“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”
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PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)
Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it.
(via iamayoungfeminist)
This. I’m a female and I’ve been accused of being “filthy” every time I life with a male partner, that I leave a mess, I dirty the house, I have a hoarding disorder, I never clean up, he has to be my maid. To me it always feels like gaslighting because I know I always clean up after myself. And to be honest, these complaining male partners were not so clean themselves.
The thing is, I have photographs of my place when I live alone. I have lived with plenty of women in share house/roommate situations and they never had this problem. In all such living arrangements everything was very organised and clean.
I realised when women and men inhabit the same space and there is an equal share of cleaning, society and men tend to view this arrangement as “the man picking up after the woman, the woman slacking.” If the woman does most of the cleaning and takes up significantly less space, this is viewed as “an equal share of duties”. It was bizarre because many times while accusing me of filth, the man would point at a vague spots in the house, separate and shared, that was his mess and accuse me that I was not cleaning up “my mess,” it was almost like he genuinely didn’t see the amount of mess he was making. He would point at a closet that was divided equally with my boxes and his and claim that I was “hogging and taking over”.
I have always cleaned up after myself, and half of the shared spaces, but I always made it a point not to clean up after male partners, because i didn’t think they were entitled to my free labour and i didn’t want to encourage them to view me as their servant. And I think, all of these other women who don’t get called filthy by their male partners, they must be cleaning up after themselves AND their male partners, not so that they could be esteemed as resourceful or remarkably compassionate, but just to NOT be slandered as filthy. And they wonder why they are drained all the time.
Woman are by default expected to take less resources, and over-perform and over-serve, and this is viewed as “equal” or the “neutral baseline” which everything else is compared from.
