« 85% Liberal and Loving It
Main
Planned Ignorance »

May 27, 2005

A Dominant Sexist Intuition

As you may know, I work part time for a small semiconductor company. One of my occasional jobs is to deflect calls from salespersons that can use up great gobs of the time of people who have more important things to do. I just got such a call. This salesperson effectively wanted an organization chart of our engineering department. I know this trick. He wanted to get to the "right person" without tell me what he was selling. The funny thing was my job, in this case, was to find out what he was selling and make a determination if he should get to anyone else at all. For several reasons he didn't get any further than me.

Anyway, he asked the name of our V.P. of Engineering. Since this was on our company website, I told him, "June Jiang." The salesperson then asked who reported to him. I said, "he is a she." He snickered. I then suggested that he send an email to her, with a copy to me, explaining his product and I indicated that someone would get back to him if there was interest. He didn't much like this suggestion but knew it was the best he was going to get. Incredibly, he then asked, "What is his email address?"

Two things standout from this: First, while "June" is not an exclusively female name (I have a male Japanese friend whose first name is Jun), a native English speaker, as this salesperson certainly was, would normally have the intuition that "June" was a women's name. Second, once corrected in a lighthearted way, he should have wanted to avoid making the same mistake twice.

However, this individual had an exceedingly strong and incorrect intuition that a Vice President of Engineering was male. Even the likely women's name and the correction could not overcome this deep misperception. Until we as a society get to the place that intuitions concerning the sex of persons having certain kinds of jobs are completely gone, there is no need or reason to worry about the role of "intrinsic aptitudes" of the sexes This is true across the board but particularly true in the sciences, math, and engineering.

Posted by DuaneSmith at May 27, 2005 02:37 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://WWW.telecomtally.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/150

Comments

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.