Basically, there are two kinds of intelligent people in the world, men and women. When one of these groups has some activity or practice exclusively to themselves, we can’t see what happens when the other group starts into it, too. In “Junior”, Arnold Swarzenegger gets pregnant. The men who are involved in this strange happening try to keep Emma Thompson from knowing about it. When she finds out, she is quite angry. She says that women don’t have much but by heaven, birthing is theirs and theirs exclusively and things should stay that way.
But, Emma, unless men also give birth, we only know birthing from a woman’s angle. The Australian professor and author Dale Spender felt the same way about the several academic areas in which there are too many men and too few women. In Men’s Studies Modified, she takes on such areas as history and economics and shows the prevailing masculine atmosphere and what is happening to it as more and more women get involved.
Spender’s book “The Writing or the Sex” often comes to my mind. In it, she explores three different ideas:
- Writing and speaking are very basic activities for women
- Authoring was a tough area for women to break into
- Men and women have unequal shares of talk time
Spender asserts that writing and speaking are as fundamental to women worldwide as athletics are to men. If you look at the division of newscasts and web pages on the news, you find a big section on sports. True, sports are very important to many women but they seem really fundamental to men. They provide the opportunity to move and to win.
Spender presents examples of women authors in western countries who wrote at a time when doing so was questionable so they used masculine pen names. Some male critics read their published work and praised it as very good. A few of the authors then revealed that they were women. At that point, the male critics re-examined the writings and suddenly found flaws in them that had not been noticed earlier. To me, such examples are embarrassing although they happened 100 years or more before I was born.
Finally Spender reports on research she conducted. She measured the portion of a conversation in which the man talked and the portion in which the woman talked. She found that on average, the men had about 2/3 of the talk time and women had 1/3. She reports with some exasperation that even after she made this discovery, she herself still tended to speak in 1/3 of her conversational time and men spoke for 2/3 of the time.
I have observed similar proportions after reading Spender. I have wondered if that is some kind of natural fraction. Maybe women’s comments tend to be twice as weighty and noteworthy as men’s. Maybe it takes men twice as many words to hold up their end.
