This article is a curated collection of quotes from various perspectives regarding women’s discrimination and the resilience of those who have tried to dismantle systemic biases. This compilation is highly personal, and I hope the following voices will resonate with you, too.
Historical Underrepresentation
The French philosopher Gilles Ménage, from the XVII-th century, found references to sixty-five women philosophers in ancient texts and works by the fathers of the Church. However, modern philosophy encyclopedias, apart from Hypatia (a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, during the late 4th and early 5th centuries), do not mention many of these women philosophers.
A small book has been published in France called Histoire de femmes philosophes. Anyone curious about its author, Gilles Ménage, will discover that he lived in the seventeenth century […] and that his book has been published in 1690 under the title Historia mulierum philosopher. Hypatia was not alone: Ménage’s book, though devoted chiefly to the classical period, presents a series of fascinating figures, including Diotima the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene, Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic (in the philosophical sense of the word), Leontia The Epicurean, and Themistoclea the Pythagorean. Leafing through ancient texts and works by the fathers of the Church, Ménage found sixty-five references to women philosophers, though he interpreted the concept of philosophy fairly widely. Given that in Greek societies the woman was kept at home, the male philosophers preferred to entertain themselves with young boys rather than girls and that a woman had to become a courtesan if she wanted to enjoy public celebrity, we can see to what lengths these women thinkers had to go to make a name for themselves.
[…]
I checked at least three modern philosophy encyclopedias and, apart from Hypatia, found no trace of these names. It’s not that women philosophers didn’t exist. The fact is that male philosophers have chosen to ignore them after first borrowing their ideas.
Umberto Eco ― Women Philosophers, an article published in 2003 and included in his book, Chronicles of a Liquid Society
Lenore Blum, a computer scientist and mathematician, faced discrimination when she tried to switch to math as one of the deans told her to see a psychiatrist. She eventually found a lucky break with a professor who taught an experimental math course.
I wanted to change to math, but nobody would listen to me. One of the deans even told me to see a psychiatrist. So I went into the math building, and I started knocking on people’s doors to ask if I could come to their classes. And one guy said, “Fantastic! I’m teaching an experimental course using this new computer in the basement of the business school.” This was Alan Perlis — he later became the first head of the computer science department and the first Turing Award winner. Because of him, I was able to take math classes. I needed this lucky break to get in.
I got lots of lucky breaks. Eventually, I realized they have a downside.
What do you mean?
It shouldn’t be that I had to have a lucky break. When I started at MIT, I was so grateful. But why should I feel grateful that they let me have an education in math? The idea that I had to be grateful stayed with me for a very long time.
Computer scientist and mathematician Lenore Blum, in a Quanta Magazine interview
In her book The Authority Gap, Mary Ann Sieghart tells an anecdote regarding Mary McAleese, a former president of the Republic of Ireland. While serving her presidency term, she led an official visit to the Vatican to meet Pope John Paul II.
McAleese was in the audience room at the head of the delegation, about to be introduced to the pontiff, where he reached straight past her, held out his hand to her husband instead, and asked him: ‘Would you not prefer to be the President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’
Her husband knew better than to take the bait. As McAleese told me in an interview for this book: ‘I reached and took the hand which was hovering in mid-air and said, “Let me introduce myself. I am the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, elected by the people of Ireland, whether you like or whether you don’t.”
As McAleese recalled: ‘He said, “I’m sorry, I tried a joke because I heard you had a great sense of humour.” I said, “I do, but that wasn’t funny because you would not have done that to a male President.”
Mary Ann Sieghart – The Authority Gap
What is Feminism, Anyway?
I felt women represented a dreary way of life, always helping a man and never performing for themselves, whereas I wanted to be an artist myself! I could certainly have accomplished more with a good wife.
Alice Neel
“Jealousy? I don’t think jealousy is the right word, says Pauline. They were both strong women and in those days people liked to make strong women compete with each other, like you couldn’t have two strong women in the same room at the same time. The world would explode.”
Richard Osman ― The Bullet That Missed
Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.
I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, ‘Is this a world you want to live in? ‘ They would say, ‘No. ‘
Helen Mirren
Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.
It’s the mark of a backward society – or a society moving backward – when decisions are made for women by men.
Melinda Gates ― The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.
Mary Shelley
RBG (RBG stands for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was the second woman to serve on the Court and became an icon for her advocacy for gender equality and women’s rights) she firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free.
It is not women’s liberation; it is women’s and men’s liberation.
Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Gloria Steinem
Defying Odds
Lenore Blum didn’t just quietly appreciate her opportunity to study mathematics; she actively devised a path to increase women’s involvement in computer science. Rather than altering the curriculum, she concentrated on providing critical mentorship and networking opportunities. This plan significantly boosted the number of female undergraduates in her department and laid a blueprint for promoting gender diversity in other fields.
How did you work to increase the representation of women in mathematics?
In those years, feminists were talking about women’s ways of doing science: We had to do science differently to attract women. And I was thinking, “That is so totally off.”
In the U.S. at that time, you only had to take two years of high school math to go to college. Most college-bound men took four years of high school math; most women were counseled out of it. Only 8% of the women coming into Berkeley had enough math to take calculus, and if you couldn’t take calculus, forget it — many fields were closed off to you.
That’s been a theme in a lot of my work over the years. In a very few years after I joined the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon, half of our undergraduates were female. That didn’t happen because we changed the curriculum to be female-friendly. We did it by giving women the mentors that they needed, giving them the experiences that they weren’t getting because they didn’t have the networks.
Computer scientist and mathematician Lenore Blum, in a Quanta Magazine interview
Building on Lenore Blum’s approach to fostering gender diversity, consider the principle of leveling the playing field. A striking example can be seen in the world of classical music with the implementation of blind auditions for orchestras.
Before implementing this approach in the 1970s, less than five percent of musicians in America’s leading orchestras were women. The introduction of blind auditions, where candidates performed unseen behind a screen and without shoes to mask the sound of heels, led to a remarkable increase in the representation of female musicians, soaring to over 30%.
Similarly, according to istechameritocracy.com, Speak With a Geek, an IT recruitment firm, conducted an enlightening study. In their first trial, they presented 5,000 candidates to employers with full disclosure of each candidate’s name, experience, and background. Only five percent of those selected for interviews were women. However, when they repeated the process with all identifying details concealed, the selection of women for interviews skyrocketed to 54 percent.
We’ve never lived in an environment free of any stereotyping. We’ve never lived with true gender equality. So even young people who are very highly sensitized, and don’t want to be discriminating on the basis of gender or indeed on the basis of anything else, can’t shed all of that social conditioning just through an act of will. You can’t say “I’m a feminist”, and somehow all your social conditioning is gone. We need to be second-guessing what’s happening in our brains, so we don’t just give in to it.
Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, in an interview with writer Mary Ann Sieghart in Siehgart’s The Authority Gap book
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s (RBG) work exemplifies another approach to achieving gender equality: challenging the legal system with cases that highlight how gender discrimination negatively affects everyone, regardless of gender.
Of all of her clients, RBG was fondest of Stephen Wiesenfeld, a single father whose wife had died in childbirth.
Representing Wiesenfeld, Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court that discriminatory laws harm everyone. Stephen, who took on the role of a homemaker, was ineligible for “mother’s benefits” from Social Security because these were reserved solely for widows.
Ginsburg’s brief contended that such laws perpetuated stereotypes, undervaluing women’s economic contributions and diminishing the parenting role of surviving male spouses.
“Just as the female insured individual’s status as breadwinner is denigrated,” RBG wrote, “so the parental status of her surviving spouse is discounted. For the sole reason that appellee is a father, not a mother, he is denied benefits that would permit him to attend personally to the care of his infant son, a child who has no other parent to provide that care.” Then she twisted the knife. Their young son, Jason Paul, RBG wrote, was another victim of a law that “includes children with dead fathers, but excludes children with dead mothers.”
She had perplexed and even angered some of her allies by bringing so many cases with male plaintiffs. After all, it was the Women’s Rights Project, not the men’s rights project. Much later, people would say RBG was a genius for presenting the male-dominated Court with their brethren. The truth was more complicated. The choices men like Stephen Wiesenfeld made baffled, even angered the justices. Why would he want to act like a woman? In a way, it was easier to understand why a woman would want to act like a man. RBG firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free. Decades later, an unnamed guest at a dinner party told the New York Times that RBG had fiercely interrupted another guest who mentioned she’d worked on behalf of “women’s liberation.” “She turned on him and said, ‘It is not women’s liberation; it is women’s and men’s liberation.’
And when will this liberation happen? RBG tells us in the following anecdote:
While serving on the D.C. Circuit in 1986, Ginsburg’s law clerk, a parent of two young children, mentioned his need to leave work for day-care pickups and to be home for dinner.
“I thought, ‘This is my dream of the way the world should be.’ When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated.”
This statement, while powerful, only partially considers all the depth and breadth of experiences and identities we navigate. Because true liberation means dismantling the biases and barriers faced by all of us, irrespective of our race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or choice to have children. And many collective struggles that intersect at various points of discrimination and privilege do we still have to undergo!
Related Articles:
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)
Women have to face more barriers than men to focus on their work: a lack of social support to recognize and support women’s work, spouses that deny their wives a right to work, continuing with childcare, mundane household chores, sexism, etc. And this is only for the “lucky” women that are white or heterosexual. So, how did women persevere? Hiding in plain sight or becoming the caretaker to a team, sleeping for a few hours a night, postponing their works by years or decades, adopting a strict routine, strategically neglecting some of their traditional duties, adapting their work to motherhood, or refusing altogether to marry or have children.
Men suffer too when society uses traditionally gendered optics. A society that remains unchallenged on women’s traditional roles will also not accept that a man can be, perish the thought, not a breadwinner. Non-productive. Not ashamed to recognize his feelings. Vulnerable.
Playing Stereotypes: How We Assign Gender Roles to Children
Sometimes, male dominant features are seen as something that needs to be actively shaped and protected, leading to restrictive parenting practices around boys’ interests and behaviors.
Colours and Gender Bias: The History Behind The Pink Versus Blue Debate
The phenomenon of consumerism plays a pivotal role in cementing gender divides, with manufacturers and retailers leveraging color-coded marketing strategies to amplify sales. By promoting products in pink and blue, businesses not only cater to traditional gender stereotypes but ingeniously create a demand for separate sets of products for boys and girls. This tactic, among others, exploits and perpetuates the notion of gender individualization and differentiation, contributing to a cycle of gendered consumerism that shapes perceptions from a very young age.