It's Time to Rethink What It Means to Be a Man

A patient is brought into the emergency room. The surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this patient: he’s my son.” The surgeon is not the patient’s father. Why can’t the surgeon operate? This classic brainteaser works -- and it worked on me -- because of the hidden assumption that surgeons are male. The answer: The surgeon is the patient’s mother.

The riddle highlights that most jobs are gendered. Only 13 percent of occupations are sex balanced, in the sense of integrating men and women beyond token levels. And most high-paying jobs, blue- as well as white-collar, are associated not only with men but also with masculinity. Thus the personality traits commonly assumed to make for a good engineer or tool-and-die maker (good at technical subjects, not high on people skills) are considered masculine. So are the very different skills assumed to make for a good executive or factory foreman (forceful and assertive, high on people skills).

No logical relationship exists between these two sets of personality traits and skills. Their relationship is historical, based on the high value placed on qualities associated with men and masculinity. Before separate spheres arose in the late 18th century, many women worked as blacksmiths, woodworkers, printers, tinsmiths, brewers, tavern keepers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, barbers and shipwrights. So long as these women were wives acting as “deputy husbands” for men who were away, this seemed appropriate and unobjectionable. Women doing jobs traditionally performed by men did not yet jar sensibilities because men and women were not chiefly defined by their separate spheres.

Women pre-1800 were defined by their inferiority. The premise was that men, as heads of the household, had the right to expect obedience not only from their children but also from their wives. Women needed men’s guidance because they were not only physically inferior to men but also intellectually and morally inferior.

The Enlightenment’s declaration that all “men” were equal destabilized established notions of women’s inferiority. Gradually, women came to be seen as equal, too -- in their separate sphere. They went from being seen as morally weak to being considered morally superior. Under separate spheres, the “moral mother” was expected to counterbalance men’s pursuit of self-interest in the market sphere, which, still new, was painted as ruthless, “red in tooth and claw.”

It turns out that our 21st century common sense faithfully channels separate-spheres ideology. Thus today’s typical man is seen as independent, ambitious and competitive, naturally suited to market work and the breadwinner role. Meanwhile, today’s typical woman is seen as nurturing, expressive and responsive to the needs of others, naturally suited to homemaking and the emotional work required by secretaries, flight attendants and nurses. These basic tenets of separate spheres continue to shape our default understandings of men and women, reproducing stereotypes that systematically advantage men and disadvantage women in the workplace.

These stereotypes lead to powerful social expectations that link our sense of what one needs to be successful in historically male professions to masculine personality traits and traditionally masculine life patterns. One prominent physicist put it this way: “In particular, our selection procedures tend to select not only for talents that are directly relevant to success in science, but also for assertiveness and single-mindedness.” In other words, physicists are expected to have stereotypically masculine personality traits: to be forceful, proactive, assertive -- ”agentic,” to use social psychologists’ chosen term.