Gender equality

I’m here to recruit men to support gender equality. Actually, I’m even here speaking as a middle class white man. Now, I wasn’t always a middle class white man. It all happened for me about 30 years ago when I was in graduate school(读研). And a bunch of us graduate students got together one day, and we said , you know, there is an explosion of wrting and thinking in feminist theory. But there is no course yet. So we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that.

One of the women was white, and one was black. The white woman said, “All women face the same oppression as women.”(所有的女性，都承受着同样的压迫)“All women are sinilarly situated in patriarchy, and therefore all women have a kind of intuitive solidarity or sisiterhood.”And the black woman said, “I’m not so sure. Let me ask you a quesstion. When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, What do you see?”And the white woman said, “I see a woman.”And the black woman said, “ You see, that’s the problem for me. Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I see a black woman. To me, race is visible, but to you, race is invisible. You don’t see it.” Privilege is invisible to those who have it. It is a luxury, I will say to the white people sitting in this room, not to have to think about race every split second of our lives.

I have a colleague, and I both teach the sociology of gender course. I give a guest lecture for her when she teaches. So I walk into her class to give a guest lecture, and as I walk in, one of the students looks up and says, “Oh, finally, an objective opinion.”All that semester, whenever my colleague opened her mouth, what my student saw was a woman. I mean, if you were to say to my students, “There is structural inequality based on gender in the United States.” They say, “ Of course you say that, You are a woman. You are biased.”

Making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality. There is another group, though, that actively resists gender equality, that sees gender equelity as something that is detrimental to men. Some thinks white man were the victims of reverse discrimination in the workplace. White man in Europe and the United States are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in

the history of the world. So, now I’ve established some of the obstacles to engaging men, but why should we support gender equality? Of course, it’s fair, it’s right and it’s just. But more than that, gender equality is also in our interest as men. If you listen to what men say about what they want in their lives, gender equality is actually a way for us to get the lives we want to live. Gender equality is good for countries, I t turns out, according to most studies, that those countries that are most gender equal are also the countries that score highest on the happiness scale. It is also good for companies, the more gender-equal companies are, the better it is for workers, the happier their labor force is. They have lower job turnover. They have lower levels of attrition. They have an easier time recruiting. They have higher rates of retention, higher job satisfaction, higher rates of productivity. It is good for man, It is good for the kind of lives we want to live.

A heated debate over why women are’t getting to the top. At one extreme, some men and many women believe that women are the victims of blatant sexism. At the other extreme, many men and some women believe that women are unsuitable for the highest managerial jobs. Because they lack the necessary assertiveness, they don’t know how to get along in rarefied world, or they have children and lose interest in --or time for-- their careers. Somewhere in between is a surprisingly large group of men and women who see “discrimination”as the major problem often differ in defining exactly what they mean by the term. For example, what they call discrimination consisits of treating women differently from men. Other issues and concerns are that women can not get the assignment that allow them to shine. Women don’t receive the kind of constructive criticism that men do. For example, vast numbers of men are reluctant to widerspread male reluctance. And the government has relaxed its commitment to affirmative action. What about the belief that women fall behind not because of discrimination, but because they are cautious, unaggressive, and differently motived than men. Even some female executives believe that women dereil their careers by choosing staff jobs over high-risk, high-reward line positions. So women should worry less about sexism and more about whether the jobs they take

are the right route to the top. They have to grips with the fact they overemphasized being a woman and underemphasized what they did for a living. The company didn’t live and die by what they did.