Women and Objects

Found this interesting paper on philosophy and women. Basically, the goal of this study is to determine some of the factors that may be at play in the gender gap in the study of philosophy. Generally, when I read about gender gaps, it is in the context of business, not academia, and not usually a specific field of study.
One of the things that caught my attention was the experiments that they described. One of the first experiments described details a story about a young man who is reading a book and leaves it and his watch on a table. It says that there was another story about a young woman and two different objects, a fork and a wedding ring. But it doesn't actually give us the full story. I'm curious as to what it was. The female protagonists couldn't have been reading a fork and also leave a wedding ring. So, she was eating? Or maybe cooking?
This probably doesn't affect the results, but it is interesting to note that the stories written here about a man and a woman were gendered. The man is reading, doing something intellectual. The man leaves a watch, something precise and useful. The woman was doing something with a fork, something that involved food, something women traditionally are responsible for within a family. She left a wedding ring, which indicates to the reader she's married; the male character may or may not be married, but a point is made to define her marital status, not his. It's interesting that the story wasn't about a woman reading a book who also leaves a watch, especially since women do read and women do use watches. Or, conversely, men use forks and wear wedding rings. Also: it specified it was a wedding ring. Although some of the readers might assume a woman's ring was a wedding ring, it could also be just a ring. Lots of women, married and unmarried, wear non-wedding rings. The researchers could have written a story about a woman who was wearing a necklace and writing a paper with a pen.
One of the other things the paper mentions, much later on, is that women with high IQs are actually discouraged because they are negatively impacted by confusing problems.  This goes back to something I read years ago in Marie C. Wilson's Closing the Leadership Gap: women only stay in a field if they are truly confident.  My mind is a little blurry on the details, but basically Wilson argued that men stay in a field of study even if they're bad at it.  Women only stay in a field if they are truly good at it.  Apparently this is why there are so few women in certain fields, because they lack the confidence men have to stay with something.  This study is defending the same basic idea that women are unlikely to stay in philosophy because they lack confidence. 
Gender informs so much of our lives, and so much of that informing is subtle. These researchers were right to work on this problem, because, clearly, it affects us all. At the same time, the paper mentioned that there were a lot of experiments where gender apparently didn't affect the results. The paper didn't expound upon those issues, but I would love to read about those experiments as well, because maybe there is information there that would be useful to understanding this gender gap.

A Feminist Aesthetic of Reading

A week ago, I read this article called "Pleasure, resistance and a feminist aesthetic of reading" by Geraldine Heng, which explored medieval literature and feminist interpretations of it.  I've spent a lot of time working in medieval history, so I was impressed by Heng's writing on that history, since she covered a lot of ground in very little space.  But I also liked the idea of looking at medieval writing from a feminist standpoint. 
In March, I read The Song of Roland, which is about Roland, a knight of Charlemagne, who defends a particular spot in the Pyrenees to the point where he and all his men die, but allow the rest of the troops to avoid being attacked by the Moors.  (The Moors, in the words of one of my professors, is another way of saying "You, them there Muslims.")  What bothered me about this story was, at the end, Charlemagne has to tell Roland's fiancee (who wasn't mentioned previously in the story) that Roland has died.  Then this fiancee goes off and dies, with the writer implying she had nothing left to live for.  Obviously, as a feminist, I don't like the idea of a woman being forced to marry, and I'm not a fan of the idea of women not having anything better going on in their life than a man, so this bothered me.  Because I was reading The Song of Roland for a history class and I didn't have to write a paper on it, I kept these thoughts to myself.  Even though Heng didn't discuss this work in her essay, I suspect she would probably have something to say about it. 
I'm also wondering how she would feel about literary interpretations of letters.  I turned in an essay six weeks ago on the letters between Pope Gregory VII and Countess Matilda of Tuscany.  Is it possible to see these in a feminist light, even though they are not the traditional idea of "literature"?  Matilda obviously defended Gregory, but Gregory helped her as well.  Since Heng advocates seeing women in medieval literature as both dependent on men but also with some degree of power themselves, I find myself wondering if I should see Matilda in the same light. 
I'm also wishing I could read the Vitas written about her by various monks, because those would come much closer to qualifying as literature.  Vitas, or Lives, were basically biographies.  They were usually written by men working within the church (as monks, abbots, bishops, canons, etc.) that tell a person's life story, emphasizing how saint-like they are.  If they were written before they were canonized, the goal is to persuade readers they should be, and if they were written after canonization, it's because they wanted to use the person in question as an example of living one's life justly.  There's been a lot of work by historians on these biographies in the last twenty to twenty five years, analyzing them using close reading, a technique that any English major worth their salt understands.  So I'm wondering if it's possible to do something similar while working in English and not history. 
I wasn't really looking to read these feminist essays in order to work on the issues between history and literature or feminist in medieval literature, but Heng's essay opened up a lot of really interesting thoughts for me. 

"Read the Last Poem"

I was in the English department office to drop off a paper and I noticed someone reading the latest issue of The Red Cedar Review. Obviously, I had to tell her that the last poem was really good. :)
Is this what it feels like to be an author? To know someone is going to read your work but keep it out of mind until confronted with proof that yes, someone is going to read your work?
I suspect the woman I told that to was unimpressed, but seeing it was nice.
I'm still trying to keep an eye out for the issue on Amazon, but so far, no luck.