Broad Recognition: » Arrival: Women at Yale College

Arrival: Women at Yale College

Presca Ahn — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 23:09:57 +0000

September 22, 2010

Director’s Note

By now there are several documentaries about Yale: To Be a Man (1966), Bright College Years (1970), Coeducation (1970), Black at Yale (1974), Boola Boola (1990), Queer at Yale (2003), and my film Arrival (2010). They all have the air of the family portrait about them, since they were all either made by Yale students or commissioned by Yale itself. The films are rarely screened beyond campus. Yale’s changing opinion of itself, as reflected in these documentaries, seems to hold little interest for those outside the family.

Three of the films—Coeducation, Boola Boola, and Arrival— are about the school’s transition, in 1969, from an all-male college to a co-ed institution.

Of the three, Boola Boola is the best-known. Finished in 1990 by then-student Julia Pimsleur, Boola Boola is an energetic survey of the early years of coeducation. It interviews a wide range of former administrators, faculty members, and students (male and female) from coeducation’s early years. The film makes fine use of humor; through deftly chosen quotations and archival film, it mocks the male chauvinism of bygone Yale. The film also bears the color of late-80s feminism, ending with a marquee of gender-related statistics about Yale (the stats scroll down the screen to the music of an all-female rock band). Made twenty years after the beginning of coeducation, Boola Boola contrasts the difficulty of “then” with the progress inherent to “now.”

I saw Boola Boola when I was a sophomore at Yale. The movie was screened in a lecture class on the sociology of sex and gender. I would see it again, several times, over the course of the next three years, but to me the first viewing was the most important. I remember being charmed by its upbeat narrative, by its story of victory over dated sexism.

I realize now that Arrival is a rather uneasy follow-up to Boola Boola‘s optimism. I have tried to figure out why. I think one reason is that Arrival isn’t a general overview of coeducation—coeducation as a phase, as a process measured in several years (or decades). I guess I was looking at coeducation as a moment; I wanted to know what it was like at first. (My working title, while I shot interviews, was The First Year.) Also, while shooting, I found that I wasn’t much interested by the administrators’ perspective– or, indeed, the perspective of male students (most male alums find this shocking). For me, the protagonists were the women undergraduates who arrived at an all-male school in 1969, and tried to claim it as theirs. So as I began filming, I focused exclusively on the fall of 1969 and the spring of 1970, and I interviewed only women who had been there at that time. As a result, Arrival is less cheerful than its predecessor.

I got a grant from the Yale Women’s Center to complete the project, and I was advised by my film professor Charlie Musser (who, as it turned out, had been a student at Yale during coeducation’s first year). I interviewed as many women as I could, given the money and time I had in my senior fall. I found my interviewees through a combination of diligent search, word-of-mouth recommendations, and chance.

The film is impressionistic in its approach. It’s short, and perhaps myopic. Though underpinned by a simple chronology and some historical facts, it can’t pretend to be more than my interpretation of events that happened forty years ago—events for which I was not present. Old newspaper stories, archival footage, and interviews were my only sources. So the film will prove inadequate for anyone seeking a straightforward history. I was more interested in memory.

Presca Ahn ’10 is the founding editor of Broad Recognition. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar in London.

Arts in Brief

Presca Ahn — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:50:02 +0000

by PRESCA AHN

December 2009

Next week, Women in Management (WIM) will host Yale World Fellow Muna Abu Sulayman, the host of MBC show Kalam Nawaem, the most popular social program across all Arab channels. The show focuses on issues of culture and gender. Sulayman is also involved with the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation, for which she focuses on women’s empowerment issues, cross-cultural understanding, and education policy in the Middle East. December 7th at 11:30 am at School of Management, A30.

On the evening of the same day, author and MIT visiting professor Thomas Glave will speak at Labyrinth Books. Glave has written Whose Song? and Other Stories and the essay collection Worlds to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award. His edited anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, was published last June. Time TBA, at 290 York Street.

Beyond campus: December is the last full month in the run of Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video, which has been on view in New York at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The exhibition was curated by Lauren Ross, and features work by Cathy Begien, Jen DeNike, Kate Gilmore, K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood, and others. It derives its title from feminist artist Lynn Hershman’s essay “Reflections on the Electric Mirror.” Go with a friend, and argue once again about feminist art, what it means, and why it does or doesn’t matter.

Politics in Brief

Presca Ahn — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:48:57 +0000

by PRESCA AHN

December 2009

The Iranian government has intensified a month-long crackdown on civil rights activists, including many prominent feminists. After the past spring’s remarkable election protests, in which women participated in unprecedented numbers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration is making an example of women’s rights leaders. In November, police arrested and jailed Mehrnoosh Eternadi, an educator who holds workshops about violence against women; authorities also seized her computer and personal papers. In the same month, at least 11 feminist leaders were threatened by phone, brought to court, or forbidden from leaving the country. Iranian state television broadcast a documentary attacking Iranian feminism. The husband of Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi was beaten and interrogated by state police about the couple’s daughters, who are studying in Europe. Authorities also confiscated Ebadi’s Nobel medal and froze her bank account. The government’s reason for this treatment was Ebadi’s alleged failure to pay back taxes; it was no coincidence, however, that Ebadi had recently expressed her support for U.N. criticism of Iran’s human rights record. In early December, female television presenters were forbidden from wearing makeup on their shows and over ten women were arrested at a rally of mothers whose children had died in protests of the spring elections.

Amid the furor over the Stupak-Pitts amendment in recent weeks, it was easy to miss another D.C. disappointment: the Senate’s failure to permanently repeal the global gag rule. Since Reagan authored it in 1984, the global gag rule— which prohibits federally funded NGOs abroad from facilitating or even suggesting abortion as a family planning option— has lived and died by presidential whims. Clinton rescinded it in 1993. The second Bush brought it back in his first executive order (on the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade). In January, Obama signed another executive order to reverse Bush’s. This cycle will continue until Congress manages to pass a permanent repeal like the one that senators removed from a recent State Foreign Operations bill. Continuing failure to pass such a provision will make no headlines during this presidency. But it will aggravate the fragility of our country’s commitment to effective family planning among the world’s poor.

Arts in Brief

Presca Ahn — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:13:12 +0000

by PRESCA AHN

November 2009

This month, RALY will present a screening of the documentary The Coat Hanger Project. Director Angie Young will hold a Q&A session after the screening to discuss the film and its subject: the current state of the reproductive justice movement. Publicity for the screening has cited the World Health Organization statistic that an estimated 80,000 women worldwide die annually from unsafe abortions. November 4th at 6 p.m. in the Silliflicks Theater.

As part of the LGBTQ Co-op’s Seventh Annual Trans Awareness Week, multidisciplinary artist and transgender individual Yve Laris Cohen will give a talk entitled “My Trans Body and Things I Make.” Originally a ballet dancer and a woman, Laris Cohen strives to improve public understanding of transgender issues through his research and art. November 6th at 8 p.m. in Linsly-Chittenden 102.

OBIE Award-winning playwright Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, directed by Liesl Tommy, explores the lives of Liberian women struggling to survive in the midst of civil war. Through November 14th at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

The Yale Center for British Art will host “Women’s Social Networks and Friendship Circles,” a thirty-minute gallery talk led by Courtney Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in History and Renaissance Studies here at Yale. November 17th at 12:30 p.m. at the Yale Center for British Art.

“Breaking the Veils,” an art exhibition featuring 51 women artists from 21 Islamic countries, will showcase works meant to counter stereotypes about women’s lives in the Islamic world. Through December 12th at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Presca Ahn is a senior in Yale College. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recognition.

A Smile Is Not a Smile Is Not a Smile

Presca Ahn — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:26:40 +0000

by PRESCA AHN and ADRIEL SAPORTA
Yale Psychology Professor Marianne LaFrance gave a talk on subtle sexual harassment on April 8. Broad Recognition sat in and took notes.

April 2009

Bad things.

At the April 8 Women Faculty Forum event “Subtle Sexual Harassment,” Psychology professor Marianne LaFrance introduced herself as an expert in subtle, unconscious messages that result in what she called—with an irony not lost on her audience—“bad things.”

LaFrance’s euphemism, which drew laughter from attendees, was fitting for a subject that remains largely unacknowledged by public discussion: the less violent varieties of sexual harassment.

“I’m interested in the kind of sexual harassment that may not ever reach the stage of being a formal complaint, let alone being litigated, because it flies under the radar,” said LaFrance, asserting that subtlety was not synonymous with harmlessness.

Before speaking about her own work in the study of subtle sexual harassment, LaFrance sketched out the two categories of legally actionable sexual harassment originated by Catherine McKinnon and later used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in defining sexual harassment: the more prominent “quid pro quo” harassment, wherein one person overtly or indirectly indicates to another that sexual favors are a condition of professional benefit or continued employment, and “hostile work environment” harassment, wherein discriminatory speech, gestures, and situations are a persistent condition of a person’s work or study environment.

The latter preoccupies LaFrance for the same reason that it evades legal action: it is more difficult to document, to avoid, and to combat than the former. Identifying quid pro quo harassment is a relatively straightforward affair, since one instance is enough to demonstrate its existence, and the interaction of power and sexual acquiescence is readily mapped. Hostile work environment harassment, or subtle sexual harassment, takes more insidious forms: graffiti, pictures, sounds, gestures, casual remarks, and—most effectively— jokes that take place at a low level over a longer period of time. (“Am I being oversensitive?” a student may wonder, when a trusted professor makes a few offensive jokes. “He’s a good adviser. Let’s let it go.” Of such situations, LaFrance said, “This is the time that you wish for blatant sexual coercion, because you can name it what it is.”)

Cases of hostile work environment harassment rarely meet with corporate action or legal redress. Rather, they are resolved when the victims of harassment develop suitable ways to cope. LaFrance said that reporting or confronting an instance of subtle harassment was the “last [and] definitely least” resort for most threatened groups, especially women. Popular strategies, noted LaFrance, include ignoring offensive behavior in the hopes that it will go away, or avoiding it altogether by moving away from the office or classroom in which it takes place.
But the time-honored technique, especially for women, is to defuse the situation through a kind of cooperation. In an overwhelming number of cases, women will redefine what is happening to them by “becoming one of the boys”—by placing themselves in the role of aggressor rather than the role of victim— and proving they can take the joke. Eventually, the situation will dissipate, and they can move on with their sense of agency intact.

What it costs to grin and bear it.

Over the course of her talk, LaFrance expressed her concerns about the psychological costs incurred by women who do not confront subtle sexual harassment. She pointed to data that suggested that depression, irritability, anxiety and confusion are more likely to occur in women whose harassment is “not expressly quid pro quo.” Frequent absences from school and work, and even dropouts (or “opt-outs,” as they are sometimes euphemized), are common for women in hostile work environments. Self-esteem and general life satisfaction are lower for these women. More interestingly, data suggests that hostile work environment harassment tends undermine basic optimism about personal relationships.

Achievement, too, suffers under conditions of subtle sexual harassment: work quality and motivation decline, as do grades and productivity on the job. In a cynical world, this last effect is the most important. As a psychologist, however, LaFrance is more interested in the victims themselves. Her laboratory research has focused on the discernible symptoms exhibited by women who are subtly harassed.

La France stressed the importance, when studying subtle sexual harassment, of relying on real-time clinical observation rather than the retrospective reports of victims: “Women can’t all be misconstruing what happened to them, but courts do; they bring in experts to point out why memory is completely distorted and forgetting is actually adaptive. We get on with things in our lives because we forget a lot that goes on… and thank god for it. Secondly, when you ask someone to respond verbally, there are certain things set in motion just by virtue of things having to be said in words.” She also pointed out the possibility that past victims of sexual harassment are more likely to respond to sexual harassment surveys, making proportions difficult to measure.

So LaFrance is chiefly interested in observing behaviors, especially subtle but telling behaviors like facial expression.

Come on, it’s only a joke.

In environments where the harassers are risk averse—elite schools full of high achievers, for example, and many white-collar workplaces— aggression often takes a cowardly form: jokes at the expense of a disadvantaged group. “Psychologists know that if you really want to stick it to someone, tease them, make them the butt of a joke—but do it in a way that looks innocuous,” LaFrance observed. “Then you say, ‘Oh come on, you know I was only kidding.”

Her claim was supported by one of her own experiments, which measured women’s reactions to sexist jokes. In the study, female participants of all ages were prepared with a version of the truth: that the psychologists were trying to see what the participants’ age group found unfunny or unfunny. Participants were seated at a computer and heard a number of pre-recorded jokes played; they were then asked to rate the jokes’ funniness and emotional effect (how much happiness, anxiety, fear, etc. they felt at the moment) on scales that appeared on the computer monitor. Meanwhile, a hidden camera recorded their facial expressions as they listened; LaFrance’s team would later code these expressions according to the FACS (Facial Action Coding System), which codes measurable muscular changes on the surface of the face.

Participants either heard seven sexist jokes or seven lawyer jokes. Examples of the sexist jokes:

Q: How can you tell when a professional woman achieves orgasm?
A: She drops her briefcase.

Q: What do you do when your dishwasher stops working?
A: Slap her and tell her to get back to work.

Unsurprisingly, the sexist jokes ranked a little lower than the nonsexist jokes for “funniness.” The more interesting result was that women’s response to sexist jokes went beyond simply finding the joke funny or unfunny. In the case of feelings of anger, hostility, and disgust, the sexist jokes got higher ratings than did the lawyer jokes.

Researchers also saw a lot of non-verbal reactions associated with rejection, such as the eye roll and the mouth cover, indicating that the jokes had a greater psychological impact on women than other jokes. Women of every age did not just simply experience the jokes as funny or unfunny; they tended to show non-verbal signs of rejecting the jokes, and reported emotions that jokes are not supposed to elicit.

What would you do?

Another of LaFrance’s experiments points up a common human trait: we aren’t good judges of our own future actions. We are optimistic, not realistic, about how we would handle difficult situations.

This was overwhelmingly true of female college students in two studies of subtle sexual harassment on job interviews. The first study described a job interview scenario to research subjects, who were asked to state how they would feel, what they would think, and what they would do in response. The second study literally placed research subjects in a job interview scenario. The objective: to measure whether responses in the real situation matched responses in the imagined situation. The answer: a definite no.

In the “imagine” study, participants read through a scenario that included the job interview locale, what the interviewer looked like, and what the questions were. They were then asked to write a paragraph or two about what they thought they would feel like. “The key,” said LaFrance, “was to ask people what they would do, not what one should do.”

The “real” study measured actual reactions to sexualized job interview questions. LaFrance’s team used a method that barely passed the Internal Review Board: it issued a newspaper ad, no gender indicated, announcing hiring for the Psychology Department. All of the interviews were unobtrusively videotaped (consent was procured by informing respondents that the Department was training new interviewers and that they might be videotaped for quality control purposes). When interviewees arrived, they were randomly assigned to one of three male interviewers; they were also randomly assigned to receive harassing questions or non-harassing questions.

Both sets of questions contained typical job interview questions interspersed with more unusual questions. The non-harassing set contained questions like, “Do you have a best friend?”, “Do you think it’s important to believe in God?”, and “Do people find you morbid?” The harassing set asked questions like, “Do you have a boyfriend?” and “Do you think it’s important for women to wear bras to work?” The juxtaposition of questions was crucial. “What do you think you have to contribute?” was immediately followed by “Do people find you desirable?” LaFrance explained that she devised the questions to be just inappropriate enough that harassment would be “in the air.”

Women who were given the “imagine” scenarios reported little fear but a substantial amount of anger. 6% said they would refocus—that is, try to get off the topic and introduce a new one. 41% would negotiate; for example, in response to the question “Do people find you desirable?” they would respond, “Do you mean as a member of a team?” 33% said they would object to what was going on. 68% said they would refuse to answer. And 16% said they would leave the interview.

The reality was the reverse. Women placed in the “real” scenario exhibited behaviors closely associated with fear; almost none exhibited anger or rejected the situation. Of the women who were subtly harassed, 52% did nothing to counteract inappropriate questioning; 20% refocused; 36% negotiated; and 4% objected. 0% refused to answer. 0% left the interview.

Smile like you mean it.

Authentic smiles, which are almost impossible for humans to fake, involve action of the zygotic major (the “smile muscle”) and the muscle that encompasses the eyes and pulls up the cheek; they are called Duchenne smiles, after the French physician who discovered them. Social smiles, which humans often fake as a defensive action, involve only the zygotic major. Explaining the difference between Duchenne smiles and social smiles, LaFrance stressed a basic tenet of those who study facial expressions: “A smile is not a smile is not a smile.”

Looking at smiles alone, and ignoring smile type, would lead to the conclusion that those interviewees who were harassed were happiest. After all, they were showing the most smiling. The fact of the matter, however, is that they were only showing the most social smiles. When asked afterwards about the interview, the participants who showed the most fake social smiles also reported finding the interview sexist, and their interviewer a harasser.
Here’s another turn of the screw: women who respond with social smiles actually end up undermining themselves. When LaFrance’s team asked MBA students to rate the taped interviewees, women who showed fake smiles were rated to be less competent, less intelligent, and less likely to be hired. So these women’s adaptive response to being harassed ended up counteracting their goals.

Finally, the stress of being harassed disrupted these women’s ability to perform. LaFrance found that harassed interviewees exhibited more speech deficiencies like pauses, ums and ahs, excess words that add nothing, repeated words, and false starts. And these deficiencies didn’t appear in response to harassing questions; there was simply a lagged effect from previous, inappropriate questions.

Ultimately, LaFrance found a rift between real and imagined behavior in response to subtle sexual harassment in formal environments. The real emotion is fear—not anger, as one would hope to feel. “The real behavior,” said LaFrance, “is to ignore, where one would have preferred to confront.”

Presca Ahn is a junior in Yale College and the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recognition. Adriel Saporta is a sophomore in Yale College and the Managing Editor of Broad Recognition.