Opinion: The Privileged Explanation and Academia

Aspen, 2012: Rebecca Solnit, a prolific writer since 1988, attends a party where an older man recommends her to read a newly published book that he considered one of the best of the season. Solnit was the author of the book.

Astronaut Jessica Meir, one of the participants of the first female spacewalk outside a space station in October this year, reports on Twitter about her entry into the “space-equivalent zone” in 2016, where she mentions that water boils spontaneously there. A male user rushes to correct her argument with the knowledge he acquired from a simulation in a space camp.

In 2017, Ph.D. in Physics, Professor Veronika Hubeny participated in a panel. She was the only woman among other expert colleagues in exact sciences. The moderator interrupted her so many times and repeated what she said that an audience member despaired and shouted, “Please, let her speak!” The audience applauded; none of the other academicians accompanying her on the panel reacted to the incidents of interruptions before that moment.

These events do not represent isolated instances. They are part of a problem that denotes a systemic inequality of access to and validation of knowledge within the academic community, or what is also known as mansplaining.

What is Mansplaining?

Mansplaining is a term inspired by Rebecca Solnit, who used her essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” to describe her experiences as a writer in public spaces, where men tried to lecture her about topics that she mastered, sometimes about her own work, that they did not associate with her until it was clarified for them her identity and authorship.

Solnit’s work resonated strongly in the women’s sectors of the academic and scientific community. Just one year after the essay was published, the word mansplaining appeared in the Urban Dictionary of the English language. The Urban dictionary defines the term as “When unsolicited advice or direction is given to a woman by a man in a condescending manner. The reasons typically being, the man does not believe the woman is capable of completing the task independently and must need guidance.” After seeing the traction of the term on the internet, Solnit clarified that it was not describing a practice totally inclined to a genre. Not all men exhibit arrogant, condescending, and ignorant behaviors, and there are also women who act this way.

The definition offered by Lili Rothman, a freelance writer, presents a more neutral and broader concept that embraces the concept of  mansplaining in The Atlantic. Rothman defines mansplaining as the act of explaining without regard to the fact that the person receiving the explanation knows as much or more about the subject than the person explaining it.

Despite keeping the basis of her definition neutral, Rothman points out that this behavior is more common on the part of men towards women. This perspective is debatable and has been widely discussed. The same dictionary that first published the meaning of the term has updated the definition according to the most popular one that defines mansplaining as a term invented by radical feminists to automatically disarm any argument put forth by a member of the male gender. It has also been defined as the most efficient way to explain something based on facts.

“Don’t be that guy.”

Regardless of the reactionary significance that arose from the discomfort of the male sector by putting into words the experience of many women in academia and the scientific community, it is difficult to argue about the reality of an academic community in which women lack representation in various fields of knowledge, especially those of the exact sciences such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer sciences, among others.

In the United States, only 6.6.% of professionals working full-time in male-dominated fields of knowledge are women; in India, women account for just 28% of the overall workforce, without even entering jobs that require knowledge acquired in higher education institutions or the STEM field. Taking into account this serious imbalance, one could say that by mathematical approximation, there would be more men making use of privileged explanation or mansplaining, assuming that the women with whom they engage in conversation do not know the field of knowledge in which they have studied or worked, because of the enormous numerical disparity women have compared to their male colleagues.

We simply do not imagine that a woman could be a career astronaut like Meir or a prolific writer like Solnit. Their fields are so dominated by the perception of a male majority that a stereotype is reinforced that gives that profession or epistemological branch a male face. The women who break this stereotype are isolated cases, easy-to-overlook anomalies as soon as we forget that news that we read about them or that encounter in which we saw them, and they informed us what they were working on. This is the danger of a gender disparity that is normalized and reinforced by perception.

In this context, there are many instances of mansplaining that do not come from a conscious intention to minimize or attack women who are developed in a certain field of knowledge or work, but these occurrences are the product of a normalized reality that favors male perspective and self-confidence over the knowledge and work of women, backed by the male numerical superiority in these fields or the perception that such a numerical superiority exists, whether real or not.

How does mansplaining affect women in the academic and scientific communities?

Mansplaining as an isolated phenomenon would not have to have so much weight in the experience of women working in academia and in the scientific community; in the end, they are just ill-advised words of people, mostly men, who are overconfident and have a sense of merit that they have not earned.

The problem is not that an arrogant host mistakes a prolific author for an amateur writer and recommends to her the book she just published, or that a Twitter user wants to correct an accomplished astronaut because he believes that going to a space camp once makes him more expert, or that a moderator completely ignores what a physics professor says on a panel and repeats the same content she said as if it was his own. The problem is that we do
n’t register the exercise of invisibility that this represents and that it is a symptom of a serious imbalance in the way we collect knowledge, publish it, and give credit to the people involved.

“So many senior faculty, people that have gone on to be provosts, people that have gone on to win lifetime achievements within their field, they all have these stories. And many  of them, at the end of their careers, say that they are exhausted, they are absolutely exhausted by trying to «outperform» to counter that narrative.”

Our empathy, memory, and capacity to assign value to the work of others are limited skills, explains Dr. Janet Bultitude, senior professor of pain research at the University of Bath. “It is easier to mentally catalog a research paper in terms of famous people and not pay much attention to the other names on the paper, who have often done more of the work usually contribute more or at least a good part of the work, or at least quite a big part of the work, and that’s another way people get overlooked,” explains the professor. This practice reinforces the narrative that only a certain profile or sector of the academic community is the one that really participates, and it dictates a set of criteria with which we visualize the whole community.

This socio-visual predisposition presents the leaders in the fields of academic and scientific knowledge to us as adult white men, in most cases. The public doesn’t expect that a professor is a Chicano woman with dreadlocks. Dr. Nicole González Van Cleve, associate professor at Brown University, argues that this biased vision can have serious consequences for the career and mental health of academicians who do not match the image of the academic or traditional scientist. “So many senior faculty, people that have gone on to be provosts, people that have gone on to win lifetime achievements within their field, they all have these stories. And many  of them, at the end of their careers, say that they are exhausted, they are absolutely exhausted by trying to «outperform» to counter that narrative,” explains González.

It is this narrative that presents a specific type of person as the expert model, and anyone who does not fit into this prefabricated image is exposed to becoming the recipient of condescending conduct and annulment within their own community. Mansplaining and other forms of privileged explanations such as whitesplaining or straightsplaining are just mechanisms of a larger apparatus designed to draw a line between minorities and the dominant group.

People belonging to social minorities, such as women, people of color, or the LGBT community, are especially likely to receive this and other subtle exercises of condescension and exclusion. The impact of these practices can be significant in the long term because it discourages these people from being part of the scientific and academic community.

“The real detriment and the real problem is that we’re creating these situations where oftentimes, this is occurring more often to younger people, to women, to people of color. And then we’re getting this situation where then they’re going to be leaving because they don’t feel comfortable, and that’s not correct,” says Dr. Tasha Stanton, associate professor at the University of South Australia. Dr. Stanton refers to the creation of a narrative in which social minorities do not have access to credit and recognition for their work to the same extent as the dominant group of the scientific and academic community.

In any community, this credit that recognizes individuals based on their achievements, skills, and talents is crucial to building a sense of belonging and self-confidence, which in turn is necessary for them to continue productive work in the community to which they belong. This is what we are losing when we make use of a privileged explanation or dynamic that denominates others as inferior in terms of knowledge, skills, and value.

The search and dissemination of knowledge are about communicating new discoveries and learning, according to Dr. Stanton. Connecting with others is key to establishing dialogue and cementing the collaboration necessary to produce that knowledge by which the academic and scientific communities exist in the first place. “Don’t miss those opportunities, don’t be that guy,” Stanton concludes.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0