A feminist's work is never done

I took a brief hiatus from blogging to start the spring semester and turn in my tenure file. Hooray, hooray.

However, I also have been on a bit of a FB rampage for the last few days b/c it seems like every time I check in, there is a post about yet another example of how a feminist's work is never done:

In case you had decided to drop off FB for a while, the matter currently raging is the decision made by the board of Susan Komen for the Cure - an organization that has done such praiseworthy work raising awareness and funds for breast cancer research - to withdraws its support of cancer screening and prevention activities from Planned Parenthood.

See this pie chart from the Washington Post, which illustrates what services Planned Parenthood actually provides.

I think it is important to note that abortion services account for only 3 percent of PP's activities. However, I personally do not think that is worth crowing over. There are any number of PP clinics that offer no abortion services, period. Which means that there are too many women who do not have abortion services accessible and available to them. I get that it is likely smart in today's political climate to spin PP as 97 percent not abortion, but I also feel like we who are taking a stand with Planned Parenthood need to get away from being oh so apologetic about abortion. Its accessibility and availability are concerns of dignity and justice.

Here is a petition being made to the Komen foundation, and here is one in support of Planned Parenthood.

In other news:

* The New York Times published an opinion piece, "Pregnant, and Pushed out of a Job,".

* Kate Clancy posted this story on sexual harassment in academia.

* The Huffington Post reposted this from Denene Milner over at My Brown Baby - a painful piece on "Birthing While Black."

What a week. So, we all should get some rest b/c we clearly have a lot to do.

Shit we say?

A friend just posted on FB a clip called "Shit Korean Girls Say," which made me laugh b/c I responded to it as more or less good natured fun. So much of it is familiar and recognizable, but more particularly, it is performed by a phenotypically white male with facial hair who pronounces his Korean so convincingly well!

Yet, I also had an uncomfortable moment wondering about what the point of the "fun" might be. B/c apparently, this is just one of the many iterations of the YouTube phenom that is "Shit Girls Say." I did not click on the other versions that popped up. I am afraid of what happens when you arm groups of young men with video production capabilities and then they produce something that they call "parody" concerning women.

However, what alerted me to the phenom in the first place was a video called "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls". I have been thinking about this video, which illustrates what we can think about as the everyday-racism-not-recognized-as-racism - in other words, privilege.

Privilege is what allows white girls to say shit like that depicted in the video without themselves intending or meaning harm to black girls with whom they actually might be trying to make a connection. Case in point: The comment about being dark enough to be black ("Twinsies!")

More particularly, I have been thinking about the comment in the video about the best friend who used to be black. ("She is black... but we're not really friends anymore.")

For me, this is a reminder of how segregated our supposedly post-racial society remains - and why white and black (and Korean) girls remain such mysteries to each other. (The same might be said about women and men in this so-called post-feminist - I would say anti-feminist - society.) So that we mistake our superficial observations about the shit we say as some kind of insight.

Beanie's New Year

Last week, I checked Beanie's backpack and found this in her purple take-home folder.

At first, I marveled over it as evidence of her reflexivity and determination. I know math is not her favorite subject. So, I was impressed that she had expressed a wish to "get better" at math.

Yet, I also felt it was necessary to remind Beanie that in fact, she is already good at math. At school, she has been moving through her addition worksheets at a fine clip. At home, she and StraightMan have been exploring multiplication and division based on her own discovery of what it means to say "times two." Having suffered my own hang ups about math, I have tried hard to encourage Beanie to think about herself as good at math and to think about math as interesting, even enjoyable. I got her an electronic Minute Math game b/c she likes to have StraightMan set a timer when she does a math worksheet or flash cards (which again were her idea to get in the first place).

Then, walking home from school, she told me in her matter of fact manner that she was so happy that she had finished the W page / would start the X page of math even though she had been "shaking so badly" and her hands had "sweated so much that the paper stuck" during her math exercise at school.

I have been thinking about this b/c I saw on Facebook a link to this post on "The Trouble with Bright Girls" from last spring.

In particular, this observation made me think not only about why and how it is important for me to rethink how I might help Beanie, which psychologists Heidi Grant Halvorson and Carol Dweck would emphasize would be not through praise, but encouragement of her efforts:

[Dweck] found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty -- what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

The difference, the author suggests, is based on what Bright Girls internalize:

More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their "goodness." When we do well in school, we are told that we are "so smart," "so clever, " or "such a good student." This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't.

This recalled to me a profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that was published in The New Yorker last year:

At her Phi Beta Kappa induction, there were separate ceremonies for men and women. At hers, a woman gave a speech called “Feeling Like a Fraud.” During the talk, Sandberg looked around the room and saw people nodding. “I thought it was the best speech I’d ever heard,” she recalls. “I felt like that my whole life.” At every stage of her time in school, Sandberg thought, I really fooled them. There was “zero chance,” she concluded, that the men in the other room felt the same.

Sandberg says she eventually realized that women, unlike men, encountered tradeoffs between success and likability. The women had internalized self-doubt as a form of self-defense: people don’t like women who boast about their achievements. The solution, she began to think, lay with the women. She blamed them more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism.

I remember feeling more than a bit irritated when I read this, and I am not the only reader who took umbrage with the emphasis on psychologies as opposed to the institutions and structures that keep women "in place." Then again, I think it is important and necessary to recognize that what the institutions and structures do is they create psychologies.

So, it matters a lot how parents talk to their daughters about math.

Driving home from piano lesson, I said as casually as I could: "Beanie, things like piano and math take a lot of practice, and I can tell from hearing you play and from your math worksheets that you practice a lot." To which Beanie replied: "I also practice a lot at reading."

To which I might respond that it takes a lot of practice to be a parent.

Threads

No year's end reflections or new year's resolutions here. Working on my tenure file, which I will be submitting in a few weeks. 'Nuff said.

***

Being an anthropologist who has published on fetal ultrasound imaging and having just uploaded about 20 photographs from Christmas, it seems fitting to ponder this, from Jana Prikryl's review of Errol Morris' new book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations in the Mysteries of Photography, published in the December 12th issue of The Nation:

On Facebook, intimate, life-altering information is often delivered in the form of a pictogram rather than a written "status update" - the ur-example being the dim, grainy sonogram news flash, which gestate as the mother's profile picture and then bursts forth into religious iconography with the posting of the Madonna-and-child snapshot. Births, bar mitzvahs, vacations, graduations, weddings and car accidents tend to be announced by way of their visual documentation. Compared with whatever we choose to write about ourselves, these snapshots seem to offer incontrovertible proof that how we wish to be seen is, in fact, precisely how we look.

***

StraightMan posted a tribute to archaeologist Elizabeth Brumfiel, who died on New Year's Day. I wanted to make mention of this here because without her willingness to take a chance on hiring an inexperienced instructor, it is likely that StraightMan would have quit academia. So, he and I both owe her something for both being working anthropologists today.

As a parenthropologist, who I particularly appreciate is that Professor Brumfiel's research as a specialist in Aztec archaeology turned attention to women and ordinary people. When she visited StraightMan's college to give an invited lecture in 2008, I became convinced that there could be almost nothing more fascinating to study than spindle whorls! I think that this is because she was interested in gaining insight into what life and work and family must have been like.

***

In college, a friend, observing the aggressive scribbles in the margins of my books, remarked that I needed to be a more "relaxed" reader.

I do not like to relax with books. I like books to make me change my mind.

YA author Walter Dean Myers speaks against a romanticized notion of reading in favor of a radical one:

“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” Myers tells The New York Times in an interview published on January 3, 2012. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”

“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life."

Word.

Occupations

OK, sooner or later, I will need to write that Kate Clancy a fan letter - I confess that I have not commented on her blog due to the fact that I would need to register as a user on Scientific American and it just seemed like a hassle - but I wanted to bring this to the attention of anyone who might be reading my blog and not already reading hers. Check out this post, "What Does It Mean to Do the Right Thing?"

As an aside, I want to say to Kate Clancy that I agree with her decision to continue blogging at SA (for now) and calling foul on what else might be published over there that is unscientific, sexist, racist, and just plain wrong.

I also agree with the commenter who noted that the person who should be leaving SA's blog is not her. I feel like I have seen or else have heard of this happening too many times - that is, the principled person takes a stand that in the end has no consequence for the transgressor and no impact on the institution, which continues to back the transgressor. This is not the fault of the principled person. This is the failing of the rest of us, who need to have her back!

***

I know that someone somewhere already has said something a lot smarter and more meaningful than what I will tap here about this, but is it not kind of interesting and cool the way in which the word / concept "occupy" has become re-occupied? Part of what is so brash about "Occupy Wall Street" is that it turns on head who is (supposed to be) occupying whom. That is, Wall Street is / has been the occupying power. At a PTO meeting at my daughter's elementary school a few weeks back - where we were discussing the possibility that our city's neighborhood schools might become reorganized in order to cut costs (e.g., closing a building, laying off staff) - I joked about a need for an Occupy Our Schools movement.

I was only half joking...

What counts (in tenure)?

I seem to have re-caught the cold from which I was recovering, so I walked around the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association - this last week / end in Montreal - rasping like an aging chanteuse who had loved her Gitanes a bit much.

My blog posts were put on hold for the last couple of weeks as I continued to prep classes and grade piles of papers and exams and in the wee hours after kiddos were put to bed, finished my conference paper then continued to edit it, right until the morning of my panel. Such is the academic parent's life.

Being at the meetings got me thinking again about a concern that is never far from my mind, which is what it means to be an academic parent or parenting academic, and in particular a female parenting academic.

A few weeks back, I posted a few musings inspired by biological anthropologist and blogger Kate Clancy on being a radical scholar. I stand by my musings with even stronger conviction today. At the meetings, friends were telling me about the pressure to publish or perish in their departments - and by publish, they mean specifically peer-reviewed journal articles. Not even chapters in edited books count for much. Much less contributing to a policy paper or testifying as an expert witness or blogging or organizing and presenting a paper at a well received and well attended panel at the annual meetings.

There are more than a few points to rant, like:

* It was noted at the business meeting of the Association for Feminist Anthropology that even while we all recognize changes in the structures of the academic publishing - with presses scaling back their operations - the expectations for tenure, especially at research institutions, have been slow to change. Undoubtedly, the expectations for tenure will need to change, but unfortunately, the female junior faculty whom I know fear falling into the gap. (I imagine that this is true for male junior faculty also, but for the moment, I am concerned with the challenges facing my female colleagues in particular.)

* Feminism has forced changes in institutional ideas and practices that now enable women to come into the academy, including women like myself and my female colleagues who work on issues such as reproduction - not because they are women's issues, but because they are also everyone's issues. It is clear that the institutions themselves are failing us. Note that I blame not feminism, but the institutions themselves. There continues to be both a bias against studying so-called women's issues and a misperception of issues like reproduction as not a men's issue.

* I have to ask, what is the point of peer review exactly? Ostensibly, it has something to do with validating the quality of the work that is being published, and that might be even more important in the age of "going viral." (On a related, but tangential point, here are a few considerations about the challenges that surround alternative forms of review, such as attempts at "crowd-sourcing" peer review, at the New York Times and at AAA's blog.) So, perhaps my rant is not so much about peer review - I recognize that there ought to be a process of some sort to check our claims and evidence - but about the particular kinds of venues (e.g., journals, but not edited books) and activities that count for tenure.

On a related note, I just read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about anthropology professors who (gasp!) love to teach undergraduates. Of course, at a so-called teaching college like the one where I teach, the challenge is more to convince administrators and staff (and sometimes even other faculty) that research contributes directly to teaching.

In short, I find frustrating the reductionist thinking about what counts in a scholarly career.

State of The Nation

In the May 23rd issue of The Nation, New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle reports on the decline in the number of dual-earner married couples between 2007 and 2010.

Uchitelle takes particular note of married couples who find themselves relying on what had been women's "second income" jobs after men lose their places as the primary bread winners:

Meanwhile, Rhonda's long working days - she leaves at around 5 am and is gone until early evening - have altered her role in the family, not to mention his. She still views him - and he views himself - as the chief provider, if not today then in the long run, when her income, they hope, will once again become secondary.

Uchitelle describes a shift in household responsibilities, but whether or not this constitutes a shift toward gender equality is another question:

When Ruth Millkman, a sociologist at the City University of New York, noticed this role reversal in data from the 1930s, she thought it was a move toward gender equality. "But because the role reversal was strongly associated with economic deprivation, it was not welcome," Milkman says. Seventy-five years later, Keith Baudendistel certainly does not welcome it. "I want to be the head of the household again," he says, "but until that can happen, we have to manage as best we can."

I have to wonder about the hope and the expectation that life can return to what it had been. Even when men like Keith find work again, they are likely to earn less (even considerably less) than what they earned before, and it is unlikely that Rhonda's income will be "secondary" again. Their home life has been and will be transformed.

I think there might have been a moment when it looked like the financial crisis might precipitate important and meaningful changes in the way things (and people) work. It seemed like crisis might precipitate a searching of our collective souls. Question the power of financial institutions. Question the work week. Question inequalities, including gender.

Did I miss the parade?

How do I raise Bubbie not to be a boob?

That question has been on my mind lately. Not b/c he has been exhibiting any boob-like behavior. (Aside from a re-enchantment with my breasts, which I reminded him were how he nursed for the whole first year of his life, not that that fact seemed to mean much to him. However, that is a story for another time.)

In fact, a number of Bubbie's favorite friends are, and have been, girls. StraightMan and I have tended to attribute this to the fact that he has an older sister who adores him and whom he adores, and has been around her friends, who are typically considerate of him. It also seems like little girls are a bit more verbal and show more interest in playing together, which I think makes it easy for Bubbie to play with them.

Within the last two months or so, I have noticed that Bubbie now names boys among his favorite friends. They apparently share his passion for Pixar ("Cars" and "Toy Story") characters and, lamentably, merchandise.

I hope that Bubbie always finds friends among girls and boys alike.

Not long ago, as I was driving home, listening to "Fresh Air," I heard an interview with Dan Savage about the "It Gets Better" project. He and his husband described their life together as parents of a straight male. The off-hand remark they made was that they knew their son was straight b/c as a small child, "he hated girls." In contrast, Savage and his partner described their boyhood friendships with girls.

I have been turning that remark over in my head for weeks now. Why is boys hating girls as children taken as a "healthy" and "natural" sign that the boys will grow up to be men who want to have sex with women? Why is little boys liking little girls taken as a sign that the boys must be gay? Must misogyny be the foundation of heterosexuality? Is that not grotesque? Is it no wonder that violence, in fact, colors sexuality in its human variation?

It seems to me that there are subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which we teach and learn misogyny in our everyday lives - and that misogyny itself lies at the heart of other forms of fear and loathing that surround men and masculinity.

For me, the concern is not really about teaching Bubbie that it is OK for boys to like pink.* More important is that Bubbie learns it is OK for boys to like girls.

---

* Which, for the record, I say it is. As an aside, Bubbie's favorite colors seem to be green and "Dinoco blue", which for the record I also will say that I find far more problematic.

Also, not that you asked me, but I did not view that JCrew spread as "gender bending" or a celebration of "transgender childhood." Beanie once slathered her father's shaving cream on her chin - to see what it felt like - but this does not make her butch. This is called playing. We all should do much more of it b/c as Beanie will tell you, "it helps us learn and grow."

Say a little prayer

On break from teaching this week. Which means I have a chance to catch up with Netflix. StraightMan and I just watched two films that illustrate what happens when people think they are smarter than every other sucker out there: "Inside Job" and "The Social Network".

If you have not seen them (or even if you have), consider watching them side by side.

Of course, you likely will trudge up to bed afterward feeling like bringing your sweet, innocent children into this world might have been a mistake - and then hating yourself for entertaining such defeated feelings.

Oops. I wrote that in the second person. "You" would be "me."

I have to say that both films inspired, in me, as much horror as rage. B/c here were these people who enjoy the advantages of education and wealth and so on - who demonstrate such disregard for other people. People - I should say men - being oh so smart and oh so hateful.

There has been commentary linking gender with the 2008 financial meltdown, and it appears in "Inside Job" also, in the connection between high finance and high-end prostitution.

The filmmakers behind "The Social Network" already have been taken to task for the misogyny depicted in their fictional film, which is based on a non-fiction book.

Unfortunately, it seems like a fact even in ordinary life: You can just about get away with saying any awful thing as long as you say it cleverly enough.

***

Unto this muck, the sun will shine: Tina Fey's "prayer for daughters" seems to be making the rounds on so-called mommy blogs and on Facebook:

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

Here is an excerpt that I want to post as a shout out to Mark Zuckerberg et al:

O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

Amen, sister.

Another item to file under WTF

Just read this item in the NYT today about Arizona banning abortion for "race selection."

I feel that I am fairly well informed on issues of reproduction in the United States, but I am unaware that race-selective termination is a concern here.

Which is not to say that policies surrounding reproduction do not effectively privilege some women over other women.

However, I am not convinced that this ban addresses an "actual" practice. Instead, it strikes me as pitting "race" against "gender."

I think it is interesting also that Arizona is positioning itself as a defender of human rights and of race and ethnicity.

Is the "race" being defended against selective abortion black / Latino / Native American / Asian? If so, then this is an interesting maneuver for Arizona, with its anti-immigrant legislation.

Or it could also be a defense of any race, including "white," which could define all terminations as violating an "ethic" against race selection.

Either way, reproductive justice is being hit. We need to hit back.

Keeping up with the Times

Apparently, when women start to succeed, this is a problem. Or so MIT has found, as the Times reports:

Among other concerns, many female professors say that M.I.T.’s aggressive push to hire more women has created the sense that they are given an unfair advantage. Those who once bemoaned M.I.T.’s lag in recruiting women now worry about what one called “too much effort to recruit women.”

WTF?!

But with the emphasis on eliminating bias, women now say the assumption when they win important prizes or positions is that they did so because of their gender. Professors say that female undergraduates ask them how to answer male classmates who tell them they got into M.I.T. only because of affirmative action.

Cue anger. Cue frustration:

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

Even the intelligent people at MIT cannot be expected to devise the solution on their own:

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

The problem is not that women have begun to succeed, but that women can only begin to succeed. Still, I find it bold, brave, and even encouraging that an institution like MIT has undertaken this kind of scrutiny of its own policies and practices and their effects. How else can we work for change?

Scandinavian family values

To follow up on my rant earlier in this week on "The downside" of women "opting out" of the paid workforce, this just caught my eye in the January 29th issue of The Economist:

A new paper, "The Nordic Way," submitted by Nordic governments to this week's World Economic Forum at Davos, hails Nordic citizens as "secular-rational" individualists, liberated by the state from any obligation to support elderly parents and given the freedom to work by cheap day care for all (in Sweden, more than 80% of two-year-olds attend preschool, often for six hours a day). Mr. Reinfeldt himself suggests that women do not just help the economy by working, they gain autonomy from men, arguing: "At the end of the day, you don't know if your marriage will last."

Mind you, Reinfeldt is Sweden's "center-right" prime minister, not a Marxist feminist, as you might tell from the celebration of "rational individualism" as the driver of gender parity and social harmony. Still. Can you imagine any politician being able to make such a statement in the United States today, without having the Beck-Palin-Fox machinery grind them into sausage?

***

Because a picture is worth a thousand words:

The downside

I followed a link from martinimade to this piece in Salon on the high cost of "opting out."

This is what gets me:

An implied, faintly sinister coercion -- a good mom doesn't want money -- fuels a system that relies on our unpaid childcare, household chores and volunteer work but offers no safety net.

Also, as journalist Katy Read details throughout the piece, a system that continues to underpay women. B/c of course we do not want or really need the money from work to which we apparently are attached only tenuously: "Opt" in or out.

What will it take for the necessity of women's various works to be recognized?

I worry that These Hard Economic Times will make it only harder.

Grrr...

Volunteer, shmolunteer

My point is not to say stop giving your time. Rather, it is a call to have us all recognize what that means. Which is a lot.

StraightMan forwarded me a link to this piece in the NYT, "Frazzled Moms Push Back Against Volunteering," with the comment: "Hm, dads holding down the fort with their 8.5 hours/week," which referred to the number of hours of child care that American men on average perform. (The number of hours for American women on average is twice that.)

He also added: "But it is also true that it's important to keep a tight rein on volunteering."

I definitely know some moms seriously overloaded with their volunteer commitments to their children's school and / or other related organizations. (You know who you are: You have no business reading this blog right now. You have something else that you really ought to be doing.)

The piece struck me because school volunteer work has been, and still is, unpaid and unacknowledged work that primarily women perform. In the past, it would have been performed by stay-at-home mothers, and it probably still is primarily SAHMs, but I have to say that some of the women I know who are busiest with their volunteer commitments also are full-time working mothers.

Or as StraightMan said to me, paraphrasing a bit of wisdom from his own dad, a former minister, about who you can trust to get something done: "Find the busiest person you know, and ask her."

I am not one of those women. At least not when it comes to school volunteer work. I do what I can: I go to PTO meetings at the elementary school, and I organize the monthly snack calendar and the Facebook page for the nursery school. I wish I could spend time visiting the kids' classrooms and so on. I think not only might it benefit my kids' experience, but I think I might enjoy it.

However. To call what all of these women contribute to schools and other organizations "volunteer" work is rather misleading. I might add: Trivializing. The work that all of these women donate is necessary to the basic functions and operations of the institutions themselves. Or as the NYT itself reports:

As local and state economies continue to struggle, budget cuts to rich and poor school systems are increasing the reliance on unpaid parent help. The need is so great that some school districts, like a couple of specialty schools in Prince William County, Va., have made it mandatory to commit to a small amount of volunteer time, and others are considering it. In San Jose, Calif., one elementary school district has been discussing a proposal that the families of its 13,000 students commit to 30 hours of volunteer work during the year.

Many parents are happy to volunteer uncoerced, and most everyone recognizes the worthiness of the cause. But the heightened need and expectations are coming at a time when many parents have less and less time to give.

"Parents"?! Ahem. Nowhere in this piece (which was 3 pages long on the Web) were men and fathers mentioned. Except to complain that their wives were never home (i.e., saddling them with "baby sitting" while they organized another school event...) - including the cautionary tale of the woman who did so much that her husband eventually left her.

For the record, the president of the PTO at my daughter's school is a dad. StraightMan serves with two other dads on the board of our son's nursery school. These guys ought not to be the exceptions.

My other response to the piece: I serve "voluntarily" on four committees on campus and in a national professional organization. (That is in addition to all that is entailed in teaching four classes and developing a scholarly career, without which, BTW, my teaching would be worthless...) I will not say all of the committee work, but I will say a lot of it is necessary to the basic functions and operations of the college itself.

A critical difference between school volunteer work and so-called professional service is that the latter becomes rewarded: With tenure. I hope.

It seems to me also that there is all kinds of gendered committee work that happens at colleges and universities. The untenured men can simmer down: I hear and see you. I know that you, like me, feel pressured to take on "volunteer" commitments. I will have to save that topic for when I have tenure...

Team players need not apply

For both the subjects and writers of recommendation letters in academia / higher ed, this piece (and the comments) in today's Inside Higher Ed is worth a gander:

You are reading a letter of recommendation that praises a candidate for a faculty job as being "caring," "sensitive," "compassionate," or a "supportive colleague." Whom do you picture?

New research suggests that to faculty search committees, such words probably conjure up a woman -- and probably a candidate who doesn't get the job. The scholars who conducted the research believe they may have pinpointed one reason for the "leaky pipeline" that frustrates so many academics, who see that the percentage of women in senior faculty jobs continues to lag the percentage of those in junior positions and that the share in junior positions continues to lag those earning doctorates.

The research is based on a content analysis of 624 letters of recommendation submitted on behalf of 194 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at an unidentified research university. The study found patterns in which different kinds of words were more likely to be used to describe women, while other words were more often used to describe men.

Sadly, while the results are not surprising - the caring, sensitive, compassionate, and supportive candidate is the one who does not become your colleague - the study has me thinking about how I characterize my colleagues and my students, particularly as I find myself writing recommendation letters for jobs and graduate schools.

I suppose that I might rephrase "collegiality" and "consensus building" as "professionalism" and "leadership." However. I hate that the advice is to "stay away from communal words, whether writing on behalf of men or women."

Cue Elvis Costello: "What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?"

A comment on the comments on Inside Higher Ed:

Predictably, there are comments that this is not really "about" gender, as in women and men, because men now have as equally hard a time being hired.

To which I must retort: How about entertaining the idea that "gender" is not really only about women and men? That it might be about arrangements of social relationships - significantly, inequalities - that both reflect and inflect ideas and practices of "women" and "men" in the first place?

One of the comments called attention to the fact that the so-called communal words refer to ideas that academia has celebrated as its values - and the so-called agentive words refer to ideas that "private enterprise" celebrates.

Unfortunately, I think there is a relationship between the devaluing of academic values and the privileging of corporate values in academia / higher ed - and the gendering of academia as communal / female and private enterprise as agentive / male.

***

On the bright side: Tina Fey was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor - only the third woman to receive it, and at 40, the youngest ever recipient. Hooray for funny, smart, female, and 40! That is for all my gal pals :)

Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference (1)

Last Friday, I had the privilege of giving a keynote lecture at the city school district’s teachers conference on diversity. This week, I will be posting excerpts from my talk, “Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference: Perspectives from Parenthropology.” Here is part 1:

The purpose of my talk is to remind ourselves of why it is important and meaningful to talk and listen to kids about difference, and to consider why we as adults refrain too often from this discussion, not only with children, but also among ourselves. I also offer my own thoughts on how we, as parents and teachers, might find ways of talking and listening that work for us all. In particular, I offer insights and approaches from the discipline in which I am trained, anthropology, which has engaged in more than 100 years of discussion on the meaning of difference.

Look around our classrooms and communities or read the news, both local and national, and it is hard not to notice that differences between people matter – even or, I suggest, especially in communities as apparently “homogeneous” as our community. These differences can include race, ethnicity, culture, language, class, gender, religion, and ability, among countless other ways that we might distinguish ourselves and each other. In my talk today, I will focus particularly on race and culture because they have been, and continue to be, especially powerful ideas and practices about difference among people in the United States and around the world today.

We know from our own experiences that difference can be cause for celebration and pride, and for conflict and pain. Children are no less aware of and sensitive to difference than adults are. They see it around them – even despite, for example, what we grown-ups might consider our well-intentioned efforts to keep our kids “color-blind.” They also observe our reactions, witness our behavior, and look to us as models for how they themselves ought to act and think. So, it seems to me that our challenge as teachers and parents is to help children make sense of what difference does and does not mean in our world today. At the same time, it seems to me that we might cultivate in children a sense of how we might think and act differently about difference. After all, we – adults and children alike – are not only members of our society and culture, we are also the makers and breakers of our own rules and customs. There is always, then, the possibility for change. This is why it seems to me important and meaningful for us to consider the matter of talking and listening to kids about difference – and for us, as teachers and parents, to be able to articulate a case for having this conversation to those who might require persuasion. In this talk, I offer words that you might use.

My interest in how we talk and listen to kids about difference emerges from my concerns as a second-generation Korean American raising children of “mixed” heritage. On their father’s side, my children can claim roots in Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Initially, I thought simply celebrating our family’s mixed heritage might be enough – that is, passively exposing them to the “positive” meanings of difference.

Then my daughter came home from school and asked me: “Why is it so important about Barack Obama?” Being a college professor, I demurred – I deflected the question back to her so that I could understand what she was asking me. I asked her: “What do you know about Barack Obama?” She told me: “Everyone is excited that he is running for president. Why?” So, I told her: “A long time ago, before your grandparents and your great-grandparents were born, some people, even a lot of people, in America believed that someone who looked like Barack Obama could never be president, could not go to school like you can, and even could belong to someone else who owned him.” Since then, Beanie and I have read stories together about enslavement and the Underground Railroad, and about heroes of the civil rights movement, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. We have talked about how she, with a Korean American mother and a white American father, is like Barack Obama, who had a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

Talking and listening to my daughter has changed my mind about whether or not “passive exposure” to race and ethnicity, and history and heritage is enough. I think we must talk and listen to kids about difference actively. If we do not guide our children on how to understand difference, then they will take their ideas from other sources who might not share the same cares and concerns that we have or who might not take the time and effort to explain what difference does and does not mean.

Crafting selves

Really interesting QOTD (from a few days back...) and discussion at martinimade - I agree with the comment that there might be a book that Adrienne Martini ought to write about the meaning of craft/s for American women today :)

Earlier this summer, Adrienne's most recent book, Sweater Quest, had me pondering, as an anthropologist will, why are these particular people doing what they do at this particular moment? Which led me to consider the political economy of craft.

It might be true, at least in part, that American women today turn to craft/s b/c they have the means to do so (including time and / or a certain amount of money to be able to do so, as hand-crafted generally is recognized not necessarily to be more "economical" than store-bought...) Or, as I had suggested, that we are experiencing a particular political economic moment in which other forms of productive work (e.g., paid labor) seem to lack a certain kind of meaning and importance that renders it unsatisfying in part b/c it is unsatisfying in terms of creativity, discovery, and autonomy.

I think it is interesting that American women ponder whether or not crafting is "feminist" - and consider what they learned (or not) from their mothers and grandmothers. There has been a strand of feminist discourse that salvages and celebrates "women's culture" that I think is being evoked here.

However. What especially strikes me now in the recent discussion at martinimade is the women's references to their age or at least stage in life: I realize that young women, too, are interested now in craft/s, but I wonder whether or not the turn to craft/s might be part of that continual process of crafting our lives / selves, esp. as women face age 40 and 50 and beyond.

For whatever reason, I find myself thinking about medical anthropologist Margaret Lock's book, Encounters with Aging, which compares women's experiences of menopause in North America and Japan. The book makes the rather surprising (and controversial) claim that women in Japan do not experience (or at least do not report complaints about) hot flashes, which are practically synonymous with menopause in the United States. Instead, Lock found that women in Japan reported other complaints, which in turn were linked to changes in their social identities.

What does crafting say about what kind of women we imagine ourselves being or wanting to be? How and why is it connected to becoming and being women, mothers, and grandmothers? How does becoming a mother (or grandmother) rewrite what it means to be a woman? Might crafting be a way that we remake ourselves?

Well, duh...

What wears this parenthropologist down to a mere nub of herself is not a particular class or the sit-down with a student who is flailing or having two letters of recommendation to write or following up on a plea from a colleague to read a research proposal: It is the accumulation of all of the above.

(That was just today. I still also have a research poster to submit on Thursday, a keynote lecture to write for next Friday, a research poster for next month, and a book review for December. Did I mention that I also am supposed to be revising my book manuscript? Which I have not seen since the semester started. Say it with me: I. Am. Fucked.)

In addition, there is the usual preparing and teaching of classes and just having to be "on" all the time. That is, projecting competence and likeability with a touch of humor and humility. Not to mention having to spend time putting on a little make-up in the mormings b/c it turns out to be, what my mother says: Honey, I have reached the age where it starts to matter...

(Not to mention at all Bubbie and Beanie and StraightMan. Sigh.)

So, when I turned on my laptop this evening to check my e-mail - basically to check if any students were having meltdowns over the exam they will be taking tomorrow - this post in The New York Times caught my eye: "Have College Freshmen Changed?

Predictably, the subtitle of the discussion is: "Are 'helicopter' parents making it harder for students to adjust to life on campus?" Which actually means mothers.

The other usual suspect lined against the wall here is technology.

Indeed, I suspect that when / if calling a professor meant having to find a pay phone and a dime, a student might have been forced to consider the mortification that s/he was about to bring onto her/his head by recording a voice mail while crying and complaining from the library that s/he was unable to watch the video (previously shown in a class that s/he had missed, and placed on reserve for her/his benefit...) b/c s/he was having trouble with the DVD players.

(When I reached the part in the message that went something like, "I don't know what you expect me to do," I finally had to erase it. Not that I am saying that anything like this ever occurred.)

Blurgh.

Would you rather be perceived as a brainy bitch...

Or as sweet, but stupid? B/c apparently that is a choice that women pursuing careers in academic administration ought to make, according to this article in the Times (of London) Higher Education Supplement.

(The feminist philosophers blog pointed me to it.)

Apparently, there is a wrong choice and a right choice: Likeability trumps competence.

Not only that, but likeability makes less likely that a woman will be perceived as competent, and competence makes less like that a woman will be perceived as likeable.

I have no interest in academic administration, but I sometimes wonder about issues of likeability and competence in teaching.

Blurgh. Just stick a fork in me. I am done.

Girls will be boys...

So, between replying to student e-mails and prepping classes, I just read this article in the NYT, intriguingly titled, "Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part."

The piece describes, in Afghanistan, a practice of families enabling or encouraging daughters to live their childhoods as sons. I started reading it b/c I thought it might be interesting to assign in ANTH 100 to discuss the construction of gender and expectations that surround women's fertility and preference for sons.

It might be just me, but I find the tone / language in this piece a little bit off: The girls are described as "masquerading" and "disguised." There are "real boys," and then there are the bacha posha, which we are told means "dressed up as a boy." Yet, the author describes how the bacha posha live as "both" boys and girls, wearing the clothes of boys and having the freedoms associated with them, but also socializing with girls. (We are told that this all changes abruptly with puberty, and the expectations of marriage that accompany it.) Not only parents, but the community at large, including school administrators, participate in allowing for bacha posha. So, I find unconvincing the characterization that this is a masquerade and a disguise.

In fact, I feel like the story is even more interesting than as told here. What I find wanting is a consideration of gender beyond the it-sucks-to-be-a-girl-especially-in-Other-Cultures perspective that is taken here.

The author quotes an historian who observes: “Segregation calls for creativity. These people have the most amazing coping ability.” Which I think expresses a stance that I hope to cultivate in ANTH 100 students: Recognize the conditions and constraints - in fact, the inequalities and injustices - surrounding gender, but also the capacity of human beings to devise solutions to the problems that they also create.