Month: May 2018

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The Martial Races

In an interview this morning, the president said deportation might be the appropriate punishment for football players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and the extent to which the American promise reflected in the lyrics to the song does not extend to African-American people. That’s not a good thing for the president of the United States to be saying.

On the one hand, he’s a madman and he doesn’t think before he speaks. But on the other hand? Well, on the other hand it reminds me of one year in grad school when the prospective students were visiting:

The players are J, a prospective student, and H, a current student two years behind me, a friend, and a guy who had immigrated to the US from an Asian country as a teenager. Also me and A, both white, American-born grad students.

During one of the meet-and-greets with the current students, the four of us were standing around talking and J asked H where he was from. H named the Asian country where he had grown up. “Ah,” said J, “I could tell that you belonged to one of the martial races.” We were all a little dumbfounded and I don’t remember how we changed the subject or recalibrated the conversation.

A and I had some words with J later. To everyone’s relief, he ended up enrolling in a different graduate program, one that, as it has emerged in the last few years, rather tolerates racialized comments towards Asian and Asian-American people.

When I talked with H about the whole incident later, he was inclined to give J the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that perhaps he had just been nervous and blurted out something really stupid because of that. And I remember saying to H that maybe that was the case, but that for J to have blurted out a comment out of a 19th-century ethnography textbook, it would have to have been not only in his brain but pretty close to the tip of his tongue to be the thing that he blurted out when he was at a loss for words due to a moment of pressure or social anxiety.

And here we are. Every rational fiber of my body and brain is trying to tell me not to worry that the president of the United States just admitted that he is considering deporting people who protest police brutality: it’s impractical (what country would agree to take political deportees from the US?); the institutions of our country are still, I hope, too strong for that to happen; and (again, I can only hope) citizens would flood the streets and prevent it from happening. But all the same — and I do not resort to Holocaust analogies lightly — nobody in Germany really thought that its own citizens would get deported, even as this kind of rhetoric surged on the political stage.

Maybe his off-handed comment about deporting football players who protest police brutality was just that, a stupid, off-hand comment; but it reflects something in his brain and on the tip of his tongue. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, the president has shown us all along who he is and he continues to show us; we need to believe him and we need to be prepared for what may c0me next.

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Gender Bias and Letters of Recommendation

Life’s been pretty non-stop for the last couple of months: I hosted Passover for the first time ever, for ten people. Then I went to Spain for NYU admin stuff. And then I came down with a cold/sinus infection/ear infection the likes of which I have not had since 2013 and which waylaid me for two entire weeks, during which time I had to make do at all kinds of end-of-semester meetings/defenses/receptions. Suffice it to say, not only are my leg and core muscles feeling pretty atrophied, but so are my writing muscles. Since part of the purpose of blogging for me has always been to flex my writing muscles and to get my brain into gear, I’m going to try to ease myself back into work on my book, my translation, and some stray articles, with a bit of a blog post. And maybe I’ll even try one that’s more in paragraph form later in the week.

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Some of the advice that circulates about writing letters of recommendation has to do with how letter-writers characterize female subjects in ways that might disadvantage them for fellowships, spots in grad school, and jobs, relative to their male counterparts. Does the letter focus on traditionally feminine qualities, such as her capacity to nurture her students rather than her capacity to teach or inspire them? Do you focus on her teaching and his research? Is she a hard worker while he is just plain brilliant? Did you mention how surprised you were that she finished her PhD even though she had twins while in graduate school? (Yes, that last one is a real example from a letter I’ve seen. We didn’t hold it against the candidate.)

I think I do a pretty good job of avoiding gender bias in my letters of recommendation, but since it’s the season for writing them (not so much for grad students, but for undergrads for summer and post-grad jobs and for honors and awards at graduation) I decided to aggregate the adjectives I used to describe my students and the characteristics/traits/skills that I emphasized, separate them out by gender, and take a look. This semester, I wasn’t writing for any students who identify as nonbinary/genderfluid/genderqueer, so I have a plain binary breakdown:

I talked about the curiosity and ambition of students of both genders, used superlatives in both categories, and talked about class participation for students of both genders. I think based on these lists I have room to make my letters even stronger on students’ behalf, but I think that at least in terms of gender balance, I’m doing okay.

Then I ran the same five letters through the Gender Bias Calculator for letters of recommendation, although I think that ultimately this told me more about the kinds of biases that are most superficial and most prevalent in the academy, and, even more, about the algorithm itself. These were the results:

It’s clear that context matters and that by pulling individual words out of phrases and sentences doesn’t necessarily yield information about bias. I understand that in designating “work” as a female-associated word the program is flagging the possibility of describing female students as hard-workers and male students as naturally brilliant; however, if I refer to a student’s brilliant work on X topic, is that really a female-associated bias? Same with teaching: Just to comment on a student’s teaching doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m flagging female students as nurturers and male students as charismatic, aloof lecturers. 

The algorithm also obviously thought that manuscript referred to the manuscript of an article or a book rather than an archival manuscript; otherwise it would have also identified paleography as a male-associated word. What technical skills are male- or female- associated? Is this tool able to assess gender bias in letters that deal in detail with students working on pre-modern topics?

There are some words that registered that seemed almost to border on a gender-equality farce. Including “semester” in the list of male-associated words just makes me think of the feminist law students in Legally Blonde who wanted to change the name of the term to “ovester.” (With that said, I do note that I used the word semester more times in fewer letters for men, so maybe there’s something to that.) And manifest? MANifest?

Also: Because? Because is a male-associated word?

The conclusion I’m drawing from this exercise is (perhaps deadly obviously) that in this kind of assessment, single words aren’t necessarily the most useful way to measure gender bias in letters; context matters and at least for now the human eye and brain can do the job better.