The End of Sexism

There are no sexist men in the 21st century, only stupid men. It’s time we reframe everyday misogyny in the West not as cagey determined acts, but evidence of staggering obtuseness.

Consider:

• “This journalist has read so few books, he listed the top 25 novels of the decade and there are no women on it.”
• “My math professor is so stupid, he hasn’t aced a girl in his class in forty years.”
• “My coworker is so stupid, when I asked him to lunch he said, ‘I guess my wife won’t mind.’”
• “This conference organizer is so stupid, he couldn’t find a woman to speak for any of the seven days of panels.”
• “The new hire is so dumb, he asked me to fetch him coffee.”
• “The CEO is such an airhead, he held the office holiday party at a strip club.”

Of course I’m being extreme here to play with this point, but while I’m already there, don’t forget: “The interior architect is such an idiot, he put glass staircases in the store.”

Yes, Apple’s glass staircases again. What many female shoppers, including myself, have long seen as an example of extremely questionable judgement. Interestingly, after writing a post mentioning it (“Skirts! Steve Jobs! Women wear skirts!”), several male friends told me, “I never thought of that.”

Now, if I were commissioning the interior of any kind of store and someone brought me blueprints including glass staircases, I’d tell him to take a hike. I wouldn’t give him a second shot. If he’s not intuitive enough to grasp that women in skirts will be uncomfortable walking upstairs, clouded glass or not, then what other errors has he made in his design?

I remember in high school we had a class on pictograms. My Vietnamese straight A classmate had what I would have considered one of the easiest to decipher: a picture of a bee and a dotted line. “What is this? I have no idea,” she said, laughing nervously. They don’t say “beeline” in Vietnamese, and it’s not a word she’d encountered learning English as a second language.

That’s the problem with cultural references. They go so far back that you would really have to live your life over to catch every one of even the most common of them.

As you can imagine, this very often happens in reverse. Plenty of women are never given a second shot because they didn’t catch a sports metaphor, didn’t understand something that a man finds blatantly obvious. And here is a fantastic post from Farrah Bostic about that.

And this is just one of the extremely complex problems women face in any kind of workforce.

There’s a reason everyone should hate sexism: it hinders progress. So long as the most qualified people are not getting the success and recognition they deserve, the world is not advancing as fast as it could.

I don’t know many people who really think “Well she can’t do x, because she’s a girl” but I can count more than enough top ten, top 25 lists of all kinds that are authored by people who can’t come up with a single female name.

Look, if you are creating, for example, a list of the top 25 tech bloggers and there’s not a single female name on there, the problem is you. You aren’t looking, you aren’t listening, something about your own cognition and repressed whatever is prevented you from identifying intellect when it comes in a female form. Because by now there are enough women in tech, media, and elsewhere that it would be statistically unlikely for one to not have several women as a colleagues.

If there is a reason I don’t always speak up every time I come across another sad example of this, it’s because I find it all so tiresome. It’s kind of like arguing with creationists all day, but creationists aren’t holding tech conferences where they invite only other creationists to speak. They don’t edit magazines where only creationists get the “big ideas” stories and all the non-creationists report on celebrity gossip. There is no prestige for them to ration out.

And worst of all, I’m tired of men who finally do enter the discussion only to offer perspectives as nuanced and thoughtful as say, “Hey, I got it! It’s not nature or nurture….it’s both!” (when not completely off the mark.)

So that’s it, everyone. If you do something sexist, I think you are as dumb as the creationists. In some cases maybe even dumber.

Related:

Where Are the Renaissance Women? [Tomorrow Museum]

Joanne McNeil blogs about technology and culture at The Tomorrow Museum, where this post was originally published. Follow her on Twitter here.