We’ll get off this topic I promise, but I just felt driven by something that was said to write once more about the whole megillah before us. Next week, all new stuff.

On one blog where this is being discussed – mostly with care – there are such huge differences of opinion showing that I do despair that we will ever be able to get this talked about. Too many people are angry or have beliefs they won’t let go of – and that’s on every side, from the “only talent matters” to “everyone’s biased” from “if you say you’re not sexist you’re not” believers to the “everyone’s a sexist” believers, I think we’ve got a hard road ahead.

It’s difficult being told or shown that you are biased, especially when that stuff matters and you’ve worked hard to ensure, to the best of your knowledge, that you’re not biased. None of us can “prove” we’re unbiased – it’s unprovable. We can try our best but the whole thing about unconscious stuff, about the things we’ve absorbed, the things we’re not aware if is that, well, duh, we’re not aware of them so we can’t fix them if we think they’re wrong.

I talked about the employers I knew who never hired anyone with a disability who would be shocked if you said they were biased against disabled people. Most of us have some bias; I just don’t think any of us can get away from things we don’t know. But few of us are saints –and I believe largely that only saintly people are without bias. But if we were all so damn good at all this, I wouldn’t have people smiling at me sweetly as if I’m somehow more delicate or in need of a hug because I’m disabled.

None of this SHOULD matter but that’s one of the problems. SHOULD. I remember years ago listening to a discussion with Faye Wattleton, the head of Planned Parenthood about condoms in the schools. The person she was talking with was adamant that we not five them out, as he believed that this would encourage kids to have sex. He didn’t want teenagers to be having sex – protected or otherwise. He thought that condoms would encurage something he did not want to see happen. I thought that was silly - In part because if there’s anything LESS erotic than a condom….but never MIND that now. It was his “SHOULD that doomed the discussion – kids SHOULD not be having sex and the access to condoms would mean that they could have sex – maybe more easily. We were helping them have sex (see needle exhange programs for similar arguments. And TOUGH issues) And Faye W took the tack that well, but it IS happening and all our desires and feelings ahd “shoulds” would not change that. We had to deal with the reality. And reality bites. That kids have had/do have/will have sex and that drug users have used/do use/will use needles to inject illegal drugs, damn, it’s a problem and we wish they would not. But while they shouyldn’t, they DO.

Once again - I do not believe that any ITW judgein any way deliberately or consciously chose books written by men because they believe men are superior thriller writers to women. I’ve heard from a cuple judges I know who expressed what I guessed – that the fact that the other 2 juries had lists of all male writers was a shocker to them.

I’m not qualified to discuss whether social factors might influence them unconsciously. Perhaps. Perhaps not. They honestly nominated the books they thought were the best thrillers. I a) thought lots of the books submitted couldn’t be called thrillers and b) think that a good clump of the matter is completely unsolvable since it comes down, like every juried award to “wha’s good” Here it is “what is a good book?” None of us knows WHY we like something and don’t like something else, not wholly - whether it is nature or nurtre to prefer books with political intrigue or romantic involvement or conspiracies or collies. WE don’t KNOW. WE can offer a bunch of possibles but we don’t KNOW. You can’t put me on a table and take my genes and come back and explain WHY I like country music, hate Balanchine and think sour cream is god’s reward for being a good person

HOKAY SO. ON one particular blog someone – someone I will not name -- said something. I won’t name him because I’m taking him partly out of context and partly because I am going off on such a tangent that has little to do with him. I’mtakig what he said to make a different sort of point, not to say he’s right or wrong. And partly because we have had out differences before and I don’t want this to sound like any attack on him. We just disagree on something. And he posted this thing and I then spent the next hour with it humming in my head. Humming really loudly. Because it was huge. And what he said was

“Gender doesn’t’ matter.”

He was talking about this judging controversy and his statement was “Gender doesn’t matter. Only what’s on the page.”

I’m yanking the statement out to examine it because I was never so fast on the keys as when I replied “Gender DOES matter”. And it hummed and it hummed and it hummed.

Gender matters. Never mind if it SHOULD, it DOES.

If gender did not matter

Then Venus and Serena Williamsw ould earn the same for winning at Wimbledon as Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. Yes it’s obscene but that’s a DIFFERENT issue (like talking about why there aren’t more black players – important and worth discussing but distracting to the SPECIFIC issue.). The Wimbledon website lists the “gentleman’s winning amount as £655,000 which today converted to $1,191,775.30 whereas the ladies winning amount of £625,000 is $1,137,189.49 - $54,600 less for the woman.

One argument offered was that a blog where someone says’ not it’s not sex discrimination”. Really?) Then why aren’t the amounts the same? (ok the blogger claims it’s because the men play longer. Um,ok I’d buy that if it were provable and the purse difference. I wonder what word the commentator would have used instead of “whining” if men were not paid as much as women. And funny thinkg, the spokesman for Wimbledon stated back in 200 “Apart from tennis' U.S. Open, "if you look around the world at professional sports, you would be hard pressed to find another event where women get paid the same as men," Wimbledon chairman Tim Phillips insisted last week.

And why isn’t it the same money – it’s that close so why not just make it even. Don’t get me wrong I know it’s a huge amount of money but if you’re going to raise that much for a tennis championship, then for godsake why have a difference? It’s a “mere” $53,000.

If gender didn’t matter, then Lauren Jackson, the 20004 league MVP of the WNBA would make what Shaquille O’Neal makes. (note NBA rookies in 2004 came in at $385,277 – a player with ONE year’s experience got $620, 046); rookies in the women’s league started with a salary of $30,000 wioth the maximum a player can make is around $87,000 to $90,000. Shaquille O’Neal of the Miami that just won a chamption ship had a salary in 2005 of 28,000,000. Yes, that’s twenty-eight million – without endorsement deals which bring in another 12 million or so.. At least 30 NBA players make over 15, miiliion dollars. Of course, the WNBA only gets to play when the men aren’t playing – they were basically started by NBA owners who didn’t like having empty arenas (that they’d convinced taxpayers to remodel) and didn’t like that there was a league out there already they weren’t part of, but oh never mind.

And yeah, we know there’s an issue here of people watch men play basketball but we’re back to the circularity of not watching what doesn’t exist, building an audience, promoting and whether men can be convinced that watching women play a sport is worthwhile and whether the women’s game can equal the men’s but that’s so much more than you want to get into isnt’ it? Sorry.

Gender matters. If it didn’t, then men in many countries, would have to wrap themselves in black head to toe coverings to shield their bodies from the eyes of women who were distracted by their manly shoulders and shins. Or at least wear “modest” clothing, never showing their arms, or shoulders, or legs so that women wouldn’t be distracted.

If gender didn’t matter then in the 70s we wouldn’t have had the stuff I refer to in my post about Tiptree when Astronaut Michael Collins told Time magazine that “women could never be in the space program, since in zero G a woman’s breasts would bounce and keep the men from concentrating.” Arthur C Clarke “predicted this problem” in a book where he had a male character saying that some women should not be allowed aboard ship “weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting.”

Get it? It’s OUR FAULT. That’ matters. YES, that was 30 years ago. (JUST 30 years ago not 100, not back in the dark ages) butin my lifetime. You think it’s groovy now?)

If gender didn’t matter I wouldn’t be reading – this week – newspaper articles lauding a “stay at home father”, or this month an article about how in current US society, despite there huge development of 2 income working adults, women are still vastly the ones who do the household work, the cleaning, the cooking. Even after they’ve worked a full day.

Gender matters. If not, then I wouldn’t have clipped that piece in yesterday’s paper that the police department still wants cell phones for women who are in shelters, have restraining orders against their partners/spouses/abusers and need to have cell phones to ensure their safety. And I wouldn’t be volunteering at a shelter which began 30 years ago and have never been empty since. (and yes, I know men are abused.)

Gender matters. When I began, years back, trying to find a woman orthopedist and read studies that said that women were discouraged from the specialty in med school (the claim most often give was “you aren’t strong enough to set a leg”) and studies of how men were treated differently as patients I realized jesus, gender matters.

If gender didn’t matter, then when AOL and search engines try to offer “safe” searching, they would have figured out how to create filtering that would not block the phrase “breast cancer” BEFORE it became an issue because they would have realized that talking about breasts isn’t just for men who want to “talk dirty”.

It shouldn’t matter. It does. Why it is that several posts about this in the last 3 days have been from men strenuously arguing that of course there was no bias and women – at times TOTALLY over the top YES – arguing that it wasn’t deliberate but it exists. Whle there are women who don’t get it and men who do, the men who are most vociferous seemed angry that we would even raise the issue and suggest we need “a dialogue”. They seem convinced that there’s no such thing anymore as gender bias.

If gender didn’t matter, then the election of the first woman bishop in the history of the Episcopalian Church (one of the oldest Christian denominations in America) would not be news in 2006 and there would be no talk of the likely threat of a church split because a woman became a bishop. And as a non-Episcopalian, I would not be aware of this because it would not be huge landmark news. (In several parts of the world, women in this denomination still cannot lead services or be ordained.)

There were, on both sides of this discussion, over-reactions, “shrillness” and deliberate and divisive attempt to distract from the discussion. One wanted to know whether books by “Jews and African-Americans” had been nominated (no mention of how anyone was to know this, no acknowledgement that these are minority groups, not a majority in our society, no helpful mention of the number of books written by Jews and African-Americans and Asians that had been overlooked. Other men stepped in with knee-slapping helpful comments like “the next thing you know those uppity women will want the right to vote.” And “Do women WRITE books?”

Yeah, I know they were trying to be funny. It’s another one of those things – demeaning a serious conversation by doing yuck yuck and then when they’re called on it going “whatsamatta don’t you have a sense of humor?” It’s a commonplace –and in my experience GENDER related - way of demeaning women’s protests about discrimination. Others pointed out the Agathas – the awards for “cozy” mystery and wondered why we weren’t up in arms that men were never nominated – ignoring the paucity of “cozy” mysteries WRITTEN by men (of course that issue was raised by a woman and I think totally unhelpful) but at least someone chimed in with statistics there. If that needs to be discussed, start a discussion but don’t try to short-change the issue being presented seriously (if angrily).

SAY IT LOUD. GENDER MATTERS.