Politics is not the Point

I have received a surprisingly large number of calls, emails and text messges this morning - most of them from women. Just when I thought it was dying, Facebook has gone nuts.

Julia Gillard is notable for a number of reasons - she's from the factional left, she's Victorian, she likes AFL, she's not married and she's a woman. She would be perfect, if only she supported Carlton.

From a political perspective, the fact that she's female is one of the less interesting aspects of the recent coup. Many people aren't happy with the PM being replaced through an internal process, rather than a general election. Many Liberals are unhappy because they were looking forward to a Rudd-Abbott election. Divisions in political views will persist. Not everything, though, is confined to politics.

Less than a decade ago, I was studying towards an electrical engineering degree. Academically, I was perfect for engineering - I was good at maths and science and I liked to build things. Despite this, I hated it. I had come from an all girls school and the culture shock was radical. The teaching style was very aggressive, put-downs and adversarial responses from lecturers were the norm, staff had very poor communication skills and questions were treated as signs of incompetance. I did well in units run by the maths and science faculties, but poorly in those taught by the engineering faculty.

To make matters worse, the course was full of group work and young men (many straight from single-sex schools) at an age where they were both terrified but strangely intrigued by women. It was often hard to find groups to work with. On a couple of occasions, the young men I was working with assumed that 'group work' meant that we were dating.

In around the second year of my degree, I relayed this experience to one of my uncles - himself an electrical engineer - and mentioned that I thought many of the females in my course were struggling with similar issues. His reponse was to explain to me how "women's aptitudes" were not at all suited to engineering and he wasn't surprised I was struggling.

At the time, I really couldn't beleive what my uncle was telling me. I had met men who hated me outright for being female and having opinions. What I found shocking was that, for my uncle, the idea that women had inferior capabilities was so ingrained in his consciousness that he hadn't heard anything I'd said. He was genuinely trying to be supportive by pointing out that my struggles with the culture were in fact intellectual failings and that I should have expected this because I was genetically inferior*.

This type of gender discrimination has always been the the most troubling for me and anecdotal evidence suggest that many women have had similar experiences. Formal, structured barriers are now uncommon but subconscious prejudice (not just in relation to geneder issue) persists. More disturbingly, I've often struggled with how you try to address a bias that people will not (or possible cannot**) admit to having.

One of my Facebook updates this morning was from a friend who is a died-in-wool Liberal stalwart. She was lamenting Labor processes and calling it a "dismal day for the Australian people". She appeared even more incensed by the fact that this process had led to "our first female PM". Even in the midst of being a one-eyed supporter, the significance of the first female Prime Minister was not lost.

Why, in this age where women can earn an income and get mortgages in their own names, does everyone seem so overwhelmed by having a female Prime Minister? I can assume that it's because, at some time, most women with certain ambitions have faced up to the proverbial "caring uncle" and have learned that there is no point in trying to argue - some people just need to be shown.

* At the time I found this response completely baffling. If you, too, find this behaviour odd I can recommend this article on the Dunning-Kreuger Effect.
** See above article.