“Men are logical. Women are emotional.”
This is a statement that is often hurled around, by mostly men, backed by pseudoscience research, to point out how men and women are fundamentally different from each other. And, this was the statement that a couple of mid 20s, STEM, male, graduate students told me during a casual conversation on the importance of feminism and gender equality. I rolled my eyes, was internally annoyed and then began thinking of refuting the statement, in their own ‘logical’ way without merely shrilling, “WTF, no!”
I quickly recollected some high school mathematical concepts taught by a wonderful teacher, who, by the way, happens to be a woman and also an ex-principal of the school. Read further to understand why I revisited these concepts.
The statement at hand is a generalization, and to a great degree can be classified as a “conjecture”.
A conjecture can be disproved if you can provide just one counter example. And to prove it, one needs to account for ALL cases for it to be valid. In my proof, I will be disproving the statement by employing a concept called “Proof by Contradiction”.
Statement to disprove: “Men are logical. Women are emotional”.
Proof: If women indeed were emotional, then they cannot excel at logical fields like computer science.
However, the first computer programmer is Ada Lovelace, who is a woman. Grace Hopper is a computer scientist who has been instrumental in developing the theory of machine-independent programming languages.
Further, if women indeed were just emotional, we would not be seeing women in computer science classrooms, neither as professors, nor as students.
There are countless more examples that can disprove the above statement.
Hence, using proof by contradiction, the statement DOES NOT hold true.
I played the game in their rules to make a point. I had to pick out the one of the most “logical” field that exists and pick out the women who had excelled in such “logical fields” to disprove it. Honestly, I should not be doing that because the statement will sound completely absurd to any “logical” mind!
Women, irrespective of their profession and qualifications, are beings who have their own agency and can make “logically correct” decisions for themselves. In the beginning of this essay, I had to put out “STEM male graduate student” to point out how ignorant one can be to have internalized an age-old stereotype even when they have been studying “logical” disciplines for nearly a decade and have seen many women as their peers and experts. This in itself should have been a testimony to the falseness of the claim.
It makes me sad, angry and sometimes laugh at the internalized sexism that is still getting perpetuated without any checks. This kind of sexism has far-reaching consequences. For instance, my friend shared an anecdote of her company’s panel (that had many women) discussion she had attended while working as an engineer. A man remarked that he knew how “Indian women software engineers” worked for the company, indicating that they are not good enough. Such ingrained sexism only results in denying opportunities for women, putting excessive pressure on women to outperform their male counterparts to be taken seriously and worse, having such men in committees making policies and decisions for women based on their false and disturbing assumptions.
In a personal setting, such discriminatory assumptions result in mishandling of issues with women in our lives and essentially gas lighting their feelings by stating that “Oh no! The dam is about to burst.” In fact, it is assumptions like these that give root to sentiments like “boys don’t cry” and gravely prevent men from expressing their affection and feelings freely, vulnerably and with sensibility to their male close ones.
Casual sexism is the most venomous poison that seeps into our everyday lives slowly and painfully and in turn, disintegrate the society. It can easily nullify all the efforts people, especially women, have taken in the past to claim the freedom that had been denied to us for centuries. Identifying casual sexism is a difficult task and weeding it out completely from our vocabulary, actions and thoughts takes a lot of observation and open-mindedness.
It is really important to understand that humans have to be treated like human beings, with sensitivity and compassion.
When we say women and men are equal, it means that we have the right to navigate the world in a fair manner by taking into account our differences.
Yes, we have different biological structures but that is no reason to impose discriminatory societal constructs and rules to deny and impede a particular gender their right to live equally and freely.
I have by no means finished lamenting my encounters with casual sexism. This article is not complete. The series is a never ending one. See you in another one soon!
