My recent post about feminism and Hillary Clinton was probably a bit obscure. Certainly I think it’s sad that the public accepts the claim that Clinton’s female supporters whining about her loss is feminism but the reason I think it’s worthy of attention is that it’s part of a larger trend: the confusion of (simplistic) emotional sympathy for women with feminism. Now in a certain sense one might be able to identify feminism with concern for women as a class but it’s the confusion of feminism with sympathy for individuals as women that I think is so sad and misguided. In the abstract this distinction may seem quite subtle, even pointless, but a few quick examples should make it clear that there is an important difference between the two attitudes.

Whether or not US women are blocked or discouraged from achieving high political office is certainly a valid feminist concern. After all the existence of a systemic bias against voting for a woman to be president is a harm to woman as a class. On the other hand strong support of a particular candidate because she is a woman and as such you identify/sympathize with her is not a feminist issue. It’s just another example of the same type of sexism women fought so hard to eliminate in the workplace¹. This isn’t to say there is no acceptable reason to vote for a female candidate because of her gender; you might think this was the only/best way to overcome anti-female bias. However, it’s pretty clear that most of the women trying to suggest Hillary’s loss is the result of rampant gender discrimination² aren’t doing so because they thought out the issue in the abstract and came to the conclusion that this was the most effective way to advance the cause of equality. After all if this was the result of that kind of strategic thinking about the aims of women as a group you would think they would find plenty of reasons not to publicly tie gender equity to Hillary Clinton³ or even decide that the interests of racial equality outweighed those of gender equality here. Rather, these women are driven by their empathetic sympathy for Hillary as another woman (enhanced by the perception of gender based slights in the campaign) and have let that distract them from any interest they may have had in really achieving equity for women as a class.

Another good example is the attitude of women in various graduate programs toward the admission of women and affirmative action for women. Now one might be able to put together some pretty reasonable arguments justifying offering women special incentives to enter math and science programs but I suspect the best such arguments would all direct our resources toward the college years and below where the gender gap gets created. Yet the strongest support is often for programs that offer female graduate students priority in admissions, cash incentives or special mentoring programs despite the fact that the primary effect of these expenditures is probably on the choice of school of female graduate students. If the support for these programs really resulted from a desire to achieve gender equity you would at least expect the question of efficacy to be of supreme interest and any support of these programs to be openly conditioned on empirical support for their efficacy. However, it is quite evident that these programs enjoy strong emotional support prior to any thought or analysis about their larger effects on society’s attitude toward women.

It seems evident that the real psychological motivation behind the support for these programs is simple sympathy and identification. No one sat down and decided to support these programs because they thought they would accomplish some goal. They supported them because they felt emotional empathy towards women so they want to support women. In other words it’s the emotional pull of group allegiance/support that motivates these policies not rational analysis of their likely effect. If you are still skeptical consider the different way we treat the (assumed) subtle social pressure discouraging women from entering certain fields from that pressuring them into entering other fields. In other words why don’t we take measures to counteract the social forces pushing women into a traditional field like teaching or nursing. If our interest was in undoing the sexist stereotypes that society has packed into girls then we should be equally diligent in discouraging women from being nurses, teachers or primary care givers as we are in encouraging them to enter traditionally male fields. On the other hand if people were really just reacting to a vague feeling of sympathy it makes perfect sense why they would only offer women encouragements.

Maybe I’m mistaken but my strong sense is that feminism used to be something much more noble, even if sometimes silly and misguided. People would be genuinely troubled about engaging in traditional feminine roles since they saw that encouragement could perpetuate stereotypes just as much as discouragement. However, women (and men) eventually decided they weren’t really interested in rejecting most of our gender stereotypes and assumptions and the visible aspects of feminism decayed into mere group affinity and sympathy for women. In a future post I will explain why I think this decayed version of feminism does so much harm to the cause of gender equity but enough blogging for today.