2 posts on Sexism

The inability of people to understand how much their subconscious influences their behavior never ceases to baffle me. Sure, they accept the idea of a subconscious in the abstract, but they will never admit that a certain behavior of theirs might have been influenced by it. I suspect the lack of total control over their thoughts and motivations scares them so much they react with denial.

No, the fact that you don’t consciously hold sexist, racist, homophobic views, does not mean that you actually treat everyone equally. Because, subconscious bias.

No, the fact that someone else treated people differently because of their sex, race, sexual orientation etc does not necessarily make them an entitled asshole, so stop crying “How can people be like that?” and asking for their head on a platter. Chances are they are just as unaware of their subconscious biases as you are.

In general, your subconscious is a dick. If it were a person, you would never want to hang out with them. It judges everyone and everything by stereotypes. Its intentions are good: it’s trying to help you save time, which in the jungle could mean the difference between life and death. But in our domesticated society, it can make you act unfairly towards others. So, I call it “the subconscious monster”.

I will focus on internalized sexism for the rest of this post, but any of the following really applies to any kind of long-standing bigotry.

Feminism has come a long way over the past few decades, but gender bias still exists. We see it in study after study after study. It’s really hard to fight this “leftover” sexism, because it’s mostly subconscious. Only few fundamentalist nutjobs will flat out say that women are inferior or that they should have “different roles”, everyone else believes they are an egalitarian snowflake and is unable to spot any bias in their thinking even when it’s staring them in the face.

We almost all have such biases since we grew up in a patriarchal society. Humans learn about the world by pattern matching, and we grew up seeing women relegated to the sidelines everywhere: in business, in pop culture, in the home. That’s a ton of patterns our brains have been feeding on, for decades. Even worse, women also grow up with these patterns and often reproduce them, increasing the predictive accuracy of these internalized stereotypes, which makes our subconscious monsters less willing to drop them (think of how many women still get their husband’s last name, happily reproducing a tradition that stems from a time where they were seen as property).

So how do you fight internalized sexism? Before you go out trying to enlighten and change others, try to fight it in yourself. How? With a lot of introspection. You need to accept that you probably have it, and be alert for when it manifests. Even just that works wonders over time. A good trick to catch your subconscious monster in the act is to try reversing the genders of people in a situation. For example, if you find yourself thinking that Mary is being pompous and arrogant, try to imagine the same things being said by John. Does he also sound pompous and arrogant or did he suddenly become confident and assertive instead? It doesn’t always work, because the subconscious monster is sneaky and resilient, but if you’re honest with yourself, it works often enough that the results will surprise you.

Secondly, try to fight it in the next generation, by not perpetuating even more of these patterns. This is why seemingly unimportant things like gender neutral language or jokes and pop culture matter: because the subconscious is a pattern-hungry monster and it will gladly feed off any hint that one gender might be less important than the other, so long as said hint is sufficiently widespread. If you use “he” as a default, your subconscious monster thinks that “she” is the exception, an oddity. Given that language used “he” as the default for so long, it’s no surprise that people tend to imagine doctors, professors, lawyers etc as male, even in cases where female would have been more likely. The pronouns in the language translate to concepts in our head, and then things like the Smurfs happen, where every (male) smurf has a skill, except Smurfette, whose skill is …being a woman.

Even if you do a lot of work with yourself and strive to get rid of your own subconscious biases, everyone else will still have theirs. And most of them are not as enlightened as you, and will not have done any work with themselves to fight it or even acknowledge it. This can be very frustrating: once you start noticing, you cannot un-notice. When you tell them that they said or did something sexist, they will become extremely defensive because in their head, you accused them of conscious sexism, and as we all know people who are consciously sexist are Huge Assholes™.

So what do you do if you witness sexist behavior by someone unaware of their bias? You point it out to everyone and call them an asshole, that will teach them, right?? Wrong.

Here’s a meta-description of practically every sexism-related Twitter shitstorm I have observed: dude says something sexist without realizing, the Internet explodes, everyone curses at him, he gets fired from his job and nobody loves him anymore. His takeaway? “People are crazy these days, everything is so politically correct. I did nothing wrong. I should just stay quiet in the future”. The takeaway of many, many onlookers? “People are crazy these days, everything is so politically correct. He did nothing wrong. I should stay quiet in the future so the same thing doesn’t happen to me”. Nobody learned anything from this. From their perspective, they said something innocuous and it was blown out of proportion. The angry crowd is temporarily satisfied, but no social progress has been made.

If anything, such incidents cause societal regression instead of progress. They make it harder to teach people to recognize their subconscious bias, because if they never feel comfortable to express their thoughts, nobody can comment on them anymore. They still however influence their actions, and it’s really the actions we want to change. Men also start avoiding talking to women at conferences and the workplace because they perceive it as too high-risk, which effectively puts obstacles on their careers, especially in male-dominated fields.

I dream of a society where everyone accepts that they have internalized biases and is alert about their manifestation both in themselves and others. A society where we would all work together to reach equality, instead of trying to find the next enemy and burn them at the stake. Imagine if you could calmly tell someone “hey, that was sexist”, and instead of them getting defensive because they know that accepting it would mean social and professional suicide, they could just reply “damn, it got me again! Thanks, I’ll introspect about it” and does so.

What can we do until we manage to reach this level of social Zen? Perhaps we can work towards it, by educating other people about subconscious bias and being less vitriolic when they get things wrong. In most cases it’s well-meaning people that were tricked by their subconscious monster, not real chauvinistic pigs. As with most situations, empathy usually works much better than rage, even if it’s less satisfying in the short run.

Lastly, the fact that most sexism these days is subconscious makes it really hard to detect. We know it exists because it shows up in large numbers and statistics, whether that’s a controlled lab study or every woman’s experiences throughout her life. But it can often be impossible to tell if an individual incident is motivated by sexism or not. If a woman was not hired, is it because of her gender or her skill? If someone is explaining to me something I already know, are they mansplaining or would they explain it to a man as well? Nobody knows, not even the person making the hiring decision or the explaining! This can easily drive people paranoid, making them see sexism everywhere or missing it even when it’s staring them in the face, depending on which side they choose to err on. I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I do wonder, every time. This is a kind of cognitive load that people who don’t belong in a frequently discriminated against group* don’t ever have to deal with.

I wish I could end this post with an upbeat call to action, but I’m afraid I don’t really have one. I don’t see any other solution besides the long slow process of introspecting, raising awareness, and, perhaps most importantly, making sure the next generations see fewer sexist patterns around them to match on. Most of the efforts to fix it Right Now™ that I have seen end up being messy patches instead of real cures, and cause even more stereotyping. But if we want to have a shot at finding a solution, the first step is to really understand the problem, right?

* No, I’m not gonna use “straight white male” instead of this. There are plenty of straight white males that are discriminated against, due to their age, religion, country of origin, native language, class, or a myriad of other reasons. Discrimination is not just about sex, race, and sexual orientation, despite America’s narrow fixation on that particular subset of diversity.

I recently tweeted that it would be awesome if the next incarnation of The Doctor in Doctor Who was a woman. Not only it would be interesting as a plot device, but it would also provide an adventurous and brave role model for little girls, of which even modern TV has too few (especially as leads, instead of feisty sidekicks). After all, we know from the show that it’s possible for a Time Lord to regenerate into a different gender. I got many interesting replies, both on Twitter and Facebook (where all my non-reply tweets get automatically posted as well). Some thought it was a good idea, but the most interesting ones, were the ones who thought it was a bad one. Most displayed typical gender preoccupations when asked to clarify. However, the most interesting one was from someone I quite respect, who asked what is and what isn’t sexism, demonstrating an honest interest to understand. I thought it would be interesting to post my reply here as well, with a few edits and additions to make it more fit for a blog post.

Well I have a problem and I am trying to solve it. Can you define in explicit terms what is NOT considered as sexism? Prejudice is one thing. Discrimination is a completely different thing.

Both prejudice and gender-based discrimination are sexism. Prescriptive gender stereotypes are sexist (e.g. women have to be nurturing, men have to be tough) as they oppress the part of the population that doesn’t conform to them. Statistics aren’t sexist (e.g. “Many women are nurturing” isn’t a sexist statement, “Women are nurturing” or even worse “women should be nurturing” both are). However, for some reason society has a tendency to turn statistics into prescriptive stereotypes quite quickly.

You might ask, why is a positive stereotype such as the one above, a bad thing? Because it sets expectations. If I, as a woman, am not nurturing, it’s seen as a lacking of mine, a way I’m broken, something that’s wrong with me. If a man isn’t nurturing, it’s fine and kind of expected.

Basically being treated differently because of gender, is sexist. If you reverse the genders in a situation, and it sounds weird to you, you’ve just stumbled on some sexist assumption you make about what men and women can be and/or do. What assumption exactly is not always obvious, you might have to dig deep in your prejudices to find out.

There is a fine line between being different and considered inferior/superior.

It’s not about being inferior or superior, it’s about freedom. People should be comfortable to be themselves without being considered freaks or being assumed to be something they might even despise, because they were born with a certain gender. As long as you assume that women or men have to be this or that, there will always be people who find it oppressive or even inferior. Someone who is assertive might consider timid people inferior. On the contrary, someone timid might consider assertive people inferior. The only way to solve that is to stop thinking in gender binaries. It’s not so much that men and women are different. People are different.

Sexism is not just a female issue. Prescriptive gender stereotypes are even more oppressive for men, as modern society is more tolerant of women who deviate from their expected gender role (with a few exceptions of very strong stereotypes, e.g. the need for motherhood or beauty) than of men who do so. When a man poses traits that are generally considered feminine, he is more heavily discriminated upon. Despite the efforts of the feminist revolution, our collective subconscious still considers women weak and inferior. Deep down, we think that women “upgrade” themselves with typically masculine traits, but men “degrade” themselves with feminine traits. Being feminine is often an insult (“what a girl!”, “pussy!”) whereas being masculine is considered a good thing (“man up!”, “grow some balls!”). This is part of the reason why most homophobia is directed toward male homosexuality.

Still, males are considered expandable and this is actually true. On the other hand, females are more valuable thus, protecting them is written in our DNA codes. Wherever we want it or not, this is true. Scientific studies in the US Army demonstrated that missions with mixed crews have little or no possibility of success since males tend to get distracted from their mission due to their “built-in function” of protecting the females of the pact.

There is a lot of talk about what’s innate and what’s acquired. Characteristics we considered male or female for centuries are constantly being proven a result of nurture, either completely or by a large part, as tiny innate differences that grow intro troublesome gaps with social conditioning. Modern neuroscience keeps demonstrating how adaptable our brains are, and how society takes on the role of conditioning them on fixed gender roles from an incredibly young age. Have you ever noticed how gendered toys or child TV programmes are? How many people keep telling little girls they’re pretty and little boys that they’re smart or brave? That’s only the start of a rabbit hole that goes quite deep…

Doctor Who is clearly a male like character. Guardian, protector, adventurous!

See, that’s the issue. Assigning properties to genders instead of people is problematic. Women can be all that as well, and even more would if we didn’t keep brainwashing them from kids that they can’t. This is another big issue with stereotypes: If we keep telling or showing people they can’t do something because of their gender, few will break through the barrier and do it. There has been a study where a group of women was given math problems and scored lower than the men. In another group, they were given the same problems, but were told they are designed for women to do equally well on them. Guess what? They actually did score just as well as the guys. People tend to try to conform to expectations, so getting rid of gender stereotypes allows them to reach their full potential.

A female character although interesting, will eventually transform this series into a “copy-cat” of “Nikita”, “Salt”, or “Tomb Rider”.

The reason we think so is that we’ve been so much socially conditioned that women cannot be adventurous or brave, that when we see a female that is, it overshadows all her other characteristics and our excellent pattern matching skills turn her into a stereotype of what we’ve already seen before. The more adventurous women we see, the more we will grow accustomed to the idea that they can be that as well, and start noticing their other traits. Same with people from different races: If you haven’t met many, you think all members of a different race look the same because their different physical characteristics prevail. The more you meet, the more you get used to those characteristics and start noticing the other differences between them. Same applies to everyone who’s different from what we’re used to see, e.g. different species, sexual orientations etc.