“But, more importantly, we need men (and anyone with privilege) to consciously and conscientiously account for their own privilege and biases and to actively work to highlight and embrace diverse voices of all kinds. Your interpretation of others is just as (if not more) important in creating change as their efforts to impress you.”

…

I’ve learned a bit to put ‘I think’ in there. But in general that doesn’t work, because I’m just too good with words to not sound confident.

Perhaps I should just learn to accept that people will misunderstand because they don’t expect my kind of behavior from a woman. After all – I do have to survive in a mans world and if we all behave like proper women, how are things going to change?

As for changing what individual people do as opposed to asking the world to change… sorry, but I really can’t wait for the world to change. I have to live in it now, and to have some help in learning why my presentation doesn’t seem to work sometimes, or gives the wrong impression, it helps to know that it’s a gender based difference.

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I would love to see more women stand up and say “me!” and I vow to continue to help younger women assert themselves. But let this not push the onus entirely to women. We need men as allies, men who both encourage women to speak up and who consciously choose to spotlight women who are talented. But, more importantly, we need men (and anyone with privilege) to consciously and conscientiously account for their own privilege and biases and to actively work to highlight and embrace diverse voices of all kinds. Your interpretation of others is just as (if not more) important in creating change as their efforts to impress you. The privileged cannot expect the disenfranchised to assimilate, as tempting as that may be. And even if that were possible, it wouldn’t give us the society we want anyhow.
\end{quote}

In contrast to focusing on what individual men or women can do, which is strongly suggested by the post above, there’s a view about sexism and other forms of oppression according to which it’s not just that people’s attitudes need to change, it’s that there’s a systemic problem in institutions and in various communities and sub-communities. The relationships which determine how someone’s identity is formed and what the person expects of him or herself and others is shaped by the broader context. Someone need not have a particular attitude or belief about women to be sexist and someone who has non-sexist attitudes may well be a perpetrator of sexism by participating in the community in a way that reinforces the suppression of women.

In academia, at least, the kinds of things that need to be done include supporting women’s studies departments and the study of gender more generally; identifying and recruiting talented women for faculty and administrator positions; harshly and visibly punishing sexual and gender-related misconduct; teaching and evaluating students in a disciplined manner aimed at strengthening content and ideas and leaving little or no scope for personal judgements about the individual presenting those ideas. Many institutions are now pursuing courses of action like those I mention above.

The task of reforming institutions and communities falls to everyone.

Dana’s blog post is especially valuable because she’s provided such an articulate account of the sense of what it’s like to have to contend with sexism. It’s fortunate for all of us that she’s managed to find a way, given all the constraints she and other women face, to develop and share her ideas and to develop support for her work. Maybe being louder or promoting one’s self or doing the other things Clay Shirky suggests would help some women attract the attention of some men and women who ignore quieter women. That recommendation, however, represents one of many lateral moves a woman can make in a sexist context—the context itself being where the real problems lie.

Maybe in some places already things are changing. We have a black president; slavery ended just over 100 years ago. Racism is still a defining aspect of American culture. Women probably have a few generations at least before significant irreversible progress is made.