Permission to speak, Sir?

No wonder girls do better in single-sex schools:

"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. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately."

— [x] (via neighborly)

Why it is so important for men to learn to step back…

(Source: sylviatietjens, via malesexistbehavior), Reblog from: profeministbro.tumblr.com.

Childhood Memories

It's been interesting, lately, talking to my brothers about gender differences and imbalances. It's also been somewhat worrying to talk to them about some of the facts and statistics. Both are anti-violence, both are on the side of not taking advantage of the incoherently drunk.
I've given them the links for Man Up Campaign, for WhiteRibbon, for Profeminist Bro, for Project Unbreakable. And I've talked to them, for the first time, about being sexually assaulted myself, in an attempt to humanise the cold data. For me, their reactions were the real shocker.
When I was attacked at knife-point, they were barely 4 years old. They didn't witness the attack, but saw me in the immediate aftermath. One had convinced himself it must have been a nightmare, as no-one in the family ever spoke to them about the day I walked into the room with my shirt ripped to shreds and blood everywhere. The other remembered it as real. Both remember wanting to take their toy swords and go after the villain of the piece, and that I'd managed (however vaguely) to sort it out myself.
This level of detail gets to me, because they were so young at the time, and it's never exactly been a conversation starter in our family. I always knew I'd been a random target, and my assailant didn't succeed in raping me. I never thought it was about me, or that I'd done anything wrong, and my parents agreed that therapy could wait until I exhibited signs of trauma. (I haven't to date, unless you count the vilification of rapists).
But if a 4 year old can remember so clearly a single afternoon, just the sight of a bloodied sister; an incident which hasn't been discussed at all then or since, then how much do children register of parental arguments, gender discrimination  or violence and abuse among the adults in their lives? How much damage does it to them even if they're not the victims themselves?