The department I work for at the university is just wrapping up a candidate search for a new faculty member. Though I am not involved in the hiring or selection process, this search has been the major reason I've been posting so sporadically lately. Because we are a state university, we're subject to a myriad of rules and regulations governing the hiring process and most of them have to do with EEO laws. Consequently, every applicant has to be logged and responded to within a pretty stringent timeframe.
And because I'm an idiot this way, I volunteered to help my co-worker out by building her a database which she could then use to run a mail merge each day and streamline the whole log/letter process (we have a lot of applicants). Of course, once the bosses found out I could do this, they asked if I could add fields to the database for one thing and then another until it finally grew to a point where each logged entry includes enough information that the search committe could basically make preliminary cuts without even having to open an applicant's file. Easy for them, not so much for me because, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I also ended up being the one in charge of applications.
One of the lessons my mother tried to teach me: Hard work is always rewarded. With more work.
Anyway, this morning my co-worker came to me to get a list of all applicants who were interviewed (which thanks to Access, was a breeze to print out), so she could fill out the required paperwork for our HR department. Five minutes later, we were on speaker phone as I was going through files, reading CV's and recommendation letters, trying to find any clues about each applicant's gender and/or race. It seems that, in order to comply with federal reporting standards which monitor our EEO compliance, these things must be recorded.
Gender wasn't so difficult. Someone named "William" for instance, seemed pretty simple. But there were a few names like "Chris" or "Sam" or "Xiangjan" where it wasn't so obvious. But most recommendations are full of gender specific pronouns, so as long as we had received rec letters for an applicant, we were fine. For those without recommendations, we went to the members of the search committee and asked.
For race/ethnicity, there was just no way to report it. We started out asking the committee members. All they could tell us though were the people who were white, at least based on their appearance. But my coworker pointed out, that wasn't necessarily accurate either, and she pulled up a picture of her cousin from her flickr account - her blonde, very light-skinned African American cousin. And the cousin's brother, as she showed us, appears to be of Middle Eastern descent. So we were pretty much at a loss as to how to fill out this federally mandated report.
Leave it to the government to require answers to questions they prohibit us from asking.
Anyway, I was talking about this with a friend over lunch, and it occurred to me that our first assumption was wrong as well. First of all, we can't just assume that "William" is male. Probably is, but not certainly. But more importantly, even the search committee members' observations aren't really enough for us to accurately report gender.
My last job at the university was in the women's studies department. Once a week, one of my bosses met up with another professor to do work on a paper they were writing together. Sometimes my boss was late and the professor waited for her at my desk and we would chat until my boss showed up. One day my boss and I were talking about the work of Leslie Feinburg and in the course of the conversation, she brought up the professor.
She'd been coming to the office for eight or nine weeks by that point and, despite the topic of the paper they were working on (transexuality in the university), I'd had no clue that the professor was transitioning from male to female. Okay, so maybe I'd had a clue. Or a few. But I hadn't really considered it - the professor presented herself as a female, so I accepted her as female. I guess 'accepted' isn't the right word here, that makes me sound judgmental.
Let me phrase it this way - this particular professor is in a department near the building where I currently work and I see her and we chat sometimes when I'm out for a smoke break. The other day she was crossing the street at the opposite corner from where I was and I called out her name but she didn't turn and I thought to myself, "I guess she didn't hear me."
She didn't hear me. A lot of people have made this argument more eloquently and convincingly than I would be able to, so I won't even try, but the point is that gender isn't a binary category in which the only options are male or female. And even if those were the options, how would you decide which label is applicable? And how exactly are the labels to be applied? Is gender an anatomical basis or a perception?
The same questions apply to race: is my coworker's "white" African American cousin black because of ancestry and genetics, or is she white because that is what a person passing her on the street would perceive?
The big-picture purpose of the report we had to fill out this morning is to ensure that state and federal instutions are complying with equal opportunity laws. If we interviewed a diverse group of people and chose too many white dudes for second interviews, for instance, this would seem to show a pattern of discrimination on our part. And there would (and should) be consequences. No argument there. But the government wants us to fill in the boxes in order to prove that we're not discriminating by putting people in boxes. But what about the people who don't fit?
The categories, the boxes, seem so arbitrary - useless and at the same time proof of discrimination. There's no way around it. We categorize. Everything. It's what we do. And by defining those categories, we give them merit. We name our discrimination.
I can't really find the words for what I'm trying to get at here, but I think the big picture is blurry. Or maybe part of what they're trying to take a picture of has been obscured. A flare in the lens, perhaps.
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