College Guide
Blog
On the other hand, this is both quixotic and ludicrous. If you put a bunch of people in their late 20s together in a small space for two years, they’re going to spend a lot of their time looking for a spouse, because that’s the age at which they’re supposed to be finding one. And treating them like kindergarteners who can’t be trusted to choose their own clothes just sends the message that fighting sexism is about being a humorless nanny. Judging from the comments from the male students, that is, in fact, exactly the message they picked up.
To be sure, Harvard administrators did also try to get involved in the social life. They mandated classroom discussions about gender and added a class for group work. But while Kantor says that they sparked free-flowing private discussion, that sounds to me like the sort of thing you tell an interviewer who has directly asked about effectiveness. Kantor seems hard-pressed to find male students, or even female students, who are very enthusiastic about the changes; mostly, she’s relaying the impressions of the administrators and faculty who supported the program.
Those faculty are relying on the almost instant dramatic improvement in female grades — so instant, in fact, that one suspects faculty members just started grading women on a separate curve. And to be fair, maybe that simply corrected for discrimination against the way women participated — fewer spirited defenses of far-out theories, more concise statements of the unsurprising truth. Or maybe there’s now a pink grading ghetto for ladies where they no longer have to practice being assertive, because they’ll get a good grade anyway. There’s no real way to tell which is the truth.
Overall, I’m less sanguine about these sorts of efforts than the folks running HBS seem to be. Not because I think that sexism is a done problem, mind you. Women do get penalized in all sorts of ways for being assertive, and in a system that rewards assertiveness, they start out with a big handicap. But I’m skeptical that Harvard really found a way to conquer this problem. At one point, Harvard sends everyone to mandatory discussions about sexual harassment, after a female student complains about getting groped in a bar. These sorts of sessions have been common since I was in college, and in my observation, they’re next to useless; mostly, they give administrators and student coordinators the pleasant feeling of having “done something” about a problem. The students who are already politically engaged on the issue find them very invigorating, but everyone else finds them somewhere between tedious and bullying, because while we talk a lot about having a “conversation” about issues like sexism, it’s not much of a conversation when one side risks offending powerful professors and administrators if it speaks frankly.
So what do you do about women who freely make choices that perpetuate structural inequalities? Do you stop them from making the choices? Neither Harvard, nor Kantor, seems to have a good answer. But that is the core dilemma. Maybe women drop out because they have a deeper biological connection to their kids. Maybe they do so because they’re raised to be nurturers, or maybe because they don’t feel the same personal anguish that a man does when he gives up on the dream of a top-flight career. Maybe if men felt they had the option to stay home, more would. And maybe women find the role of breadwinner more stressful than men do — all the women I know who are the primary earners are neurotic about it in a way that the men I know don’t seem to be. I’m not talking about the fear that your partner will resent your success; these are women married to admirably feminist men. I’m just talking about a near-constant fear that you will not be able to provide, and your family will end up horribly destitute. I’m not saying that men don’t experience that worry, but they don’t seem tormented by it the way the women I talk to are.
Or maybe it’s that women just don’t want it badly enough. In my experience, one of the reasons that women drop out of finance, and 80-hour-a-week fields more generally, is that they just don’t want it as badly as the men. In their 20s, they’re happy to work those kinds of hours, even at tasks they find boring. They do well at them, too. But a lot of these jobs aren’t actually that rewarding as work: The investment banking associates I observed seemed to spend most of their time on basically clerical tasks, tabulating data and proofreading PowerPoints. And eventually most of the women seem to say “You know, I just care more about relationships than I do about success.” There are always exceptions on both sides: women who will sacrifice anything for the career they feel called to and men who would rather be home. But on average, the women I talk to just aren’t nearly as willing to sacrifice close friendships, and family relationships, for the sake of their jobs.
Facebook
Twitter
Comments
(You may use HTML tags for style)
comments powered by Disqus