A new post -- 7 years later + discussion of gender equality

It's been a long time since I posted on this blog. I've been living in China and it's possible I'll go back there again sometime. Not that I couldn't have posted from China, but being in a different country suddenly pulls you out of the cycle of reading and watching political news. I became focused on other challenges and forgot about this little corner of the web for seven years.

Now I'm here again with another update. The topic today is gender equality.

Obviously I'm talking about this in the normative sense. What standards are acceptable as equal standards between genders in social and relationship settings? Here, 'relationship' means any sort of association between two people who know each other and expect continued interaction.

The first, and strictest type of equality is gender blindness. In this arrangement, people simply act as if there is a single gender, and that all people are part of that gender. This is ideal for most social situations and professional relationship settings, especially the workplace. The principal advantage of this strategy is its simplicity. 

One strategy to enforce gender blindness in action is to actually hide peoples' genders. HR that follows this standard should even go so far as to hide applicants' names when reviewing applications to avoid gender bias. This can of course easily be done online as well, although in practice many websites make genders public.

But when genders can't be hidden, people who report themselves to be gender blind will inevitably make gender-biased decisions. They literally can't help themselves. Their subconscious sees people as different, and it isn't just because what they are taught in school or by their parents, so society as a whole can't correct this problem with half-baked solutions.

An interesting thing to note here is that the mere practice of assigning different names to different genders is itself a violation of gender blindness which promotes inequality.

A second strategy is gender-based roles. Each gender has its own set of social and relationship expectations. Women must be coy. Men must be gentlemen. Gay women must be tomboys. Gay men must be boisterous. Obviously this isn't reality... unless you turn on the television. This strategy is not the continuing cause of the workplace today. Sure, statistically there is a lot of evidence that workplaces are unequal, but that isn't because these roles are overtly pushed. Rather, the people involved simply don't live up to their words.


But interestingly, gender-based roles are still overtly practiced in many contexts outside education and the workplace. Some gender-based roles are actually connected to biological necessities. A man can't bear a child, for example. For the most part, however, it is in the context of romantic relationships and courtship that rituals with different gender-role expectations are consciously accepted and practiced, albeit without any direct biological basis (at this point 'men are from Mars' arguments have been thoroughly refuted). And just as in any other walk of life, alongside these consciously practiced gender-roles are the many unconscious ways in which different genders behave differently, and unfortunately are in the end treated unequally.

This tendency ought to be criticized, not simply because there is no biological basis for it but because some of the participants may not truly prefer to engage in some of these rituals in the prescribed way. Few would take offense to a man holding a door for a woman, or a man giving flowers, a man taking the initiative, a man being the one to propose. Kudos also to the women who are willing to hold the door for their man, take the initiative, etc. Society generally applauds them for taking on these extra obligations. But what about the men who don't want to be obligated in this way? A man who doesn't want to propose is no worse than a woman who doesn't want to shave.

The truth is all of those rituals and obligations are holdovers from the times of vast gender inequality. They are connected to entire social orders that don't exist anymore. They continue to perpetuate and maintain a residual inequality that is difficult to perceive directly. It may not be clear at this moment, but one day it will be.

What would a relationship be like absent these rituals? Generally, the objections to the feasibility of this lifestyle are all criticisms of feasibility centered on the act of initiative. Perhaps the man and the woman would become stuck at an impasse? Actually no, because by de-ritualizing the action it becomes more spontaneous and natural. If a man and woman can discuss the possibility of dating in a casual way, then there is no longer any special import attached to the "woman asking". The nature of the dialog becomes more relaxed, the questions asked are no longer heavy with obligation, and even the significance of the status of dating itself changes. When the act of ritual asking is abolished, the status loses its rigidity and both parties are more able to connect to their emotional inner-self.

This is not an argument against romance any more than an argument against religion is an argument against ethics. On the contrary, romance itself is smothered by the duties of relationship. If a person in a relationship acts again and again according to perceived duties, it makes it difficult for both people in the relationship to develop real and true feelings. Indeed, all of those rituals are just a sham designed to entice and trick people who are miserable together to stay together.