In 1992, Jacques Derrida gave Osvaldo Muñoz an interview which concluded with a traditional ‘Proust questionnaire’. If this text, meant for the daily El País, was in the end not published, this is perhaps because Derrida deemed it a bit too revealing:

What are the depths of misery for you?: To lose my memory.

Where would you like to live?: In a place to which I can always return, in other words from which I can leave.

For what fault do you have the most indulgence?: Keeping a secret which one should not keep.

Favourite hero in a novel: Bartleby.

Your favourite heroines in real life?: I’m keeping that a secret.

Your favourite quality in a man?: To be able to confess that he is afraid.

Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought.

Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.

Your favourite occupation: Listening.

Who would you like to have been?: Another who would remember me a bit.

My main character trait?: A certain lack of seriousness.

My dream of happiness?: To continue dreaming.

What would be my greatest misfortune?: Dying after the people I love.

What I would like to be: A poet.

What I hate more than anything?: Complacency and vulgarity.

The reform I most admire: Everything to do with the difference between the sexes.

The natural gift I would like to have: Musical genius.

How I would like to die: Taken completely by surprise.

My motto: Prefer to say yes.

[From Derrida: A Biography, p. 418]

One could say many things about this. But for now, I mainly want to observe that I am struck by the open sexism of admiring “thought” as a woman’s virtue while singling out “vulnerability” (in essence) as his preferred “quality in a man.” Of course, one of Peeters’ interviewees remarks that “In spite of his love of women and his closeness to feminism, he still had a bit of a misogynistic side, like many men of his generation.”

I want here to present some quick graphs that suggest the changing gender dynamics within American anthropology. This first graph shows the production of new doctorates since the 60s. It is commonly thought in the field that there has been something of a “feminization” of anthropology over the past few decades, and as we can see here, the number of doctorates awarded to women (in blue) has indeed been greater than the number of doctorates awarded to men (red) since 1992. We can see here that males were demographically dominant in the production of doctorates until 1984, after which there were eight years of approximate equality (where the two lines overlap) followed by divergence.

Important to note, it seems to me, is that although it’s true that the relative place of males and females has indeed been inverted, the overall picture here is that the two lines have risen together fairly regularly. Quite often, especially in the last fifteen years, we can see that little shifts correlate across genders, as in the little drops in 2001 and 2005. And the demographic expansion of the field in general is of a far greater demographic magnitude than the shift in gender balance. In 2007, we awarded more than five times the number of new doctorates as in 1966 (519 vs. 98) — a fact whose significance I will come back to later. But to get a better sense of changing gender ratios, consider a graph of women as a percentage of the total pool of doctoral recipients.

Since this is a graph of women as a percentage of all PhDs awarded, the 50% mark signifies the point of gender balance. As we can see, in the 1960s women comprised a fairly small minority of new doctorates, but grew fairly steadily through the 1970s, hovering around parity during the 1980s as I said above, and now comprising between 55%-60% of new anthropologists. This definitely constitutes a majority, but a far from overwhelming one. Women have not become as demographically dominant as men once were; if anything, the proportion of women among new anthropologsts may even be converging on some sort of rough slightly-majority equilibrium.

However, when we look not at doctorates awarded but at total graduate enrollments (many or most of which are at the Master’s level), we see that the gender gap has in fact been continuing to widen fairly steadily.

As above, there are some overall similarities in the graphs, some similar local maxima, but it is very clear that the number of men enrolled has been falling slightly since 1995, while the number of women enrolled has continued to increase. Compared with the previous graph, which you’ll recall dealt with doctorates awarded, this seems to suggest that there are a lot of women graduate students who don’t end up with PhDs. Or, put differently, there’s greater gender parity by the end of doctoral education than there is at the beginning stages of graduate programs. As we know, people who get doctorates have to pass through the earlier stages of graduate education. If there are proportionately more men at the later stages, that has to mean that women are disproportionately being screened out along the way.

Worth noticing, in passing, is that if we look slightly farther back into the 1970s, we can see that women as a fraction of total graduate enrollments passed the 50% mark in 1977:

So women attain parity in overall graduate enrollments in 1977, while as we saw in the first graph above, women first attained parity as recipients of anthropology doctorates in 1984. This seven-year difference is an interesting time gap because it is just what one would predict if one expected it to take about seven years on average to get a anthropology Ph.D from the start of one’s enrollment in grad school. In other words, we can see the likelihood that gender parity was reached around the time of the 1977 grad cohort, but that it then took seven years or so for this cohort to graduate.

I do have some further graphs of continuing gender imbalance in the discipline, alas. Take a look at the gender balance across different levels of degree recipients (based on degrees issued in a given year, not enrollments).

Again, the 50% line marks the point of gender parity. The top line (orange) indicates the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women; the middle line indicates the percentage of master’s, and the bottom line (yellow) indicates doctorates. Insofar as each curve here is rising, we see again that the fraction of women in the discipline has continued to increase at all levels for a long time. But we can learn two new things here.

First, on the down side, the basic demographic structure of our field has preserved a kind of masculine bias for decades — indeed, since the start of the data. In other words, men have always been increasingly well-represented the higher up you go in anthropological education. This shows again, and more clearly than above, that women have always been, one way or another, disproportionately weeded out of the ranks of new anthropologists.

Second, on the positive side, the curves do seem to be converging. The difference between the fraction of women who get bachelor’s degrees and the fraction of women who get doctorates is decreasing. My sense from this graph is that convergence was happening much more markedly through the 1980s, while since then there has been more of a steady state. (See how the curves are roughly parallel in the right-hand part of the graph? That’s what I have in mind.) This means that this demographic dominance is smaller than it used to be. A double conclusion suggests itself: while men are no longer demographically dominant, and are even a minority (remarkably so at the undergraduate level, where women receive nearly 70% of anthropology degrees), there are still gendered principles of selection at work in the field.

These lingering gender dynamics will not, of course, be a major surprise to anyone. But it’s good to have some statistical confirmation of what is intuitively viewed — somewhat paradoxically — as both an increasing feminization of anthropology and an ongoing masculine bias. That said, I would stand by my earlier remark that the most demographically striking thing here is still the overall population growth of anthropology, hundreds of percent over the decades. The effects of growth on disciplinary social dynamics are probably vast and worth much further exploration. This demographic expansion seems linked to a number of fairly important intellectual changes in the field: there are a lot more little subfields and subspecialties than there used to be; there are a lot more AAA sections than there were when the discipline was smaller and probably more socially homogenous; and there is currently perhaps less of a shared set of ongoing debates or even of a shared theoretical canon. Some professors say they don’t really know what makes something cultural anthropology anymore, and have no further sense of a shared disciplinary endeavor; old-timers sometimes conjure the nostalgic image of an earlier, pre-World-War-II era when the discipline was small enough for everyone to know everyone else. All of these, I would point out, are the subjective or experiential correlates of the objective fact of decades of vast disciplinary growth.

I do have some additional data on gender balance in other social science fields, but I’ll have to postpone that momentarily because I promised to start blogging about comparative university neoliberalisms…

It’s quite a long piece, this confession. But it has a recurring image that seems deeply suggestive: the male husband polishing the woman president’s shoes.

If they could see me now. I am sitting on the floor of the president’s house, polishing the president’s shoes for her. My wife is now a lot busier than I am, and has a sizeable staff. Her importance on and off campus is a lot greater than mine, so I suppose it makes sense that I polish the presidential shoes – which are smaller and easier to polish than my own shoes (which rarely need to be shiny). I have sometimes seen people polish the shoes of other people, but only when they were paid for it. And the polishers were always male, as were the polishees. Shoe-polishing used to occur in railroad stations, or in old-fashioned barber shops that were bastions of maleness – quiet places, with discreet sounds of snipping and stropping of razors, with a ballgame on the radio, and smells of witch hazel, shaving lather, and shoe polish. So here I sit polishing a woman’s shoes and not even getting paid for it.

So when he polishes shoes, it seems, he finds himself in a moment of gendered abjection. He’s down on the floor, not even getting paid, polishing shoes which are symbols of power and sometimes sexuality and are themselves down on the ground, protecting the foot from the grime of the world; he’s in a position of no (relative) importance on campus so it’s pragmatically sensible for him to devote his time to polishing the shoes, for him to be doing this traditionally feminine work of the care of the working spouse’s appearance.

Alongside the structural sexism of this whole outlook, there’s something slightly poignant about the fact that what this man has to do is hard for him and takes re-learning and is symbolically dissonant for him. The echoes of his 50s upbringing are loud, as if he’s judging his life against the gender norms of the past even as he knows the world has changed, gender norms have blurred, roles have reversed. He feels like he’s just not completely ready for the task of taking care of the household while his wife works long presidential days. He seems happiest when he gets to take care of the car, when he drives his wife around, when he cooks dinner.

As boys, most men of my generation never learned to do “girl things”. As a consequence we are not very good at the practical or aesthetic details of maintaining an elegant home, or paying attention to all the important minutiae that underlie the public lives of presidents and their spouses. Things like making sure the silver is polished, as well as the shoes, and checking that napkins and table cloths are ironed and matching. Before her dinner parties I can recall my Mum putting out ashtrays and placing cigarettes in elegant silver receptacles from which smokers (a majority back in those days) would extract their smokes. The most she expected me to do was tidy up my own room. Surveys have shown that the only task husbands do almost universally is taking out the trash. In recent decades some of us also learned to do cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the kids, etc., but we reminded many people of the chimpanzee who typed out a novel — nobody expected us to do such things well, and it was remarkable if we could do them at all.

And he seems sad that some things he might be doing – making the house elegant, polishing the silver, doing the ashtrays – are things that boys just weren’t taught. Masculinity here is a practical predicament. Masculinity here is not just a gender identity but a set of quotidian competences and another set of lacking competences, of practical incapacities. Gender as point of pride, as product of socialization, as disability, as occasion for solidarity with other men who like to work on cars. Gender would seem to be a contradictory situation that causes many things to happen at once. He seems half sad that he can’t do some things and half accepting, with an almost traumatized calmness, that he probably won’t do and wouldn’t entirely be expected to do women’s work that still, in the crevices of the language of this text, seems to appear to him as abject.

Structure here is the man’s incapacity to see shoe-shining as not abject. Structure is this unexplained incapacity to shift contexts. Since shoeshining used to be something just done among men, accepted as an odd form of masculine care labor a bit like a pedicure. Shoeshining started to feel bad to him when it was an uncompensated service to a woman.

Someone in the comments section of the article asked if she (I think she) could drop her shoes off outside the man’s office door. But she was joking.

Jokes show us that something real is at stake.

Masculine consciousness here is so deeply about shame and managing shame. As if what underlay this whole system of masculine values was a systemic fear of women and a phobic hatred of being in their shoes. Over which humanistic values are overlaid, like upholstery for a lethal structure.

Incidentally, if you count, this comes to 18 males (prof included) and 23 females (TA included), i.e., 44% male and 56% female. The “Me” is yours truly, and the “?” is someone who may or may not have been sitting across from me, but was masked, in any event, by someone else’s head. In any event, the “objective” gender balance isn’t that far from even.

We see here, first and foremost, a striking emergence of same-sex spatial blocs (colored lavender): a large male block is in the bottom right corner, while a large female bloc is in the upper left. Elsewhere in the room, the seating was more mixed by gender.

Why might we see this pattern? Is it because certain academics simply prefer to sit beside people of the same sex? Surely many academics are conscious of gender and sexuality in public settings, and in choosing who to associate with among strangers. This was the first day of class, after all.

Or we could consider a more plausible hypothesis: does this pattern emerge because academics sit near people they know or are friends with? Certainly, when I enter a public space, I try to sit with my friends, and in this case I actually came in with friends. On this hypothesis, we might observe gendered spatial arrangement as a result of certain academics preferentially developing same-sex friendships. Such a pattern has been around in anthro grad school since the 60s and 70s, according to Susan Philips, and I think it continues today, insofar as many academic friendships are shaped by long-lasting sexual competition or collaboration, difference or solidarity, sexual desire or disinterest…

Also, we have to consider the extent to which gender is merely the expression of other forms of social organization. In this room there was a very salient, collectively recognized difference between the Anthropology Department doctoral students and the Social Science Master’s students (MAPSS). For instance, the bloc of males in the bottom right was all doctoral students, if I recall correctly. We can’t really analyze this here, for lack of knowledge of prior relationships in the room, but it’s interesting that space gets structured into blocs without anyone having a conscious will to create such structures. That a general spatial organization can emerge from a number of little personal decisions about who to be proximate with.

Gender in this space did not seem difficult to decode, on a crude level. I read it off from footware, from hats, from coats, from the length and shape of their hair, the tone and pitch of their voices. People seemed content to perform their genders in unambiguous fashion. I should emphasize: I’m not saying that “M” or “F” exhausts what there is to say about gender; it’s a crude and simplistic categorization and it needs to be generally resisted. But the sad fact is: this crude binary categorization captures real patterns in the social world.

For instance: the symbolically central space, of course, was occupied by the male professor, the “head” of the table (colored green). In an odd visual reflection of this spatialization of male authority, the foot of the table was occupied by a male student too. That guy happens to be a friend of mine, and he has long had a habit of sitting in that seat in this particular room. I don’t know if gender has much to do with that habit.

Perhaps, then, there’s no gendered pattern to read in this reflection, just contingency into which observers can project their own predetermined symbolic structures; perhaps it’s a mistake to read symbolic structure directly out of the empirical circumstances, as I’m doing; perhaps the real gendered dynamics of the room have little to do with the seating chart. Perhaps I’m ascribing structure that is meaningless to the participants (except me). Certainly, it would be hard to detect a direct link between participants’ genders and the academic conversation that subsequently took place.

The problem with analyzing gender in academia is an inescapable tension between gender as a hermeneutic that one uses to ascribe order to an indeterminate social situation, and gender as a deep structure that brings prior order to the world in unconscious and unnoticeable ways. Gender is a thing one invokes contingently, perhaps wrongly, in making sense of the social world; but it’s simultaneously what determines and regulates that world prior to anyone’s perception or action.

Feeling silly and reflexive, I said at the beginning of class when we went around: “I work on anthropology of universities. This week I’m especially interested in the gendered organization of academic discourse.”

People laughed.

Apparently the thought of social determination and gender provokes laughter. The only question is: is it the laughter of recognition or the laughter of disavowal?

But to avoid making claims based purely on the hazardous results of personal experience, let me report the following.

Today I was in the first meeting of a seminar, an anthropology seminar on biopower, taught by a woman professor who’s deeply interested in Foucault and the way that social domination works through regimes of knowledge and that social orders are discursively constituted. She told us about the syllabus and then we read two articles in class, discussing each in turn, one by Habermas, one by Foucault. She led discussion quite actively, summarizing students’ comments and proposing new questions to the room at large, generally speaking herself before and after each student remark.

Struck by the initial masculine domination of the conversation, which began when we started to discuss Habermas, I began to take notes on the gender distribution of student speakers in the seminar. It was a very large seminar, 35 people or so; unfortunately I don’t know the gender ratio in the room, but my guess would be that there were somewhat more females than males. A sequence of the (apparent) genders of speakers runs as follows, in the order in which they spoke:

First article:
M (F*) M M M M F** M M F M F F F

Second article:
M F M F F M M F F F F M F F F M F

* First female speaker laughed at a certain point in the discussion, and the teacher asked her if she wanted to say something, but she declined.

** The second female speaker, and the first female speaker to make a substantial comment, was responding to a question that happened to be about Habermas’s view of feminism as a social movement. It struck me as either a depressing irony, or else an even more depressing symptom of what topics women felt more empowered to address, that the first woman speaker chose to speak on a topic specifically dealing with the women’s movement.

Brief analysis: In the discussion of the first article, there are 8 male and 5 female speakers (not counting the first, declined female utterance), the male speakers entirely dominating the beginning of discussion and the female speakers only entering gradually into classroom discourse. In the second discussion, there are 6 male and 11 female speakers, and the gender distribution over time is much more even, although again the male speakers are very slightly clustered towards the beginning. However, while male speakers outnumber female speakers in the first conversation, female speakers drastically outnumber male speakers in the second instance.

So it certainly isn’t the case that this was a totally male-dominated discussion. In fact, of 30 turns at talk (ignoring F* because it was a declined turn, and some other peripheral utterances — jokes and interjections — which I didn’t record), 14 were by males, i.e., 46.6%.But it’s really unlikely that, in a conversation where males are talking about half the time, they’re going to randomly happen to make the first five consecutive comments. In fact, the probability of that happening randomly, if gender isn’t a factor, is only 2.1%.

So, voilà, debatable but suggestive statistical evidence that gender affects turn sequencing in academic seminar conversations. A friend of mine suggests that a much larger dataset for this research might be the lecture recordings for MIT’s Open Courseware. I normally have no inclination (and certainly have no training) in quantitative research, but if anyone wants to collaborate…

and I should be commenting on the gendered phenomenology and experience of these conversations, and on reasons why people talk when they talk. thoughts on that?