Women are too Sensitive About Gender Issues

Since the inception of Aequitas Educational Consulting, friends and co-workers have asked a million questions, which we love. Commonly, they ask why this work is important. We’ve got lots of answers for that! Sometimes, we hear arguments against the work; individuals contest that it isn’t needed or it isn’t really what schools should be doing right now. These discussions can be tough, but they are essential. 

Argument #4: Women are too sensitive about gender issues.

After reading the argument above, you may have started screaming internally and wondering how people could possibly think that way. And yet, people that you know and respect may harbor this view, consciously or unconsciously. Often, the idea that women are too sensitive will come out by accident, perhaps couched as a well-meaning question of whether that comment really counts as a micro-aggression. Or, this perspective might emerge when someone kindly suggests that a woman just “stand up for herself” when a man continuously interrupts her during a meeting. People don’t usually mean these comments to be offensive; instead, they think that they are encouraging women to be assertive. But what’s really happening here?

Calling women hysterical or overly emotional is a story as old as time, as evidenced even by the use of the word hysterical. Hysterical has the same Greek root as the word hysterectomy and actually means “uterus”. While it can seem like a cultural norm, calling women crazy or hysterical (or any variation) is a way of silencing women. After all, if women’s ideas and behaviors can be reduced to a lack of emotional control, you shouldn’t have to listen to them, right? Also, when others label women as crazy, it gives the labelers the power to explain women’s emotions to them. When women are assumed to be irrational, it follows that they do not understand their own emotions.  This is a form of gaslighting, which is defined as convincing someone that their thoughts, feelings, or experiences are not valid. By extension, gaslighting aims to convince people that they cannot trust even their beliefs about themselves. This is a well-documented phenomenon and emerges most often in research about abusive relationships.

Gaslighting happens in schools regularly. For example, I have taken student discipline issues to male administrators, only to be told that I was making too big a deal out of it or that I shouldn’t “overreact”, since doing so gave students the impression that I couldn’t handle my own classroom. We also see gaslighting on a national stage, most notably from the people who claimed that the President’s use of the imperative, “Grab her by the…” was nothing more than locker room talk. We have been so programed to think that this type of language is acceptable and funny, that we rarely think twice about something as seemingly benign as labeling a woman as crazy. We may even use such descriptors for ourselves. But as we have discussed previously, the language that we use really matters.

So this week, instead of telling you how to fix this problem, I have an assignment for you, my reading friend. Count the number of times you hear women described as “crazy”, “hysterical”, or “irrational” or any variation that suggests that women’s emotions undermine their credibility. Look at both who says this (you may unfortunately find women using these labels for one another) and at the context in which it is being used. What behaviors were exhibited when these labels were employed? What meaning were the words intended to convey? How was the woman supposed to feel and how did the balance of power shift once the label was invoked? I’d love to hear your feedback and in my next blog, I will feature some vignettes you share with me (anonymous and changed to protect identifying details – just so no one calls you hysterical!). I’m so excited to hear your stories!

- Amy