BLOG POST BY DOROTHY SHIPLEY
If you believe that the “women’s lib” movement was launched in the 1960s with bra burning and feminists marching, think again! For centuries, powerful women have pioneered paths into battlefields, courtrooms, and classrooms, despite a prevailing gender bias that ran rampant in society. Women have been fighting for power and recognition by stepping into male-dominated roles, centuries before feminist activists of the 60s took to the streets in support of women’s rights. This was in direct defiance of society and their male authority figures. Eagly and colleagues stated in 2012 that the first official wave of feminist activism took place at the dawning of the 20th century with the suffragist movement. What we saw in the 1960s was labelled the “second wave of feminist activism.”
Gainful employment requires the appropriate level of education. Derleth emphasized in 2018 that as many late 19th century women were still denied access to secondary education, with parents and influencers steering them toward more domestic pursuits such as sewing and cooking, this meant that they could not meet the admission requirements for post-secondary institutions. While many colleges and universities opened their doors to women
in the late 19th and early 20th century, most women chose the traditional path of homemaker, and as a result the transition of women into the workplace maintained a glacial pace. To keep women in their “rightful place,” suffragists were described by their opposition in thelate 1900s as waging “war against the very foundation of society.”
No Help from Psychologists
In 2012 Eagly and colleagues pointed out that the first six decades of psychological research of the 20th century was largely devoid of research on women, and that which did exist, served to perpetuate the belief of women’s intellectual inferiority. This perception of lower intelligence closed most doors for women seeking employment outside of the home. This misconception, combined with the pressure on women to perform their God-given responsibility of caring for their home and family, exerted a great deal of pressure on those who would challenge gender norms and push for a position in a male-dominated workplace. Prompted by the women’s liberation movement, the period spanning 1969 to 2012 finally saw the number of studies with solely female participants surpass those with only males. This was a new direction for psychology, according to Ball and fellow researchers in 2013, and resulted in the production of many studies demonstrating that women were, in fact, well suited to employment outside of the home, and possessed intelligence that was comparable to that of males.
Post-war Employment? Think Again!
Recruitment of women to provide an essential workforce during the two world wars is depicted in the above image that was created by R.G. Harris in 1943. Once the wars had ended, however, American business executives determined that it was essential to keep women in the home to protect the economy. In 1963 Friedan learned through interviewing business executives that the lady of the house wielded 75% of the purchasing power. According to powerful execs, allowing women into the workforce would be denying women the opportunity to “fulfill” themselves through purchasing for the home, and this belief was widely accepted across American industry. In reality, these execs were merely protecting their own financial interests!
STEM: The Final Frontier
Organizations steeped in tradition remained closed to gender equality the longest, and STEM is no exception. Decades of effort to increase the number of women in science, technology, engineering, and math saw an upswing of women completing STEM bachelor’s degrees in the 80s and 90s, but that early success has since fallen off. According to Wall in 2019, what has been termed “leaks in the STEM pipeline” results in many females who demonstrate interest, skill, and motivation toward STEM courses in high school withdraw from that stream, either to enter another academic stream or leave academics altogether, as they move from secondary to post-secondary education. Women who successfully enter a STEM work environment continue to face barriers to success at work such as toxic workplaces, gender bias, and lack of advancement/promotion in the male-dominated STEM world. Shaw and colleagues asserted in 2019 that even when women are mentored by other STEM women, this just serves to place additional burden on the female mentors. The need to continually “prove their worth,” as well as provide valuable mentoring to junior STEM women, proves counterproductive to the success of all women in STEM.
Are We There Yet?
Through the years, women have challenged barriers to entering the workforce that were based in social, economic, or gender biases. While we’d like to think that we are approaching equality for women at work, progressing toward gender equality in the workplace is still an uphill struggle in many fields. Valian observed at a 2018 conference in Switzerland, a leading male physicist who stated that women in science are routinely afforded unfair advantages, yet they lack both interest and ability in the field of physics. An online male presence calling themselves “Incel,” meaning involuntary celibates, posted the above image online, depicting their perception of men versus women in the STEM domain. It is the proliferation of beliefs such as these that prevent true gender equality in the workplace from becoming a reality. Sadly, we still have a long way to go.