I’ve always wondered why reading, writing, thinking, and teaching are quietly coded as feminine. Philosophy, literature, English, and psychology are treated as acceptable subjects for women, and men get pushed toward science, finance, technology, and business. Teaching is called a woman’s job and running a company a man’s. Curiosity gets labeled feminine and dominance masculine. Men who use knowledge to make money are celebrated, and people who gather it to find the truth get much less attention. I see it even in colors. Pink is for girls, and navy blue, black, and gray are for boys. Those colors carry meaning. Women are tied to softness and sensitivity, and men to action, competition, and results. It has been this way for so long that most people never question it. When I started reading feminist anthropology and evolutionary history, I began to see that it wasn’t always this way. Rahul Sankrityayan’s Bengali historical novel Volga Theke Ganga (From Volga to Ganga) imagines early human societies that were matriarchal, or at least equal, where women were mothers and also keepers of knowledge, spiritual leaders, and healers. One argument I kept running into is that once men understood women’s role in reproduction, they began organizing power around controlling it, because controlling women meant controlling lineage, property, and social structure. I also read that the size difference between men and women used to be smaller, and that bodies changed over centuries as labor and social roles hardened. Somewhere along the way, men protecting women from other men turned into men owning women.
I’m a woman doing a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering. I read about cognition, psychology, and complex systems, and men who have read one blog post or watched one YouTube video explain these things to me all the time. It’s funny, and it’s exhausting. Mansplaining comes from a system that teaches men that knowing a little is enough to lead, while women have to know everything just to be allowed to speak. Emotions follow the same double standard. A 2016 study by Deng and colleagues in PLoS ONE found that men often had more intense emotional experiences than women while watching emotional videos, and women showed their emotions more openly, especially negative ones. Tell that to a man, and he’ll probably get angry. A man can shout at a football game or lose his temper in the middle of a hard task, and everyone calls it normal. A woman cries once, and she’s too emotional. I see how much effort women put into learning, teaching, and explaining things clearly and gently, and how often that work gets dismissed as emotional or unnecessary. Knowledge, curiosity, and depth belong to everyone. The gender shows up in how we’re taught to relate to knowledge. Men are trained to wield it, and women are trained to earn it. I want a world where knowing has nothing to do with control, and where studying counts as a revolutionary act.
