Gender and "Systems Thinking"
I want men to understand something about women: we know when you're checking us out. It's "intuitive" because had we never developed this "intuition," our ancestors would have stalked, raped and killed before reaching the age of reproduction.
Think about it.
Women know things men think would be impossible for us to know. We “intuit” things that seem to fall outside men’s scope of awareness. We sense when things are off. We anticipate needs before they’re expressed. We seem to foresee cascading failures before they happen so we can do something that might prevent them from happening.
I’ve been reading Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows and I find myself thinking about how the household system is what women are socialized to manage. Women are raised to “run” a family like a machine, to get the kids off to various activities and obligations, to care for relatives, and to take concern for their wider community. Housewives may not earn an income, but they work, a lot, especially involving their families in civic functions, such as volunteering for schools, food banks, and conservation efforts. None of that gets paid, of course, but it’s necessary for the system of community to keep running.
Systems thinking came so naturally to my grandmother, who was an innkeeper. Her job was to anticipate everything that could go wrong and stop it. She calculated so many steps ahead and smoothed out any bumps she saw in the process. She knew who was likely to fuck up during a big event and she sat down with them beforehand and prepared them with her expectations and the consequences for not meeting them. Our kitchen never ran out of anything. She knew every handyman in a 50-mile radius and they demonstrated mafia-level loyalty to her, willing to drive out in any storm to fix anything. She was regimented and her admittedly abusive commitment to systems-management worked really well, which is the only thing that really saved it considering she and all of her kids who ran the inn with her were straight-up drunk much of the time.
The only way to participate in my family’s life was to integrate myself into the work itself, which was constant and never-ending. Wake up and mop the floors together. Fold napkins together. Sort silverware together. Clean rooms together. Put dishes away together. Prep salads together. Put the order away together. Cut butter into tiny cubes together. Peel carrots together. Do the dishes together.
That’s what “family time” was for me. It just never fucking ends. Systems forever.
After my grandmother got too old for it, my uncle took over and it fell apart. My uncle, a literal executive chef educated in one of the finest cooking schools in the country, could not keep it together. He had no head for systems. He had for his entire career worked in the context of resort kitchens which provided the system for him. They did the hiring. They did the management. They did the books. They did the marketing, the housekeeping, the maintenance, the sanitation. He just showed up and was made to feel like a king reigning supreme in a petty fiefdom of prep cooks and busboys.
So even though he had some idea of what his mother was doing as an innkeeper, he had never really grokked it. He never mastered the systemic thinking necessary to be an innkeeper. He could not marshal a small army around him to keep the system going. He could not manage the flows like my grandmother could.
A lot of that I know was the product of privilege. My uncle was never made sensitive by necessity. Because much of the system was managed for him, first by my grandmother and then by the resort, he never had to develop skill in those areas and never developed anything like my grandmother’s intuition for the urgent and necessary. He never made himself the inn the way she had. He had not internalized its needs as his own and expressed them as if they were his own desires and wants the way she had.
Which is a lot to think about, actually. My grandmother made herself the inn. She lost herself to it or gave herself to it, whichever is more accurate. She made herself one with the machine until you could no longer guess what part was my grandmother and what part was the inn. She had few people I would call intimates necessarily but she was surrounded by friends who loved her establishment, who loved her because she was the pulsing heart of the establishment.
I really can’t tell you if she was happy or not with the way that worked out. Like everyone else in my family, she was an alcoholic. I don’t think running a country inn in the Poconos was her dream as a little girl. My grandfather was the one who bought it in the 1970s, not her, and he did it on a whim, without even consulting her. I don’t think a Jewish girl from inner-city Philadelphia could have dreamed up such a place as it was had she tried.
I see there is a certain karmic irony to this story. I think about it a ton. That was my childhood and it’s gone because my uncle was an idiot.
But c’est la vie!
The point of me telling this was that I was thinking about how invisible this labor of systems thinking really is. My grandmother excelled at it. Anyone could see she was was a master systems thinker. But we don’t think about running a country inn in that way because who amongst us has experience running a country inn?
I am the last of a dying breed, having witnessed the last of the greats.
But that intuition for household management demonstrated on a grand scale by my grandmother, the innkeeper, that’s not regarded as labor. It’s not thought of as work because thinking and planning are not thought of as work. Saving nine with a stitch in time, for some reason that eight can never be measured and so can’t be monetized.
Women in the media are constantly having to remind seemingly oblivious men that households take work to manage. Systems don’t just happen on their own, they have to be intuited. And because that intuition for systems of people is feminized, somehow all the work of that system also falls to women to do. This gendered intuition for the work of keeping a family healthy and intact keeps falling on the shoulders of women despite men’s insistence of equal partnership
So we have this buzzy idea of “systems thinking” that is eagerly picked up by men when talking about anything else, but it’s not being used to describe what is the oldest human system: the household. Home economics is the original systems thinking. But applying this buzzy idea of systems thinking to the home reveals too much truth about the oppression of women.
Men can be one with their startups. They can internalize the needs of a job and become their careers. But few men are willing to do that for their families or their communities. Far fewer men than women are willing to identify with the needs of their spouses that they, in a very real sense, live for them, anticipating their needs and systematizing their satisfaction.
It’s a curious thing!
The role of systems manager falls to women more often than not because the realm of relationship itself is feminized. Women are expected to think in interpersonal systems if they are to be considered “good women.” Women who can’t keep a household are thought of as bad wives and mothers. Even if she works a full-time job outside of the house, she’s still judged as a person on the functionality of her household.
So while everyone is potentially capable of thinking in systems, the question of which systems you have to think about all day is political. It’s 2020 and the systems management of households is still somehow women’s domain.