Quote of the Day: On Blogging, Digit Ratio and Gender Equality

[matgb]

In a discussion about the interesting Beeb article on gender differences andrewducker says:

You know, the quality of comments like this, and the breadth of knowledge available on my friends list is one of the reasons I love livejournal.

I'd amend it slightly to say blogging generally, but LJ, with the built in friends list aggregator, does make it very easy to keep in touch with a huge chunk of people with knowledge in specific areas way beyond my own.

Not sure on the research as presented, she's definitely got a point, but as always generalisations can be beaten by specifics--my index and ring finger are roughly the same length, and I definitely show both "male" and "female" traits depending on context, and I know a fair number of women that are a lot more "male" than me in most respects. But on the other hand, I definitely agree that a good mix of talents and a good gender ratio make for a much more succesful office/business in general situations, and I'm always slightly wary when a profession, office or place of work is too skewed one way or the other.

Comments

[innerbrat]

And I still get angry when Isee intelligent women talking about gender differences in positive constructive ways, and claim they're not feminists.

[andrewducker]

gender differences I'm fine with. Claiming not to be a feminist annoys the living hell out of me. If nothing else it shows total ignorance of what the word _means_.

[innerbrat]

'sactly.

Your icon rocks, btw.

[matgb]

Heh, see comment below I was typing—unfortunately, some words do effectively lose their meaning and/or are used in a derogatory way. The question becomes is the word itself worth reclaiming or is it better to move on and pick a new descriptor.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

As a woman who sometimes claims not to be a feminist, I think there's a gap between the dictionary definition of "feminist" and the real-life definition. The original dictionary definition is more or less useless these days, because it encompasses 95% of the population (in the UK at least), and is therefore no use as a label. I think of a feminist as at best someone who actively campaigns for equality of opportunity for women, ranging to at worst one of the horribly sexist "feminists" who really want women to have more power than men, hate transexuals, etc.

The other reason I wouldn't tend to call myself a feminist is that doing so seems to prioritise one kind of equality (male/female) above all the others. Is there even a word for people who fight for equality of opportunity for different races, religions, ages, sexualities? Why should gender be so special?

[matgb]

I think the problem with the term "feminist" is that it's become a bit like the term "liberal" in the US, it's been misused, misapplied or misappropriated so many times that some people want to disassociate themselves from it regardless of whether they should or not (faeriecween for example always vehemently denied being a feminist, despite being succesful in a field that would have previously been denied her, etc).

It's why I tend to talk about equality of opportunity a lot more than more gendered terms, you can't be misunderstood if you avoid terms some people choose to misinterpret. Similar-but-different example, "vegetarians" who eat fish, cause problems for real vegetarians. "Feminist" is frequently interpreted to mean "man-hating-loon", and it's hard to dissassociate that in the minds of many, no matter how wrong the assumption is.

[innerbrat]

Sometimes I wonder if I should say "I don't eat meat or fish, but I'm not a vegetarian", just to prove how stupid that attitude is.