I initially conceived of this essay as part of a series of open letters to Jordan Peterson, inspired by my interest in some of his positions and my disagreement with others. As I’ve further evaluated my own positions, or better understood his, I’ve changed my mind about some of the topics I had slated—or at least determined they warrant further thought. So here’s one letter, at least. We’ll see what happens after that.
Dear Jordan Peterson:
I'd like to address a study you often reference showing that “gender-equal countries,” like the Scandinavian countries, “produce comparatively fewer women in the STEM fields” and greater sex differences in the workforce. In other words, such a country finds itself with “more male engineers” and “more female nurses.” This, I believe you have asserted, indicates that inequalities between the sexes in workplace representation and pay are more likely a result of women's choices than of discrimination. This is reinforced by the well researched observation that “men are comparatively more interested in things and women in people.” I understand, as well, that you also credit women's broader base of talents (compared to men’s), and our consequent wider range of career options, for our tendency to choose female-traditional fields.
I can't access the study, so I'm not precisely sure what measures are used to determine “gender-equal countries.” But the abstract suggests that “gender-equal” countries are those in which “girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science.” This brings us to my first objection. For me, “gender-equal” must imply more than equal academic achievement. Societal attitudes about marriage, sexuality and divorce would play a part; as would women's financial standing, access to birth control and abortion, rates of domestic abuse, and much more. While I expect Scandinavian countries will fare well enough in these areas, many convoluting factors remain unexplored. In fact, the ability to score good grades seems to me like one of the more trivial indicators of equality available.
My more important objection, however, concerns the time it takes for the legacy of inequality to filter out of a system.
How long have these countries been “gender-equal?” Two, three, four decades? How long have their women had access to hormonal birth control, a major factor in women's participation in a workforce long since established and dominated by men? The seven decades since the advent of the pill, at most. Were their women ever prevented, as in the U.S., from opening a bank account? If so, most women who lived under that policy—likely mere decades ago—could not prioritize a career over the financial survival conferred by marriage. We could examine the historical effects of sexual assault on women's mobility, too, the absence of women's restrooms in public spaces, and a host of other factors.
Now, how many years did women live, before these last several decades, without equal learning opportunities, without reproductive choice, without financial independence, without access to the workforce? Hundreds or thousands of years.
In this time, men were socialized to disregard women as equals in many realms, particularly that of the workforce, and women were socialized to internalize our supposed inferiority in these realms. This alone could send women running for the comfort of the few fields that welcome us with open arms, to say nothing of our challenges with accumulated disadvantages of the financial or material sort.
Now, please bear with me as I take you through a brief history of my career trajectory, starting in childhood.
I was born to an artistic mom and a dad whose blue-collar experience and self-directed education eventually landed him a position in engineering. My parents were products of the fifties; my mom valued looking pretty and never worked outside the home, while my dad earned the family paycheck and zoned out with the newspaper each night after work. A brother a few years my senior enjoyed solving math problems recreationally and playing chess with my dad.
I could draw, like my mother, but also discovered—solely on my own steam, at the age of 11—that I very much enjoyed programming our home PC using something called BASIC I'd discovered in one of my dad's magazines. Nobody paid much attention to this quirk, though I racked up countless hours creating my own games, animations and other small applications. Instead, I was praised for my artistic prowess and taught to shave my legs and apply eyeliner at a shockingly young age.
From the time I was born, a myth emerged in our family: that the women were right-brained artists, and the men were left-brained mathematicians. I got art supplies for Christmas; my brother got Mensa puzzle books. Mom loved to proclaim, as Barbie would later do, that math was hard—rolling her eyes when my brother cracked a joke with “pi” in the punchline.
I was not expected to attend college. This was partly because my parents hadn't, partly because we were rural people (read: rednecks) without knowledge of education's inner workings, and partly because my parents drank too much to focus on the more advanced aspects of child rearing. But also: because I was female and expected to marry. I still recall my mother encouraging a fifteen-year-old me to flirt with the grown man who'd arrived to repair our furnace; after all, he was nice looking and had a decent job. And the time she stood in our living room before an array of friends with her fist balled up, asking if they could guess what was inside. “My daughter's bikini,” she revealed, opening her hand and letting the tiny garment drop to the ground. She was bragging: I was cute and small and scantily clad; in other words, womaning correctly. Meanwhile, my older brother was dragged to college kicking and screaming to get an engineering degree—he was a left-brained mathematician, after all, and would need to support a family. Soon after, he dropped out, never to return.
Utterly uninterested in marriage, I suddenly realized, during my senior year's career fair, that I would need to support myself in adulthood. With my lack of funds, my ill-preparedness and my consequent terrible grades (cultivated by my parents' attitudes), it's no surprise I was drawn to the local community college's table. I considered fashion merchandising and cosmetology before settling on graphic design, an apparent way to marry the artistic skills I'd been praised for with the possibility of gainful employment. However, my associate's degree from that low-budget school landed me a series of jobs that barely broke minimum wage.
Fast forward to my thirties. Not only am I living in poverty, but I realize I'm not all that into graphic art. I wonder why I never pursued programming. An employer shows more faith in my potential than my parents ever did and allows me to cross-train for a web development job. I love it. I go back to college to get a degree in computer science, never more sure of anything in my life.
A guidance counselor warns me off the program because “there's a lot of math.” I ignore her and complete a semester. A second guidance counselor encourages me to switch to digital arts, certain that an “art person” can never change lanes. I ignore her, too, and complete another semester. A third guidance counselor encourages me to abandon ship and consider “general studies.” This is baffling and insulting. I've expressed nothing but certainty about my chosen major. Do I seem that incompetent? Do I seem that lost? I wonder how eighteen-year-old women, certainly less self-assured and stubborn than I am, fare in the face of such clearly biased counseling. No doubt many give up and take a path of less resistance.
I complete my degree with honors and straight A's in math, because I’m not terrible at it, after all. I land a good job in IT.
I work almost exclusively with men. I find I'm a bit behind most of them—even the younger ones, whose parents took an interest in their childhood programming and helped encourage and cultivate it. No matter—I know how this works: I work harder. I volunteer to help where I'm not assigned. I improve inefficient processes without being asked. I shadow people in other departments to increase my base of knowledge. I take classes, often self-financed. I earn certifications that prove my acumen.
But in the time it takes me to prove myself, the men around me are assigned to the most interesting and challenging projects. Then, those who've succeeded in past projects get first crack at future projects. Opportunities beget opportunities. Meanwhile, I must constantly resist being funneled into the least technical, most “feminine” jobs and tasks: project management work that requires note-taking and organization, business liaison work that requires communication skills. I don't hate all this, at first, because I'm making more money than most women I know, even if, as I suspect, it's less than my male peers are making.
The work environment is starting to annoy me, though. The men around me spend much of their time bragging and disparaging their wives. I can't participate in these conversations. “I love to backpack or camp or fish,” goes a common complaint. “But my wife doesn’t have the stamina for it. Plus she doesn’t want to break a nail.” Cue eyeroll or sigh of exasperation. It isn't personal—in fact, I like backpacking and camping too, not that they’ve asked. But as a woman, I feel like the odd one out. The dumbass. The killjoy.
My career trajectory goes well enough, for a while. I gain some skills. I get some promotions. I try different positions in different environments: agile small startups, secure corporate behemoths.
Fast forward again. Somehow, I've hit a wall. I don't seem to know what's going on around me. I start work on a problem, only to find, halfway in, that the guy sitting next to me has been working on the same problem for six months. I make progress on a project only to learn the project's been canceled. I create a training program that someone's already created.
One day, while heading to lunch, I see my closest co-workers huddling in the doorway, discussing where to eat. It's clear they've had this conversation many times. They've been going to lunch together for months, maybe years. I have never been invited. There's a regular golf game I didn't know about either, I learn a few months later. This seems to be where those decisions are made that I don't hear about, where new projects are conceived and assigned.
I'm still doing tasks that aren't challenging, tasks I don't like. I route paperwork. I send communications. I hold meetings. It's hard to complain, because I'm living well. But let's face it—I want out of IT. Not because I don't like STEM work as much as I thought I would. But because I'm not doing STEM work. After 14 years in the field, I have not been able to crack the code that allows me to participate in a meaningful way.
I also have no camaraderie with my coworkers, something that might help kindle my enthusiasm. If just one other woman had been present when those men complained about their wives—or better yet, two other women—I'd have felt less like a square peg in a round hole. Perhaps we'd have told stories of our own, creating a lively atmosphere of friendly banter. In fact, I know that's true, because I worked in a mixed-sex consulting firm for about a year, before the random exodus of a few veterans caused its sales to dry up. A mathematical model shows that if Blacks and whites want to live near just a few people of their own race, they'll self segregate their neighborhoods over a short period time. This could be happening with men and women in the workforce, too.
I got a bumpy start, but if “gender equal” amounts to good grades in college, I was gender-equal. Those grades had no effect, however, on my managers' and peers' perception of me. Theoretically, it takes a single woman about the same amount of time as a single man to become competent in a particular field. But before the last few decades, humankind spent thousands of years in which women were chained, by virtue of biology, to our offspring. It wouldn't be surprising if men's faith in our programming and math skills simply hasn't caught up.
This is not an essay about feeling victimized. I live well and I'm proud of my decisions. This is an essay about the myth that the playing field is fully leveled and that rewarding STEM careers await the woman who bucks tradition and steps forward to claim them, if only she cares to.
I understand the proclivities of men and women exist on overlapping bell curves, and that I may have interests atypical for a woman. But in light of the uphill battle I fought, we can't be sure how much women's interests are shaped by environment rather than nature. Who knows where a woman might land whose childhood interests are nurtured, who's encouraged to study instead of marry, who's interviewed by women as often as men, who's trusted to take on big projects and pushed to the limits of her abilities.
Here's the really telling part of the story. The legacy I received is the legacy I'll pass on, even though I want to break the cycle. I have no wisdom to pass on to the girl who wants to work in IT. I can't teach her to program because my programming skills have languished. I can't tell her how to snag interesting work, at least not with conviction. I can't tell her it's been challenging or rewarding. I can't even tell her it's been fun.
Seems that study has been published to ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323197652_The_Gender-Equality_Paradox_in_Science_Technology_Engineering_and_Mathematics_Education