We’ve known for quite a while that we socialize our children based on gender once we know “what we’re having.” At the point that the child can actually articulate their desire for “dolls” or “trucks,” it’s typically too late to conduct any sort of “experiment” to discover how boys and girls might truly differ. I’ll say what I’ve long said related to this issue, there are likely some innate differences given that in most other species there are, including average size and strength, but we can never actually know what they are because it’s impossible to raise a child without applying some gendered expectations. Certainly there has been a loosening of the strict “boy equals blue” and “girl equals pink” expectations but there are also still pretty embedded norms that are harder to challenge. This is especially pertinent in the context of STEM education where there is a national effort to diversify and bring more females into traditionally male-dominated fields like mechanical engineering. This often involves efforts to show the diversity of what one can do with STEM – e.g., it’s not just cars and space shuttles, it’s also hair dryers and medical equipment.
Instead of delving too deeply into the fraught waters of human gender and education, I’d like to take a step back and consider a different species entirely…dogs. Over the years I have heard people say the most interesting things regarding their dogs and presumed natural and unnatural behaviors corresponding to their gender. Regarding gender specifically, these comments typically come in two contexts: female dogs mounting “like males” and male dogs urinating or being mounted “like females.” Just as with gender in humans, there are some empirically observable differences in terms of average sizes of male and female dogs of the same breeds, with female dogs, predictably, being proportionally smaller than their male counterparts. These differences aren’t generally accompanied with any sort of judgment or emotion, though, unless of course the difference challenges the norm and the female of the breed, for example, happens to be bigger than the male of the same breed to whom she’s being compared.
Back to the dog behaviors, though. I have heard individuals in professions where they themselves are gender minorities who note that their female dog is “so weird” because she “mounts other dogs” “like a boy.” Or similarly, people seemingly baffled by the fact that their male dogs squats to urinate “like a girl.” I am not an expert on dog behavior by any means and it is definitely possible that statistically male dogs are more likely to mount as a show of dominance than females but I will say that I have heard more than one dog owner describe this behavior to demonstrate the strangeness of their female dog. Given the frequency with which owners of female dogs comment on it, it’s hard not to wonder if it isn’t normal behavior after all. I even heard one woman complain about her female dog frolicking too closely with another female dog to the point where she said something like “this is weird, don’t you know you’re both girls.” One thing I’ve noticed about dogs is that they don’t seem to care very much what we think is weird, gross, or objectionable. Unless trained (intentionally or accidentally) out of or into specific behaviors they will typically do what is dog-natural to them.
So what does it say about us in terms of our troubled responses when a female dog seemingly dominates or a male dog seemingly submits? Decades ago, Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and disturbed a lot of people by suggesting that gender itself was performative and that our perceptions of “male” and “female” are largely affected by the performances of us in those categories. Her arguments are far more complex than I will get into here but I will ask if the ways in which these unruly female mounting dogs trouble humans suggests something deeper about our chances at success when it comes to educational diversity? If we are this bothered by dogs violating our gendered expectations, how are we reacting when humans similarly threaten our perceptions of what is natural? And how are these reactions, perhaps inadvertently, cementing those percentages, like females in STEM, that seem so hard to budge?