This article by Karryn Olson-Ramanujan was published in the “Permaculture Activist” magazine in August of 2013. This version is edited slightly, with longer captions, more pictures, and hyperlinks.
Click here for a pdf version of the article.
Though women receive the majority of all college degrees in the U.S., and are well represented in the work force, they are very under-represented in positions of high-level leadership. Most of the women I’ve encountered in permaculture note analogous patterns: often, women constitute 50% or more of the participants in PDCs, yet occupy disproportionately few of the positions of leadership and prominence in lucrative roles, such as designers, teachers, authors, speakers, or “permaculture superstars.”
To address this situation, this article drafts “A Pattern Language for Women in Permaculture.” Each pattern can be applied in many ways and names a core solution to a problem that undermines women’s full participation and leadership. Just as words connect to form a language, one can connect these patterns to form a language that describes good social design practices.
This approach is modeled after the book, A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al, in which the authors write, ”Each pattern may be looked upon as a hypothesis… and are therefore all tentative, all free to evolve under the impact of new experience and observation.” Using the same analogy, I invite your input to help craft this new language.
Pattern 1: Shift “mental models”
What are mental models? They are deeply ingrained generalizations that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. The problem with mental models arises when we are unaware of them–so they remain unexamined, yet govern our behavior.
Dr. Virginia Valian, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and Co-Director of its “Gender Equity Project,” studies “gender schemas”–our unaware assumptions about what it means to be male or female in our society, and the “accumulation of advantage.“
Valian shows that women leaders are measured against “masculine” characteristics for leadership, competence, and assertiveness. As a result, both men and women consistently overrate men’s performance, while women are underrated. “Whatever emphasizes a man’s gender gives him a small advantage, a plus mark. Whatever accentuates a woman’s gender results in a small loss for her, a minus mark,” states Valian in her book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.
Accumulation of small disadvantages for women stalls or slows their path to leadership and undermines their earning potential. To illustrate this, Valian cites research in which a computer simulation begins with equal numbers of new male and female employees. A tiny bias–only 1% of the variability in promotion–in favor of men is programmed into many iterations of simulated opportunities for promotion. In the end, men occupied 65% of the highest positions in the organization.
We can see this dynamic in the US. According to the White House Project, in their “Benchmarking Women’s Leadership” report, women receive the majority of all college degrees, make up almost half of the workforce, and are well represented in entry- and mid-level positions in most sectors of the economy. However, women occupy on average only 18% of top leadership positions (and numbers are lower among women of color). Further, the wage gap for women means that they make 78.7 cents for every dollar earned by men, and that gap widens with age.
This makes little sense, especially when studies show that “…of the various qualities of leadership, women were rated far, far ahead of men on being honest, intelligent, compassionate, outgoing, and creative, and were considered just as hardworking, andambitious as men. Men were perceived as excelling only in being decisive,” according to studies cited by Linda Tarr-Whelan in Women Lead the Way: Your Guide to Stepping Up to Leadership and Changing the World. Indeed, although most Americans agree that women are more likely to have the qualities needed to make a good leader, they often still opt for a man in charge.
In permaculture circles, the women I interviewed expressed universal frustration over the low number of women in traditional roles of leadership. At the same time, they also expressed dismay that other roles in which women are at or above parity (such as organizers, homesteaders, farmers, or other related fields) are often not valued as leadership.
