Women Entrepreneurs Created a Fake Male Cofounder to Dodge Startup Sexism
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Their personalities seem pretty effervescent. This might also have contributed to the need to create a persona who just says, "OK, I need that status update."
Could it be that sometimes the perception that someone is "effervescent" is attributable to a tendency to perceive women as "effervescent"?
I wonder a lot how much of that is innate wiring and how much of that is socialization. But, generally speaking, when a guy does the same thing, it gets interpreted as gay.
Stereotypes tend to come from somewhere. We don't just make them up whole cloth due to innate assholery.
I don't have all the answers. In fact, I am not sure I have any answers. But I feel like I am finally starting to ask the right questions. And one of those questions is "Am I really just innately feminine or is my concept of femininity a learned cultural construct that is not serving me well?"
If a lot of gender is just a construct and our gender roles are rooted in a time when women were taught to be subservient to men, then it's highly possible that a lot of traits that are deemed "feminine" are just traits that were taught to women to make them subservient/less competitive/etc.
So maybe being timid, shy, soft-spoken, and like traits should not be considered "feminine" in a biological sense. They should be considered traits that make you less likely to get what you want and much more likely to be taken advantage of. And those traits were included in the feminine construct of yesterday to make women easier to control.
So maybe it's ok to discriminate against some of those traits when hiring because you aren't discriminating against biological traits but rather learned traits that may or may not make you more productive in certain environments.
(Among other things) I am not soft spoken. That fact actually gets me a lot of social friction for failing to be what people expect from a woman.
I am trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. I hope to start blogging soon in a "thinking out loud" manner. My hope is to sort a few things out for myself and maybe help other people think through the problem space a tad.
I am not ready to write about it. I have started several posts and the attempt is just not going well, plus I am hip deep in other goals right this minute.
My hope is to "bring solutions, not complaints." And justifications for the current status quo are just inherently problematic and a great way to provoke ugly reactions.
But thank you for replying. I realize it involves sticking your neck out.
I quite like this discussion, but I'm not a fan of this point.
"likely to get what you want" is a very combative way to look at the world. On the other hand, less forceful people work together well with others and cause less unnecessary conflict.
I think humanity is more about cooperation and empathy than about domination and taking advantage of each other, at least in terms of what makes us stand out.
It generally does seem that the "masculine" traits are considered "better", but I don't think that's a proven fact.
Consider also that women acting more combative get a lot of push back.
"When I say that Professor Lindzey’s left shoe is an “introvert,” everyone looks at his shoe as if it were something the shoe was responsible for. . . . Don’t look at that shoe! Look at me; I’m the one who is responsible for the statement."
The mere existence of the word feminine implies there is a dichotomy between male & female worth observing. When we search for this difference, we find it (funny how our brains are good at finding whatever they search for..). That confirmation leads us to form the perspective "women & men are different" and now see the world through this construct. From then on, confirmation bias is enough to sustain the correctness of this concept.
When a person who has no idea what feminine means, behaves in a "feminine" manner, others call them feminine (because this concept is near universal). That reinforces the concept, and like a virus the concept spreads to yet another person.
So the more existence of femininity as a cultural construct in a sense makes it all the more real. It is partly a "social reality" [1].'
Its like in cultures where the language has 1 word for 2 colors (from perspective of english speaker), they have observed that these people literally perceive less difference in the colors... so is the difference between blue/green a social construct or reality? The lines between social construct & reality are very blurry :p
[1] From Sapiens - Yuval Harari
...or perhaps people look at the shoe due to the claim, and they do so in order to evaluate for themselves if Professor Lindzey's statement has any merit or is in fact just bullshit.
After all, either the shoe is "introvert" or it isn't, and the veracity of that claim does not depend on who stated it.
There's a very good reason why the Royal Society's motto is "Nullius in verba" ( literally "take nobody's word for it").
Advocating that the message should be ignore and instead the focus should be shifted to the messenger is just absurd and goes against basic concepts of rational reasoning and even the scientific process itself.
If militants of a particular social cause feels compelled to attack rational reasoning to even be in a position to make a case for their cause then that speaks volumes about the cause.
There is no hard definition of introvert or feminine. There are no hard definitions and eternal truths when it comes to people evaluating other people. Only perceptions and judgements made by other people. The closest thing to a truth in this scenario is consensus.
You can point to a test that grades someone 1-10 between introvert and extrovert. That test, too was made based on someones subjective idea of extraversion/introversion, formed by direct perception of people before they converted it into a set of questions with objective answers. One of the measures of the validity of the test will be inter-rater reliability, that is, how much do different people rating a person agree on the score they assign - consensus. If people are unable to broadly agree when rating the same person, it would not even be accepted as valid test.
I'm honestly clueless what social cause you think I'm advocating for - i wasn't really advocating for any, just pointing out an idea I find interesting that seemed relevant here. Of course, your perception of how political my statement is may differ, informed by your own interpretations. But surely that is not objective reality and must be rejected by the rational thought you espouse.
Stereotypes do come from somewhere but the relationship may often be nonsensical by the time it gets here. See the whole anabolic/catabolic thing.
the flagging of this story reinforces what these entrepreneurs were up against.