Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

When Does Gender Matter?

A Reflection by Richard Heydt, Worship Associate
April 29, 2001
Palo Alto, CA

When I hear about women moving into traditionally male professions I always feel like it's good news. It appeals strongly to my sense of fairness and balance. And I feel the same way when I hear about men becoming elementary school teachers or staying at home and raising children. Isn't it great when that happens!

In my professional life I'm a research engineer, and I pay attention to the numbers of women in engineering and science because I'm interested in how things change in our culture. A few weeks ago I met a young woman who had just started a career as a mechanical engineer, and I thought to myself how motivated and brave this woman must be to put herself into one of the strongly male-dominated professions. The numbers vary depending on the type of engineering, but you still find more women in fields like biology and medicine - 25% of American doctors are women - and you find lots more women in the social sciences, like psychology. In 1999, the representation of women in all of the sciences and engineering in the U.S. was around 25%, while 10.6% of engineers were women. Overall I view those numbers very positively, because it says to women, "Yes, come and be a part of these professions."

Of course it isn't a sure thing that the percentages will keep increasing, and in some fields there are indications that they may decline somewhat. The rhetorical question I ask is, "Does that matter?" By that I mean, have we as a society succeeded if any woman who wants to become an engineer can easily become one, or do we really want better parity in numbers? I'm inclined to believe that equal opportunity is the most important thing, and to let the numbers come out as they will. After all, a lot of women don't want to be engineers or plumbers, and a lot of men don't want to be psychologists or flight attendants. Should we care?

There have been several stories in the media - including the Mercury and the Chronicle - in the last year or two about a woman named Anita Borg who founded the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT). She wants to help promote a new generation of women engineers, and she thinks that we need female engineers to bring women-friendly and family-friendly tech products to market. The overwhelming majority of design engineers are men, and she claims that men come to different conclusions than women do about what products are needed. One of her ideas is that men are enamored with products with nifty features, while women go for practicality. According to Borg, the typical man thinks, "OK, what else can I mechanize in the house?" rather than sit down and figure out what things might be really useful. Now it is true in my experience that male engineers and scientists seem to be almost magnetically drawn to things that are technically cool. Then afterwards they try to rationalize how these cool things might be useful. That approach can be very valuable when it leads to scientific discovery, but when it comes to designing consumer products it can result in a lot of techno-junk. So maybe Anita Borg is right that having significant female representation in a traditionally male profession (or vice versa) is more than just a matter of equal opportunity, or even glass ceilings. But is this effect of gender difference important enough for people to care about? After all, it might be that when we reach the point when there are lots of women product designers, they too will come up with techno-junk. Will it be different than male techno-junk? I don't think that we understand gender difference well enough to know.

Let me jump to something completely unrelated to engineering, like religion, in particular Unitarian Universalism. One of the things that's really exciting about our religious movement is that we have so many female ministers. In 1998 almost 45% of the Parish Ministers and 49% of all UU ministers were women. Our religious movement has clearly come a long way and the numbers seem to say that that we value women in leadership roles. I can imagine in the coming years that women might fill well more than 50% of the ministerial positions in Unitarian Universalism, and maybe in some other liberal religious movements as well. That sounds fine to me, but I wonder if it is necessarily a good thing? Playing devil's advocate, if at some time, say, two-thirds of UU ministers were women, would that be better than what we had 30 years ago when the large majority were men? Suppose one of the side effects if this were to happen was that, since women historically receive less money for the same work, it contributed to keeping down the already low salaries of UU ministers. Perhaps that's too cynical and our movement is too self-aware to let that happen. Or how about this: What if having a large number of women ministers somehow reduced the appeal of Unitarian Universalism among men and therefore reduced the growth of our movement? Could that ever happen? Is it self-correcting? Again, once we get past the issue of equal opportunity, it's not obvious to me how well we understand gender difference or the consequences of gender imbalance.

Here's another thought. Suppose you are part of a church that has a lot of very talented women leaders. Suppose the president of the Board of Trustees is a woman, and the associated Community Minister is a woman, and the Minister of Religious Education is a woman. And the last two Intern Ministers were women. The Parish Minister is a man, but it happens that he is going to be leaving, maybe in just a few months. You figure that the way things are going he's likely to be replaced by a female Interim Minister, and maybe the next Parish Minister will be female. So what? Does it matter at all? Would this church gain something, lose something, both, or neither, if its professional religious leadership were entirely female? Well it also turns out that this remarkable church has a very active worship associate program, and against all odds eight of the nine current worship associates are women. Let me assure you that the chances of this happening in a real church are almost non-existent. But there is one more wild card in this hypothethical church: there is an unwritten three-year term limit on worship associates, which means that the one male worship associate won't be heard from again up at the pulpit after June. So it's conceivable that in this church almost all of the people who got up here and talked to the congregation on Sunday morning would be women. Would you be missing something in the way of perspective if that happened? Maybe the things in our perspectives that lead us to become UU's are more significant than any differences in male/female ways of looking at things. Should an enlightened religious movement even have to think about the implications of something like this?

I'll stop throwing out questions and close with two thoughts. If the scenario I just laid out matters to you and you happen to be a man, you might want to consider becoming a worship associate next year. Second, my own attitude when it comes to gender, and to the other "issues" that our society used to take for granted but doesn't any more, is that it's very important to be patient and to maintain a good sense of humor. Unlike the case of women in UU ministry, in many fields gender imbalances don't change very quickly and sometimes may not change at all. I read an article this past week about the roadblocks that women face in becoming engineers, which quoted a woman who directs public relations for engineering at Lawrence Livermore Labs. She remarked that one of the problems is that there aren't any role models on TV to influence girls toward engineering, shows like "E.R." for doctors, or "The Practice" for lawyers. And she said, "What we really need is someone to do a TV series with a woman engineer who is drop-dead beautiful and gets things done." The thing is that she's probably right, but if we have to wait for a successful TV show about engineers, we really need to be patient. Can you imagine "L.A Engineers" going up against "Survivor?"