As sociologists, one of our (my wife and I) biggest pet peaves is gendered activities. These are activities where an individual is excluded from participation based on a superficial external sexual characteristic. You know the drill right? Only boys allowed into the tree house! Only girls allowed in the club house. You can’t come in because you have a vagina. You aren’t allowed because you got a penis. It is exclusion and sorting based on sex and gender and to be honest and frank, as two counselors and social scientists working on healing the damage done by patriarchy, and trying to create a saner and just world, it’s a real annoyance.

Why?

Well, because gender based exclusion, one sex only activity, is quite literally the root of all female (and male) oppression in this world.  We’ll stop short of saying it is the root of all evil because as we all know, the root of all evil is love of mone, but it is definitely the root of all gender based oppression.

Now, we know that’s a pretty bold statement, but bare with us for a moment. We all know that women are not treated equally in this world right? That’s the reality! Women perform 60% of work world wide, they earn 10% of income, and own 10% of the land (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 2003:243).  Women are segregated into pink collar occupations, enjoy less financial stability, lower rates of pay, and are generally expected to sacrifice their career paths to raise the family while their men get ahead. Women are generally left at home to raise the children (an incredibly difficult and demanding job) with minimal help from their spouses and ironically, this is true even in relationships where the male and female are overtly egalitarian. You can go into a marriage with very high ideals but when the babies come, traditional scripts tend to come into play and it is the women who are the ones who bear the primary responsibility. Of course, take ten years off your career path to raise children and what do you get? Less raises and fewer promotions! It is a sacrifice that we have to make when we raise children, but it’s almost always the woman who makes that sacrifice.  Ironically, this sacrifice can come back and slap ya in the face when the kids grow up, the marriage breaks up, and the female who made the career sacrifice is left with nothing but the pink collar ghetto. As a result of the sacrifices they make, women experience higher rates of depression, poverty, and social stigma. Globally, around the world, women are oppressed and there is no denying that. If you were born female, you are born with a social and economic handicap that is going to make your life a lot harder than it needs to be if genders were treated equally.

And why is this?

Well, there are a lot of reasons why it happens but if you ask us it all comes down to the fact that we (and by “we” we mean the people of this earth) have convinced ourselves that boys and girls are significantly different on an emotional, intellectual, even spiritual bases. Boys are like this; girls are like that. Boys play with trains; girls play with dolls. Boys are the breadwinners; girls are the nurturers. Boys are stronger; girls are weaker.  If you think about it long enough you’ll probably come up with a hundred oppositional differences between boys and girls. And therein lies the rub. Our mind contains a hundred oppositional differences between boys and girls and it is the differences which we are certain exist that are used to exploit the girls. When you believe that there are significant differences between boys and girls, men and women, you have a ready made JUSTIFICATION for just about any gender based inequality, exclusion, or oppression that you might want to think of.

Why do women stay home and look after the babies? Because girls nurture.

Why can’t girls be doctors? Because they aren’t rational.

Why don’t men stay home? Because they aren’t suited.

Why do women get paid less? Because they are the weaker sex.

You the man of the house?

You don’t want to cook your fair share of suppers?

Hey, you don’t have. You can come home, put your feet up, and leave the cooking to her because that’s women’s work.

You get the picture?

In order to justify and support gender inequality and oppression all you have to do is invoke gender difference. 

The world is the way it is because that’s the way the gender cookie crumbles.

Honestly though, and despite the great lengths that people will go to, to try and convince themselves (and others) that there is a great gulf between man and women, it is all load of pseudo-scientific nonsense. Despite all the huffing and puffing people do about gender, there’s really no scientific basis to suggest that boys are all that much different than girls. In fact, quite the opposite is true. A recent study has demonstrated quite robustly that there is no difference between the male and female brain (Joel et al., 2015).

That’s right…

You heard me…

NO DIFFERENCE!

I have to say, this is a bit of a problem for the vast majority of people on this planet. If there are no structural differences in the brains of men and women, the “house of cards” upon which our notions of gender rest starts to wobble and shake.

so why do we do it? like i said above. ideological. benefits some people. factories.

how do we get away with it? few ways

1 bias in research. psychological confirmatory bias.

2 misinterpretatoin of statistics.

3 perceptual filtering.

4 actual construction of gender differences.

Now don’t want to get into an argument here about the basis of gender differences.

But to be honest, the house was never that stable at all.

And what does this have to do with gendered activity? Well, gendered activity is the prototypical gender oppression. It is the prototypical exclusion upon which all other exclusions are based.  Of course, I understand you might have a hard time swallowing this. I mean, what does a girl’s only baby shower, or a boy’s only hockey club, have to do with the suppression of women on this planet? Well, everything because once you polarize the genders, once you create a distinction, once you allow exclusion and sorting based on difference, then it becomes possible to rank, and sort, and organize and deny and exclude along any other indices you can care to think about. If you say, only girls can play or only boys can play then by default you give legitimacy to the mythology of gender difference.  And if you give legitimacy to the myth of gender difference, then you have provided support for the reality of gender oppression.  Of course, you may not like to hear this. You may be sitting comfortably in a life organized around gender based activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that if that is your life, then you are supporting the gender based oppression of women on this planet, even if you don’t want to. It is exactly like the feminists say, the personal is political.

So what are you going to do about it? Well, if you are a male and you have a wife, or a sister, or a mother, or a daughter, and you are interested in seeing them treated equally in this world, then you have to stop thinking about gender differences, stop supporting gendered activities, and start working towards gender inclusion. If you do anything else you are a part of the problem, and a component of the oppression. If you need help, take a page out of this grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no (http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion)

Problem: Sometimes a group of children won’t let another kid play with them just because of their gender. Gender is whether you are a boy or a girl. Sometimes boys will say that a girl can’t play with them. Sometimes girls will say that boys can’t play with them.

Rationale: This isn’t nice. It is wrong to exclude someone just because they are a boy or a girl, or because of their gender. Not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying, and bullying is not allowed…

If you are a female and you don’t like the social, political, economic and (even) spiritual inequality that becomes possible when we allow gender difference and gender exclusion, if you don’t like the idea of maybe one day finding yourself on the wrong end of a glass ceiling, submerged in a pink collar ghetto, or crying as your husband of twenty years, whom you sacrificed your entire life and career for, leaves you to go hang with a younger female because “that’s what men do,” then take a page out of the same grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no. You can’t say “you can’t play just because you’re a boy.”

[ad#article]And just to be clear, just because you are female doesn’t give you free pass. You don’t get to engage gender inclusions and then complain about the sorry state of this world, or your life, or your daughter’s awful marriage to that “typical male,” down the road. The personal is political and change starts with you.

Oh an incidentally, everything we’ve said here about gender difference and exclusion applies equally well to ageism, racism, or any of the other exclusions, based on difference, that make the inequality of this world go around. As long as we keep thinking of ourselves as different and not as a unified human race, as long as we hang onto our “we and they” mentality (however we choose to spin that), we create the wedge that allows the inequality that causes the suffering that ruins the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth.

References

Joel, D., Berman, Z., Tavor, I., Wexler, N., Gaber, O., Stein, Y., . . . Assaf, Y. (2015). Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1509654112

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca-Zinn. 2003 Social Problems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.