“Why So Slow?, The Advancement of Women”, by Virginia Valian

Pg. 180

Since the unrealistic nature of white men’s expectations has not been acknowledged,  and since the implications of gender and race schemas have not been appreciated, many white men are unable to understand or come to terms with their failures. They perceive that they are losing out to some women and minority men, but they cannot see the loss as justified because they are in the grip of race and gender schemas portraying non-whites and women as professionally inferior to white men. For many white men, losing out to a minority person or a woman engenders shame and anger and also compromises their masculine identity. some then invoke the explanation of “reverse discrimination” to claim that those were less able and qualified receive unfair advantages…

Gender schemas do men a disservice. They prevent men from being realistic and objective and require men to be successful in order to maintain an essential part of their self-concept — their masculine identity. They lead men to think that they are more capable than they are and encourage them to have overly high aspirations.

Pg. 183

To the extent that women see success as due to random or uncontrollable factors, they will profit from it less. Seeing success in those terms is particularly disadvantageous because it leaves women with nothing to analyze, nothing to learn from success. People cannot build on an experience they attribute to luck. To benefit cognitively from a success and increase the chances for the next one, a person must figure out what was causally relevant. Successes are linked to each other. Each success teaches a lesson that can be used to advantage for the next attempt. There is a causal chain from one success to another, even if that chain is harder for women to construct.

I have said that it is rational for women to attribute more of a role to luck than men do, because cause-and-effect relations hold less strongly in their world. But it is even more rational for women to understand how the inaccurate evaluations of their success weekend the causal chain between ability and success. That understanding will, in turn, allow women to perform a more sophisticated analysis of their situation and develop a more sophisticated strategy to deal with it. Perhaps the single most important factor in success is flexible perseverance — “flexible” because simply doing more work in the same way may not be enough. Long-term success requires having a strategy and refining it in the light of short-term successes and failures.

“Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics”, by Jennifer Baumgardner

Pg. 225

For me, this fight for inclusion is linked to feminism. Inclusion is one of the reasons I am a feminist and one of the ways I define equality. Women have the right and responsibility to go where men go, be it to strip clubs, to war, to work, or to the bank. Men have those same rights and responsibilities with regard to women’s spaces. When I apply this desire to trump exclusion to sexuality, it means that gay people deserve to get married and have kids and receive social approbation for their relationships, just like straight people. Moreover, straight people deserve what gay people tend to have: the privilege of equality in their relationships and freedom from rigid gender roles.

“Bridging the Class Divide: And Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing”, by Linda Stout

Pg. 87

Oppression is part of the fabric of everything we do and experience — what we’re taught in school; what we see in the media and on billboards; the images of beauty we absorb from our culture. In school we learn about white men who supposedly discovered everything and invented everything. In a majority of churches, women in the Bible are presented in negative ways; we’re taught that men are supposed to have power over women. Men are always shown as the powerful ones. Heterosexual couples are always shown as the basis for a family; theirs is the only acceptable kind of love. Poor people are shown as stupid and lazy, often as Southern, so many people actually associate Southern accents with being dumb. All these images reflect institutionalized oppression…

the great weight of the system operates as if the oppressive images were true instead of lies and distortions. For example, if you are poor and you want to buy a used car, you soon find out you’ll have to pay more interest, make higher payments, than for a new car. So you end up having to buy a new car… Institutionalized oppression is when a prejudice is supported by all the systems of society with all the power to back up that prejudice, so that it becomes the canon — the accepted way.