TDR Comment: Women's Work?

Certain jobs were (and still often are) considered "women's work." Schoolteachers, nurses, modern dancers, receptionists, supermarket checkout clerks, prostitutes, child caretakers, domestic servants, manicurists, and homemakers, to name some. Yes, plenty of men ply these trades (but it's not nearly half-and-half); more importantly, these kinds of jobs are conceptually and economically "feminized." Women's work is considered "nurturing," "caregiving," and "sensitive"; it is sometimes exploitative and almost always underpaid relative to "men's work." You know what I mean by "men's work." Airline pilots, combat soldiers, economics professors, plumbers, U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of Defense, neurosurgeons, and so on. Yes, there are some women doing these jobs, but statistically they are nowhere near half the workforce. Furthermore, men and women doing the same work are not paid equally. In sad point of fact, workplace gender discrimination is going to be hard to get rid of even if the number of women and men workers in any job category rises to level off at 50-50.

What about performance studies and the humanities in the academy?

Let's start with some anecdotal evidence from the fall of 2003 at NYU. The current student population of NYU's Department of Performance Studies is more than 80 percent women. Over the past several years, the overwhelming majority of new participants are women. From what I can gather, this is not something that is happening only in performance studies. I am teaching a Freshmen Honor's Seminar on "Performance and Society" open to honors qualifiers from all schools at NYU. Every one of my class of 15 is a woman. In the humanities—but especially in "soft" disciplines like English, languages, comparative literature, cultural studies, and history—the preponderance of majors and graduate students is female. This is not a blip, but an aggregating national (and maybe even international) trend.

A sea change is taking place—today at the student level, tomorrow among the professoriate. At present, women are the majority of students in the arts and humanities, while the preponderance of senior professors is men. When I looked around the room at my fellow Freshmen Honors teachers, I saw mostly middle-aged and post-middle-aged men. But over time, the professoriate in the arts and humanities will follow the student body as attrition removes older males, replacing them from today's stock of graduate students. At one level this is good news. Intellectual and artistic fields led by women can only be positive.

But at the same time, this trend raises some very troubling questions.

Do women seek performance studies because it is marginal? Does the presence of so many women make it marginal? Is performance studies intellectual domestic labor? Or is the increasing presence of women a vanguard leading to the equal or even a dominating presence of women across many disciplines? In an informal discussion with about a dozen current PS students, several were vehement about their choice of performance studies. "I want to be here because this is what I want to do. It is not about marginalization but about controlling my life." While noting the "male flight," they were not overly disturbed by it. Yes, generally, salaries in the humanities are lower than in the sciences; and yes, generally, salaries in the academy are lower than in nonacademic jobs. But, as one woman put it, "I see getting a PhD in performance studies as a power move. Strategically, it will make me more powerful than just being a performer or a director." I was told that at NYU there are many more men studying film, photography, and digital media than performance studies. I agreed: there is gender separation and hierarchy even in the arts. Architecture, film, and the visual arts are the most male, music is in the middle, and theatre and dance are the most female.

When women teachers and scholars become the majority in the arts and humanities at the university level, how will this affect the education of everyone? In other words, is the gender gap going away or has it been intensified by being localized in fields like performance studies...