Clay Shirky revisits rant about women in the workplace

Posted at 2:20 PM Mar 16, 2010

By Andrea Grimes

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Back in January, New York University prof Clay Shirky wrote "A Rant About Women," wherein he argued that if women would only be mouthy and arrogant and demanding, great things would happen to them in the workplace. As in, if women would just start acting like men, they would be a lot better off professionally. This caused a reasonable amount of uproar in the blogging community, and now Shirky is back to talk about his "Rant" again, this time via the BBC's "World Have Your Say."

I think it's fair to say that Shirky does not appear to have read any of the many and various responses to his "Rant" detailing why his outlook is problematic, because then he would be like, "Oh yeah, I should have written this instead because I failed to take almost everything about how the gendered world actually works into account." It is probably also fair to say that Shirky's latest "Rant"-extension is more offensive than the first, because his latest addition just proves his own point wrong: many, many women spoke up in response to his article. They were pushy. Arrogant. Jerks. And you know what? His second "rant" is exactly like the first. Gosh, it's like women were totally ignored no matter what! Interesting.

Here's the nut of Shirky's original argument:

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose  educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren't  just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it  would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can  say about those behaviors, you can't say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We're in the middle of a  generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and  more sensitive partners, to take more account of others' feelings and to let out our own feelings more.

The various responses from women on the 'net have been along these lines: in fact, women are punished for being aggressive (i.e. Hillary Clinton), there are established systemic and institutional forms of oppression that keep women from succeeding even when they are the best candidate for the job whether or not they say so, there are established cultural and social beliefs about women and their role in society that keep them from professional success, not to mention that whopping pay gap women suffer for doing the exact same work as men that cannot be attributed entirely to women's lack of self-assertiveness, and the list goes on and on and on.

To which I would add: we do not ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We ask women to cross gender lines all the time. Carefully, and within certain constraints, but women have classically been asked either to put up with their lot in life or, if they don't like it, to man up. Women wanted to go to work? Okay. They can go to work. But they still do the vast majority of child care and housework. Men have not, it appears, crossed that gender line in any significant way.

Men are, in fact, discouraged from crossing gender lines--this is evident in the recent upswing in male beauty product marketing, wherein any attempt at consumption of beauty products by men has to be deeply couched in hyper-masculinity so that we know that men are not REALLY crossing gender lines. I mean, what is this guy actually saying, that, in pop culture, it's Maxim and The Hangover and Tucker Max and AskMen.com and Digg.com encouraging men to be sensitive? I want to laugh, but this idea is so funny it's sad.

Anyway, let's get on to what's happening now, which is a post on "World Have Your Say" from Shirky, who I think unintentionally proves his opponents' points in this whiny rebuttal to his original detractors. Because a lot--a lot--of women commented on Shirky's original post, and on other blogs, and Shirky does not seem to have read or considered any of those responses. So tell me again, Shirky, what happens when women speak up? They get heard and their opinions and needs get respected? Or they get ignored and dudes just keep doing the same thing they were doing before? Hmmmmmm?

When you imagine a person who is self-assured and willing to speak their mind, and another person whose an egotistical contrarian, you quickly discover that they can actually be the same person simply being judged differently in different social contexts. In that rant I was very careful never to use the language of existence or essence; I always talked about behavior.

For any class of success that involves public visibility, the threshold at which other people are willing to start hating on you is very very low; I'm advocating that women steel themselves to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks, not because that's what they'll be, but because that's the negative judgment they have to be prepared to receive if their work is good and they say so.

This reads to me like Shirky is saying that people's behavior is judged by others. What he doesn't seem to realize is that, since this is true, that behavior will be judged with all the racial, gendered, ablelist, classist, etc.-ist prejudices and privileges of the person judging. And anyone who is teaching at New York University ought to have some idea that women are judged more harshly and punished more frequently than men for exhibiting all kinds of behaviors, (sexual behavior, particularly) including this assertive assholery he thinks we should all get on board with immediately. Once again, women are being asked to fix something that is a problem within society at large, rather than society at large being asked to fix something that oppresses women.

And seriously, this sentence: "... that's the negative judgment they have to be prepared to receive if their work is good and they say so." Shirky assumes that the consequence of a woman being an arrogant jerk is for people to think she's an arrogant jerk--he assumes the consequences for women are the same as they are for men. For better or (more likely) for worse, in what universe does this happen, ever?

The problem, Professor Shirky, is not the players. It's the playing field.