From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Gender Parity
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 03:34:09 GMT


In article
<1992Nov11.081105.6474@godel.questor.wimsey.bc.ca>
aberno@godel.questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Anthony Berno) writes:

>In article <1992Nov10.215839.25777@athena.mit.edu>
>tcarlin@athena.mit.edu (Thomas B Carlin) writes:

>>What IS GENDER PARITY?

>A concept which destroys gay and lesbian organizations by
>distracting attention from important issues into endless and
>futile debate.

It's been quite a long time since I was directly involved in
a gay & lesbian organization in ways that had to come to
grips with this problem directly.  And I don't disagree with
you about how ruinous -- especially of the time and energy
budgets -- it can be.

There is, of course, a serious problem that badly needs to
be addressed, and the fact that any number of organizations
have addressed it and made (for the most part) apparently
little progress *itself* tells us something we need to know,
I think.  And ...

>Male domination is a serious problem in any group
>that tries to be representative of the entire community.

... this is at the heart of it all.  Male domination is
not actually well understood, especially by males, whose
understandable (though not in my mind suitable) complicity
in male privilege is thoroughly interwoven with every
fiber of our social fabric.

>>What can we do to ensure gender parity if it is
>>important.

>Not much, particularly at a male-dominated institution.  It
>is helpful to have female executives, but this is not a
>cure-all.  In my five years at UBC, the gay and lesbian
>organization here has made various moves, from the passive
>to the passionately active, in an effort to achieve greater
>female participation.  Success was very limited until we had
>a woman in charge of things.  Now, we have perhaps 10%
>female involvement, which is the best it has been in years.

>If you can't guess, I'm not particularly enamoured of the
>issue.  It certainly wasted a lot of time at UBC, and it came
>down to the fact that GLUBC was male dominated because it
>was male dominated, and that women didn't want to get
>involved because there were not very many women involved.
>My conclusion is that this is such a catch-22 situation that
>almost nothing that can be done.

Understand, please that I take no exception to the
experiences you report, and indeed I think they are pretty
typical.  I wouldn't say nothing can be done, because in due
course something *must* be done, or we will never have a
truly free and equitable society in which systemic
depreciation of women in all roles has disappeared.  That, I
feel sure, will be a *very* different society from the one
we have today.

The difficulties associated with such a transformation
should not, I think, be seen as anything like an excuse not
to get on with the work.  Having thought about this
somewhat, I think there is considerable utility to an
intermediate concept, namely not struggling directly toward
gender equity in *existing* institutions, for all the
reasons implied by past experience, which boil down to: in
various ways, the best you can get is half-measures.

Notwithstanding that half-measures are arguably better than
no measures, it seems to me more productive to work
separately on various aspects, in a manner that in fact
echoes somewhat the practice here in soc.motss.

I don't think it's possible, at least it seems highly
impractical, for women to spend so much of their energy
battling men over basic awareness and sensitivity issues
when indeed there are many higher priorities for feminism,
as I understand it.  After centuries of patriarchy, women
almost certainly have a lot of work that probably *cannot*
be done in the context of continuous struggle with male
privilege.

So in more practical modes, I find a lot of appeal to
fostering a multiple-thrust approach.  In male-dominated
sectors (soc.motss for one), some women who can stand it
without getting too discouraged volunteer their input,
confident that at least some of the men "get it" most of the
time.  Some of the men will identify more or less strongly
with new points of view and help in various ways with
creating a new male consciousness that owes less to
classical male privilege and sexist paradigms.

Meanwhile, feminism evolves largely on its own, allowing
enough contact with men -- through publications, for
example -- to provide good communication of emerging ideas to
the evolving general society.  The main ideological impulses
for the underpinnings of that evolution would come, I think,
primarily from woman-developed ideas.

Several others, notably Steven Levine and Steve Dyer, have
mentioned a simple principle as an indicator of the degree
of presence of women-developed ideas in a mixed-gender
context: if the men are starting to feel crowded, you're
maybe half-way there.  :-)

To sum up, gender parity is probably not possible in today's
context of overwhelming male privilege.  Rather, through a
long-term process of separate and shared developments,
ideologically spearheaded by a largely separate feminism
developed by and for women, a new context will become
available.

Suffice it say, parallel and by no means completely separate
developments surrounding racism and homophobia are also
indicated, for these major malaises are all linked.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
Room 3130 <> 1210 West Dayton Street / Madison WI 53706 <> Phone 608/262-5888
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Newsgroups: soc.motss