Cheers, everyone!  Especially my new wonderful friends from glorious 
Lisbon!

Yesterday, I jotted down what turned out to be two pages! of text 
related to a quick introductory lecture I’m giving in five minutes.  I 
couldn’t resist an attempt to address a couple themes that have been 
introduced to the list recently.  So apologies, apologies but I’m going 
to send this now anyway since everyone has the option to delete at will!

Sociologists distinguish between sex and gender.  Sex is a biological, 
ascribed attribute.  It is dichotomous, and usually assigned for life.  
Gender is a sociological, achieved attribute; it is about learned 
behavior and it is distributed across an ideal-typical continuum, 
ranging from behavior that is extremely feminine to extremely 
masculine.  

Note:  We sometimes use the word gender instead of “sex” in order not 
to confuse it with sexual intercourse (or whatever Bill Clinton did or 
did not do) but in my discipline, one’s gender is analytically distinct 
from one’s sex.

We tend to roughly assume the gender of people on first sight, given 
what appears to be their sex and the gender work they have done to 
create a certain impression:  what they do about clothing, facial 
appearance, body hair, smell, musculature, movement and then, if it 
happens, things like styles of conversation, vocal timbre, face work, 
etc.  Again, all of this is learned and we learn to do gender work in 
accordance with what our culture, significant others, and we, 
ourselves, expect of us.  Gender is extremely cultured, of course, and 
what, precisely, constitutes femininity or masculinity changes around 
the world.

Any given individual may be classified as more masculine or more 
feminine in general, given cultural norms about these behaviors.  
Certainly, for instance, any female can be surprisingly masculine and 
any male can be surprisingly feminine in both their general way of 
being and in how they behave during any specific encounter.  But it is 
quite normal for any given individual to be more masculine or feminine 
at given times of the day, in different places, with different people, 
or at different times across the life course.  Each individual combines 
femininity and masculinity and is therefore – at least theoretically -- 
able to emphasize more of one or the other as appropriate.

In the U.S., for instance, the ideal manager, employee, parent, 
professor, student, president, janitor, athlete, conference attendee, 
etc., etc., embodies both classically feminine and masculine 
attributes, switching between them as needed in order to best achieve 
the performance and goals expected of her or him.

Many of the world’s most revered religious and political leaders 
provide fine examples of this.  One may note that Jesus Christ, the 
Prophet Mohammed, Buddha, and people like Mahatma Ghandi and Martin 
Luther King, Jr. encouraged others to aspire to daily in practices that 
must be considered extremely “feminine” by the classification 
guidelines of Western European thought.  

One cluster of their ideological frameworks (thinking is a behavior, by 
the way) as well as their more visible behaviors certainly focuses on 
the importance of unmitigated inclusion of all human beings as people 
who matter, for instance, and they often conveyed this message through 
provocative stories and remarks that require quite a bit of thinking in 
order to understand.  They remain quite the political radicals and 
visionaries for this.

It turns out this is also a very feminine way of thinking and being, 
for Westerners.  Deborah Tannen, a sociolinguist, argues, for instance, 
that more feminine styles of talk are not only indirect but they are 
focused on connection and leveling social hierarchies – finding common 
ground with the people we talk to, in ways that invite them to do the 
same.  More masculine styles of talk are direct, however, and focus on 
establishing individuals’ status within a specific social hierarchy.  
Men tend to focus on the question of “who’s one-up on whom” in their 
conversations, she finds, while women try to find the substantive 
footholds that establish their equality and their care for each other.

Consider, for instance, people who 1) go (sometimes massively) over 
their allotted time in conference presentations, 2) prepare and read 
extremely closely argued and difficult to follow “papers,” or 3) 
provide a single, closely-controlled point of access to their thoughts 
(say, only verbal delivery) and belittle individuals who might offer or 
benefit from other ways of presenting.  These are people who, in other 
words, refuse to make room for the audience, who perhaps even think 
that a conference is not supposed to be about the audience, only about 
the speakers.  

Such individuals are simply behaving in a more classically masculine 
way.  So, too, are people in the audience who make long expository, 
corrective, constant, or aggressive statements, as these are also part 
of a metaconversation about who’s one-up over whom.  They also show 
what Charles Derber calls the largely masculine behavior of demanding 
and getting (not giving) attention.

On the other hand, consider people who 1) carefully adhere to their 
allotted time, who 2) prepare and deliver their talks in an inviting, 
accessible way  -- including those who 3) offer multiple points of 
entry to accommodate those who are better visual learners, better 
auditory learners, or who might find a certain style and rapidity of 
English difficult to follow.  These are people who, in other words, 
make room for the audience perhaps because they see their talks as part 
of a conversation and they are at least as interested in what others 
have to say than they are in what they, themselves are saying.  

Such individuals are behaving in a more classically feminine way.  
People in the audience who make succinct, supportive, sometimes 
appreciative statements or who actually ask for more information about 
something (the most attention-giving form of conversational support 
according to Derber) are behaving in more feminine ways, too.

The feminist movement in Western scholarship also has led to the 
assertion that women scholars are responsible for inserting the 
legitimacy of a research interest in the classic territories associated 
with their sex and with the feminine gender.  Everyday life, the home, 
emotions, family relations, etc., etc., became important points of 
interest and were properly problematized because women were finally 
permitted into the halls of the Academy.  Accordingly, we understand 
much more now about things like power, public life, politics, the 
economy and economic behavior, the workplace, etc., because of the 
insights gained from the problematizing, feminist, “outsider” 
perspective that most of us now take for granted in our academic work.

Thus, it is quite conceivable that there are designers, for instance, 
who are more masculine and designers who are more feminine, as well as 
designers who are very good at being more of either, depending on the 
situation.  Conference organizers, conference panels, conference 
presentations, conference-sponsoring societies and conference-
interested communities -- any of these may contribute to, reinforce, 
challenge, or constitute gender work as well as reveal the gender 
assumptions and behaviors of those concerned.  

Far less obvious -- and therefore of more interest to me -- is the 
possibility that there are more masculine and more feminine approaches 
to the practice of design, to the reward structures of design, to the 
teaching of design, to the kinds of problems and solutions one is 
attracted to in design, and to the designs, themselves, produced as 
they are in their possibly variously gendered ways for variously 
gendered people.

I have asked a number of my students about this and encouraged many of 
them to pursue any of these questions.  I don’t know much about it but 
would love to know more!  If anyone knows a good article on the 
subject, please share!  Probably the whole list would like to know, but 
if we go off-list, I’ll put the collective responses together and share 
later.

Very best wishes,

Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology
Illinois Institute of Technology
312-567-6812 (office)
312-567-6821 (fax)
http://www.iit.edu/~socsci/faculty/nippert-eng.html