Reconceptualizing underrepresentation

I've spent the past week reading Iris Marion Young's Justice and the politics of difference, and the last day or two thinking about this thread on the underrepresentation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. (I should say `some STEM fields' or just give the list -- physics, engineering, computer science, pure mathematics, economics, and philosophy -- but I'm just going to use the easier-to-type version and let you know right here that I'm not talking about biology and chemistry, at least with respect to women.) Putting these two thinkings together, I feel the need to reconsider the basics of underrepresentation: the problem is not what we think it is.

We usually think of underrepresentation as a problem of numbers: STEM fields are `disproportionately' male, or white, or straight, or able-bodied, etc. As evidence, we cite facts about the percentage of tenured faculty who are female or people of colour or queer or disabled, etc. (To cut down on the number of lists like these, I'm going to primarily use the generic `group X'. Substitute in your favourite oppressed social group for the X.)

But such facts are insufficient to establish a claim that group X is underrepresented in STEM. In order to establish this claim, we need the normative claim that the percentage of tenured faculty who are members of group X in a STEM field should be approximately such-and-such, or in the range from here to there. And that should causes problems, because (at least in part) no-one seems to have given much systematic through to how we're going to determine what comes after it, or even whether it's the right sort of claim. Nor is it at all clear what's backing up that normative claim: why should the percentage of group X-tenured faculty in a STEM field should be between a and b?

So, instead, I'd like to suggest another (or a novel) way of understanding underrepresentation. On this approach, underrepresentation is a matter of epistemic injustice (I'm drawing on Miranda Fricker here, too). More formally, underrepresentation is about the way certain groups are deprived of access to certain communities of epistemic and political power and prestige. (Namely, STEM communities.) As I see it, there are two aspects to this deprivation:

1. whether members of group X have the same access to membership in the prestigious community as members of other groups, and
   
2. whether the members of group X are oppressed within the prestigious community.

To put these in terms of the underrepresentation of women within STEM, the first aspect concerns whether women can get into the laboratory -- as a group, do they have opportunities to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians? The second concerns their status within the laboratory -- does the STEM community treat women justly?

With just this much, we can make some preliminary observations. First, the feminist underrepresentation claim is that women are oppressed within certain STEM disciplines. The corresponding opposition claim is that women are not oppressed within STEM. Second, numbers tell us something, but not everything. This parallels injustice in the broader society: looking at the race and gender of poverty can tell us something, but it doesn't give us a complete understanding of economic, racial, or gender injustice. Third, examining the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences (as John Tierney did in the NYT article that inspired the FPh post) is only relevant to the extent that the satisfaction of (Humean) preferences is significant in the theory of justice we are using to analyse underrepresentation as epistemic injustice. Unless you're a utilitarian, this will be at best only somewhat significant -- again, it won't give us a complete picture.

I mentioned Young's book up in the first paragraph. Young has two major goals in this book: to challenge what she calls the `distributive paradigm' in mainstream political philosophy and theory, and to articulate in its place an alternative paradigm of injustice as oppression. The last paragraph parallels the first task: my observations indicate that a statistical examination of the distribution of resources and positions of power gives an incomplete picture of underrepresentation. This distribution is certainly relevant to issues of epistemic justice, but not the whole story.

Young lays out her alternative approach to justice as a taxonomy of forms of oppression. Borrowing this taxonomy as our background theory of justice, we can re-articulate the feminist claim of underrepresentation as epistemic injustice: women are exploited, marginalized, powerless, and sometimes subject to cultural imperialism and violence within STEM.

1. Women are exploited as research assistants, technicians, instructors, test subjects, secretaries, janitors, and other assistants and support staff to primary investigators and tenured faculty. Their work, both creative and menial, is appropriated by and benefit PIs and tenured faculty. I say `women are exploited as research assistants', for example, and not `research assistants are exploited' because these lower status positions are disproportionately held by women or held by women who are less likely to receive eventual returns on their sacrifices than their male colleagues (the leaky pipeline effect).

2. Women are marginalized and powerless is similar ways. (Young is not, to my mind, entirely clear on the difference between these two.) Assistants and support staff to PIs and tenured faculty have little or no power to make decisions about the research they will participate in or how they will participate in it. They might be able to choose whether or not to participate at all, or suggest new directions, experiments, research strategies, etc., but have no real power to shape the course of research. Similarly, instructors and teaching assistants have little or no discretion over their courses -- they are assigned by their superiors to teach this class or that, on a term-by-term basis, and usually based on the department's need to cover teaching duties perceived as menial or boring by tenured faculty (Physics 101, the early calculus sequence, remedial classes, etc.). The content of these courses is usually dictated by official standards and texts or all the sections of a course being linked to a standardized midterm and final.

3. Cultural imperialism and violence, Young's last two categories of oppression, are less common than the first two (treating marginalization and powerlessness as one category for the moment), but still issues of injustice within STEM than need attention. Cultural imperialism refers to the widespread acceptance of stereotypes and biassed perceptions of marginalized groups. In the context of STEM, this would mean the acceptance of scientific theories with, say, sexist content and implications. Uncontroversial historical examples abound -- Stephen Jay Gould's The mismeasure of man has some jaw-dropping ones. More controversial are contemporary theories of, for example, gender- and race-linked differences in the distribution of IQ and problem-solving abilities and still-prevalent `active male/passive female' models of fertilization. (In this post, I'm going to remain neutral on the question of whether any of these theories was epistemically acceptable in its heyday, or is epistemically acceptable today. Perhaps there are genuine dilemmas of epistemic justice.)

4. Violence is exactly what you would expect. I suspect -- though I could be wrong -- that violence is a pervasive or systematic problem only in medical and pharmacological treatment and research, and not other STEM fields. (Although perhaps medicine and pharmacology should not be classified as STEM fields at all.) Violence in medicine is closely linked with race and class, and with powerlessness: women of colour and living in poverty have been subject to forced sterilization as recently as the 1970s, they are less likely to receive proper medical care and due respect for their autonomy as patients, and so on.

Similar observations apply to racial groups, and of course disability. (I suspect there's a whole thesis to be written on the ways disabled people are the victims of violence within medicine.)

I have one final observation. One especially persistent feminist criticism of STEM fields with underrepresentation problems (I've heard this about philosophy, physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics) is the prevalence of a macho, aggressive, or `duelist' culture (the phrase is Janice Moulton's) that is supposed to drive many women away from these fields. In such a culture, one is supposed to be a vigorous and aggressive defender of one's views in a such argumentative context; the thought is that this creates a great deal of competition, effectively weeding out the weakest (and, presumably, therefore untrue) ideas. Traditional feminine attributes of pleasantness and self-abasement create a catch-22: either women cannot adopt these aggressive norms (they conflict too much with the way they have been taught to behave), or they are punished and disparaged by their male colleagues for being too aggressive.

This is, I think, an extremely important criticism. But I'm not sure where to place it in Young's taxonomy of oppression. Perhaps one side of the dilemma is marginalization -- women who do not adopt the aggressive stance are denied standing within the community -- and the other is cultural imperialism -- the successful imposition of masculine norms of behaviour on women.

Quick debunking: Singular `they'

Myth: `They' is always a plural pronoun, never a singular pronoun, and hence it is grammatically incorrect to use it as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. (`The student turned their paper in a day late.')

Example: David Gelernter's recent anti-feminist grammar prescriptivist rant

He-or-she'ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the Establishment couldn't help noticing. So feminist authorities went back to the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar--which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional. "When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, they are about to address the congregation." How many of today's high school English teachers would mark this sentence wrong, or even "awkward"? (Show of hands? Not one?) Yet such sentences skreak like fingernails on a blackboard.

Response:

Language Log suggests that `they' is used as a bound variable -- it doesn't pick out any one person or particular group, but instead ranges over some set of people or some set of groups of people. `It' can work analogously, ranging over individual things as a variable rather than a temporary name for some one thing. `He' and `she', by contrast, are not variables. They're temporary names, and have to pick out some one person, with some one gender. (Note that the two examples -- mine and Gelernter's -- can both be read this way.)

Still not happy with what you might be tempted to call a crazy revisionist grammar of `they'? Shakespere used singular they, as did Jane Austen.

Quick debunking: The college education gender gap

Myth: Colleges are facing a `man shortage'

Example: Weekly standard, 2006:

At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. And as the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. Because more men than women drop out, the ratio after four years will be 60--40, according to projections by the Department of Education.

The problem isn't new-women bachelor's degree--earners first outstripped men in 1982. But the gap, which remained modest for some time, is widening. More and more girls are graduating from high school and following through on their college ambitions, while boys are failing to keep pace and, by some measures, losing ground.

Response:

The percentage of men 25 years and older with a Bachelor's Degree or higher has risen steadily since 1940, and continues to rise. In particular, while only 7.3 percent of men 25 and older in 1950 had at least a Bachelor's degree (that would be around the time all the WW2 vets who went to college under the GI Bill started to graduate), in 2000 26.1 percent of men 25 and older had at least a Bachelor's degree.

For comparison, in 1950, the percentage of women 25 and older with at least a Bachelor's degree was 5.2 percent; in 2000, 22.9 percent.

Education is not a zero-sum game; the statistic is only alarming if you think that, for every woman who has a Bachelor's degree, a man is prevented from having one, or vice-versa. Every decade for the past sixty years, both more men and more women have gone to college than before.

Source: US census, A Half-Century of Learning: Historical Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000, Table 2 (XLS).

Formalising Moller Okin

In chapter 4 of Susan Moller Okin's Justice, gender, and the family, she gives a feminist argument against Nozick's Lockean/libertarian/free market account of property. Libertarians have tried to respond to this article, but often seem to fail to understand its structure. Formalising Moller Okin's argument will help us get a grasp on how, exactly, it presents a problem for libertarians.

Libertarians, as a general rule, want to argue from a conception of individual liberty and autonomys as self-ownership to a fairly robust right to property. Let's start with two predicates, Person(x) and Owns(x,y). Person(x) means that x is a person -- as opposed to just a thing, like a hammer or a pizza -- while Owns(x,y) means that x owns y. The full depth of the property right involved is not so important here. But to get a feel of what libertarians want to show, here are two quotations that start to cash out the Owns relation:

`x is A's property' means `A has the right to determine the disposition of x'

Narveson suggests the following set as giving some sort of full ownership: (1) exclusive use, which includes the right to permit or refuse the right [sic; I think this is supposed to be `use'] by others; and (2) transfer in the form of sale, exchange, gift or bequeathal.

What's important is that, if x owns y, then no-one besides x (or another owner of y) can use y (presumably, in any way) without x's consent. We will also need a predicate for the relation of x gives y to z; Gives(x,y,z) will work nicely.

Of course, capitalism isn't just a system of free exchanges. It's also a system in which people make things. As part of the property system, libertarians want to say that, if something is made in the right way (with resources that are either unowned or acquired through fair exchange, and a few other so-called Lockean provisos that aren't important quite yet), then it is owned by the maker. So our last predicate is Makes(x,y), meaning x makes y in the right way.

The ultimate, fundamental principle on which libertarians attempt to ground their justification of private property is a right of maximal liberty:

(L) people have a non-overridable right to such liberties as do not interfere with those of others

This, they claim, can be read as a principle of self-ownership:

(S) one owns oneself

Formalise this as

(SO) (x)(y)(Person(x) -> (Owns(x,y) <-> x=y))

Moller Okin's argument focuses on the purported inference from this to a principle of original acquisition. And so shall we. Narveson states original acquisition in this way:

things acquired in ways that meet the initial (Lockean) conditions are indeed the property of those who acquire them, for precisely the same reasons that we have the general right of liberty, and as a straight implication thereof

Formalise the first clause of this as

(OA) (x)(y) ((Person(x) ^ Makes(x,y) ^ -(Ez)Gives(x,y,z)) -> Owns(x,y))

The final clause of the quotation from Narveson is the claim that SO implies OA. Formally, this is false -- Makes and Owns don't show up in SO, so it can't imply OA. However, presumably there is some set of definitions and/or axioms D that, Narveson thinks, will, when combined with S, imply OA. That is, Narveson's claim is

(1) SO + D |- OA

Moller Okin's argument is an attempt to show that 1 is false. Her counterexample is based on the fact that mothers make their children -- literally. She carefully works through Nozick's version of original acquisition, and describes a scenario in which all of the Lockean provisos have been satisfied: the mother was freely given the sperm, say, and procured all the resources necessary to maintain herself and (this bit varies from version to version) give birth to a healthy infant/raise a healthy child to adulthood according to free exchange and the principles of original acquisition. But then she doesn't give her child away -- either to another person or to himself. Instead, she keeps him as a slave. Hence the subtitle of Moller Okin's chapter: `Matriarchy, slavery, and dystopia'.

Let's formalise this counterexample as follows: there is a person, x, who makes another person, y, in the right way, and does not give y to any z.

(MOC) (Ex)(Ey) Person(x) ^ Person(y) ^ Makes(x,y) ^ -(Ez)Gives(x,y,z)

Moller Okin's criticism is that MOC, with OA, implies the negation of SO.

(2) MOC + OA |- -SO

Hence, either SO is inconsistent, or SO implies the negation of at least one of MOC and OA.

(3) SO is inconsistent
(4) SO |- -(MOC ^ OA)

Cashing out (4) gives two possibilities (which are not exclusive): either SO implies the negation of MOC, or SO implies the negation of OA.

(5) SO |- -MOC
(6) SO |- -OA

Of course, if SO implies the negation of OA, and is consistent, then it can't imply OA. And throwing in D won't help things, either.

(7) SO+D |/- OA

So, to sum up, the libertarian wants to claim that self-ownership implies an account of property that includes original acquisition (1). Moller Okin's counterexample shows that at least one of three things must be true: (a) self-ownership is inconsistent (3); (b) self-ownership implies that mothers do not make their children in the right way (5, roughly); or (c) self-ownership does not imply an account of property that includes original acquisition (7). Clearly option a is a disaster for libertarianism. I don't think b is all that promising, either -- at the very least, a libertarian who chooses to take this route would have to work through Moller Okin's discussion of how mothers make their children in exactly the right way just as carefully as she worked her way through Nozick's account of original acquisition. A libertarian cannot, as Narveson does, simply dismiss Moller Okin's counterexample by asserting that `What parents do is initiate a process that eventuates in human organisms, which grow up' and concluding immediately that `We should ... deny that children are `made' by their parents'.

Note that libertarians also cannot simply dismiss Moller Okin's argument as `absurd' -- again, as Narveson does. Anyone who knows a little about formal validity will agree with the analysis I gave in two paragraphs ago. The only option for a libertarian, then, is c.

Denying 1 might seem like a serious blow to libertarians. But is it? What if libertarians don't want OA, but instead want some more sophisticated principle of original acquisition? Recall that OA, the property right, wasn't the original principle. Rather, S, a basic right of self-determination, was. And Nozick is quite clear that, when property conflicts with self-determination, property must yield. Hence he introduces `side constraints', that limit property rights. These can be nicely incorporated into my formalism. For example, suppose we want to replace OA with a qualified version: so long as the made thing y isn't a person, x owns anything she makes in the right way.

(OA') (x)(y) ((Person(x) ^ -Person(y) ^ Makes(x,y) ^ -(Ez)Gives(x,y,z)) -> Owns(x,y))

This can be generalised: if C(x,y) is a predicate formalising a side constraint (or conjunction thereof, etc.), then let

(OA/C) (x)(y) ((Person(x) ^ -C(x,y) ^ Makes(x,y) ^ -(Ez)Gives(x,y,z)) -> Owns(x,y))

We include the side constraint in the antecedent, and so it blocks an inference to ownership in bad cases. Indeed, it does so in Moller Okin's case: MOC and OA' do not imply the negation of SO.

MOC + OA' |/- -SO

Hence Moller Okin's counterexample does not cause problems with this argument.

But there are, I think, at least three problems with this side constraint strategy. First, Nozick (I'm not sure about Narveson) believes that there's nothing wrong with selling oneself into slavery. That is, a side constraint concerning personhood does not show up in the principle governing free exchange. But why should it show up in the principle governing original acquisition, but not in the principle governing free exchange? That seems ad hoc. But, since the idea that there's nothing wrong with selling oneself into slavery is kind of weird, perhaps this isn't a serious objection.

Second, adding qualifications to OA makes it trickier, in general, to derive from SO. We haven't looked at the set of definitions D that libertarians will use to bridge the formal gap, so perhaps SO does indeed imply OA'. But showing this will require more care than I have seen libertarians giving.

Third, and most importantly, adding side constraints seriously compromises the robust property rights that were supposed to be implied by self-ownership. Consider the following side constraint: there should not be a person z such that x's ownership of y interferes with z's self-determination (self-ownership). This seems to be a good way of capturing the non-interference on which libertarians want to base side constraints. We'll call it C*(x,y), and formalise it as

C*(x,y) =df (Ez)(Person(z) ^ (Owns(x,y) -> -Owns(z,z)))

Now we plug this into OA/C.

(OA*) (x)(y) ((Person(x) ^ -(Ez)(Person(z) ^ (Owns(x,y) -> -Owns(z,z))) ^ Makes(x,y) ^ -(Ez)Gives(x,y,z)) -> Owns(x,y))

Note that OA* does just as nice a job of avoiding Moller Okin's counterexample as OA'. It also applies more generally -- it blocks ownership in any case where this would interfere with the self-determination of anyone, not just the purported `owned thing'.

But what does it mean to interfere with someone's self-determination? Suppose Maria has just baked a loaf of bread, using ingredients and an oven that she procured using free exchanges, and Jorge, just outside the door to her bakery, is starving to death. Without Maria's bread, Jorge will surely die in the near future. It seems clear to me that her ownership of the bread -- in particular, her right to refuse to give it to Jorge -- would interfere with Jorge's self-determination, as he certainly cannot determine the course of his life if he is dead. If this seeming is right, then OA* does not imply that Maria owns the bread. (Note that it does not imply that Jorge owns the bread, either, as he did not make it and has not been given it.)

This thought experiment can be generalised. First, let's formalise. If there is a person x such that x owning (or, more generally, using or having) y is necessary for x's self-determination, then no-one but x can own y.

(N) (x)(y)((Person(x) ^ (-Owns(x,y) -> -Owns(x,x))) -> (z)(z=/=x -> -Owns(z,y)))

Now, N is not implied by OA*. However, with the additional assumption that original acquisition and free trade are the only ways anyone can own anything, which libertarians all seem to endorse, N does follow.

Now consider Jamal, who is homeless. It is a bitterly cold night, and without the use of a small house nominally owned by Tasha, Jamal will surely die. It follows from N that Tasha does not own the house -- indeed, no-one except possibly Jamal owns the house. If Jaime nominally owns a course of treatment of a drug, and Lorenzo will surely die without taking it, then Jaime does not own the course of treatment of the drug.

Services are more difficult, because it does not seem like there is a thing that is owned or transferred in the case of, for example, a teacher teaching a student. It is also difficult to generalise to cases in which a suffering person needs any one of a variety of things. For example, Jorge will surely die if he doesn't get some food in the near future, but he would survive for at least a while if he had Maria's bread, or Michael's pizza, or Dana's apples, and so on. But, with the examples above, it is clear that OA* seriously compromises the libertarian's property rights: she does not own anything which is materially necessary to sustain the life of anyone nearby.

Finally some sense! Or not

Clearly fashion designers are insane sexists:

As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering.

The feminist imagination boggles at the monstrosity that made a fashion `journalist' for the Times sound like one Twisty Faster. What could be even more egregious than designing shoes that can only be worn by women with eight toes?

Your answer is below the fold.

Men's pants without a fly. I shit you not. Guy Trebay throws a fit because of a pair of pants that subject men to that most horrible of disgraces: having to use the bathroom like a girl.

It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.

Other `humiliating' features of the line, designed by Miucca Prada, include `tutu belts' and `severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back'. Evidently, Trebay either (a) believes that all women -- unlike men -- are contortionists, or (b) is such a horrible fashion `journalist' that he doesn't know how to put on an evening dress.

Which leads me to the questions I often pose my female friends when I hear about this sort of spectacular douchebaggery from the fashion industry: Why the hell do you listen to these people? They are clearly misogynists and hate you. When is it ever rational to treat someone who hates you and wants you to suffer as a good source of advice?

Let's just top that racism off with a nice big scoop of sexism, too

NYT:

Though women and men have roughly the same credit scores, the Consumer Federation of America found that women were 32 percent more likely to receive subprime loans than men. The disparity existed within every income and ethnic group. Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to get subprime loans than comparable white borrowers.

Unlike earlier analyses that revealed clear racism on the part of lenders -- Black and Latin@ applicants were actively encouraged by loan officers to apply for larger mortgages than White applicants of the same income and credit score, and hence got worse terms for their loans -- this article does not suggest explicit racism. Instead, blame is laid on the fact that women are generally poorer than men.

Which is rather dumb, since the analysis controls for income.

“The striking thing is that the disparity between men and women actually goes up as income rises,” said Allen J. Fishbein, director of credit and housing policy for the Consumer Federation of America. Among high earners — defined as people earning twice the median income — black women are as much as five times more likely to receive subprime mortgages than white men.

A better explanation? Not structural sexism, but good old fashioned misogyny.

Mr. Fishbein said that even at high-income levels, mortgage brokers may assume that women are less confident to negotiate or shop around, and so offer them higher rates. A survey in 2006 by Prudential Financial found that two-thirds of women graded themselves at C or lower in their knowledge of financial services or products.

The payments rates are astounding. One woman bought a $130k house four years ago. Her initial payment was $841 a month, which is about 0.65% of the principle. Assuming a 30 year mortgage, at that payment she would pay the bank just under 232% of the principle. But her payment more than doubled after 2 years, to $1769 a month. That's 1.36% of the principle. Over 30 years, she would pay the bank just under 472% of the principle, or about $613.6K.

Nearly two-thirds of a million dollars, for what sounds like a dinky little townhouse in a lower middle class neighbourhood. At an average $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, 51 weeks a year, it would take someone 20 years worth of work just to earn that much money. That's half of your life's wages, just to buy a house.

And lest you argue that `they shouldn't be buying a house if they can't afford it':

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which buy loans from mortgage lenders, have estimated that 15 percent to 50 percent of the subprime loans they bought in 2005 went to borrowers whose credit scores indicated they were qualified for prime loans.

Yes, they couldn't afford the usurious subprime loans. But their credit scores say a significant percentage could have afforded prime loans.

This sounds familiar

From a comment on an article in the Chronicle of higher education:

MIT does not really tenure for excellence in research. Like other top-of-the-top universities, MIT tenures for reputation of excellence in research. (Forget about teaching or service; neither factors into the equation.)
This means two things: First, cutting-edge research, risky research, or what the corporate-types like to call “thinking outside of the box” is not viable when faced with a grueling tenure process, based so heavily upon peer review that—in order to garner outstanding reviews—one must cater to the preconceptions of one’s peers at other top institutions. Thus, much like that Other university up the road, MIT is forced poach its very best scholars who first proved their genius elsewhere, because the tenure process does not allow its own junior faculty the time or intellectual flexibility to excel at that level.

What does this have to do with gender (or race)? Well, peer review might claim to be an “objective” analysis of research, but any psychologist or sociologist worth their salt will tell you that evaluation of one’s peers is a social process. And look at the gender and racial breakdowns of these “peers.” White to a man. MIT’s unyielding adherence to reputation can and will only reproduce the social circle (white, male) of those called upon to evaluate the reputation. Meanwhile, there is a myopic and simple-minding insistence, pervasive throughout the institute, that this tenure process is somehow “objective” (tossing out a century of social science on the impossibility of such a thing), which leaves the Institute unable to address the problem.
Only after women and minorities (and white men with numbers of women or minorities in their social circle) have broken into other top and just-below the top institutions, and occupy positions of power in the profession, will they then advocate for those in their social networks in tenure cases at MIT. And only then will MIT’s tenuring process be physically able to recognize these one-time outsiders as worthy of tenure.

Most of the other comments are simply odious. For example, the way the next comment flatly denies that sex and gender play any role any the tenure process and raises the specter of -- oh noes! -- people getting things they don't deserve. The commenter is, evidently, completely ignoring decades of research that the same CV is consistently rated as less impressive when there's a woman's name at the top. S/he certainly misses the entire point of the previous comment.

Yes, these data show that the number and percentage of female faculty receiving tenure at MIT is increasing slowly. However, by themselves, these numbers do not prove that gender discrimination took place. In order to prove this, it would be necessary to provide evidence that female tenure candidates achieved the research record necessary to attain tenure, but were turned down because they were women (i.e., because of their genitalia or feminine attributes) .... It seems logical to believe that the vast majority of highly educated people would not turn down a candidate that has achieved the necessary record of accomplishments for tenure because of their genitalia or femininity. The flip side of this is whether a candidate without the necessary record of accomplishments should be granted tenure because of their genitalia or femininity so the percentages improve more quickly and become more equal? Those who use identity politics to try to leverage power and resources for individuals who may not merit them would say yes.

Now, I actually don't agree entirely with the first comment. S/he says that an objective evaluation is impossible. I think that an objective hiring process is possible. Or, to be more specific, an evaluation in which the consideration of candidates' races and genders and the fact of historical and ongoing discrimination against members of certain races and genders are considered specifically at certain points, would be more objective than the current system. When it comes to junior faculty, for example, measures could be taken to make sure the initial stages are completely anonymous (or as anonymous as possible), and gender, sex, and racial identity could be used to choose between candidates considered to be of the same quality by the initial stages.

Making a place for the other

Janet Kourany is one of my mentors here. She's married to Jim Sterba, another of my mentors. Today, both are tenured professors in the philosophy department -- Janet is an associate professor, and Jim is a full professor. Their daughter, Sonya, is also planning on pursuing a career in academia. Janet recently wrote a heart-breaking and infuriating open letter to Sonya that was published in the latest APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. In it, she describes -- to put it bluntly -- the incredibly shitty way she has been treated by various departments of philosophy in attempting to solve the two-body problem, and she warns Sonya not to make the same mistakes she did.

People who have interviewed professional women of my generation—people like the journalist Vivian Gornick—have set out poignantly what so many of these women experienced: how they started out full of ambition and promise, how so many of them became trapped in dead-end positions such as research associate positions in the sciences, and how they ended up believing that that was all they could be. Rather than transform a negative environment to meet their needs and deserts, they allowed the negative environment to transform them. Something of that happened to me. Indeed, my third, and probably my worst, mistake was that I allowed my adjunct status at Dad’s university at least to some extent to define me. True, I fought for and eventually got an office with the regular faculty, paid trips to give papers at conferences, the possibility of teaching graduate courses and, in fact, any courses I pleased, and many of the research supports available to the regular faculty, and true, I kept professionally active, but the demoralization took its toll.

You can read all of Janet's letter here.

The diversity of philosophy

Quoting a quotation of a summary (with quotations) of Anita Allen's keynote address at the recent first meeting of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (my source; the punctuational oddities are, I believe, theirs):

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them. The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow. Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?”I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”Despite delight at the birth of the collegium, the existence finally of a “critical mass” of black female philosophers, she admits “philosophy still feels to me like an isolated profession. I don’t think I would encourage a black woman who has big ideas necessarily to go into philosophy,” Allen says. “Why? What’s the point? Go out and win the Pulitzer Prize! Don’t worry about academic philosophy. On the other hand, I would like to see that world open up to more women and women of color.”

I worry a lot about the lack of diversity in philosophy. (Setting aside for the moment the problems with treating diversity as a mass noun.) As a discipline, we're notorious for being just about the only branch of the humanities that's still as male- and caucasian-dominated as physics and mathematics. That's an ethical problem, and it's also an epistemological problem.

The first thing I want to ask is, How do we create more diversity in the community of philosophers? The obvious but unhelpful answer is, Eliminate or counteract the features of that community that drive off most of the potential philosophers that aren't caucasian men. This leads to the second question, What makes contemporary philosophy so unattractive to people who aren't caucasian men? And this question is ill-posed. Philosophy isn't unattractive in an absolute sense. It's unattractive as a major compared to other majors, as a career compared to other careers, as a discipline compared to other disciplines. The choice to go into philosophy is neither made at any one discrete moment nor made in a vacuum.

So, before answering the second question, we need to identify the comparable disciplines that do not have the problems with diversity that philosophy has. This, I think, is fairly easy: pretty much every other discipline in the humanities. The interdisciplinary disciplines that have formed over the last 35+ years -- African American studies, gender studies, and so on -- are especially important answers here. Someone interested in clinical psychology might take a courses or two in philosophy of mind and early psychology (Freud, James, et al. were still considered philosophers), but she's unlikely to end up a philosopher. Likewise with political science and history. African American studies, gender studies, and similar interdisciplinary disciplines in the humanities, by contrast, draw heavily on the work of a certain kind of philosopher, just as much as they draw on the work of historians, sociologists, political theorists, and so on.

This leads me to my hypothesis. As distinct majors, these interdisciplinary disciplines are drawing potential philosophy students away from philosophy. To expand on Allen's question, Why would you go into philosophy when African American studies is a much more inviting place to do the same sort of thing?

The passage from Allen has given me some things to think about under the aegis of my hypothesis. First, doing philosophy in gender studies (with which I'm more familiar than African American studies) isn't the same thing as doing philosophy in philosophy. The abstract worries over, say, whether compositional nihilism is compatible with ante rem realism about universals (and if so, what sort of ante rem realism) that are the central problems of contemporary Anglophone philosophy are non-starters in gender studies. This is one thing that Allen might mean when she talks about `so many more topics ... be[ing] written about' in other humanities departments. While the methods and techniques can be the same, the topics are very very different.

But this is a gross overgeneralisation. There are ethicists and political philosophers in philosophy departments; not all of us spend all of our time worrying about compositional nihilism. The topics contemporary ethicists and political philosophers consider are much more closely aligned to the topics considered in gender studies. And it's also grossly prejudicial to assume that an undergraduate trying to choose whether to major in philosophy or African American studies wouldn't be interested in worrying about compositional nihilism, as grossly prejudicial as assuming that women decide not to pursue careers in mathematics because set theory is just so boring.

Hence, second, the content and topics of `mainstream', `important' philosophy are not the only reasons why philosopher has a problem with diversity. As much as I'd like an excuse to cast metaphysics out (in the nicest possible way, of course), diversity is not going to be one. So we need to look at other potential causes. We need to look at discrimination, on both a personal and structural level. Third, we can't do this, as philosophers are so often wont to do, from our armchairs. We cannot divine, a priori, the reasons why our discipline is so much less attractive than our sister disciplines in the humanities. We cannot, by pure ratiocination, discover the objectively best way to structure the discipline. We need to be talking to students from underrepresented backgrounds, especially those who consider majoring in philosophy and decide to major in something else -- Why did you decide to major in gender studies/history/African American studies/Swanhili instead of philosophy?

Fourth, this means we need to meet these students. We need to offer classes within philosophy that deliberately align with and support the classes offered under the heading of African American studies, gender studies, and so on. We need Intro to Philosophy classes that aren't just a parade of dead wealthy European men worrying about whether the fact that the stick looks bent but feels straight means I'm being deceived by an evil demon. We need joint minors and, eventually, majors with these interdisciplinary disciplines -- not to mention more traditional disciplines like history, psychology, and political science.

Underrepresentation

This is months old, but in my internet wanders I just stumbled across a summary of a meeting of the APA (that's the American Philosophical Association) Committee on the Status of Women and Inclusiveness. There are lots of interesting numbers and theories, and it all makes me rather sad and frustrated with the spectacular backwardness of my discipline. From the conclusion of the post:

The session ended with some "anecdata". Haslanger mentioned (among other things) that she had once been told that she ought to stick to history on the grounds that women ought to reproduce the ideas of men (and keep their own to themselves), that she had been told that she ought to get tested to see whether she was in fact a man (given her success), that people would laugh when she told them that she did metaphysics (would anyone ever laugh at a man?), and so on. The audience (including a female undergraduate student) had similar stories to report about the current climate in the philosophy profession.

In conclusion: the joint session made it exceedingly clear that despite efforts made (under the names of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action) to prevent all forms of discrimination against women in academia (and elsewhere), many departments continue to tolerate discriminatory practices in graduate admissions, interviewing, hiring, promotion, article acceptance and invitation.

I'm not sure if Philosophy-Notre Dame is guilty here. But we clearly have a lot of trouble attracting and keeping female grad students and faculty. That's certainly not a good sign.

Pornography is a mirror

As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.

That's Robert Jensen, a journalist at UT. You can read a review and excerpt of his new book, Getting off: Pornography and the end of masculinity.

Problems with consent

I'm going to stretch myself into an area in which I usually don't write -- legal philosophy. I have no real training in the area, though I've been reading some feminist legal philosophy (MacKinnon and Nussbaum). Hopefully the lawyers in the crowd can point me in the right direction when I inevitably stray off the path.

The feminist blogosphere has been talking a bit about a notion recently promulgated in book and Cosmo-interview form by one Laura Sessions Stepp, a staff writer at the Washington Post. The notion is `gray rape' -- sexual encounters where it's not entirely clear whether there really was consent. Here's a passage from Sessions Stepp that's circulating as an illustration:

Oh, the gray area -- that insidious "if I hadn't gone to that party" place, that "if I had only stopped after one beer" place, that "if I hadn't worn such a revealing top and come on to that hot guy" place where young women go when someone they probably know lays siege to their most private parts and everyone assumes it was at least partly their fault. More than half the time, they're drunk and can't remember details, and most of the time they don't press charges .... some defense lawyers and even some students have taken to calling such episodes "gray rape" out of a mistaken belief that when both parties have been drinking heavily, responsibility for what happened falls into a gray area.

Session Stepp's work is controversial mostly because -- as one can probably tell from the passage above -- she blames `gray rape' on the young women who are going to the parties, drinking too much, wearing revealing clothes, and coming on to the hot guys. I think the feminist bloggers are right to attack this etiology. Session Stepp is straightforwardly blaming the victims for their assaults.

But are they assaults? One thing that seems to have gone mostly unexamined is the idea that responsibility and consent are murky in these sorts of cases. The writers that have looked specifically at this aspect just seem to reject it, as Echidne does here, as an attempt to inappropriately muddy the waters. Note that Session Stepp herself calls the belief that `responsibility for what happened falls into a gray area' to be `mistaken' in the quotation above.

I'm not so certain this is the case. Sexual assault law usually defines rape as nonconsensual sexual penetration, and recognises a notion of implied consent or reasonable consent -- consent need not require an explicit `yes', and denying consent need not require an explicit `no'. But what counts as reasonable? MacKinnon has pointed out that, until very reasonably, anything short of resistance `to the utmost' -- usually, a struggle to escape or death -- was considered as consent under the conventions of `reasonability'.

This definition of rape has other problems. It assumes that a sexual encounter has a very specific structure: the advances of an active penetrator are either accepted or rejected by a reactive penetratee. The agent is not required to give consent; indeed, the idea of the agent denying consent to the encounter is logically incoherent. It is, in particular, incompatible with a model of two autonomous sexual agents, both consenting, coming together in a sexual encounter. And the assumption that the penetrator is the sexual agent is clearly dubious.

Finally, rape as defined in this way is discontinuous with sexual harassment. As both rape and sexual harassment are based on the use of sexuality to humiliate and dominate another, the two should be continuous notions, at least linked with each other in recognition of their similarity of structure.

Thus, I suggest the following definition, to replace `nonconsensual sexual penetration' as the basis for sexual assault law.

Rape describes any sexual encounter in which one or more parties lack real control over the encounter.

Let's walk through the definition

First, `sexual encounter' is vague. But this vagueness is necessary to cover the gaps left by the standard definition's use of penetration. Rape need not involve penetration, after all -- forcing a male to masturbate himself at gunpoint, for example, ought to qualify as rape. Lesbian theorists have long decried the phallocentrism of penetrative definitions of sexuality, but I am not familiar enough with any adequate positive proposals to deploy one here. Suggestions are most welcome.
Second, a sexual encounter may involve two, three, five, or ten parties. My definition does not presume what, following MacKinnon, I call the `subject-verb-object' model of sexuality, on which Man fucks Woman. All the parties in a sexual encounter are regarded as potential sexual agents. The question is whether or not they actually have agency in the encounter.

The third and central component of the definition is the notion of `real control'. This might also be called `actual agency'. A participant in a sexual encounter, for the encounter to not be described as rape, must recognise that she has the ability to exercise control over the encounter. In the first moment, this means she must be able to end the encounter easily and completely. This means any level of incapacitation, whether physical or pharmacological, makes the encounter rape. Likewise, the presence of any coercive factors -- from an explicit threat of grievous harm to verbal wheedling -- make the encounter rape.

It may be objected that I have cut far too broad a swath through the field of human sexuality. Consensual BDSM (Bondage-Domination-Sadism-Masochism) encounters can be immensely sexually satisfying to all parties. Am I not inappropriately ruling these out by explicitly forbidding physical incapacitation, as in the last paragraph?

This objection vastly oversimplifies BDSM practices. The first habit any responsible practitioner of BDSM learns is the use of `safewords' -- vocalisations or other indications that allow any participant, at any time, to easily and completely terminate an encounter. Responsible BDSM, in contrast with its name, is about creating an illusion of domination and torture, and simulating submission and servility. In reality, all parties to a responsibly organised BDSM encounter are autonomous sexual agents, in complete control of the encounter.

This point is one of two critical aspects of the central notion of real control or actual autonomy. BDSM, on my analysis, involves pretending to strip an agent of her or his autonomy, while actually (and explicitly, in the negotiations that take place beforehand) maintaining it. The second critical aspect is that mere formalities of control and autonomy are insufficient. A petite, scantily-clad woman in an unfamiliar neighbourhood may technically be able to leave, but the unknown threats to her safe return home could easily outweigh the more obvious threat of unwanted sex.

Let us return to the notion of `gray rape'. In cases of `gray rape', intoxication and other factors make ascriptions of consent problematic. On my definition, this issue falls out as only indirectly relevant. Consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for a sexual encounter to qualify as non-rape. All that is required is for every agent involved to have control over the situation. In practice, this amounts to a straightforward empirical determination of what coercive factors were in play in a given encounter, from intoxication and threats of force to psychological manipulation and geographic familiarity of the alleged victim. (This would mean that rape cases would be easier to evaluate, if not easier to actually prosecute -- the evidence is entirely empirical and objective, and not dependent on biased testimony of subjective impressions.)

Finally, `reasonable' standards of `implied consent' do not lead to the guilt that Sessions Stepp connects with gray rape. If rape is defined as a lack of control over a situation, then it is impossible for the victim to be in any way responsible for her assault. She did not `lead him on' -- imply consent to a sexual encounter -- by flirting or wearing a skimpy outfit or anything else. Even explicit consent to the encounter is not immediately relevant according to my defintion. Explicit consent can be an indication that actual autonomy is being enjoyed by all participants, but it is not automatically taken to be so.

Not actually anywhere near the most disturbing thing I read today

but chapter four of Nussbaum's Sex and social justice is about Female Genital Mutilation, and that's just so horrible I don't even want to think about it, much less blog about it. This is from chapter five, which is about the importance of contemporary American feminism. Nussbaum quotes William Kerrigan, an English professor at UM Amherst in 1993.

[T]here is a kind of student I've come across in my career who was working through something that only a professor could help her with. I'm talking about a female student who, for one reason or another, has unnaturally prolonged her virginity .... There have been times when this virginity has been presented to me as something that I ... half [sic] an authority figure, can handle -- a thing whose preciousness I realize .... These relationships exist between adults and can be quite beautiful and genuinely transforming. It's very powerful sexually and psychologically, and because of that power, one can touch a student in a positive way.

I'm speechless. Probably because of the overwhelming nausea.

Completely missing the point in Ohio

Via Broadsheet I learn, while procrastinating writing evaluations for my students, that the `choice for men' contingent of the MRA movement have actually gotten legislation up for consideration in the Ohio House of Representatives.

In Ohio, there's an actual bill being considered in the state's House of Representatives that would require a woman seeking an abortion to obtain written consent from the father, according to the Record-Courier by way of Feministing. 'This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child,' Rep. John Adams, an antiabortion Republican state legislator who submitted the bill, told the paper. 'I didn't bring it up to draw attention to myself or to be controversial. In most cases, when a child is born the father has financial responsibility for that child, so he should have a say.'"

Broadsheet blogger Katharine Mieszkowski goes on to ably point out all the myriad ways in which actually enforcing this law would be a complete nightmare. But even she seems to miss the real problem with this bill, that is, the entire point of reproductive rights, viz, bodily autonomy.

You see, ultimately, the right to an abortion isn't the right to avoid child support or commit quasi-infanticide. It's the right to not have one's body used as a life-support system against one's wishes. The problem with this bill is simply that it was written specifically and deliberately to deny women this right. Indeed, it establishes a major organ system in a woman's body as the joint property of her and the man with whom she had sex. Whether that man was her husband or a complete stranger, and whether that sex was an act of love or an act of rape, simply by having inserted tab A into slot B he now enjoys one-half ownership of slot B, which incidentally happens to be another person. `Choice for men' might try to use the rhetoric of gender equity, but it's really about resurrecting coverture.

Masculinity in Disney films

Here's an interesting little documentary about portrayals of sex, gender, and race in Disney animated films. The claim is, unsurprisingly, that Disney uncritically promulgates vicious, traditional gender roles, especially in their portrayals of masculinity as violent and domineering. But their evidence for this claim is a bit on the weak side -- many of their clips show villains acting in a traditionally masculine way. What's more, these traditional masculine qualities are usually part of the villainous qualities of these characters. For example, in The Incredibles and Beauty and Beast, for example -- the latter being one of the documentary's primary sources of evidence -- the aggressive individualism expressed by these characters is what makes them villains.

This doesn't mean I think Disney films are totally progressive. The documentarians are right in the broad strokes, and some particular claims -- that the climax of a Disney film is often a physical confrontation between hero and villain over who will possess a woman is dead-on accurate, even if it's completely untrue for Pixar films. But the evidence is insufficient to prove their primary thesis.



Via Feminist allies

Once More To The Well!

Ok, I really do need to find a few things to post about not related to comics and sexism, but what can I say, this stuff is hot right now.

So we've been talking about Heroes for Hire for a few days now, so let's tie it in with the Mary Jane statuette we talked about earlier. Here's a much better column from the other side than you'll find in any of the postings on the various message boards where this is discussed. At least, it's better in that it's not filled with bile, complete ignorance, and raises some interesting counter-arguments. Of course, it is rather dismissive of people who might dislike the statuette.

I think it's important to keep things in perspective though. Too often I find liberal arguments, whether they are about national politics or discussions about comic books, lumped together as if there is only one level of outrage or dislike that a liberal can feel. We're either in favor of something, ambivalent, or insanely, irrationally pissed off. Are both the H4H cover and the Mary Jane statuette in bad taste? Of course they are. Am I as upset by the Mary Jane statuette as I am about the H4H cover? No.

The Mary Jane statue is immature fanservice. It's cheesecake, yes, and invokes certain styles of the past, but that doesn't mean we should just accept it as totally awesome and give it a pass. It takes a strong female character and reduces her to a passive, submissive, sexy object for Spiderman, and the viewer's, pleasure. To me, it's eye-rolling sexism; a symptom of the way many men still think they need to view women. It's juvenile and should be addressed both by fans discussing it and within the company, but it's not something that I get outraged about. I should note, however, that I do get rather frustrated with the discussions *about* things like the statuette when people deny that there's anything even the slightest big sexist about it.

The H4H cover, on the other hand, deserved every bit of outrage it got. It isn't just a bit of juvenile arousal, it's an attempt to sell books by sexyfying rape. These two examples of sexism are not the same, and they shouldn't be treated as such, but neither is worthy of being blithely dismissed as "fangirl entitlement". People who are such things get the Bingo.

On the other hand, Steven Grant writes a column over at Comic Book Resources and has a much better post over at Publisher's Weekly about this stuff and more.

When On A Roll...

Here's another in what's becoming a long line of posts about sexism in comics. Well, I don't really have a lot to add to this column. It's just one of those things that hits you (well, it hit me!) on the head, forcing an "Oh yeah, I guess there really *aren't* a lot of female science heroes in mainstream comics!" Now, the column doesn't mention this, but it's important to note that mainstream comics aren't without examples of women who are scientists, though those examples are certainly few. But those few women who are written with a firm grasp on hard sciences almost never (I certainly can't think of an example) apply those skills to heroic pursuits as their male counterparts do.

Got Me Thinking

So the H4H cover got me thinking again about Women In Refrigerators and how rape is sometimes used as a motivating factor for women to become heroes. That end, you should read this series on sexual assault in comics.

How Can There Be Any Question?

Another day, another wince inducing image that fanboys just don't get. Here's the cover for Heroes for Hire #13. What could possibly be wrong with that? Could it be that, despite a male arm in the background, we have a bunch of women bound, nearly bursting from their tops, and looking helpless as tentacles approach? Could it be that Black Cat, not so long ago retconned as a rape survivor, is shrinking in fear as not-semen drips on her breasts? Could it be the learing onlookers?

This cover is an obvious homage to the tentacle rape scenes found in manga and hentei. It takes a book that was supposed to be about strong women starting a business in kicking ass and makes them helpless victims. The worst part about it, as ever, is that most comic fans out there just don't see the problem. Like the Mary Jane statue, they just think it's a bit of sexy that has people overreacting. Or, as Gail Simone said about fanboys in response to this cover, "NO whining is too trivial if it's a character they like. But shoot spermsnot at the actual exposed cleavage of a favorite female character and it's, "Them silly dames is so hysterical!"" Actually, the thread that quote came from it far better than most on this topic, though if you don't have time to read over twenty pages of posts you can always just skim for Gail's bits of insight.

The award for the most absurd defense on this topic, however, goes out to those guys that think there's nothing wrong with the cover because the cover artist was *gasp* a woman! How could a woman ever act in a way that's offensive?!

Though certainly not the be all, end all of the argument, the simplest explaination of why this is offensive is: Would this cover *ever* be made with men substituted for the women, pose for pose, expression for expression? The answer is, of course, not in this man's comic's continuity.

Justice? Screw justice

I really fucking hate the Roberts Court:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for many workers to sue their employers for discrimination in pay, insisting in a 5-to-4 decision on a tight time frame to file such cases. The dissenters said the ruling ignored workplace realities.[...]

The court held on Tuesday that employees may not bring suit under the principal federal anti-discrimination law unless they have filed a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set. The timeline applies, according to the decision, even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker and even if they continue to the present day.

Six months?! I'm speechless.

Fortunately (if somewhat futilely) Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read part of her dissent aloud (itself an unmistakable sign of anger), and the tone of her opinion showed how bitterly she differed with the majority. She asserted that the effects of pay discrimination can be relatively small at first, then become far more serious as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay, and that instances of pay inequities ought to be treated differently from other acts of discrimination. For one thing, she said, pay discrimination is often not uncovered until long after the fact.

The majority’s holding, she said, “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure.” She said the majority “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

“This is not the first time the Court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose,” she wrote.