::Shebytches::

December 6th is Women's Remembrance Day. It's the day when we all sit around and think about violence against women. Women's shelters organize bake sales and fund raisers, not to mention candlelight vigils. (Question: What's the deal with candlelight vigils anyways? I mean, I see the various religious symbolisms behind candlelight vigils, but in a secular context, they just look cheesy and unnecessarily cloying.) All these events are held on the anniversary of the slaying of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, the engineering school associated with Universite de Montreal. Because these women were assassinated back in '89, we now take the opportunity every year to remember the violence that women face daily: sexual harassment, physical abuse, etc. The one thing we never look at, though, is the "intellectual violence" committed against women by North American society.

For the past four years, my University's various student organizations have "called attention" to violence against women. Every year they hand out buttons and discuss domestic violence and sexual abuse. But they've never taken the opportunity to emphasize the lack of women in the "hard" sciences such as physics, math, computer science and engineering. And it's not just my educational institution; it's all of them.

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying, "What does the lack of women in the hard sciences and engineering have to do with violence against women?" Give me a moment and I'll explain.

The gunman (and he shall remain nameless since I don't believe in giving free publicity to criminals) targeted women in an engineering school -- women he felt had too much power and were taking work away from him. He didn't walk into a sociology class or a women's studies class. He went directly to an engineering class, a class where women were already in a minority because it's not a "traditional" female subject. And then he killed the women. This wasn't a random act of violence against women; this was a deliberate act of violence against women in a non-traditional gender role. And we have to ask ourselves two questions: (1) Why would a man feel threatened by women in engineering and (2) Why don't more women enter engineering to begin with? But rarely, if ever, do students' groups ask either of these questions. If they at least asked the second question, they would realize that the answer isn't that "women don't like math" or something like that; the answer is much more complex.

I recently got a chance to read a few research articles about stereotype threat. Stereotype threat refers to how a stigmatized group reacts when they are faced with stereotypical images of themselves. I'm not going to go into the details (because I'm not a social psychologist), but the gist of all this is that if you expose men and women who are proficient at math to a set of TV ads depicting women in a stereotypical manner and then make them take a math test, the women's performance will be poorer than the men's. However, if the women and men are shown gender-neutral ads prior to the math test, the women perform as well as the men. (The men's performance stays stable over all TV ads.) Apparently the mechanism at work is that the stereotypical ads remind the women that women are stereotypically bad at math and this gets internalized and affects both their self-esteem and their performance. I won't go into the details, but I'll gladly give you the citations if you ask for them.

Basically, TV ads depicting women in stereotypical ways affect the way women see themselves. It affects the way that women make decisions about who they are in the world. If ads affect women this way, imagine how they affect girls?

It seems that student organizations and institutions of higher learning could use Women's Remembrance Day to lobby for real changes in the way toys, say, are marketed to kids. Engineering toys, such as Lego and K'Nex, are marketed to boys. Meanwhile, "ello," a "construction" set which allows the player to create pink and curvy figurines who go shopping, was conceived specifically for girls. The ad for "ello" mentions that what the player can make is only limited by the player's imagination. As long as the player isn't imagining a spaceship or a skyscraper. What does this say to girls? Men make spaceships while women go shopping? And don't even get me started on how engineers and scientists are always men (or plain-looking, geeky women with no boyfriends) in movies. Even in my beloved "Harry Potter" books Hermione, the lone girl, takes a back seat to Ron and Harry despite the fact that she consistently does most of the work.

I know that encouraging girls to enter the sciences and engineering (and changing the way science and engineering is portrayed in the media and in toy advertisements) is not considered a "violence against women" issue, but I think it should be. Sure, discouraging girls from pursuing the pure sciences doesn't leave a black eye on an individual, but it leaves a giant black eye on society. This is a form of "intellectual violence" committed against girls and women. By discouraging girls from pursuing the pure sciences, we, as a society, prevent girls from reaching their full intellectual potential and we lose many great minds, great inventions and great discoveries as a result. I think it would be a suitable memorial to the 14 women who died all those years ago if we try to break down the barriers that portray women in the pure sciences and engineering as weirdos or "men with ovaries."