Equality vs. Sameness

As a woman, I am naturally interested in the debates on women's rights. As an immigrant Chinese, I am naturally vested in the discussions regarding minorities. Interestingly, when I was growing up in China, I never thought of either topic for two different reasons. I never thought there was an issue for women, because the prevailing propaganda was all about "women holding up half of the sky" and there was no mention of prejudice against women in the society. In addition, I never heard of stay-home mothers when I was growing up. I never thought there was any prejudice against minorities, because I was the majority and therefore never noticed anything. In fact, if anything, I thought that the minorities in China were getting much better deals because they could get into schools with lower scores than the general public. Only when I became sort of a minority did I understand how it feels to be a minority - we often cannot think from others' perspectives because we really do not know from personal experience what it feels like to be in their shoes.

When I first came to this country, I was baffled by many things I saw. There were so many stay-home mothers, which would suggest that China was more advanced in the feminist movement than the US. On the other hand, the girls I met at Harvard were much more free-spirited and bold than the Chinese girls I knew before. While in China there are no girls-only schools, there are a lot here in the US. When I looked closer at these women's colleges such as Wellesley, I realized that the girls often grew up to be more out-spoken and confident than those from co-ed institutions, including of course Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. The endless discussion and debates on feminist movement, women's rights and how to balance career and family as a woman would sometimes seem a bit too much. I gradually understood that the China where I grew up tried to institute a notion of "sameness" between the two genders, when in fact there was far less gender equality. Here in the US, many of the ongoing discussions are precisely about the difference between equality and sameness. One of the mistakes that the radical feminists made was to push for sameness instead of equality. The two genders have not been the same, and will never be the same. B

Recently a friend came to visit from out of town. We had lunch, followed by a leisurely walk through the woods at the nearby Foothills Park. We had not talked much since Winston's birth, as she has been immersed in building her academic career while I have been learning (often unsuccessfully) how to best raise Winston while having a career. She's been enormously successful in her research, and has received many awards and distinctions. While her research field is in biology, she was a physics major in college, graduating top of her class from a leading university in Canada and decided to make a switch to biology in graduate school. I heard of her even when I was in middle school, as she was winning math and physics competitions from that early on in Beijing. I often describe her to others as perhaps the smartest woman I know. How many people can switch to a knowledge-intensive field such as biology after college and be extremely successful?

That description makes me realize that inherently even those who whole-heartedly push for women's rights and equality view women as different from men. Does it mean that she is the smarted woman I know but not the smartest person I know? Or does it mean that she should be compared to women first and then the population at large? In the end, I realize that my categorization of her is the result of a combination of factors. First, she is after all one of the few women I know who have pursued a most rigorous and challenging academic career, while I know plenty of men in that circle. That alone makes her truly stand out. Second, I do think that the psychological environment for an ambitious woman is much tougher than that for a man, because a man can have a couple of kids while building up a career while a woman cannot, at least not in the most intense period of her professional life. Therefore, in order for a woman to achieve equal distinction and success, it takes either more work or higher IQ, or a combination of both. After all, women are not the same as men. There may be policies in Sweden mandating fathers to take paternity leave, but in the rest of the world, men are going back to work the day after their wives give birth. And those men will always stay ahead of women who have kids, if they are equally smart, hardworking and lucky.