On Sep 7, 2009, at 8:41 PM, William Conger wrote:
I regret that I must thoroughly reject Michael's idea that one can ascertain truthful traits of maleness and femaleness by observing people at work "in his experience". His experience is casual, subjective, unstructured, and lacks, for one thing, a control group. Surely, Michael knows that any study of gender behavior would need a carefully structured script. Psychologists who like to study such behaviors frequently devote enormous time to structuring their laboratory investigations before conducting any experiment. What Michael practices at random, with his own unexamined bias, is pseudo science. His slogan "men work to access feelings; women access feelings in order to work" sounds pithy but in fact is empty of any sense. Its underlying but unspoken premises are that men and women are opposites, that reason is intrinsic to "work", that "feelings" must be seen as separate from reason. None of those premises can be demonstrated except by assuming that the social/ class/economic distinctions that assign passive roles to women are fundamentally true and that reason is something independent of some other cognitive functions.
What I wrote was from my direct, anecdotal, uncontrolled experience ... and it's probably imperfect for that reason, as you point out.
But, William, do not put words in my mouth. I never mentioned anything about passivity or any of the way womens are treated under a regime of "unexamined biases." Personal history: for almost all of my adult working life, I worked for women supervisor, rarely for a man. I worked at UNC in two departments for a total of 20 years, both of them large and non-curricular, in both cases for a woman supervisor.
However, the departments themselves were run by men. One department of 100 had a staff that was 3:1 women and a faculty that was 4:1 men; the director was a man (in fact, in the department's 70 year history, all 4 directors were all men). The other department of 350+ was 5:1 women, and most of the men were on the support staff, not faculty, but its director, too, was a man who was voted by the faculty. (I didn't get that.) In its 40 year history, five of the six directors were men.
My observations conveyed no value judgment about how men and women conduct their business, nor did I artificially separate reason and feeling. What I describe is a difference of behavior, action first or reflection first, not any putative antagonism between reason and feeling. I didn't suggest or mean to imply that men = action = work = reason = good and that women = passivity = talk = feelings (non reason) = bad. You know from other conversations with me that I don't subscribe to the notion that reason is "something independent."
I am, sadly, not surprised that my nonjudgmental report of experiences and my equally nonjudgmental conclusion were interpreted to be some kind of criticism of women. I offered no criticism, I didn't say that men were more successful than women or that the women's results did not measure up to the men's, etc. I simply said that men and women seem to do similar things in a different manner, and that was taken by others to be way of disparaging women. Not so.
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