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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!mcnc!rti-sel!wfi
From: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles
Subject: Re: career vs. relationships
Message-ID: <660@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Feb-86 17:46:23 EST
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.660
Posted: Wed Feb 12 17:46:23 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Feb-86 03:32:29 EST
References: <11785@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 73
Xref: watmath net.women:8931 net.singles:10247
Summary: 

In article <11785@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> ...(Daz) writes:

>...
>My experience after about 10 years in that role is that {male|nonblack}
>students are far more likely to be excited about mathematics,
>really gung-ho over the subject matter.  ...
>I have an internal
>guesser-daemon who assigns differing probabilities to the student's
>chances of being gung-ho, according to the student's {sex|race}.  ...
>And besides, I couldn't make the guesser-daemon go away if I
>wanted to: it's based on experience.

I've inserted a reference to blacks in addition to your reference to
women to make a point: if you had made your comments about nonwhites,
most people would agree that it reflected a racist reaction to a
situation (note I'm not saying anything yet about your handling of the
racist reaction). Your "guesser-daemon" is clearly reacting in a
sexist fashion based upon your experiences with female students. There
are three important questions to be asked here: exactly what is the 
"guesser-daemon," what is the extent of your control over what the 
"guesser-daemon" does, and how do you deal with its assessment of events?

It's convenient sometimes to compartmentalize our mental activities
into "daemons" that take responsibility for certain functions. People
who work with computers frequently like to do this (how many times
have you heard a compunerd talk about dumping his/her buffers? :-).
But in reality I think there's little reason to claim an autonomous
process is making the assessment you're talking about. We make sexist
and racist assessments because the constraints of a sexist and racist
society have taught us to do so. An American in a big city who meets a
black person after dark is more likely to be afraid of being mugged 
than an American who meets a white person after dark. An American who
hears the job description "secretary" is more likely to think of a
woman than of a man (although as a coworker pointed out, this
certainly wasn't true in the 19th century). No matter what our race,
creed, or sex, we've ALL been guilty of knee-jerk racist and/or sexist
thoughts from time to time. And you don't have to postulate a "guesser-
daemon" to understand why.

So the "guesser-daemon" doesn't really exist. Given that, can we
eliminate these racist and sexist reactions entirely from our life?
Saying that it's impossible is claiming that in this particular case a
set of reactions can't be unlearned or replaced with another set of
reactions. Is this so? Is it not possible for the addictive person to
learn a new set of behaviors to replace the old? Of course it is: the
fat person who eats because s/he's lonely or has problems can learn to
do away with the loneliness or find other ways of dealing with the
problems. Why should it be impossible for you to make the "guesser-daemon"
go away if you want to, even if it's based on experience?

As to dealing with the "guesser-daemon," you say that you don't feel
it really affects the way you deal with people. As I've said, we've
all had to deal with our own "guesser-daemons" from time to time. The
key thing is RECOGNIZING when we're trying to stereotype people and
being aware of our tendency to do so. You might try, for example, to
go out of your way to make sure you grade papers and assign final
grades fairly without regard to sex since you known this "daemon" is
working away somewhere out of reach of your current awareness. 

The only way we'll totally do away with sexism and racism is to change
the way people relate to each other socially and economically. This
has to be handled in part on the state and national levels through
legislation (sorry, all you conservative folks out there, I DON'T
believe in the Benevolent Corporation :-). But the place to begin
change is at home: if each of us recognizes sexist and racist
tendencies in h/erself and nips it in the bud (and disapproves of
racist and sexist comments on the part of family and friends) we'll at
least have taken a small step toward the just and fair society implied
by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

[There, how's that for pie in the sky? :-)]

                               -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly