Here I am…. You get the parts of me you like and also the parts that make you uncomfortable. You have to understand that other people’s comfort is no longer my job. I am no longer a flight attendant.
Patricia Ireland
In the first chapter of Intuition Pumps, the philosopher Daniel Dennett makes the point that making, acknowledging and exploring mistakes is “the key to making progress”. In Dennett’s view a good mistake is one that can “light the way for everybody”.
So, in that spirit I want to acknowledge and explore one of my recent mistakes. A few days ago, Florentina Taylor tweeted this:
Just in case you didn’t know, I have a new book out and the picture on the right is a list of those whose contributions I have acknowledged. Florentina’s point was that I had only acknowledged the contributions of two women amongst a sea of men. This was, to her mind, the publishing equivalent of an all male panel at a conference. My first reaction was to feel a bit defensive. I mean, was it really my fault that fewer women had directly contributed to the book? Ought I to have evened up the gender balance as an act of positive discrimination?
This provoked a bit of soul-searching. In my mind, I am a feminist. I’ve read the Female Eunuch; I’ve even read Caitlin Moran. No mere patriarchal apparatchik, me. When I read Summer Turner’s post on being a ‘feminist and a teacher I wanted to stand up and applaud: this, I said to myself, is exactly the sort of point which needs making. So why have I never said it?
I asked my wife whether she thought I was at fault. She suggested that possibly my online persona is offputtingly ‘male’ and as such I tend to default to interactions with other men. Maybe my gender generates its own echo chamber?
Di Leed provided a response to my question about balance:
She’s right. And the fact that I’d omitted so many women who might potentially have appeared in my acknowledgements wasn’t due to an overtly sexist decision to marginalise or exclude female voices, it was the product of my limited viewpoint; I hadn’t even had the conversations which might have enriched and extended my thinking. Mea culpa. The irony that I’ve written a book about the need to challenge one’s biases does not escape me.
A much valued female colleague wrote to me to say how saddened she felt by the status quo and my place within it. She ended with these words: “I simply value you too much to let this one go because I would like you to think about your daughters. They will live in this world we build every day with our biases.”
I don’t want them to live in a world where they have to work twice as hard and be twice as clever to be acknowledged. I want to be part of the solution rather than building a wall around my thoughts and pulling up the drawbridge behind me, which is why I’m writing this. I need to listen a little a lot harder to the voices I struggle to hear.
All great stuff. So what are you going to do about it?
This is about awareness, right? I’m going to strive to be more aware.
Plus, it’s a bit late to rewrite the book – you’ll have to wait for the next one 😉
I have made constructive feedback on several occasions but you don’t respond to my thoughts. I just want some advice about how to set up a blog like yours. I have been a teacher for 20 years and I would like to explore different avenues.
Sorry Mark – I do try to respond. But according to wordpress, this is the first time you’ve left a comment on my site. Are you sure it’s me you’ve been writing to?
This advice on education blogging is pretty comprehensive: https://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/advice-for-education-bloggers/
Wow, honest post David. When I was a child my mum did say I’d need to work harder than any man for anything, I just thought; “OK, as long as there are no laws stopping me just because I’m a girl… who’s afraid of proving themselves?”
Mark; I’ve been using a free evernote account to keep track of comments I make online. This is particularly helpful for blog writing because on each note you can include a link to the original so, if you reference an idea in a post a few weeks later its just a quick evernote search and you have the link (without scrambling in your mind asking ‘which post was that?’ ‘who do I need to credit?’).
I’m fairly new on this scene and I’m here from a student perspective rather than a teacher perspective, but must say that there is something important about teachers blogging -with stage names or just first name as David’s link mentions. Good luck with yours Mark and feel free to reach out to me (link via my name above) if you’re needing help. I’ll be at the Festival of Education at Wellington the next days then back to normal from Monday.
What other biases are you neglecting? Are people of colour and LGBT views adequately represented in your work? After all, they hardly get a look-in. Well, maybe in the Guardian, the BBC and the Independent. But surely it’s more important to give everyone a voice than to worry overmuch about what they say.
What about some cognitive training. Try positive affirmative action for a while 🙂 Good luck!
What an honest post! I think that we are all guilty of ‘in-group’ mentality however the truth is that pockets of education are affected differently. Thus primary teaching is very much dominated by women and has struggled to diversify or even acknowledge the voices or different perspectives. Awareness is the first step, the next is to seek out the ‘other’ and listen to what they have to say. The fact that you even tried to take on board what was said even though it is a difficult (adopting and maintaining a defensive stance is far easier!) is a good example to us all.
I think I first became aware of how deeply embedded gender bias can be when I talked to Margaret Maden (now a Professor at Oxford University Department of Education) when she was Director of Education in Warwickshire, my LEA, from the late Eighties into the early Nineties. Margaret would speak, usually in private and often very amusingly, about the prejudice she had encountered all the way up the ladder. That’s a familiar story in many ways, but as I sat by her at a dinner once, I ventured to try to explain that people of my generation were brought up during a time when gender stereotypes were taken for granted. As I spoke I realised that my words, which seemed reasonable enough when I formed them in my mind, actually sounded crass when they emerged, and sure enough she just smiled and said, ‘So you want us to say it’s OK then?’
I realised, in fact, that by saying what I did I was being exactly like the people, also of my generation, who excuse their racism in the same way — or (perish the thought) the ones who, confronted with their past sexual crimes, say, ‘It was a different world then’.
Some years after that, I sat as a lay member of a panel which interviewed people wanting to be magistrates. It was chaired by a wise man (and yes, we did have women members too) who would ask every candidate, ‘Do you have any prejudices?’
He would always challenge anyone who claimed not to have them, because his belief was that we all have prejudices, but what’s essential is that we identify them, confront them and work to ensure that our speech, actions and attitudes are not affected by them.
[…] more experienced and productive candidates. I’m as guilty of this as anyone as I explored in this post. It’s certainly not the case that I deliberately favour male contributors, but it may well be […]
I am not sure how someone thinks your online presence is male orientated? What does that mean? There are lots of female voices in educational sites and in fact when I read stuff I generally don’t think about the gender behind the site.
I have heard staff room chat about the feminisation of education – is this not an example of reacting to a minority voice about a bit of a non issue? The readers needs a greater sense of perspective, I think. Why change your delivery and style when education is a profession where the female voice is forever hardhat every level.