All the small things

I seem to talk a lot on this blog, and will talk in the future, about things that many people would dismiss as fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.  Why does it matter for feminism and equality that a beer pump has a naked woman on it, or that drills are advertised as a male gift, or that little girls are dressed in pink and boys in blue?  These things are small and we can ignore them, right?

Let's have a look at associative memory.

We all subconsciously have ideas of what is feminine and what is masculine, what it is to be female and male.  Even if we do not consciously subscribe to these views, we are primed to have the thoughts in our subconscious, arguably even before we are born but certainly from the minute we are exposed to the world.  It is what we take on from the world around us, soaking it up like a sponge.  Even reluctant sponges don't have much choice but to get wet when you pour water on them.

Research shows that people implicitly attribute maleness to certain careers and certain personality traits, and femaleness to other traits, even if they do not consciously pigeonhole people based on gender.  This subconscious thought process can lead to unintentional stereotyping and discrimination. 1

People are quicker to recognise traits that match their stereotype (a caring woman, an aggressive man) than those which challenge them (a nurturing man, a strong woman) 2

Associative memory basically means that from birth we are exposed even involuntarily to many cultural associations.  This could be something simple, like "red means danger", we are learning about our own culture and what things mean within it.

It also incorporates many ideas of gender, all of which contribute to us subconsciously gaining a fixed set of associations of what is female and male, which we are not able to change.

Even the smallest things can contribute to our development of this associative memory, from the language and voice your mother uses to speak to you while you are in the womb, to being given a doll or a toy car, to seeing women doing housework in advertisements.  Your memory will take all this on board, even if your conscious mind rebels against the associations.  As Cordelia Fine puts it, your memory "picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society. media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don't consciously endorse".  These patterns are then passed on to future generations.

I bet you know what gender the children that I have blanked out in the photographs below are.  That you do know shows how ingrained gender stereotypes are within our society.

This helps to explain why people who may not challenge their own thinking and preconceptions act the way they do, why people accept stereotypes, and why stereotyping is so rigid and unchanging in today's society.  To change this, we need to make huge changes at the cultural level and also challenge the way we are already thinking.  A very big task, but we can start by highlighting all the pieces that make up the gender association jigsaw.

So some of the things I talk about may seem like trivial matters, unimportant matters, things that don't have any real effect on how women are seen and treated on matters of real importance.  But as you can see, I argue it is a combination of all the many small things that lead to the ingrained stereotypes, which in turn lead to more serious discriminations.




1 - Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, published by Icon Books
2 - Assessing Stereotype Incongruities