So how does the school respond to this fracas? By calling a meeting of the M1 and M2 women, wherein one of the female instructors tells them they all need to behave more professionally - at which point one of the M1 women asks why the men aren't having this meeting, too. The answer: Because the women are held to a "higher standard." Because they won't be respected in the "real world" unless they behave more professionally than the men, so they're going to have to straighten up and fly right or risk career consequences down the line.
(My stepdaughter relayed this info to me over a family breakfast at Cracker Barrel. When she got to the "higher standard" part, my husband started snatching sharp objects off the table and placing them out of my reach.)
Aside from the patronizing aspect of the entire exercise, the thing that made my brain spontaneously combust is the way the school is propping up the male-centric paradigm. Heaven forbid we show the male med students and doctors that we have a zero tolerance policy for sexist behavior! Instead, let's tell the women to button up - wear oversized clothes if you have to! - so the guys won't be distracted.
Seriously?
And this came on the heels of an article in BusinessWeek about a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) - a report that shows the gender gap is still as wide as the Grand Canyon:
Given current rates of change, it will be 50 years before women achieve equal pay with men and nearly 100 years before they gain equal representation in Congress, estimates the think tank on issues affecting women. Currently, females earn 76 cents for every dollar males earn (up from 73 cents in 2002) and have only 79 representatives in Congress out of a total of 535 seats, despite representing slightly more than half of the U.S. population. [Emphasis added.]If you're wondering why things don't seem to have improved for women all that much, allow me to direct you to Exhibit A: the aforementioned med school meeting. On the surface, it might seem that those M1 and M2 women were being offered practical advice on how to succeed in a male-dominated field - advice from women who've been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Seems reasonable, right?
Um, no. It's twaddle.
It's also feminism's version of Uncle Tommery - "go along to get along" and similar flavors of tripe. The truth is that as long as women buy into the notion that their behavior needs to be modified in order to keep men in line, things will never improve. As long as they believe that their professional success hinges on making themselves less enticing to men - read: less female - they will never be considered equal to men, and the paradigm will never shift.
Of course, some will argue that women aren't considered equals anyway, whether they behave like men or not. After all, hasn't the problem always been that when women behave like, well, women, they're not taken seriously? Indeed, that's been true in many respects. But what's also true is that we've spent years defeminizing ourselves in order to move up the business ladder, and what has it gotten us? What good does it do to redesign our femaleness so we can fit into the male business mold? What do we gain by unsexing ourselves?
Enough already. Time to stop accepting the way things are as the way they're always going to be. And it's way past time to stop ceding the business field to the guys. They don't get a free pass just for having a penis and a Y chromosome - and if they can't keep their inner horndogs in check, that's their problem. Once and for all, it's not our responsibility, no matter how much they try to tell us it is.
Because this isn't about sex; it's about power. It's about who dictates the rules of engagement. And the minute we agree to play by men's rules, we've lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment