Are Obama's All-Guy Basketball Games Really a Big Deal?

Posted by Sady Doyle, Comment Is Free at 10:15 AM on October 30, 2009.

This just in: work isn't fair. It's true. No matter how good you are at your job, how committed you are to the organization, how many extra hours you put it and how many grandparents' funerals or illnesses you've refused to take time off for, your success will still depend, to a large measure, not on these things but on less controllable social factors. Specifically, it will depend on whether or not people like you. And, more specifically, it will depend on whether or not you are liked by your boss.

It would be tempting to whine about these facts, and how they affect the antisocial curmudgeons of the world (hey, we need jobs too), were it not so very pointless. People are more inclined to trust, respect, reward and forgive each other if there is a mutual bond of affection, and not all the lectures on professional detachment in the world can change that. However, when these social factors edge into old, entrenched power dynamics, they cease to be yet another example of the petty unfairness that is built into the world, and become a legitimate concern.

When Barack Obama held an office basketball game and invited only male employees to participate, it sparked anger, simply because it looked so familiar. It's tempting to view Hoopgate as essentially silly – one more example of the supremely trivial non-controversies that have dogged Obama throughout his first year in office. (Was it right for the president to call Kanye West a "jackass"? Should presidents know how to use swear words? Is Obama a secret Taylor Swift fan, and, if so, should we be worried?)

But for women, this situation is anything but trivial. The sight of a male boss bonding with his male employees over a stereotypically male activity – and leaving female employees out – is something that many of us have seen before, at our own places of employment. And it can result in real-world inequalities.

First things first. It's important to acknowledge that Obama has appointed women to positions of power, to an admirable extent. We have our secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. We have US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor. It's also important to recognise that the Obama administration has largely taken a progressive stance on women's issues and has advocated for women's rights. Clinton alone has done an immense service in that regard.

But this isn't the point here. Hiring women and taking a high-minded approach to gender equality are good things (and, sadly, still not things we can take for granted at this point in history), but they are not enough, on their own, to ensure a workplace that is totally devoid of preferential treatment for men.

Like is drawn to like. People are simply more comfortable around other people whose interests, or outlooks, or life experiences are similar to their own. And men and women both assume, due to years (if not centuries) of conditioning, that each man is more similar to every other man than any man is to any woman. The same holds true across lines of race, sexuality and class. Even if people are not consciously bigoted, they often feel more comfortable talking to members of their own group than they do to people they've been taught to see as Other.

To treat this as if it were an issue of conscious, wilful discrimination is wrongheaded. It's simply not. It's a matter of people needing to make connections in the office, and making those connections primarily with others who (they assume) can speak their language. But what results is an environment wherein men – including, crucially, the male boss – know each other better than they know the women they work with, and are more inclined to help each other up the ladder.

When the boss is male – and he often is – an ability to speak in "guy talk", or to engage in stereotypically male activities, often becomes the accepted social currency in that workplace. That puts women at a rather obvious disadvantage. The New York Times reports that women who work for Obama are, in fact, complaining about this, though not with any severity. One said that the "sports-fan thing at the White House" got "annoying", which is about the strongest employee condemnation of Obama you will find in the article.

It's worth noting that, in offices with lots of female employees, the same sort of thing can occur. I've certainly worked in places where talking about stereotypically female interests – shopping, in my experience, is a good opening gambit, as are children if you have any (I don't) – was a good way to move forward. But the fact is that the higher up you go in any hierarchy, the more you will find that the people occupying choice positions of power are men. The dominance of guy talk, and the like-selecting-like principle that results in men socialising with, mentoring and promoting other men for reasons of which they themselves may not be fully aware, makes it less likely that this will change.

The problem is not that people network. It's not even that people form friendships based on what they have in common. Those are basic human traits, and they're not going away any time soon. The problem is the assumption that women and men don't have much in common with each other. Even among women, talk about shopping or dating is good because it's safe. It's so stereotypically female that we assume other women will have an interest in it, or will at least be able to talk about it. Once it works, one can move on to topics of conversation that are less insultingly gendered, and based on the individual.

Men ought to be able to do this, too – to approach the women they work with, and make small talk with them, based on things that have nothing to do with gender. The task is to get over the idea that we are alien to each other, and to actually approach each other every once in a while. Once that's done, establishing a comfort level is a matter of course.

Hardcore sexists, of course, won't be able to do it. But well-meaning men and women should be able to. There are plenty of topics of conversation – the weather, the news of the day, whether or not Kanye West is a jackass – that have nothing to do with gender. Start with those, and see where things go from there.

Tagged as: sexism, white house, barack obama, basketball