Discriminatory Rationalization: The Equity/Excellence Debate in Canada.

Introduction The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than story of that emancipation itself, speculated pioneer feminist critic Virginia Woolf back in 1929 in A Room of One's Own (54). And she noted how male professors' treatises about women's inferiority contributed to one of chief sources of patriarchal power, namely, feeling [of a patriarch] that great numbers of people, half human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself (35). Analyzing men's resistance to women's equality--their self-serving arguments about women's intrinsic lack of aptitude for top-tier scientific research, and blame-the-victim rationalizations about women's professional and personal choices--remains relevant today in trying to understand attitudes and behaviours that produce and maintain gendered hierarchies, including those in postsecondary education. Ongoing biases and discriminatory assumptions that impugn women's intellectual capabilities rather than patriarchal institutional structures persist in twenty-first century North America, as was manifest in inflammatory remarks about in science made by former Harvard president Larry Summers in 2005, and in ongoing controversy surrounding two prestigious Canadian research programs, Canada Research Chairs, established in 2000, and Canada Excellence Research Chairs, established in 2008. Men's (and some male-identified women's) opposition to women's equality in postsecondary education, self-righteously defended with prejudices about women's potentially lowering standard, has a long history; though largely forgotten, this tradition of negative stereotyping of educated still casts a long shadow that chills campus climate. A solid, feminist counter-tradition of research on schemas and effects of bias, which refutes patriarchal assumptions and documents women's achievements, exists, but it remains marginalized. For example, in 1970s, research revealed that stereotypes led people to overrate men's abilities and underrate women's when same academic resume was rated more highly if assigned a man's name (Valian 1999, 127-28). In 1990s, Cecilia Ridgeway explained that such biases create employment inequity by causing people to expect greater competence from than from women, and thus to expect greater rewards to go to than to who are otherwise their equals; biases also lead men, on average, to pay less attention to information that undermines expectations based on gender. A 1997 study of scholarship made in Sweden found that women have to be 2.5 times more productive than in order to get same peer review ratings (Motiuk). Yet gender stereotyping remains a significant problem in twenty-first century. As Donna Shalala et al. (2006) point out, evidence establishes that most people--men and women--hold implicit biases ... most of us carry prejudices of which we are unaware but that nonetheless play a large role in our evaluations of people and their work (3). Thus rationalizations and myths about women's competence or its lack still abound. Most are perpetrated by and a few token (or men in skirts) to defend their privileged turf. As critics point out, the unique role of university is that it sits on supply line for its own workers (Williams and Emerson, 4), so university self-reinforces by groom[ing] certain members for and discouraging others from seeking positions of power (Swartz, 413). Sometimes, sadly, myths about women's lack of merit are internalized by women, which leads to self-doubt, lack of self-confidence (Hill, Corbett, and St. Rose). When measure up to male norms, result may still be feeling like a fraud, also known as imposter syndrome, for participating in patriarchal competition and hierarchy may not accord with feminist principles and values. Many and minorities feel fraudulent since, if they hold more egalitarian views, they may not want to claim to be an authority or an expert; also, they may retain a skeptical outsiders' perspective that those who happen to get high titles and acclaim are not always the best and brightest, as Peggy McIntosh argued in Feeling Like a Fraud (1985). …

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