A few days ago I posted the first installment of a discussion of how gender inequality on the domestic front may affect gender inequality professionally. I discussed women’s limitations in terms of traveling for work, and now I will focus on similar limitations concerning professional relocation. But let me start with a caveat, which occurred to me after writing the first installment: the observations here do not pertain primarily to philosophy, in fact they seem to hold at least of the academic career in general. Indeed, traveling to conferences and the willingness to relocate so as to go after advantageous jobs seem to be part and parcel of academic work in general. So the observations offered here cannot in any way explain why gender balance in philosophy is so much worse than in other disciplines. Nevertheless, I think it is still useful to reflect for a moment on the effects of gender inequality on the domestic front, and possibly on ways to mitigate them.
In order to discuss the issue of relocation, let me start with two anecdotes. The first concerns a distinguished young philosopher/logician who is now just forming a new, exciting research center. He has hired something like ten people to get the center started, and unfortunately all of them are male. I asked him in private what he thought about it; he replied that he deeply regretted this outcome, and that he had made serious efforts to prevent this from happening, in particular by approaching several female potential candidates and encouraging them to apply for the many positions available at the center. But they would often reply that they couldn’t apply, as relocation was out of the question; their partners had jobs elsewhere. (I have to admit having been one of the female potential candidates who gave him this exact reply…) So in the end they had virtually no female candidates applying, and thus no wonder that there were no female hires.
The second anecdote concerns a friend of mine who recently made a horizontal but very advantageous career move, involving a somewhat significant relocation, and for now at least entailing a long-distance relationship. Interestingly, he suspects that, had his girlfriend been in his position, she would simply not have made the choice of taking up the new job. He asked: “Why is it so? Do we [men] care less?”
These are of course just two anecdotes, but I think they illustrate a more general pattern, namely that men are much more willing to relocate for professional reasons than women. By not being willing to relocate, women have their job opportunities severely reduced, which of course affects the development of their academic careers. The expectation is typically that, when a man takes up a new job somewhere else, his female partner will in principle simply follow him along (Sally Haslanger comments on this phenomenon in 'Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)'); it is still quite rare (although certainly not unheard of) that a woman relocates for professional reasons and her male partner goes along. The alternative is to go for long-distance relationships, but here again, while it seems that many men are willing to go through with it and to choose for the professionally advantageous relocation, women are much more hesitant to do the same (again, I have no statistics here, just general perception).
It is again in Cordelia Fine’s book that I found concrete elements that help explaining this phenomenon. In chaps. 17 and 18 she discusses how our own expectations concerning gender shape how we are as parents from *very* early on, in fact even before the baby is conceived! In one research, it was observed that mothers who knew they were expecting boys typically described the movements of the fetus as ‘vigorous, strong’, while mothers who knew they were expecting girls typically described the movements as ‘lively, but not overly so’ or something to the same effect (of course, they controlled with mothers who did not know the sex of their fetuses: no difference whatsoever was found between female and male fetuses in the mothers’ reports when they were not aware of the sex during the pregnancy).
It is also well known that mothers typically talk and interact much more with baby daughters than with baby sons. Fine remarks: “[t]his was despite the fact that boys were no less responsive to their mother’s speech and were no more likely to leave their mother’s side. As the authors suggest, this may help girls learn the higher level of social interaction expected of them, and boys the greater independence.” (p. 198) Moreover, it has also been found that mothers typically overestimate their baby boys’ physical abilities, while underestimating their baby girls’ physical abilities (independent testing found no significant difference between boys and girls on physical abilities). I think these observations pretty much hit the nail on the head: from *very* early on girls are expected to prioritize social and affective interactions, while boys are taught that they must be fierce and independent. In sum, parenting styles seem to differ tremendously according to the gender of the child, even among those parents who are convinced that they are practicing gender-neutral parenting. No wonder thus that, many years later, men are more willing than women to choose for a professionally advantageous relocation.
What to do here? Unlike the case of making domestic arrangements so as to allow the female partner to travel for conferences, it would seem that no ‘easy’ negotiating solutions are forthcoming here. In fact, it is far from obvious that women (and men!) should always prioritize their careers over their personal lives. On a personal note, I can say that I have always made the choice of ‘staying put’, which means that many very attractive professional possibilities are out of the question for me, but I am happy with my choices. There is though at least a bit of gender equality in our household in this respect, as twice my husband was about to be sent overseas for work, but I was adamant that we were simply not going anywhere. He knew that, if it came to that, he would have to look for a different job (fortunately, it wasn’t necessary).
So while it is not obvious what could be done to mitigate the inequality here, I think it is important at least to be aware of where these different attitudes towards professional relocation seem to be coming from. Again, other factors may be involved, but the data I presented here goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenon, I think.
Recent Comments