Let's talk about...male privilege in academia

Recently, this excellent post by blogger Barry Deutsch, describing examples of male privilege, has been making the rounds through social media. I thought I’d contribute my own version specific to academia. All of these examples come from either my personal experience, or an experience described to me in detail by a close friend.

For those who are still fuzzy on what ‘male privilege’ means, or who don’t have time to read the original post, it is simply the myriad ways in which society (in this case, academia) still confer advantages on men that aren’t similarly extended to women. Importantly, this does not mean that men have it ‘easy’, that they don’t have to struggle, or that they haven’t endured suffering and hardships. It just means that, as a group, they do not have to deal with specific set-backs that women face on a regular—if not daily—basis. So here is my list. You might have male privilege if:

1. When attending a gathering of professionals in your field, most or sometimes all of the people in the room are the same gender as you. You rarely notice or question this.
2. When speaking on a panel at a conference, you take twice the amount of time as other panelists (both younger; one female), even though you have received clear instructions about speech length and even though the moderator (female) is signaling you to stop.
3. When speaking at a conference about the history of your field, all of the prominent scientists you mention as contributing to the field are the same gender as you.
4. When speaking at a conference about excessive consumption that is contributing to environmental degradation, the examples you give are all explicitly associated with the opposite gender, even though global studies indicate that it is your gender that is associated with more wasteful consumption
5. You can make distasteful jokes that cause half of the graduate students and several of the junior faculty in your department to be intensely uncomfortable in your presence, and no one will call you out on this behavior for months, or even years.
6. You can undertake international research without being questioned about whether this is ‘too challenging’ for you, as you have young children at home.
7. You can expect that you will be compensated fairly according to the standards of your field, without facing a gender-specific pay imbalance.
8. If you decide that you would like to have children and also attain a high level of professional success, no one will question whether that is even possible.
9. If you do have children, you can expect your spouse to shoulder most of the sacrifices to her professional career while they are young.
10.  You never question whether the outfits you have selected for teaching or professional activities appear unprofessional, are too revealing, or too frumpy.
11.  You can expect that you will never be judged based on your appearance, but only on the quality of your ideas and contributions.
12.  In your field or department, there are many successful leaders of your same gender that serve as examples for you.
13.  Most of these leaders also have children and have successfully balanced career and family demands.
14. When any of the above are pointed out to you, you insist that women are actually more successful today because they make up the majority of undergraduate degree-holders, ignoring the fact that gender bias still exists in many scientific fields, and the still pitifully low percentage of female full professors at research institutions.

Any others?

As I mentioned when I first started this blog forum, I want to provide positive suggestions and actions each week, and not simply indulge in a bitch-fest. In that spirit, I believe that the first and most important way to combat male privilege is to be aware that it exists. And many (younger) men are! After many of the instances referred to above, male colleagues (in every case that I can think of, male colleagues under 40) have approached me to say, “Hey, what was up with that talk? Why didn’t he mention X, Y, and Z [prominent women who have contributed to the field]?”, or “How do you think we can get more women to take on leadership roles in this professional society?” I am so very grateful to all of the wonderful male and female colleagues who are willing to take a close, honest look at their own fields, acknowledge that gender bias and male privilege still exist, and begin conversations about how to address them. That is more than half the battle.

The problem, of course, is that this level of awareness still seems not to have percolated to the upper ranks of most departments and professional societies, where the leadership consists of predominantly white men over the age of 40. I am hopeful that change is coming, although it may be slow in arriving. In the mean time, I am hoping to do my part to expose male privilege and talk about it respectfully and honestly. This blog is a small step in that direction.