Read it here. Below is an excerpt:

“… Some of the most important opportunities we have are in two-sided markets: education and employment, contracts and loans, grants and prizes. And the institutions that offer these opportunities operate in an environment where accurate information is hard to come by. One of their main sources of judgment is asking the candidate directly: Tell us why we should admit you. Tell us why we should hire you. Tell us why we should give you a grant. Tell us why we should promote you.

In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less. Some of this is because assertive people get noticed more easily, but some of it is because raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something.

That in turn correlates with many of the skills the candidate will need to actually do the work — to recruit colleagues and raise money, to motivate participants and convince skeptics, to persevere in the face of both obstacles and ridicule. Institutions assessing the fitness of candidates, in other words, often select self-promoters because self-promotion is tied to other characteristics needed for success.

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction. … ”

Feminist Law Professors

Over at On the Issues Magazine, Amanda Marcotte writes about Getting Over the the Online vs. Offline Debate.  Here is an excerpt:

[T[he distinction between online and offline life is collapsing to the point of meaninglessness, making some of the discussion about online and offline activism sound a little like having a debate on cars that assumes they are used mostly for recreation instead of a primary form of getting around to live your actual life. You can try, I suppose, to run offline activism as if the Internet didn't exist, but that's a little like sending telegrams because you find telephones disconcertingly modern. I'm sure some people do it, but I'm 34 years old now and I can't actually say I've ever really participated in any kind of pure offline activism in my life. Even when I do offline activism, it's still online.

Let’s take, for instance, a protest in New York City in February 2011 on behalf of Planned Parenthood, and where I spoke.  * * *  I was invited to speak at this rally because I had started a Twitter campaign supporting Planned Parenthood and I invited people to thank the organization while using the hashtag#thanksppfa. Thousands of stories were collected in one spot over just a couple of days. The organizers of the rally spread the word through online means, such as Facebook and blogs. Before the rally, a friend of mine used online methods to organize a sign-making party, and we made sure to take photos of our signs with our cameras and post them online. * * *

 In the past, protest organizers were quite often at the mercy of the mainstream media, who could render a protest basically useless by deciding not to cover it. With the Internet — and especially with smart phones — that becomes much less of an issue. * * *

Fears that the Internet would somehow discourage people from getting out in the world and having that critical face-to-face interaction that adds depth to our activism are often proving to have missed the point completely. People crave reasons to leave the house and meet others, and the Internet gives them more reason to do so. In the past, going to an activist event often was a matter of luck — did you see the right flier or come across the right person before the event? Now, you can create invite chains on Facebook that will reach people that were unreachable before, and integrate them more readily into the community.

Read the full piece here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

image source: virtualtourist.com

Writer Charlotte Bacon describes her pilgrimage to a Bhutanese temple:

[T]his was the place to release the grief that had come with the obstetric misery that dogged my late 30s. We had our son with ease when I was almost 35. But when we were ready for another baby three years later, my aging body proved less willing.

One loss followed another, and then another, the last releasing a baby at five months. The sadness in the wake of what felt like my failure was numbing. It is not the same as losing a child you’ve embraced and named, no. But it was hard and dark and drove me toward choices I thought I would never make.

Finally, when I was 41, through a stark amalgam of science, chilly doctors, my own steely drive and who knows what measure of luck, my daughter arrived, strong, sweet and fully loved. When she was born, I thought the spell of harshness was over. She had redeemed those losses. They were grieved and gone and I could lose myself instead in her. And I did.

But there in Chimi, wrapped in the balmy reek of incense, I realized that the sadness I thought I had dismissed was still at work in me. Grief has its own rate of decay, and it rarely coincides with when we think it ought to go. Each baby’s shadow was still there, wrapped like a length of silver wire around bone, as close and deep and glinting as that.

In Chimi I was able to grasp the end of each wire, unwind it and feel the fragments of life or soul that were still in me splinter, dissolve and depart. Where? I don’t know. Somewhere else. Beyond me.

As they left, I wished them well, I said goodbye. With each ending came a new sense of peace and clarity and fullness. The sadness had had such a quiet grasp on me.

Now, in its wake, there was room for a bloom of gratitude, not only for being the mother of my particular children, embodied, here and healthy, but for being allowed to be a vessel for life, to be the channel through which more life had come, on its own terms, for its own reasons.

Read the full essay here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Over at Jezebel, Jenna Marotta asks (here), “Do Egg Donors Lie?” Ms. Marotta was rejected as an egg donor about her experience because she admitted to having a family history of depression.  She wonders whether other women lie about mental health issues in order to become compensated egg donors.

I can’t help thinking that in a country with so many anti-depressants prescribed, where so many people live long enough to develop cancer (and survive), some women will lie to donate their eggs for guaranteed compensation. As the founders and directors of egg donation agencies I spoke with confirmed, there is no such thing as a donor with a perfect family history.  * * *

While there are a lot of inquiries from women looking into donate, the number of women accepted remains very low. At Alternative Reproductive Resources, [president and founder Robin] von Halle says that although she receives up to 40 or 50 inquiries a day, perhaps five percent of those women go on to donate (“You have to be accepted and you also have to follow through” with the estimated three month process, she says.) Part of the reason the rejection rate is so high is that women may not know what factors will make them ineligible to donate their eggs — clinics don’t necessarily make the information public. “If the secret is out, then no one will tell the truth on their applications,” says [Mary] Fusillo [, founder and director of a Houston surrogacy agency]. [Souad] Dreyfus [director of a Florida surrogacy agency] has another take: “If you put this list out there, a lot of people will disqualify themselves,” as I would have done. But this lack of transparency may cause women to get their hopes up in vain. This is especially troubling given that many women consider egg donation after a life setback –- job loss, unexpected expenses, or a family tragedy might leave them emotionally and fiscally vulnerable. “A lot of young women, when they make that decision, there’s no room for rejection,” Dreyfus says. * * *

“It would be a complete lie to say donors are not motivated by financial motivation,” says [Rachel] Campbell [, a social worker at a Boston surrogacy agency]. “But for the donor who gets through the process” -– medical screening, psychological screening, genetic testing, being matched with a couple, interfacing with the egg donation agency and the couple’s fertility clinic, legal counseling, hormone injections, egg retrieval –- “their motivation is something bigger, they’re doing something more meaningful than just trying to make a quick buck.” Of the five donors I interviewed for this story, four of them said money was the catalyst but that they did not turn to egg donation as a “last resort” (the fifth donor waived her fee –- she donated her eggs to secure her brother-in-law and his wife a place at the front of the line to get matched with their own donor).

The description that surrogates themselves offer — that “money was the catalyst” for egg provision strikes me as especially important. The fertility industry relies the myth that egg donors are purely altruistic actors.  Marotta’s sources suggest otherwise (and in that sense, Marotta’s piece is consistent with the critiques offered by Kim Krawiec, for example, here and here).

Marotta also reports, without much explanation, that “many women consider egg donation after a life setback –- job loss, unexpected expenses, or a family tragedy might leave them emotionally and fiscally vulnerable.”  I would be curious to read more about the relationship between these “life setbacks” and the timing of egg transfers.  The data might or might not suggest psychological or financial motives that are otherwise obscured.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

There’s an internet-based petition addressed to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Apple, Apple PR and iPhone 4s, which says:

Apple: Stop promoting anti-choice extremists. If a user asks for family planning services, they should be directed to a group that offers full services, like Planned Parenthood–not to a hard-right clinic with an extremist agenda.

If you’d like to sign on, see here.

H/T Adele Bernhard.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Over at The Raw Story (here), Megan Carpentier reports on “10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion”:

Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won’t direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she’ll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women’s Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you’ll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service.

Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you “I didn’t find any abortion clinics.” * * *

But Siri certainly seems to know a whole lot about plenty of other things iPhone customers might want. Below are 10 things Siri can help you find.

1. Viagra.
2. Hospitals to go to if you’ve had an erection lasting for more than 5 hours.
3. Places you might be able to score marijuana.
4. Where to dump a body: in Brooklyn, it recommends a smelting plant in New Jersey.
5. The meaning of life: Siri will alternately quote from Douglas Adams (42) or Monty Python’s “The Meaning Of Life.”
6. What to do if a hamster is caught in your rectum: in D.C., she’ll direct you to Charming Cherries Escort Service.
7. Asked how to obtain a free blow job in D.C., she’ll direct you to the same escort service. (We doubt that they are free.)
8. If you’d like to see a naked woman in Brooklyn, Siri will suggest a variety of Manhattan-based strip clubs.

See more coverage of Siri’s anti-choice politics here at Feministing and here at Gizmodo.

H/T Darren Rosenblum.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

Allison Tait, a Gender Equity and Policy Postdoctoral Associate with the Yale Women Faculty Form has posted a review of Dan Burk’s piece, Do Patents Have Gender?  Dr. Tait writes:

While Burk would like to separate gender realities from gender theory, the two are not so easy to disentangle. The marginalization of women scientists continues to inform the framework of feminist theory. What is interesting, however, is to speculate about the kind of patents we will see when women scientists reach parity and have the luxury of large shops of their own.

Read the rest of Dr. Tait’s post, with comments by Tan Mau Wu, here.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

(Cross-posted to Concurring Opinions blog)

A familiar theme comes up frequently in internet discussions: Women who complain about online harassment are just missing the joke.

As an initial descriptive matter, it’s pretty clear that women and men are often treated differently in online discussion. (Quick, name a case in which someone was harassed online. Was the person you thought about a woman? I thought so.)

A few months ago, John Scalzi noted that:

In my experience, talking to women bloggers and writers, they are quite likely to get abusive comments and e-mail, and receive more of it not only than what I get personally (which isn’t difficult) but more than what men bloggers and writers typically get. I think bloggers who focus on certain subjects (politics, sexuality, etc) will get more abusive responses than ones who write primarily on other topics, but even in those fields, women seem more of a target for abusive people than the men are. And even women writing on non-controversial topics get smacked with this crap. I know knitting bloggers who have some amazingly hateful comments directed at them. They’re blogging about knitting, for Christ’s sake. . .

I can contrast this with how people approach me on similar topics. When I post photos of processed cheese, I don’t get abused about how bad it is and how bad I am for posting about it. People don’t abuse me over my weight, even when I talk explicitly about it. I go away from my family for weeks at a time and never get crap about what a bad father that makes me, even though I have always been the stay-at-home parent. Now, it’s true in every case that if I did get crap, I would deal with it harshly, either by going after the commenter or by simply malleting their jackassery into oblivion. But the point is I don’t have to. I’m a man and I largely get a pass on weight, on parenting and (apparently) on exhibition and ingestion of processed cheese products. Or at the very least if someone thinks I’m a bad person for any of these, they keep it to themselves. They do the same for any number of other topics they might feel free to lecture or abuse women over.

It’s this sort of thing that reminds me that the Internet is not the same experience for me as it is for some of my women friends. (Emphasis added.)

That bears repeating: The Internet is not the same experience for men as it is for women. (No wonder women are numerically underrepresented in prominent internet discussion spaces.)

Why is the internet a different place for men than for women? There are doubtless a number of contributing causes, but one of the major factors is that the internet is largely a male-constructed discursive space, and internet discussion norms often build on assumptions of male privilege.

Men build discursive spaces and discursive norms based on their own experience. And for instance, in a male-built discursive space, a threat of sexual violence may be viewed by male participants as an obvious joke. After all, the vast majority of men will never experience sexual violence in their lifetime. (Fewer than 4% of men will be sexually assaulted.) And so within the context of a male discussion on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, it may seem entirely innocuous to use ideas of sexual violence to express one’s views on the game, or to use “rape” as a verb to describe one’s gameplay skills.

Women as a group have a vastly different experience with the idea of sexual violence. One in six women will be a victim of sexual assault during her lifetime. (Yes, some men are also sexual assault victims. But the numbers are overwhelmingly female — about 90% of sexual assault victims are women.) Rape is not an abstract idea or an obvious joke. For thousands of women, it is an immediate and extremely painful reality.

At one point during class I was talking about male privilege, and one student asked me to explain. He noted that he is a man and he doesn’t feel particularly privileged. In response, I noted my own privilege: “When I leave the building late at night, I don’t give a second thought to my safety as I walk to my car. If it’s ten at night, if it’s dark, I just assume that I’ll be fine. But for many women, there is a constant thought process: Do I find someone to walk me to my car? Is it safe at this hour? What are my options?” And then I asked, “who has gone through that train of thought recently?,” and every woman in the class raised her hand. And then they told stories: About avoiding parts of town; about setting their schedule in certain ways; about making sure that they had someone to walk them out; about being on their guard, all the time. The need to guard against the possibility of sexual assault is simply not part of most men’s everyday thought process, while it is a major part of many women’s everyday lived experience.

And the fact that as a man I don’t have to spend mental energy thinking about protecting myself from sexual assault is itself part of male privilege. One part of male privilege is that you never have to notice the ways in which you benefit from male privilege.

The same goes for statements about violence in general. In a male-dominated discursive space, it may be viewed as normal to make aggressive, threatening statements. However, men’s and women’s experiences with violence are also vastly different. One in four women in the United States has been a victim of domestic violence. Suddenly, the joke about wanting to punch somebody else isn’t so funny.

Women face these kinds of microaggressions on a daily basis, in all sorts of environments ranging from the workplace to the public sphere. And they seem to be especially prevalent (surprise) in discursive spaces built by and dominated by men. (It’s true that not all women struggle to express themselves in male-built discursive spaces, and some women develop real facility for the kind of bullying that sometimes passes for dialogue on the internet. But, as Danielle Citron’s work makes clear, many don’t.)

And then when someone (almost always female) stands up against the male-constructed discursive norms in which threats of violence and sexual violence can be characterized as merely a joke, she is attacked for being oversensitive. These attacks are another instance of denying of the reality of women’s experiences. Male commenters discount women’s experiences as irrelevant if when those experiences don’t conform to male discussion norms. Feminist blogs have a term for this: Mansplaining, where a male interlocutor explains to a female writer that she ought to ignore her own experience and bow before his superior wisdom.

This discounting of women’s experience echoes equally problematic discussions that happen in the political arena, where male writers incredibly feel comfortable opining that sexual harassment probably doesn’t even exist, it’s all just something made up by overreacting women. For instance, here’s a direct quote from prominent male conservative writer John Derbyshire: “Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like ‘racial discrimination’? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up.” Yes, Derbyshire is arguing that sexual harassment does not exist. Of course, this is a topic about which he has a vanishingly small likelihood of having any personal experience, since sexual harassment is overwhelmingly targeted at women. But I’ve never personally seen a zebra; therefore, they probably don’t exist.

Male privilege on the internet — or in law, or in society at large — isn’t going away any time soon. But let’s call it out, and let’s label it for what it is. When male interlocutors tell a female writer that she is overreacting and just isn’t getting the joke, they are speaking from a starting place of male privilege. They are assuming that casual threats of violence are something which can easily be shrugged off, and are ignoring the vast difference between lived experiences of men and women in America. And they are denying the reality of something which, in all likelihood, they don’t even understand.

Which Scalzi explains well in a follow-up post:

Underlying all of that is the basic set of advantages I get unearned by being what I am, i.e., a white male. I became aware of this fact only over time, by having this advantage set pointed out to me repeatedly by those who are not what I am. Which is a bad deal for those folks, to be sure — the highest life crisis of everyone else in the world is not, in fact, making the White Male understand what he gets unearned.

I suspect in my case it would have been even more work for the rest of the world if I hadn’t had the experience of growing up poor, which meant that every time I saw or read someone who’d never been poor expound obliviously on what was really going on with poor people, I had to fight back the urge to beat them to death with a hammer. The experience of having to deal with people wealthsplaining poverty, and then trying to get them to listen to someone who had spent actual time in poverty, made it possible for me to more easily conceptualize the idea there were lots of subjects about which I had great potential to show my ass simply by opening my mouth.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. So sit back. Calm down. Pay attention. Take notes. Learn. And stop denying the reality of women’s experience.

Feminist Law Professors

Cryos in Denmark claims (here) to have “the world’s largest selection of sperm donors.” According to this report in the (UK) Telegraph, Cryos no longer accepts donations from redheaded sperm donors.

Feminist Law Professors

Rene Almeling’s new book, Sex Cells:  The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm, explores the inner workings of the world of donor gametes, and then sets these observations in the larger contexts of gender and commodification.  Almeling, a sociologist at Yale, collected data on six different kinds of donation programs, interviewing staff members as well as egg and sperm donors.  Through this intensive research, she found that the donation programs  emphasized that egg donation involves caring and helping others, and tried to encourage feelings of altruism even though, like sperm “donation,” this too involves money.   Egg donation was framed as a gift, sperm donation as a job.  On the other hand, while egg donors rarely think of themselves as mothers to the offspring who are born from their gametes, sperm donors consistently think of themselves as fathers to any resulting children. This may, she speculates, be the result of cultural norms concerning the causal relationship between sperm and fatherhood that differ when it comes to eggs and motherhood:  women experience substantial interventions before an egg turns into a baby (nine months of pregnancy and the birth process).  Indeed, Almeling found that egg donors (more than sperm donors) are quite conscious of the recipients of their gametes, and accord great significance to the role of the woman who actually gestates and bears the child.

Ultimately, Almeling concludes that commodification is a social process, and, in the gamete world,  the market draws on cultural understandings of biological differences  to satisfy consumer demand for eggs and sperm. The book marvelously shows both how gender shapes the donation process  for the egg agencies and sperm banks as well as for the  gamete providers, and how the donation process is framed by the intersecting rhetorical devices of gift and market.

-Naomi Cahn

Feminist Law Professors