Why everyone should be a feminist

In my previous post I proposed that there is inequality which disadvantages all women around the globe. Anyone not wanting to change that situation seems irrational, or self-serving and hence morally blameworthy. Since this situation affects half of the Earth's population the matter is urgent, that is why it merits its own treatment.

Why should everyone accept that this is so?

Well, we know at the moment the following: We know that there is inequality that we can all agree is wrong. Namely:

- Income inequality: women doing the same job get lower salaries in many places.

- Chance inequality: often when admitting students or hiring applicants for a job male's are preferred, even if there is no other relevant differentiating detail in the applicants' CVs.

- Recognitional inequality: women get promotions and favourable performance reviews less often. This even happens - sadly - when women rate women, or for example when students rate teachers and lecturers.

- Inequalities in further gender-role based expectations: it is widely different how much work is expected from a woman to be spent raising her children, cleaning, and providing other essentials for her family. On top of this in many societies there are further unequally spread expectations such caring for the elderly and the sick, playing community roles, or being physically attractive.

To the last inequality some people object: but there is a similar expectation towards man, just look at the fact that handsome man are on TV and in ads. But this argument is wrong because it mixes up two things: it is very different that some people (among them some women) enjoy, and on men expecting women to look good. This is especially salient, because for women looks are often less important in choosing partners, whereas men sometimes 'punish' women on the basis of their looks, going even as far as to leave them, or making employment, promotions, and so on conditional on appearances.

All the above listed are inequalities between men and women that are proven, that have been measured and observed in experiments, and can be read off from economic data. It is certainly obvious to any grownup that this situation needs to be changed.

With this, I’m not saying that woman should not care about their looks, not have children, etc. but that this should be in their freedom to choose, and not what is expected of them to be prioritized. I’m sure many would choose to those these things, as these activities can be very joyful, rewarding, fulfilling, etc. for some people, and there is nothing wrong with them in themselves. What is wrong if someone chooses these activities because they are made to believe that that’s the only right thing to do and they should choose it otherwise something is wrong with them.

Of course as with any problem that is very large scale we should look at the causes of the problem. As with other social-psychological large scale problems there are social structural problems in the background. Most plausibly the factors are that: 

- Girls are not encouraged to follow certain career paths, and life-way, and to also experiment with new life paths, and

- women are given role models and feedback that prioritizes the traditional gender behavior, plus

- there is a lack of viable role models and alternatives, a lack of support for these, and a lot of punitive political and social action and feedback if one tries to step out of line.

- Add on top of this that due to implicit bias even people and organizations who are consciously and explicitly committed to equality make sometimes biased judgments.

What we need to do is to provide choices, and a range of role models, and to protect those who are punishing women for following their own paths. Just as a man nowadays one can aim at becoming a good father, an astronaut (the most boring example of aiming high), a lawyer, an electrician, and a nurse; a carer, an artist, a dancer, a bachelor, a family man, a community fighter, a lone wolf, etc. so all options should be open and the same should be available for any woman. And just as all these different types of men are cheered on, and there are people who reassure them that they are filling in a role that is needed, that they are making the right choices, so, women need the same kind of assurance, whatever track they choose, and whichever way they go.

There are some important mistakes that need to be avoided while giving positive feedback. One of them is essentialism, the idea that there is some element of the traditional gender role that has to be maintained to be still a woman. This mistaken notion has had harmful effects already in many cases in the last 40 years. Just look at supposedly ‘empowering’ videos featuring woman who train hours every day and appear in the videos dancing in minimal clothing  - reinforcing one of the most harmful stereotypes that being attractive sexually is what being a woman is - and perform stereotypical male actions like handling power tools, fighting and shooting, taking revenge, driving sports cars, and so on.

What would be needed instead would be the message that "Hey, you men – most of you – aren’t like that either, and I don’t need to be like a man anyway. I’m happy to let go of the traditional woman package too: I don’t have to be sexy, and I don’t have to wield power tools or be a top business executive. I can be an okay lawyer or counselor, or ... whatever! I can have my average business dealing in whatever I know about, I can write books or pretty much do whatever I want. I can identify with whatever I want, and I can change. If I want to be like that I will be." Of course I'm not advocating radical individualism or that in making up one's mind about how one should live one shouldn't take into consideration one's family, loved ones, and community. But not in the way that one only thinks of the ways one could contribute to the life of others as people living in more rigid times did.

 

Of course in some cases there might be people who can 'max out' both the requirements of the traditional male and female stereotype. But that to me seems overly ambitious taken that most of us don’t even succeed in either one of those two categories even when some of us try. What seems to be much saner is to treat these options as a basket into which one puts what one can identify with – this can change as life goes on. Of course commitments have to be taken seriously and people should be encouraged to foster their skills, talents, work hard, help others, raise amazing kids and so on – but not to do all these things at the same time. 

The mistake of pushing woman to pursue corporate and top-manager careers at all costs definitely has to be avoided. Liberation is not to have to be like some of the most competitive, stressed, overworked and sometimes unscrupulous man. And it definitely isn't being like that, plus taking upon oneself to also tick the boxes of fitting the traditional women-roles. One should not be forbidden to achieve such things, but no one should be expected to accomplish such crazy feats which are not good for employers, persons, and kids in most cases. 

So, what needs to be done? Our communities need to provide more support and give more trust to woman whatever their goals and pursuits are. We need to provide girls with many options. Whatever they want to keep or reject from the traditional ‘woman’ package, and whatever else they won’t to buy into, they need to be encouraged to give it their best and figure out if it fits them.

As I said, getting rid of inequality is not taking on elements of the traditional male package or combining those elements with traditional female elements. This also calls for work-place reform: workplaces and environments shouldn’t be built to suit mostly guys, and then claim that they are women friendly if a woman can adjust and get along in them. That’s not equality, that’s expecting women to take on traditional male roles.

What’ better is to offer more employment flexibility: 4 and 6 hours positions, work from home options, opportunities to learn and stay engaged and connected while at home with children and return later, etc. There is nothing necessary in constantly prioritizing people in jobs who are 100% percent devoted to their workplace. While this might be good in short term profits for bigger companies in large economies, it surely isn’t good in the long term. Humans live in states partly to foster happiness and cooperation, not the operations of super-wealthy individuals owning companies. And surely not, that companies can make profits on employing unhappy, unsatisfied, and unhealthy, overstressed people.

Companies get away with these things too easily: they focus on profits, and that is said to be okay in capitalism. Nobody seems to notice that companies only get the best of the employees and state services and communities bear the burden of dealing with stressed, burnt out, disillusioned individuals. Capitalism is not a higher order system when compared with a society, and its demands should not be placed higher than those of communities of humans.

This proposal is in my opinion a modest feminist proposal with which everyone could get on board. It focuses on eradicating striking inequalities as well as their roots. It does not propose that people of either gender should rule or dominate the other gender, nor that one or the other gender is better. People of both genders show a striking variety of emotion, thought, taste, and preferences in lifestyles. Why is it that men can tolerate this in each other but not in women? Once we let go of the notion that there is one type of women it will also be easier for men: just treat women as people, as persons who might or might not like different things, who think this or that way. You can ask questions, find these things out, get to know them, talk with them and so on. Don’t stress about figuring out some supposedly existent female mystique, or getting right 'what women want'. It is as different as what we guys want. I guess you will find that you can even have female friends, because, guess what: they have thoughts, ideas, can be fun, and are interesting.

On the role, usefulness and value of the humanities

When one studies a subject in the humanities or works in any of its fields one can often encounter complaints from students and even from professionals that the humanities are useless and it does not make sense to learn or practice them.

Most of these complaints come from students in other fields. Accordingly, the source of their complaints is probably that they don't know what one could be working on in the humanities. They have no knowledge of what is studied, how it is studied, what one working as a professional in the humanities does, how this relates to society and whether it is useful or not. Their ignorance and intolerant attitudes can usually be dispelled quite easily if one spends a few minutes explaining what they don't know.

The problem is worse if one encounters serious grown ups voicing such concerns. A few years ago in one of his books for wider audiences Stephen Hawking pushed that the job philosophy did earlier is now entirely taken over by science and therefore we should stop doing philosophy. Hawking is surely a great physicist but we should treat his claims regarding other fields with due suspicion. Of course they can be right, it is just that he is not a professional on education, on teaching or on research, but on physics. Thus we should require a bit more detailed information and argument before we accept big - and superficial - words.

Another instance of condemning the humanities occurred just recently in Hungary. The leading party, Fidesz, is in a governing-frenzy. The country's economic situation is bad, Fidesz enjoys two-thirds majority in the parliament, that is they can pass any law they want, and accordingly they try to reform everything. The under-secretary responsible for higher education, István Klinghammer, voiced the view in an interview with him that "In today's world it is the natural sciences and the mechanical sciences are producing value. The humanities, and culture, are very important, but they do not produce values, they give people delight and  enjoyment."

Are such views justified?

There might be many reasons why they aren't. First, there is an organization trying to test whether teaching philosophy in primary schools helps kids develop better skills, needed both for science and humanities related subjects, but of course also beyond school subjects - such as when reading news, instructions, contracts. According to some studies on the effect of their classes critical thinking group-games, with philosophy related material, can lead to such development. They also recently argued for this publicly.

Another function philosophy and other fields of humanities serve is one of being information sources that can shape decision making well. This happens on three levels: first, we all learn the basics of literature, history, the structures found in society throughout school. This shapes both our identities, our notion of what sort of beings we are and what has happened to communities of humans before our birth. An adequate preparation of this sort can help people spot dangers and threats, both on the personal and the community level, thereby guarding them against making immoral judgments, accepting very bad choices from their representatives, and so on. Second, keeping track of good and bad decisions, of different types of states and their relations, on how people conducted themselves and what good and bad effect that had (on their psychology, personal happiness, groups, economy, etc.) is important, both in order to avoid similar pitfalls, and in order to get good ideas for solving problems. Third, many practical questions touch on the lives of individuals, on the lives of communities, nations, institutions. If these questions are to be answered well, they need to be informed by data about how the individuals and the groups behave, what they are, what they value. It is not much use to push certain developments at all costs, if it radically undermines the life-quality of those whom it should serve. This mechanism at large explains why it is a bad decision simply to push forward production rates, without taking into account their effects on our environment, or its effects on small and large scale societal changes.

Any type of humanistic discipline, but especially literature, has an additional virtue: it provides us with a special understanding of others. Understanding isn't used here either its emotional meaning (as to forgive), nor in its scientific meaning (as to give a good causal explanation of it). Understanding in this sense means that we can see the motives for which others act, why those motives are important for them, why they resist forms of rationality that rely on values or reasoning that are external to theirs, and why certain people and groups cannot handle some problems. This sort of understanding can serve the role of disabling our animal instincts to react aggressively and hostile to anyone unknown, or belonging to a different group. Understanding disables our ability to condemn other people for things that stem from their being different from us.
Fostering this form of understanding does not mean - and as clever democrats and liberals know it never did - that one should accept evil, harm bringing means or the condemnation of virtues. A good liberal will stand up and try to show that she or he is right, and act accordingly. But that does not mean that she takes away the right of others to try and defend their views. Bad and faulty views fall, since questions of morality, conduct and norms aren't relative within a group. Nor are they relative on a general human level. (In relation to what would they be relative in the latter case?)
In connection to understanding consider literature for a moment: when one reads a book like Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, the book takes about 10-16 hours to read, depending on your tempo, your imagination and level of tiredness. It tells the story of a single person - in the course of this it touches on other people, but all the way through, the protagonist is in the center. How often do you take the time and effort to pay attention to someone else for this amount of time? How often do you spend time on trying to figure out why and how it happened that one did just what one did? How often do you make so much effort to understand how someone's position in society makes them feel? Literature can enable us to do this.
Of course there are many different types of works, not all of them aim at giving us better understanding of others (some of them do not even aim at being entertaining, but for a good reason), some are just shallow forms of entertainment. There is not much wrong with fun, but those books are not the ones doing a lot of important work. The ones combining entertainment and enabling understanding are the great ones.

Also, a charge often brought against people studying humanities is, that many of them do not get jobs in their fields. Let us have a more careful look at this claim, and at why it is problematic.
1. What exactly does this mean? What percentage of people getting diplomas in humanities subjects do not get a job in their field? What's the percentage in law, in engineering, in economics, in management? One rarely sees such claims backed up by data.
2. Why is this a problem? A good training is not necessarily a vocational training. One can gain many skills, experiences and value without preparing for one given job. What sorts of skills can one obtain if one gets a decent humanities diploma with a decent result? A) one will be good at organizing large amounts of data quickly, B) learning new theoretical constructs quickly, C) use models to understand meaning, communication, social interactions better, D) communicate clearly.
3. If there are so many people getting humanities degrees that they cannot get jobs in their fields, why did the governments adopt a uniform and unrealistic support scheme for universities, where you get more money if you have more students? Obviously, this led the universities in every field to accept more and more people. Inevitably, the standards dropped. Since to do well in any field of the humanities appropriately one needs to be quite clever, it could easily be foreseen that the faculties will get lots of people who actually won't be able to do well in these subjects, and cannot get a job in this field with their diplomas. This is similar to the huge droup-out rates in informatics, maths or in other difficult fields.
4. Many people make the following mistake. They look at one or a few undergrad(s), someone who is at most average, or below that in his/her subject and conclude that the people studying in that field aren't studying anything useful, since they cannot give a clear account of what they will do, what their professors research, etc. Of course there is no field where, with the exception of a few outstanding students, young people could answer such questions well. They can give you textbook definitions. What can they tell you about the inner workings, the everyday, the many connections of their field to other social institutions? What can anyone without determination and aspiration tell you about such things? So, why not ask the best ones who have finished and have gotten jobs?
5. What exactly does it show that many people getting a diploma in the humanities do not settle for 'a job in the humanities'? It surely does not show that the overwhelming majority of them don't have the abilities, or knowledge to do so. There simply aren't too many jobs in the humanities. So, they work in all sorts of fields.
Where, you ask? At companies, at hospitals, for the government, as writers, and so on. Would it be better if all these jobs were filled by people with different diplomas? Is it so: the good and giving private sector would love to create more jobs, it is only that there wouldn't be enough people to fill them? No, this isn't the situation. And people with humanities diplomas are obviously capable of doing these jobs well.
But wait, couldn't they do these jobs just as well without their diploma? Well, it isn't sure that they could. Think of the following: people after leaving school with 16 or 18 aren't usually very reliable and disciplined. University gives them many skills in this. Even if at a humanities faculty you learn certain things not related to how a business is run, or a car constructed, you do not just read pulp. You have to exercise your capacities in many ways, figure out solutions to problems, prepare for exams, grasp difficult material, organize your life well and get through exams. All tests and experiences that strengthen the confidence and enable you to handle a job much better.

Also, let us not forget that most systems that are important in our lives, including moral, political, cultural systems (and by cultural I mean habits, forms of leisure and punishment, duties, all in all: forms of life) are not systems that emerge simply from the workings from underlying natural systems. Of course they are realized by such systems, but this does not mean that from the workings from the underlying systems we can understand the workings of the higher level systems. Anything in this world has an underlying natural realization. But this does not mean that the logic of a higher order system is always determined by the functioning of the lower one. Also, it does not mean that we can read off good suggestions on how to make a system work better by understanding natural systems.

Of course, no one clever is against cooperation between the humanities and sciences. Why would anyone be? Why wouldn't we use all the methods we have to discover interesting answers to interesting questions? The suggestion simply is, that the material of humanities is well worthwhile funding and studying, even working on it as a vocation, it can change lives, and thus it is valuable. At the same time when more and more people in the humanities understand how the sciences can be used to contribute to the pursuit of truth, the general public should understand why the humanities are doing just fine, doing good work and can solve many of their problems on their own. You just have to study them, before giving an opinion.

Plus: maybe it is not entirely fair to weigh this in, but most fields in humanities are still way more cheaper than research on sports cars, on far away galaxies, on new anti-depressants, on oil mining, etc. Many of these fields also receive large amounts of funding from the private sector. Although they contribute to economy and create jobs, taking into account their negative consequences - such as enforcing bad consumer choices, creating extra profit for already wealthy companies, pushing non-sustainable energy usage, etc. - is it sure that that's where government funding is best spent? Let's rather spend more on cancer research, Alzheimer's, good economic models, and research in ethics.