lumière des étoiles

Rumble in the Jungle
2008-02-06 6:15 p.m.

I'm publishing a report through ASEE next month about the massive deficit of women in engineering positions in the United States (as a co-author, don't get too excited for me). This is very much a domestic/local issue, as other countries are not only outpacing the US in generating engineers and cornering the "global market" in engineering projects, but more specifically are generating more women engineers and have a more sex-balanced workforce than we do. And yet many of these nations - like South Korea and India, for example - have horrific records on the protection of women's rights and the state sanctioning (or ignoring) of violence against women.

Such contradictions never cease to amaze me - and plague me, actually, since the very disparate research I do for work and for study is usually this dramatic. For example, when I’m not researching women in tech fields, I'm currently studying states that fail to implement CEDAW despite having signed on to it. Pakistan and Jordan are probably the most dramatic examples, as these are states that talk big pimpin about legal protection for women, but then overlook honor killings or dole out very light sentences if a murdered woman was deemed deserving (you know, like if she is seen talking to a boy from a rival tribe or carrying a physics book and whatnot).

So how do I reconcile what I investigate for work - which is discrimination of otherwise privileged women - with what I investigate for grad school - which is discrimination of women whom no one would classify as privileged? How do I compare the life of a woman in such a dire situation, whose country won't prosecute rapists or won’t allow a women voting privileges, to the life of a woman whose confrontations with gender bias consists of restrictions to her professional advancement? For woman A, from Jordan, survival is on the line. For woman B, from Texas, a promotion at work is on the line. Both are very wrong. But obviously in such dramatically different ways.

The answer to how I reconcile this is that I don't. Or, I can't. Or, I'd go nuts. It's becoming a bit difficult to scour through UN/NGO reports on women and violence to mine for data - and sometimes this means stumbling across photos of women's corpses or stories of a village stoning a woman to death because she was raped by a relative - and then the next day research stats on how many women make it to the level of "administrator" within colleges of Engineering in the US.

I can’t let one negate the other – as I said, both are very wrong on so many levels and are linked under the umbrella idea that discrimination on the basis of sex – whatever the mechanism or manifestation – is wrong. And that’s what CEDAW aimed to universalize anyway. But I’m sure you can understand how odd it is to do both of these projects at once.

Someone accused me recently of having massivesurvivor's guilt or something comparable, as I am a “first-world women with every resource and privilege available to her”. While this is marginally true in the context of my own country as my husband and I are both teachers and do not accumulate wealth/capital/etc. easily, it certainly is true in the context of developing-world women; I have access to running water, antibiotics, literacy, and do not fear that insurgents will break into my house, kill my husband, rape me and cut off my breasts, and then take my children to fight in their renegade army. So maybe said person was right – I do have survivor’s guilt and it’s making the time I spend researching how to help what I guess I see as already-privileged women (remember, context counts here) more difficult. But if I really think about it, I can see the “wrongness” of both situations on so many levels…

I read that Angelina has some sort of guilt complex too, and that’s why she’s so skinny– she feels guilty that others have nothing to eat, so she doesn’t eat much herself. While I definitely don’t have that problem (especially around cranberry-orange scones, babaganouj, and Trader Joe’s Gorgonzola-Walnut tortellini), maybe Ange and me would simply be the bestest of friends. I bet she’d understand what I’m going through. And yet somehow, I bet not.