Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!ora!ambar From: ahimsa!mjm@intelhf.intel.com Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: sexist space Message-ID: Date: 28 Mar 91 03:25:08 GMT Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz) Organization: O'Reilly and Associates Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 72 Approved: ambar@ora.com [someone else commented on an experience of a temporarily all female class and how the women did not speak up even when men were not present--at least, at first] jim> I'm very confused by this post. It sounds like what you are saying is jim> that women are inherently less aggressive/assertive than men. After jim> all, there were no men around to "oppress" the women, and they still jim> acted shy and retiring. How can this be blamed on male jim> aggression?--there weren't any "aggressors" in the room. [edited...] jim> Could this have more to do with the women themselves than any external jim> cause? My opinion on this situation is that it is probably a form of learned helplessness, which is not unique to women. Consider the experiment where a dog is in a cage with a plexiglass divider. The floor is wired so that someone can give the dog a shock. The dog tries to escape when the shock comes, but after a while learns that she cannot. Then the divider is removed so that she can go to the other side of the cage and avoid the shock. But the dog does not even try, because she never succeeded in escaping the shock before. She has given up. This is commonly called (I think) "learned helplessness" in psychology. In a similar fashion, people can be conditioned to stop trying after awhile. If girls/young women are routinely discouraged from speaking up, many of them will stop trying, even if one or more of those obstacles is removed. There are several studies that show the ways this can happen--if I remember correctly it was teachers, male and female, that did more of the discouraging than the male peers. The teachers are usually not aware of their subconscious bias in favor of boys. It takes an independent observer to count the # boys called on versus # girls called on, to notice that boys are often coached to arrive at the right answer whereas girls are just told they are wrong with no coaching, etc. A similar example, not specifically related to women, is something I have observed at work during my career. It can happen over a much shorter span of time. When an organization has thwarted every attempt at change in the past, most people stop trying to solve any problems they see with the process and just learn to live with it (possibly complaining to each other). It gets so bad that even when new management comes in that geniuinely wants input on what and how to change, the people don't bother trying. They have "learned" that anything they do will not make a difference. For those of us who have not fallen into learned helplessness, it is very frustrating to try to work with those who have given up trying. So, in some sense, it is the "women themselves" that are the cause. But if they have been conditioned to stop trying (after beating your head against a wall, it starts to hurt), it isn't very productive to simply blame them. It makes more sense to help them learn new ways of behaving, which often takes a lot of time and effort if the new behavior is contrary to what they have learned in the past. My head is harder than a lot of others :-), so I tend to go on beating it against the wall, but even I am not immune to the learned helplessness feeling at times, so I can relate to this situation. Sometimes you just don't even realize that you can do something different if you never got a chance to do it, or got punished for doing it, in the past. [After I wrote this, I read Mara's article on the differences that may be there in how people respond, and I agree that it may go deeper than speaking up is "good" and being quiet is "bad", but I don't think that changes the main point of this article.] -- Marjorie Panditji mjm@ahimsa.intel.com -or- uunet!intelhf!ahimsa!mjm An accommodating attitude is often more helpful than cold logic.