gender issues

Presidential party caucus day has arrived for many of us, and it brings with it a sobering reflection on how the media chooses to exercise its power to persuade. Even more sobering is the related reflection on how we choose to exercise our power to think.

My city's less-than-intellectual newspaper has been distracted through much of the pre-election season by our governor's bid for the Democratic nomination. Not that he was ever a viable candidate, but he was ours and we were treated to interminably long months of evaluating his every expression and calorie. Since he dropped out of the race, the newspaper's ability to shift gears and focus on the larger, more relevant contest has been notably impaired. If our fair citizens know anything about the other candidates, it is due to our own resourcefulness, and not because the newspaper has done an adequate job of reporting on them.

So this morning it was with some surprise that I saw pictures of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama splashed across the front of one of the sections of the paper. What an interesting choice -- no, what an interesting series of choices -- were made in the construction of that section cover. Think of the questions that were asked and answered. Should we show the two candidates? Should we show the two spouses? Should we just show the two women? Which pictures (of the many dozens they likely have access to) should we show? Should we make them look smart? Angry? Animated? Peaceful? Should we show them with similar expressions, or different? The foundation for all of the answers to these questions is the underlying rationalization of why.

So here is my question. Why did the Albuquerque Journal choose to show Hillary and Michelle instead of Hillary and Barack? Why did the Journal show Hillary as a bit removed, composed, peaceful, hands folded in front, but Michelle as directly in your face, eyes alight, mouth wide open? What was the purpose?

The average reader may not stop to reflect that Michelle Obama has a B.A. in Sociology from Princeton, and a Harvard Law Degree. They probably don't know that she worked for a number of years in corporate law at a major Chicago intellectual property firm, and that in 1991 she embarked upon a life of public service. She was an assistant to the mayor of Chicago, and the City of Chicago's assistant commissioner for planning and development. In 1993 she became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago, a leadership training institute that helps young adults develop skills for careers in the public sector. In 1996 she joined the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, and she developed the University's first community service program. Michelle also served as executive director of community and external affairs until 2005, when she was appointed vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She also managed the business diversity program, and fostered the University of Chicago's relationship with the surrounding community and developed the diversity program, making them both integral parts of the Medical Center's mission. Michelle Obama has been a tireless and passionate organizing force for public good in one of our nation's largest cities for nearly 20 years.

I don't expect that the Albuquerque Journal expects most of their readers to know this information or to stop and reflect on it. The reaction they likely anticipated -- indeed, counted on -- is the emotional reaction of the simple majority of white people who do not have a black female friend or colleague. Americans are not only considering the prospect of a black president, but of a black first lady. What knowledge, experience, and sensibility do we have to give this consideration its due?

Ultimately, the responsibility for our impressions lies with us -- not the newspaper, not Fox or CNN, not our spouse, or some blog. Just us. Only us. But thinking is not the same as perceiving. Thinking is powerful, evaluative, fundamentally creative. Perceiving is shackled by our emotions, our baggage, our fears and our wants. When we think with our perceptions we are not thinking at all – we're just feeling.

I hope this nation can pull it together in time. I imagine a world where a critical mass of people are amassing critical thought. If we don't take responsibility for our thinking -- soon -- we will have to take responsibility for the mess that ensues.

Today I voted for Obama. I believe that both Obama and Hillary (interesting, isn't it, that as a society we've selected the first name for one and the last name for the other? What does that mean?) can handle the presidency and do a good job, so once the caucuses are over I will support the winner with time and resources. But today I was shaken. I like to think that I am a more rational, more careful thinker than most. But perhaps today I simply benefited from a lifelong influence of strong black women. If the trigger had been something different, would I have responded with perception rather than thinking?

A reality based on thinking is bound to be better than a reality based on perception. It's time for us to think our way to a new reality, by dismantling one perception at a time.

It's been a long time since I had to report to anyone at work other than my customers or a Board of Directors. But not so long that I couldn't remember being asked to fetch coffee, pick up a birthday gift for the wife, have my suggestions mocked (instead of politely declined), or simply ignored. I'm fairly thick-skinned, and that type of treatment most often inspired a wait-until-I'm-rich-and-you're-still-working-here internal response. But when I witnessed this behavior happening to others, and ultimately to my children, my response was much more emotional. What does it mean to honor an employee's dignity? For starters, it means remembering that you are not doing them a favor. The employer/employee exchange is one of parity - one works, the other pays money. These exchanges need to be in balance for dignity to be a possibility. Second, it means that the employer takes seriously his responsibility to train, guide, and communicate. People don't come into any new job automatically knowing how things work. Even the same job in a different company can be radically different than your version of that job. To bring a new employee on and then doom her to failure due to lack of structure, expectations, or instruction is to undermine her dignity. Its a bit too easy, when you're the boss, to forget that there are often many ways to arrive at a particular destination. It's your responsibility to honestly identify which paths are nonnegotiable and which have some flexibility of approach. To deny others the right to think any way but your way is to discount their value - and therefore their dignity. Unfortunately, many business owners believe that the absence of profanity or yelling means they have created a dignified workplace, but some of the most demeaning behavior I have ever witnessed was done with a smile and polite language. To respect someone's dignity is to respect his essential equality, his inherent value, and his full potential to not only contribute, but to teach you something as well. To create a workplace imbued with dignity, we must endeavor to be genuinely dignified ourselves.

How does any thoughtful woman reject the concept of feminism? After all, feminism is simply defined as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.” Not better than, just equal to.

That sounds right and reasonable to me. Would anyone argue that we should not have the right to vote? Should we not be safe to walk in the streets, able to rent an apartment or buy a home without the co-signature of a husband or father, eat in a restaurant unaccompanied by a male? And I have yet to hear one reasonable explanation for the fact that women in the United States still earn 73-cents to each male dollar.

 I don’t think anyone can present a defensible, rational argument against women having equal political, social, and economic access. Rather, I think too many people – male and female – have a problem with women in general.

Several millennia of enculturation seem to have left genetic reactions where rational thought should be.

There are so many different types of men. Wall Street types, urban sweet boys and lost boys, farmers, blue-collar workers, biker gang types and yuppie biker types, quiet outdoorsmen, nude-beach men, Playboy-reading men, nerdy men, mousy men, gun-toting men, earthy meditative types, street preachers and community organizers. We look at all these types of men and we say, “Men!” and we love their crazy wonderful masculine diversity. 

There are also many types of women, but society isn’t nice about many (most?) of them. The worst thing we do is divide them into two groups based on womb-output – moms and not-moms. Then we take the moms and divide them into stay-at-home moms and working moms. Then for fun we pit them against each other.

What about all the other women? Tell-it-like-it-is women, biker women, felonious women, CEO women, fighting-to-be-taken-seriously women, diva women, hunter women, hairy-armpit-women, truck-driving women, librarian women, nerdy code-writing women, secretarial women, sex positive women, asexual women, nude beach women, artist women, gun-toting women, commune women, blue-collar women, tom-boy women, lesbian women, and just-became women. We (and I include women here) tend to disregard women’s roles (other than as moms) and instead look at them in terms of their physical beings – skinny, fat, fashionable, dowdy, old, young. How sad and limiting.

The objections I hear to feminism are typically objections to the women who represent it, not to the concept itself. And – incredibly disheartening to me – many of the objectors are women.

We must have each other’s backs. Any woman who is discriminated against is one of us. Every woman who is sexually harassed – on the street, in an office, or in her own home – is one of us. Every woman who is raped is one of us. Every woman who is denied the right to have - not just “a” say, but “the” say – over her own body is one of us. Every woman who is paid less than a man for doing the same job is one of us. Black women, Latina women, white women, indigenous women, Asian women – we’re all just “us.”

What do we do? First, we get off each other’s backs. So what if that hot (or fat, or too-old, or whatever) woman wears skin-tight clothing? She’s happy with her body. Celebrate her! So what if that mom is (or isn’t) nursing her new baby – she probably knows what she’s doing! So what if that woman just dropped an F-bomb. She’s communicating! So what if she doesn’t shave her armpits (wear a bra, wears socks with her sandals). She’s an individual!

Once we get off each other’s backs, we need to get on each other’s bandwagons. Speak up when you see an injustice. Step up and support women who have been discounted. Promote other women, mentor women, be an excellent boss to other women, be a cheerleader for women. Most of all, refuse to ever give society, business, or individuals alibis for inappropriate and unequal treatment of or respect for women.

We women have immense capacity to be fearless, strong, and outspoken. We use those attributes for those we love. It’s time for us to spread our love a bit wider, to encompass all women. Because once we take ourselves seriously, once we regard each other with the kind of respect and awe that all humans deserve, the rest of the world will fall in line.

People are resentful that radical jihadi terrorism has caused us all to live in a Code Orange world. Women have been living in a Code Orange world for a long time. Sometimes you figure it out when you’re really young, and you carry that wariness and those high cortisol levels around with you for the rest of your life. Other times, you don’t realize you live in a Code Orange world until your boyfriend beats and rapes you over buying the wrong kind of beer, or a stranger yanks you into the bushes on your college campus. But eventually, most women come to realize that we live in a Code Orange world.

One out of every 5 American women will be raped in her lifetime.

One in 4 girls and one in 6 boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old.

It’s hard to come up with clear statistics for sexual assault, because in some states the assault statistics are included with the rape statistics, and in many other states they are not. Additionally, a very large percentage of sexual violence goes unreportedWhat we do know, is that somewhere between 35% and 60% of American women will experience some type of sexual assault in their lifetime.

This means that you most definitely know a woman who has been raped or experienced some form of sexual violence.

This is why “locker room” talk (whatever that is) is not acceptable. Ever. When people banter about sexual violence toward women, they reduce the gravity of it to something the level of a joke. Rape is never a joke. Getting your body groped as if you were an item on a grocery shelf is not a joke. Going through years of therapy so you can actually feel as relaxed as you try to look when you go to work or walk outside your house is not a joke.

Want me to lighten up about this? Oh, hell no. Not until you’ve experienced that sexual assault in my shoes. Not until you’ve walked into a crowd of people, quieted the monkey voice in your head, and counted off each woman you see as follows:

Raped.  Assaulted.  Assaulted.  Not assaulted.  Not assaulted.

Raped.  Assaulted.  Assaulted.  Not assaulted.  Not assaulted.

Raped.  Assaulted.  Assaulted.  Not assaulted.  Not assaulted.

Maybe then, when you leave that crowd and all its tragically violated women behind you, you’ll know that locker room talk isn’t a thing. It’s just another form of violent foreplay.

There are few things I have been more disastrously bad at than dating. I was the poster child for dating the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and then continuing to date them for more of the wrong reasons. Not only was I bad at it … I was bad at it for more than a decade. It was so bad that I caused my friends considerable discomfort. So bad that there was finally an intervention.

The intervention went something like this:

BFF 1: “What are you even doing? What is it you’re looking for when you go on a date?

Me: “What do you mean what am I looking for? I’m looking for a date. How is this even a question?”

BFF 2: “No you’re not. We know you. You want to have kids. You want a family. You’re the nesty-est nester of all of us. You’re not looking for a date. You’re looking for a relationship.

Me: “Well that’s why I go on dates! How am I supposed to be finding a relationship if I don’t go on dates?”

BFF 1: “Yes, but you’re doing the dates all wrong.”

Me: “Well I’m not going home with them on the first date if that’s what you mean.”

BFF 1: “That’s not what we mean. You’re not asking the right questions. You’re not even putting them in the right setting.”

Raised by Wolves

There is an ongoing joke between my siblings and me that we were essentially raised by wolves. Case in point: How had nobody ever bothered to explain to me that there was a point to dating, and that the point was relative to what it was you were trying to accomplish? My friends went on to illustrate how each of our dating approaches were different because we each wanted something different. Who knew there was a science to dating?  (apparently, everyone but me)

The intervention landed me in dating rehab for a few months while I stopped to evaluate how I should approach dating to achieve my desired life goals. And it wasn’t long before I started applying this new lesson to everything I did.

As it turns out, most job interviewers were also raised by wolves; trained to do job interviews by people who had no training themselves in job interviews. Or, worse yet, never trained by anyone at all. And the result is a lot of disastrous dates hires, many of which go on to be relationships that are disappointing, psychologically and monetarily expensive, and hard to get out of.

There Is a Science to Interviewing

Interviewing is used in a lot of roles: Journalists conduct news interviews, scientists conduct research interviews, criminologists conduct case interviews, law enforcement officers conduct interviews of people adjacent to crimes, health care professionals conduct patient interviews … and all these professionals are trained in something called interview science. Yet when it comes to job interviews, most managers just start firing questions at candidates about whatever pops into their heads.

It's no surprise that so many hires are just another bad first date followed by a U-Haul rental.

One of my companies is a strategic HR advisory consulting firm, and it has become somewhat of a mission for me to help our clients do a better job of dating hiring, and that means doing a better job in the interview process.

The Science of Interviewing

You could spend (as I have) months of coursework and years of practice to learn the science of interviewing, but some basic knowledge goes a long way.

Interviewing is an interdisciplinary field, which means that it draws upon principles from psychology, communication studies, sociology, and data analytics to create a process that is intentional, structured, capable of delivering a specific result, and fair. Science is required  because interviewing is about understanding human motivation and how that motivation influences behavior. While we cannot perfectly predict future performance for anyone based on an understanding of their past actions, a well-structured and conducted interview can get us closer to understanding than a random collection of questions without any strategy behind them can.

And if you think you can depend on your gut for this, you’re destined for many bad marriages hires. I won’t even try to explain in this already longish blog why that’s a bad idea, but you could read this book if you want to know more. In it, Malcolm Gladwell does a fantastic job of laying out the risks of trusting one’s gut too much when it comes to assessing people.

The principle we lean on most in interview science is Behavioral Psychology. Behavioral psychology is the branch of psychology that focuses on how past behavior influences future actions. Social Psychology also plays a strong role, helping us understand group dynamics, communication patterns and — of grave importance — understanding how biases influence interview outcomes. The Communications discipline, including active listening and attending to non-verbal cues, is crucial to creating a productive interview environment.

Like most scientific disciplines, there are many theories about the best ways to use all these principles to do interviews. Some theories are more suited to some professions than others. For example, the Reid Technique is a police interrogation theory that would not be at all suitable for job interviews. Likewise, Cognitive Interviewtheory as used in forensic psychology would be deeply intrusive and inappropriate for a job interview. But there are several interview theories and practices that are applicable to the hiring process.

One of them is Competency Based Interviewing Theory, which focuses on assessing the specific skills and competencies relevant to a job. Most people who have never studied interview science would say, “Yes! That’s the theory I’m using!” But there’s way more to it than simply asking about skills and experiences. Competency Based Interviewing Theory uses structured behavioral questions to elicit detailed examples of past experiences. It provides a framework for getting past superficial knowledge and into deeper understanding of a candidate’s abilities and suitability for a given job. Competency Based Interviewing also provides the necessary framework for ensuring a fair and objective assessment across all the candidates for a given job.

Another theory used in a good hiring process is Cognitive Ability Theory, which assesses a person’s problem-solving abilities. Again, if you’ve ever asked “how would you solve such-and-such problem,” this does not mean you were using Cognitive Ability Theory. Unlike simply asking about past problem-solving experiences, this theory involves tailored assessments that delve into a candidate's innate abilities, providing a more direct evaluation of their cognitive aptitude and analytical reasoning skills. To do this, you need suitable assessment tools to provide the data necessary to analyze each candidate and formulate the right questions.

We also use Situational Judgment Theory in the hiring process, which involves presenting candidates with hypothetical scenarios to evaluate their responses and test their judgment and decision-making skills. Again, this isn’t as simple as asking “how might you …” questions. Using Situational Judgment theory, the professional interviewer studies the role thoroughly, identifies the critical competencies and scenarios relevant to the position, and then creates a set of situational questions designed to specifically assess these competencies. The questions are designed right down to the way the questions are asked, because if the questions themselves are vague, or are asked differently from candidate to candidate, the results will not be fair or reliable.

A well-structured interview process involves all these practices and sometimes a few more, depending on the professional requirements of the role. All candidates should be asked the same set of questions to ensure fairness, though the questions asked during the probing of cognitive ability are likely to be different from candidate to candidate based on their differing attributes, qualifications, skills and experiences. The key is to strike a balance between consistency and customization to gain insight into each candidate’s qualifications and potential.

Since all humans have biases, it is also essential to provide bias awareness training, to include diverse interview panels, and to make use of good data for the assessment, interviewing and decision-making process. Efforts to mitigate the effects of bias will produce more equitable — and higher quality! — hiring outcomes (see new section on the use of AI in hiring, added on 10/30/2023 as an addendum at the end of this article)

If you are getting the impression that you must interview someone 32 times to understand if they are the right candidate, that would be wrong. In fact, the majority of good hiring decisions can be made with just two interviews … as long as those two interviews are well-structured.

What Skills and Experience Won’t Tell You

Of course, a candidate can have all the skills and experience in the world, and still be a douchecanoe that gives you a chronic headache and makes all your other employees want to quit. Most skills can be trained on the job, but you cannot train someone to have character, to be kind, to care about others’ needs and opinions, or to be disciplined. These are all attributes that each interviewee has already been born with, raised to, or chosen, and nothing you do in onboarding or training will change those fundamental characteristics.

There are simply some personality and behavioral traits that make candidates a better employee, and you must uncover those in the interview as well. You can use a combination of Behavioral and Situational Judgment interviewing techniques to uncover these issues. But again, I  caution: Simply asking the question “You discover a colleague engaging in unethical behavior. What steps would you take, and how would you balance your loyalty to your colleague with your commitment to the company’s ethical standards?” will not give you the insight you need, because everyone knows how to answer that question “correctly.” You must also employ Depth Interviewing skills to ask the right follow-up questions in the right way to encourage candidates to provide more detailed, specific,and … eventually … genuine responses.

The Interview Sequence

I prefer a two-interview strategy for most hires. I say for most, because for leadership positions and other roles with great strategic impact, two interviews are rarely sufficient. But the majority of hiring activity is for the rest of the roles, and two interviews can work very well if you structure them properly.

In my experience interviews are best done with more than one interviewer, which helps balance out preconceptions and biases and allows you to take advantage of differences in perception and interpretation. But if there will be multiple interviewers, it is important to have the whole group follow the same script and to train the group on how to interview together.

The first interview is to get at the questions of character, personal discipline, and orientation to others. This can be a short interview (20-30 minutes). In the first interview, I only probe skills and experiences as a mechanism for exploring character, discipline, and behavioral or communication issues. No matter how smart or experienced a candidate is, if I see warning bells on issues of character and behavior, there’s no second interview. Why bother? A less skilled candidate with better behavioral attributes will serve the company better in the long term, so there’s no risk when it comes to passing on people that come with a behavioral warning label.

Besides, most of what you need to know in the first interview should have been visible from the resume and/or your job application. Where they worked, what they did, skills required to do the job … these are all things you should review before the first interview is even scheduled. If you don’t receive sufficient insight on the resume, send them your job application (which should ask for sufficient insight) before scheduling the first interview.

For those candidates we deem interesting enough to do a second interview, we schedule them for a pre-employment assessment first. We administer the 16 Personality Factors Comprehensive Insights assessment by Talogy, because it gives us the greatest insight for developing further interview questions, and it benefits from greater peer review and anti-bias development than any other assessment we’ve researched (which is not to say there’s any such thing as a personality or performance assessment that is completely without bias, but that’s another article).

The second interview typically lasts an hour and includes a selection of questions designed to deliver insight into all the candidates’ skills, experience, abilities, behaviors, and motivations, plus individual questions derived from our analysis of the pre-employment assessment.

It is important to group the first and second interviews together as much as possible. This helps to remember candidates more clearly relative to one another and can also help to reduce personal biases and filters from interfering with good hiring decisions. In most cases we have enough insight to choose from among the candidates after second interviews are complete.

Conclusion

The science of interviewing integrates psychology, communications, social sciences, and ethical considerations to deliver a systematic approach for evaluating candidates. Does that sound like a lot of work? Well, it’s not so much a lot of work as it is a lot of learning and study. These days I can prepare for a good interview process in an hour or two, but it’s taken me 30 years of study and practice to get to this point. Is it worth it? Most definitely. Understanding human behavior and using best practices improves the accuracy and the fairness of hiring, which leads to making better choices and, ultimately, to running better companies.

Which brings us back to dating. After what I lovingly refer to as the “Big BFF Intervention, or BBI” my dating took a turn for the better, and it wasn’t long after that I found the relationship that would turn into the love of my life and (at the time I write this) nearly 25 years of commitment. Though I do appreciate the mistakes I made before the BBI, I’m also quite relieved that I was able to stop making them. After all, dating is fun … for a while. But what you really want to do is get on with your life, and when it comes to the quality of life … and business! … the decisions we make really matter.

 

 

Addendum: AI in the Interview Process

The following addendum added on 10/30/2023 to reflect accelerating use of AI in the hiring process.

The fact that HR departments — and companies that have no formal HR process at all — are increasingly integrating AI tools into the hiring process is concerning on many levels. It is hard enough to get human beings past their biases, poor listening skills, and vague communications; though producing structured interviews and providing training can at least help with that. But the algorithms powering AI tools are opaque, and we have no idea if they have been meticulously designed to avoid biases.

AI systems learn from historical data, and if that data contains biases, AI will perpetuate those biases and cause discriminatory outcomes. To date there is very little transparency regarding the data used for AI decision-making. You need to understand and be able to explain how AI systems make recommendations (download our e-book to understand the evaluation process you should use when implementing AI in any business process).

Of equal concern, the lack of human empathy and understanding in AI systems could lead to misinterpretation of candidate responses. Human emotions and contextual cues are vital for successful interviewing, and AI cannot respond to them the way a trained human interviewer would. If an initial video interview is conducted using AI, only to be skimmed watched by a hiring manager after-the-fact, there’s no opportunity to further probe candidate responses. This can lead to failure to understand a candidate’s suitability for a role. Additionally, reliance on AI hiring tools might result in a loss of the personal touch needed to effectively evaluate a candidate’s soft skills, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit within an organization.

AI is being used to increase hiring efficiency, but it should be used sparingly. Concerns about fairness, unbiased evaluation, and privacy protection are important, but perhaps most important is that AI still does not have the ability to use psychology, sociology, and communication sciences sufficiently to improve HR outcomes. The result for most companies will likely be making all the same hiring mistakes they make now … only faster.

I was delighted to see Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Glenn Close, and Bette Midler tonight on the Oscars. I recognized them. And though I am hardly in-the-know about whether or not they have had cosmetic surgery, if they have, they've kept a light hand about it. They are beautiful women past the age of 55 who look past the age of 55.

Which is brave in a society that still primarily values women based on bust size and curve ratio. Particularly in Hollywood, where sex appeal still matters at least as much as talent, the women who refuse to try to look 20 years younger are practically taking a stand.

The majority of women still spend the first 20 years of life learning what the world expects, the next 25 years devoted to families, and finally, finally, we get to ourselves. What we expect ourselves to be. What we now have time to become. But at that exciting moment, with all the time and potential in the world before us, too many women look in the mirror and see only the wrinkles, the gray hair, the softened jaw line, the extra pounds. We fail to inspire ourselves because the reflection in the mirror doesn't live up to society's expectations of fuckability.

As if that's all we're good for. As if that's what we aspire to.

Poor Kim Novak. She doesn't need kissable puffed-up lips, a wrinkle-free face, she doesn't need to look 35 to remind me of her glamor. She could have walked out on that stage with a face that bragged of her 81 years and held our attention. I don't think for one moment it was vanity that drove her decision to hit the botox hard. I don't think it's ego that causes Goldie Hawn to keep going under the knife. It's lack of self-worth. If the only value you've placed on yourself is society's meter of youth and fecundity, then you can't look in the mirror and take pride in the woman staring back.

Sure, the human attraction to fertility has a strong biological basis. But in other cultures, other times, a deep appreciation for survival, contribution, and the wisdom one gains over time have also played an important part. I gratefully traded my flirtatious and slightly wild years for my child-bearing and nurturing years. And now I've traded that role for my next phase. Maiden. Mother. Crone. All powerful archetypes, equally valid.

I'm not saying that one's 50s and 60s can't be vital and exciting. Just that we don't need to look 25 or 35 to experience the benefits. Will I still use my eye cream and my skin tone corrector? Certainly. That's a bit of vanity. But I will also celebrate my laugh lines and every reminder that I am older and therefore wiser. That's self worth.

This little medical tidbit of insight flipped my stomach. Apparently, women have developed a biological response to protect us from sexual assault. A biological response. That means we've learned to anticipate rape at the level of our genome.

Researchers at Cornell University have been conducting research to determine what pupil dilation can reveal about sexual arousal. Apparently the most common research methods to analyze sexual arousal are invasive - instruments to measure changes in penis size and vaginal probes to measure lubrication - and understandably most people aren't willing to subject themselves to that sort of research study. Newspapers around the country have been reporting on the success of this study and how using eyes for sexual behavior research will help advance this area of science.

But in the last paragraph or two of the reports is a tid-bit that has disturbed me ever since I read it, and I wonder that nobody else is gnashing their teeth with me on this.

The findings support the idea that sexual response has different biological functions in men and women. For men, an important function is to facilitate erection and penetration. For women, the function is to stimulate lubrication and prevent genital injury in case of penetration -- a response that may have developed early in evolutionary history in response to rape by males.

Apparently it's this little detail more than the discomfort mentioned above that makes vaginal probes an unreliable method of testing arousal in females. A woman is likely to become lubricated even at the site of something repugnant and/or terrifying to her. I mentioned this to a friend, who pointed out that the response was likely developed "early in evolutionary history," suggesting that this was more like an appendix or wisdom teeth than a current social concern.

But if, as the Department of Justice statistics suggest, over 300,000 women in the U.S. are raped each year (and worldwide the numbers go up dramatically), then that little evolutionary detail remains a modern-day requirement.

So are you gnashing now?

Christine Media wrote an amazing article on The War on Women in the cultureist. Read it here.