[PEN-L:11403] Re: Gender and Hierarchy (was: Male Chauvanist

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:20 AM 7/23/97 -0700, Anders Schneiderman wrote:

>As sociologists and historians have shown, when women have dominated
>positions of power over time (which is pretty rare), they are just as
>capable of creating nasty hierarchies.  However, their hierarchies are
>differently structured--just look at women's vs. men's pecking orders in
>U.S. high schools.
>
>Corporate hierarchies don't look the way they do simply because of the
>inherent needs of capitalism or because they are "reproducing the power
>elite":  they are gendered in a way that fits how Western society
>constructs maleness.  That's why, as Maggie pointed out, it's good for male
>corporate weasels to be aggressive but not ok for female corporate weasels.
> That's also why in corporations, men in traditionally female roles tend to
>be treated better than women in traditionally male roles.  For example,
>female secretaries are expected to "mother" their bosses in a way that male
>secretaries are not (for a wonderful analysis of these dynamics, check out
>Jennifer Pierce's study of male and female lawyers, paralegals, and
>secretaries in corporate law offices).
>
>This doesn't mean that if women were running things, we wouldn't have
>domination, competitiveness, back-stabbing, etc.  But in our form of
>capitalism, sexism isn't just a matter of how much men vs. women get paid,
>it's built into the fabric of how power operates at a day-to-day level.


This is also the position I tried to argue -- that apparent differences in
"peronality traits" can be tracked down to differenttypes of interaction men
and women usually findthmensleves in.  As I understood Maggie's position,
she argued the opposite, namely, that the type of interaction results from
differential "personality traits" in mena and women (developed through
socialization rather than genetically programmed, to be sure).  But perhaps
I misconstrued her argument, and if that's the case, I concede.

The reason why I accept the "interaction causality" rather than the
"persnality/cognition causality" position is that the former makes social
change possible while the latter does not.  If social interaction is a
natural outcome of some intrinsic "human nature" (coded as "personality,"
"tastes" etc.) as the bourgeois ideologues maintain, then the only rational
conclusion is that no matter how hard we try, we will always end up with the
social order order that resembles the status quo.

If, on the other hand, "personality" is in fact an outcome of social
interaction, then changing the nature of the intercation (by changing social
institutions that are nothing more that rutinised interaction) we can
actually  hope to change things by changing social institutions -- which is
what progressive social science is all about.

regards,
wojtek sokolowski
institute for policy studies
johns hopkins university
baltimore, md 21218
sokol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
voice: (410) 516-4056
fax:   (410) 516-8233

POLITICS IS THE SHADOW CAST ON SOCIETY BY BIG BUSINESS. AND AS LONG AS THIS
IS SO, THE ATTENUATI0N OF THE SHADOW WILL NOT CHANGE THE SUBSTANCE.
- John Dewey