Shhhh… Affirmative action by stealth can have big results.
This year, the thing I’m most proud of is that I’ve brought in an affirmative action plan for women at my workplace.
Let me explain. I run safe driving courses for teenage drivers in schools. On every course, we give out a few little prizes – it’s an extra way of making programs fun. I was giving these out on a course recently when it occurred to me – all the recipients were male. And when I thought about it, I realised that on all the courses I remembered, most prize winners were male.
How could this occur? Well, quite easily. Teenage boys are generally louder and more confident than girls, so they’re more likely to ask questions, say something funny, or do something interesting. The kinds of actions that get them noticed.
They’ve been conditioned to be assertive and by their teenage years already expect to be paid attention to. Yet girls tend to be conditioned the opposite way – to be told to be “lady-like”, and to feel deficient in both understanding and skill around cars and similar fields such as engineering, science and maths. It’s not innate – it’s pure conditioning. But the effects are that girls on our courses tend to hang back, sit quietly, and not volunteer. Even those who would love to be enthusiastic hold themselves back, from a feeling it wouldn’t be feminine to show interest. Many girls won’t even drive the simulators and cars we supply – sometimes they say this is because they think they’re hopeless, and sometimes because they fear being ridiculed by the boys.
I wish girls knew that the general consensus women aren’t good drivers or good with machinery is absolute rot. By any possible measure, women are much safer drivers than men, and there are plenty of expert women scientists and engineers. The only reason there aren’t more at top levels of motorsport or other car fields is the same reason there aren’t more top female jockeys – they’re not encouraged to be there and are rarely promoted on merit.
Anyhow, when I realised the prizes on our programs were going mostly to boys I was horrified. As a feminist I hated the idea I was actually helping keep girls on a lower rung, and was therefore contributing to the thousand ways women are subtly put back in their place in this sphere.
So I made a decision. From now on, our company would give prizes only to girls.
No male would receive one, unless there were only boys on the program.
I thought I’d encounter resistance from my co-instructors – all male – in implementing this policy, but to my surprise they readily agreed. They were also concerned about how much the girls lacked confidence and encouragement, and wanted to change it.
So in March, we made this a company rule.
We also decided we’d try to promote girls’ interests on courses more. We’d talk more about women’s achievements in engineering and women race drivers like Danica Patrick. We’d encourage – even force – girls to step forward first. We’d call on girls to answer questions. We’d try to tone down the confidence (even arrogance) of boys, and refuse to let them belittle the girls.
It started well, and seemed to work brilliantly. And it would have continued to go well, except for one mistake – we told some of the teachers about our new rule. All of them – male and female – were horrified. On every course, I’d find myself arguing with teachers about male entitlement and women’s pay rates and how we were just trying to even up the gender imbalance. But teachers were having none of it – they saw our quasi-quota system as completely unfair – on boys. I found they were extraordinarily attached to the idea of fairness, but only cared about fairness they could see. And as it’s not easy to see the incremental poor treatment of girls, it’s easy to ignore – even easy to pretend it doesn’t exist.
I wasn’t prepared to accept the teachers’ views on this, so we solved the issue by simply not telling them. Now teachers think we just randomly choose girls to win prizes and answer questions, and everybody’s happy.
I think girls on our programs are bewildered by how they’re treated now. They come in nervously in the morning, and sit at the back in huddles. But when they see the boys aren’t permitted to be dominant, they blossom. When they see me as their instructor (on arrival they think I’m the tea lady) they look first confused, then thrilled. They finish the day bubbling with enthusiasm for what they’ve learned, and with enormously enhanced confidence. When given prizes, they can’t believe it, and the looks on their faces are priceless.
They regularly say they’re amazed how competent they felt and how much they enjoyed themselves. Then something unexpected happened – they started sending emails telling me they’re thinking of doing more to become better drivers. One girl emailed to tell me about a fight she had with a boyfriend, when she wanted to drive rather than be a passenger. When he told her the passenger seat was hers – in her car! – she dropped him like a stone.
I was so proud of that, I blubbered like a baby.
I learned a lot this year. I learned to stop accepting the status quo around feminism. I learned there are real, practical things I can do to promote women – and they’re right under my nose. I learned young women are held back from achievement only because none of us are doing enough to combat it. There’s always more we can do. I wish more companies and governments would try harder, and I feel completely dispirited by recent news women’s representation in politics in Australia has actually gone backwards in recent years.
Look around. Forget fairness in this very moment, and concentrate on what will achieve fairness in the long term. Because that’s what matters.
I learned something else, too, perhaps the most important thing of all. Which is that affirmative action is brilliant, but – shhhhhh – it works best if you don’t tell anyone you’re doing it.
In other words – just as it has worked for men, these past few thousand years …
