Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men(9)
The persistence of this myth continues to affect how we see ourselves today – and if the past few years have shown us anything it is that how we see ourselves is not a minor concern. Identity is a potent force that we ignore and misread at our peril: Trump, Brexit and ISIS (to name just three recent examples) are global phenomena that have upended the world order – and they are all, at heart, identity-driven projects. But misreading and ignoring identity is exactly what obfuscating maleness under the guise of gender-neutral universality causes us to do.
A man I briefly dated tried to win arguments with me by telling me I was blinded by ideology. I couldn’t see the world objectively, he said, or rationally, because I was a feminist and I saw everything through feminist eyes. When I pointed out that this was true for him too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just objective, common sense – de Beauvoir’s ‘absolute truth’. For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.
I was reminded of this man in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, when it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘calling out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women voters’.83 This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with ‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been reading his V. S. Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’.
Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explaining that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’85 In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’,86 while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.87
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism. ‘I have no tribe,’ he wrote. He could not ‘join the prevailing hysteria’. What he wanted was ‘to re-enact the glorious revolution of 1832’ – which resulted in the extension of the British franchise to a few extra hundred thousand men of property.88 Heady days, indeed.
These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380.89 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820.90 So who’s the real working class?
These white men also have in common that they are white men. And I labour this point because it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.
Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1977 that ‘what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition’.91 Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalised. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them and their needs.
The way whiteness and maleness go without saying brings me back to my bad date (OK, dates), because it is intrinsically linked to the misguided belief in the objectivity, the rationality, the, as Catherine Mackinnon has it, ‘point-of-viewlessness’ of the white, male perspective. Because this perspective is not articulated as white and male (because it doesn’t need to be), because it is the norm, it is presumed not to be subjective. It is presumed to be objective. Universal, even.
This presumption is unsound. The truth is that white and male is just as much an identity as black and female. One study which looked specifically at white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences found that Trump’s success reflected the rise of ‘white identity politics’, which the researchers defined as ‘an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box’.92 White identity, they concluded, ‘strongly predicts a preference for Trump’. And so did male identity. Analysis of how gender affected support for Trump revealed that ‘the more hostile voters were toward women, the more likely they were to support Trump’.93 In fact, hostile sexism was nearly as good at predicting support for Trump as party identification. And the only reason this is a surprise to us is because we are so used to the myth of male universality.