairs: ignorance is not a bliss!
I was born in the 1990s not 1900s, in Poland that has given women rights to vote in 1918 (so much earlier than Switzerland which reached that in 1960s), yet things I heard when growing up make my blood boil till today, especially if they came from figures of authority who simply should have known better. I certainly need not a rich husband to sustain myself as a scientist, nor do I need to drop my dreams of a Nobel Prize when I become a mother. A young ambitious woman in today’s world has to find the courage, the will and the tools to understand and combat sexism on her own, both the overt and the implicit one. She also needs to find strength in herself to ignore voices that she is incompetent or can never have everything, which to my dismay, she likely internalizes (see the part 2 in the series on individual obstacles). But it need not be this way.
My high school education was of excellent quality, however, the notion of being a woman in the world’s history has been merely brushed upon in a 1h lesson about suffrage. I consider it a mistake that authorities who design education curricula do not concern themselves with placing the past and the present state of women’s affairs in the spotlight. It is a failure of leadership that girls are not being equipped with tools to defend themselves against every day expressions of social injustice. The damage done to them by equating being girls to being worse at certain things or meant for some things but not other, which they are confronted through their communities and pop culture, is enormous, and it traps them from within.
The pioneering women who (still) get us into sciences
Role models are not needed just to show women that yes, they can be scientists, yes, they can win Nobel Prizes, and yes, they can be loved at the same time. The real stories of struggle and burden of paving the way for other women in the real message here: of perserverence, heroism in the face of all adversities, unrelented spirit, and ingenuity to find avid supporters who would take the risk of social exclusion to give them a voice (aka the “allies”). It’s the fairy tales of good winning over evil that a little girl should hear before going to sleep.
Mary Putnam Jacobi, a scientist in the field of medicine in the second half of 1800s, lived in the times when people believed that education of boys and girls should differ. Physicians such as Edward’s Clarke, who taught at Harvard Medical School, were even publishing works claiming that education of women leads to “undeveloped ovaries”. As we can read in the “Headstrong — 52 women who changed science and the whole world”:
Jacobi challenged Clarke’s thinly veiled justification for discrimination with 232 pages of hard numbers, charts and analysis. She gathered survey results covering a woman’s monthly pain, cycle length, daily exercise, and education along with physiological indications like pulse, rectal temperature, and ounces of urine. (…) Her paper was greatly influential in helping women gain opportunities in higher education — especially in the sciences.
Ellen Swallow-Richards was the first woman ever admitted to MIT in 1870, with a stipulation that “her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females”. She obtained a second bachelor’s degree in chemistry from MIT and spearheaded the creation of a parallel science program for women at the MIT campus, the Women’s Laboratory. It shut down 6 years later when women were finally admitted to MIT’s standard sets of classes. Many women were sending letters to Ellen, asking for science-based advice on improving life at home. In an effort to educate the public about healthy nutrition, she advocated for domestic science, while pursuing groundbreaking work on water sanitation. She is regarded as the mother of home economics.
Emmy Noether worked at the University of Erlangen without a salary or a job title but published dozens of papers, advised PhD students and lectured abroad. When Albert Einstein was gathering a team of mathematicians in Göttingen lead by figures like David Hilbert in order to find help him develop new concepts for his theory of relativity, Emmy Noether’s specialisation in invariants was a jackpot. “It is through her that I have become competent in the subject”, he once wrote. Her permission to teach as a woman met with fierce opposition from many scholars and the government. This is why her lecturs were David Hilbert’s on official documentation. Even when she finally became an “unofficial extraordinary professor”, she was unpaid, or eventually lowest-paid. Her effort to obtain recognition and equal treatment as a professional was bolstered by her achievements. Noether’s theorem explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws is the “foundation of modern physics” and she is also considered a founder of abstract algebra.
After Austrian universities had finally allowed women to enroll, Lise Meitner obtained a PhD in physics at the University of Vienna and then arrived in Berlin in 1907. Max Planck, who is known as the originator of quantum theory, had reservations about educating women but eventually became one of her most fierce advocates. While in Berlin, she partnered with a chemist, Otto Hahn, but she was not allowed to conduct radiation experiments in the same lab as Hahn. Eventually in 1908 she was finally allowed to leave the damp basement with separate entrance and use the main building. By 1917 she ran her own radiophysics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, where together with Hahn they discovered the new element, protactinium. Later on, in 1934, they teamed up again to search for new heavy elements at Meitner’s invitation. They conducted experiments, sending neutrons towards atoms of uranium. In 1938, Meitner who was Jewish, was forced to flee Germany, while Hahn could continue smashing particles. When he found a curious result, he wrote to Meitner, seeking explanation. She figured out that uranium’s nucleus was splitting — they’ve discovered nuclear fission. However, Hahn took the full credit and obtained a Nobel Prize in 1944. This injustice has been partially remedied post-mortem, when a new element was named in her honor — Meitnerium.
Margaret Rossitier, an American historian, coined the term “Matilda effect” to describe the bias against acknowledging the achievements of women in science, and gave Lise Meitner as one of the examples of this effect. The bias is evidenced in suppression of information about women in history of science, as well as attribution of women’s achievements to their male colleagues across time. Uncovering hundreds of women in science in American history is Margaret’s life’s work, and she published many forgotten stories in three volume’s project “Women Scientists in America”. In one interview she recalled her time at Yale in 1969:
During a lull in the conversation at one of those sessions, Rossiter threw out a question to the gathered professors. “Were there ever women scientists?” she asked. The answer she received was absolute: No. Never. None. “It was delivered quite authoritatively,” said Rossiter, now a professor emerita at Cornell University. Someone did mention at least one well-known female scientist, Marie Curie, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize. But the professors dismissed even Curie as merely the helper to her husband, casting him as the real genius behind their breakthroughs. Instead of arguing, though, Rossiter said nothing: “I realized this was not an acceptable subject.”
The background stories of those hand-picked women explain that due to the opposition from peers, governments and institutional law, in order to succeed in the field of sciences, one had to be a superwoman. Women needed to divide attention between actual (and often unpaid) work, navigate the landscape of social and professional exclusion, and go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their pioneering work does establish a precedent for women to follow.
Since then a lot of progress has been made in societies endorsing gender equality but the cultural obstacles still exist. Informing ourselves about the past helps put those obstacles in an appropriate context, which is important for a myriad of reasons. Not only is it important for generations of women experiencing biases and placing blame for them on themselves, but also for expressing compassion towards women who to this day need to share the burden of paving the way for other women. The time and energy they spend on confronting and/or advocating for equity is a personal cost that is not avoidable and continues giving men unfair advantage in the race for leadership.
The masculinity and the “stalled revolution” at work, at home
The gender revolution was a huge success until the mid 90s — women made significant gains in closing gender gaps in education and labor force participation. However, at that point the progress plateaued and has not accelerated since. The gaps in labor force participation, wage, and household labour between women and men continue to persist, hence the term the “stalled revolution”. At its core — men’s reluctance to move into roles traditionally ascribed to women.
Facts and figures from the European Commission are capturing the reality of an average woman and the “way things work” around her that everyone observes, internalizes, and eventually normalizes in the process of gender socialization (more on this process is in part 2 of the series).
In households, in which men are the sole financial providers, women tend to do 4 times more housework. One would thus expect that in households, in which women are the sole financial providers, they would do less housework, too. That is not the case — the numbers show that they do signficiantly more. In households, in which income is relatively equal, or women are the main income earners, women still spend twice as much time on domestic work as men do. The time which they dedicate is in excess of 10–20h a week compared to men. Additionally, children do matter: across the European Union it is women who mostly reduce their working hours in order to take care of the youngest child in the household. In the former 27 countries of the EU, ~30% of women as opposed to ~5% of men report to have done so. Accepting that 85% of parents who are part timers are women will always allow men to be favored in the race for leadership because they tend to work longer hours than women do.
From the financial standpoint, most EU households are primarily funded by men (between 50–60%), in about a quarter of households women and men have the same income, and in less than 15-20% of households women are the main breadwinners. All in all, the stalled revolution costs women their time, limits their opportunities for promotions, and hurts their financial situation. What this translates into is, sadly, less independence.
The stalled revolution and the reluctance of men to move into the female-dominated roles is in part driven by the stigma of doing so (e.g. assumptions that a man in nursing must be unable to get to the medical school), and in part by the lack of economic incentives. “Historically male” (STEM) jobs have always been associated with a higher status and pay, and “historically female” jobs (nurses, teachers) come with the opposite. Interestingly, studies show that while women experience a glass ceiling in male-dominated fields — chilly climate, discrimination — men experience a glass escalator in the female-dominated jobs. In fact, men are pushed to move up and out of female-dominated fields. As asserted in the 2015 review article of Sarah Friedman “Still a Stalled Revolution? Work/Family Experiences, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Moving Toward Gender Equality”:
The “stalled revolution” of women’s and men’s roles at work is fundamentally connected to the persistence of the “stalled revolution” at home.
Without a redefinition of masculinity to include stereotypically “feminine” pursuits (i.e. caregiving fields and historically female-dominated occupations, greater responsibility for household labor and child care), the gender revolution toward equality at work and at home will continue to be incomplete and stalled.
Feminism will always be needed: a word of caution on politics
This is one of many disturbing maps which illustrate how deeply engraved gender inequality is on a global scale. As a young adult educating myself on the state of women’s affairs, I discovered two facts which have changed my sense of social responsibility for women’s affairs, forever. For one, there are shockingly many more women in the world who don’t have the same basic rights as men do than the ones that do. Most women on Earth are “second class citizens”, i.e. face violence and discrimination when it comes to access to education, free mobility even just out of their homes, justice system, or reproductive rights. Equitable societies actively opposing gender discrimination are still a minority. Secondly, I have always found comfort in thinking that the rights, which were earned, will not be taken away because the progress of the civilization always goes “forward out of error, forward into light” (National Women’s Party motto). This, however, was a naive point of view, and I dare say that because of it many women take their rights for granted, and often remain passive in political discourses.
Yet history teaches us a very important lesson: social injustice does not cease to be an issue and the political divides create a fragile balance that needs to be continuously monitored. Women must not just be involved in politics, but steer its course so that, to the very least, they ensure that their own interests are protected. The reactionary involvement when it is too late to stop the social revolution overtly restricting their rights will not always suffice, as sadly shown in the two modern examples below.
Key takeaways / action items
- Equip girls and young women with tools to defend themselves against sexism and social prejudice, a systemic global issue. Don’t sweep it under the carpet, don’t think they will just figure it out. Some will, but at a great cost.
- Shed more light on the history of women as a part of the society — of the bravery, achievements, hardships, paving the way for other women, and of the opposition from men. This context matters because everyone needs to really understand why things are the way they are today. People forget the facts of the past and tend to cling onto “their ways” without much thinking.
- Women moved into the roles previously reserved only for men. There will be no equal opportunities for women and men in the labour market and leadership unless men move into roles previously reserved for women, at work and at home. The notion of masculinity has to evolve.
- Without strong interest and participation of women in political discourses and politics, women’s rights will always be at risk.
- So long women are underrepresented in certain areas and places, they cannot avoid the extra workload of paving the way for other women. Appreciate them for what they go through.
