Re-thinking gender role assignment

This article was originally a response to an article written on the website of the Academia Vitae, a university in Deventer, The Netherlands, that I am connected to somehow. The original text the response was aimed at discusses the differences between the number of men versus women in high positions in society. And the reasons behind that. That text was in my view very old fashioned and disregarded new ways of thinking about gender and the way society handles gender role assignment. It simply used the old argument of the man-hunter versus the woman-carer as an evolutionary explanation for male-female inequality as it is today. In my view a very simplistic approach to the situation. The original text can be found here.

This was my response:

Hello gentlemen,

The discussion is very interesting but also very incomplete. It’s a gender discussion that needs a broader view than the al so typical but rather underdevellopped gender dichotomy that our society is build on.
When we dive in the gender subject, we need to study Judith Butler’s publications like ‘Gender Trouble’. (Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.)

If we study Butler’s views and findings we will start to understand that apart from the biological gender dichotomy current society knows, this society is evolving into a gender continuum based society. In that society traditional male and female gender roles are for a large part of society no longer attached to the male or female born gender. They are roles, nothing more!

This obviously means that we can expect that the male bastion in many professions will deteriorate. Examples are there for anyone to observe. For instance in 2007 the number of women law students in the Netherlands was - for the first time in history - larger than the number of male students.

Another example is even more explicit. The way society handles queer people (or transgenders or transsexuals for that matter) is slowly changing. Much like it changed it’s attitude against homosexuals and lesbians over the last forty years. We can expect that the general acceptance of people living in between genders or switching gender will increase over time. That said, we will also experience emancipated transgenders in public office and high standing positions all through society. This is already the case in parts of the US and in the US academic world. Frontrunners like Ann Lawrence, Deirdre McCloskey, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein and many others show that gender diversity does not have to be a blocking issue for social, political, scientific and commercial positions that people might reach.

My contribution to this discussion is that in my view, based on historic evoloution on emancipation and gender thinking over the last decades, we will in the coming century experience a slow but sure downfall of traditional gender role assigments. It will take time, but evolutions in thinking usually do. But I also observe that in some asects the European thinking on this issue is way behind that in the USA.

For me as a human being I have come to realize (the hard way) that changing my gender did in this era mean accepting social losses. But it also showed me that changing gender and thus experiencing living in the other gender than the one I was born in, has given me a lot of insight in how human we humans are. It certainly did no block me intellectually or professionally. On the contrary.

So, my dear gentlemen, changing views on gender is a matter of time and experience. Next generations will be much wiser on this than our generation is today.

Kind regards,

Alice

If I receive any reaction on the discussion I will publish that here with my comments included. Looking at the original paper I have a strong feeling that this is another proof of the backlog in gender thinking that we still have in Europe and The Netherlands compared to the more mature gender thinkers in the U.S..

Alice © 2008