What's in a Name?

     I knew something was going on when I listened to my husband's comments on the phone:

"No, there's no one here by that name."
"No, I'm not Dr. Crafton -- that's my wife."
"No, she is not Mrs. Crafton, her name is Dr. Crafton"
"No, that's not me, it's my wife.

     I could tell by the silences and the way he was talking that he was just having a good time with t the charity person on the phone.  He laughed when he got off:  "She just couldn't get her head around the idea that I wasn't the doctor -- she was totally frustrated, like someone had turned her world upside down now that there were female doctors.

THE FOLLOWING IS FROM MICHAELEMOUSE  blog:

The gender division of professional work in the next few decades

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Perhaps you've noticed that some jobs are seen as women'S work and that many men avoid them. For example, secretaries, nurses, dental hygienists and paralegals are overwhelmingly women and few men enroll in such programs. Those are all jobs where someone assists someone else. That someone else used to predominantly be a man in the case of an executive, a doctor, a dentist or a lawyer, respectively.
The job of secretary used to be filled with men but as more women moved into that occupation, men deserted it. I don't know if the same thing happened with dental hygienists and paralegals.
Some time from now, the majority of doctors, dentists and lawyers will be women. Will we see men desert those professions as well? Will those professions see a reduction in income and status?

Will bright men looking for a professional career pretty much only go into engineering, computers and business?

The charity person on the phone with my husband was clearly making an assumption about gender and professions that she simply could not rethink.  Assumptions drive our perceptions and our consciousness and are often extremely difficult to name, reflect on, examine, and change.  In her book, The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer notes that most girls in our society are taught to be "good" in terms of behavior and  how they respond to authority.  Boys, on the other hand, are usually taught to take more risks, and be more independent from authority.  Consequently, if we are "told" through many forms of communication that girls/women should go into particular professions but not others, we learn the lesson very well because we want to be good girls, good learners, obedient to authority.  Langer says the more rigidly we learn information (in terms of absolutes -- we only see male doctors on TV shows, everyone refers to doctors automatically as "he", etc.) the harder it may be to open up those closed packages to accommodate the new information.  If, on the other hand, we learn that there are always
Sometimes we (male and female) can just be trapped by what we have learned (here, how to be a girl, how to be a boy)  and, because change takes effort and time, many people will decide "that's just the way it is".

I wonder what kinds of interactions and forms of communication that parents and preschool teachers can put into place so what children learn that being a boy or being girl is not a fixed role or performance?

 

Constructing Social Constructionism

I moved this post from my other blog site -- thought it might be useful as you come to terms with the social construction of gendered identity.  PLEASE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS SPACE TO ASK QUESTIONS RE: YOUR LEARNING -- WHAT MAKES SENSE, WHAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE....
The concept of becoming  a particular kind of person through a process of "social construction" basically means we can't become anyone by ourselves (individual as the opposite of social).  Imagine on the day you were born, your misguided parents put you in a room by yourself and had no contact with you until you were, say, ten years old.  With all good intentions, your weird parents did not want to interfere with your "unique development", they wanted you to become "who you were meant to be" and  "fulfill your God-given talents" and other unexamined colloquialisms that people say every day.  But, of course, you guessed the problem -- you turn out to be even more weird than your parents.  Basically, this means that people don’t just automatically become who they are, they are pulled, folded, tucked and hammered into a certain shape through their interactions with others – during conversations, the way people act toward them (or ignore them), labels they are given, attributes others use to describe them, until we start to become well, a real human being. We are used to thinking of more or less mainstream parenting in which we guide, direct, listen, interact, share values, rituals, specific family practices, etc. as allowing our children to "become who they want to be" or  even "allowing them to follow their interests".  While, all the time, they are immersed every second of every waking moment in a hubbub of social activity filled with social interactions of every imaginable kind -- other children, relatives of every age, babysitters, siblings, TV, videos, games, etc.  There is nothing individual about growing up even if you are an only child.  And not only do we, as parents, have great influence over who our children become, we intend to have as much influence as possible -- we really DO want our kids to be certain kinds of people (loving, industrious, good moral/ethical values, polite, clean, etc.) and so we pay very close attention to how we engineer their environments hoping to have a monstrous impact on who they become.   Social and cultural environments are crucial overriding components and they are the components over which we have some control.

Scoring

A couple of weeks ago, my husband (Paul -- you should know him by name as he is likely to come up frequently in my blogs as are other members of my family especially my daughter, Samantha -- I hope to meet some of yours as well.  Anyway, Paul and I were meeting a long-time friend and her newest boyfriend at a restaurant for dinner.  We were there first (unusual) and my friend called to say they were running a little late because John was watching the end of some football game (which we had actually been watching earlier in the day).  When they walked in, we did introductions and hugs and handshaking all around.  When things quieted down, I asked John a question about the score of the game; he told us and I asked what did that mean (inferring that it had a meaning in relation to future games, championships, etc.)?  He got my meaning but turned to my husband, gave a big wink, and said:  "Well, scoring means something very different to men than it does to women, right, Paul?"  My friend and I gave each other one of those sideways glances that you think no one can see, Paul did not comment but laughed a little, and the conversation quickly turned to another topic.  However, Paul asked me later if I caught the gendered remark and its inference about men and women and I said:  "Do you know who you are married to?"  Of course I noticed.

John's remark might seem trivial to some but I was surprised that gender entered the conversation so explicitly, so early and in such a traditional way - of course, gender assumptions are always present and perceptions of what it means to be male, female, transgendered, etc. are also always present.  John Searle's theory of "speech acts" looks at something someone says in terms of a speaker's intentions and the effects it has on a listener.  Speech acts can function a performances that create a moral bond between speakers which is what I think John's intention was (and Paul thought the same thing although he called it "male bonding").  The only problem is, it didn't work -- Paul felt an emotional distance as a result of the remark rather than bonded, the "we are in this together, hey, buddy?"  And it had a similar impact on me.  Communication and gender includes all kinds of assumptions regarding who is with you and in what capacity -- when those assumptions break down, communication is, at the very least, side-tracked.  I wonder about the social and cultural processes that come into play to change foundational assumptions over time?