When I opened my laptop to read an essay titled “Why Are Girls Less Likely to Become Scientists?,” I was expecting a systemic analysis of the slippery, patriarchal cracks in our society that contribute to long-lasting consequences for social justice and equality.
I was not expecting to be insulted.
But that’s exactly what William von Hippel, professor and social scientist in Australia, did in his latest Wall Street Journal essay.
In the essay, von Hippel argues that “Sexism is surely a problem, but it may not be the main problem. There’s growing evidence that girls and women aren’t pursuing STEM careers because they’d simply prefer not to.”
I had to reread that a couple times. For an essay talking about gender disparity, understating the effects of sexism in society feels like a weak start.
Von Hippel acknowledges that this is a “controversial claim.” At least we get that caveat.
It is a controversial claim — I’d go so far as to even say it’s uninformed, biased and ultimately pernicious to the overall work that women’s rights activists and feminists have made over the past hundred years.
“A better explanation for lasting sex differences in various disciplines, I believe, is that they reflect the inherent attractiveness of different fields to men and women,” von Hippel wrote.
He argues that women are more attracted to fields that involve people and nurture-oriented skills. I don’t inherently disagree with that argument from a data perspective, since we do see high percentages of women in fields associated with caregiving — for instance, women make up about 87% of all nurses.
But it’s a shallow interpretation of the data to see higher numbers of women in certain professions and make the claim that women just prefer it. No, we have to think about why they prefer it.
Is it because women have long been shunted into caregiver roles? Is it because women are expected to be soft-spoken and foster tension-diffusing skills because we have to tiptoe around the egos of straight, white men for not only our careers and our livelihoods, but our general safety?
Or is it because to be a woman means to not only have one job as so many men do, but to pick up the invisible, burdensome and sometimes even unpaid work that society refuses to see as valid?
Yes, women are good with people. Women are good at caregiving. We’ve been raised — no, forced — into that role.
Von Hippel then brings up a study about how women who performed high across STEM and non-STEM categories as children were a lot less likely to continue into a STEM field in higher education. He argues women who are strong in many things don’t pursue STEM later in life, therefore women must choose not to go into STEM because it’s not attractive.
No.
Again, von Hippel is ignoring the roles we’re forced into from as early as a pink or blue themed gender reveal party. The same social programming that gives baby girls princess dolls and baby boys hammers and Legos.
If you were told — by your parents, by society, by your teachers — that there are certain rules and pathways that you must follow to receive acceptance and love, then you will likely gravitate towards those pathways.
You can be amazing at something and still be told to give up. Ask any female scientist, they will tell you.
Ask anyone who’s not a cis, straight white male that. They will tell you.
So, we do what society tells us, and we see the way society treats people who don’t, and it reinforces the inequality. If women are good at so many things, of course the pathway stuffed full of — at best — microaggressions and barely-tolerable cruelty seems less appealing.
And at worst? I shouldn’t have to talk about the sexual harassment, the violence and the manipulation that can occur in spaces dominated by men. But von Hippel’s essay proves to me that I still must.
The essay concludes with this quote: “Efforts to remove the barriers that may prevent girls and women from pursuing STEM are certainly worthy, but prejudice and discrimination clearly don’t tell the whole story. Perhaps the answer is to offer both coding camps for girls and caring camps for boys, and more generally to make sure that so-called ‘women’s work’ pays better.”
Von Hippel is close to making a real conclusion about gender disparity, but instead he seems content to lay a paper-thin argument down and call it a day.
He writes “prejudice and discrimination clearly don’t tell the whole story,” but then follows it up with two instances of prejudice and discrimination.
The need to foster men’s emotional intelligence is a necessary part of feminism. But that’s an example of sexism in and of itself — men are forced into the hypermasculine role of the protector and can’t express their vulnerability else they’re taunted with schoolyard insults of being a “girl.”
I completely agree that “women’s work” — both invisible and visible labour — should be fairly compensated. Still, that’s an example of sexism.
I’ll remind us that von Hippel starts his argument by saying that sexism isn’t the “main problem,” and yet his sentences are littered with clear byproducts of sexism that he mistakes for the illusion of choice.
Women’s rights have had a lot of breakthroughs. That doesn’t mean that the attitudes that have prevailed for thousands and thousands of years have simply stopped affecting us. It doesn’t mean that sexism is over.
Fixing gender disparity begins by acknowledging the real problem in the first place, not claiming that it’s a choice to be oppressed.
