x + y Quotes

“Convincing people that they are about to rise up while simultaneously keeping them down is a particularly pernicious way to maintain power.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“We were stuck thinking along the lines of men and women being "different," and distracted by questions of whether those differences are innatte or not. So we were stuck making a false choice between various gendered ideas of how to change the status quo.
We can now move away from all the gender-based choices. We can move away from pseudo-feminism or "leaning in", in which women are exhorted to become more like men in order to be successful. We can also move away from the opposite, in which men are asked to become more like women. We can move away from "reverse sexism," in which women are deliberately favored to make up for past oppression, and away from anti-feminism, in which women are told they simply biologically don't have the characteristics to be successful.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Alfie Kohn describes "pseudofeminism" as seeking "the liberation of women through the imitation of men". It is a compounding of two assumptions: first, that gender differences are tied to character differences, and second, that the character types associated with men are more valuable, or even critical, for success. Of course, it's not just women who are imitating men; it's men too.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Note that this does not mean that science itself is flawed—sometimes people see any flaw in a scientific result as evidence that science is not "trustworthy" and we might as well go back to relying on personal opinion. The scientific process is a process. Part of that process is a process for finding flaws, and the fact that scientists are able to find flaws in scientific work is a sign that the process is working.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“So seeking to validate someone's experiences is a very important aspect of congressive behaviour, and this requires empathy in order to tell whether they want to know that their experience is unique or want to feel that their experience is universal.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“You might think that my congressive utopia is a lovely dream but can never become reality. Well, I always say that if we declare something to be impossible, then it will become impossible, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't have much to lose by trying, and who benefits if we don't? The people who benefit the most are the ingressive people who are currently in power. As Alfie Kohn says, "I would prefer to see skepticism directed at the status quo rather than employed in its service.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“An example of a congressive version is the "registered reports" format for publishing research. Unlike the ingressive system, where dramatic positive results are favored, in this congressive system peer review is conducted on the research question and the methodology before the data are collected. Thus it is the process that is reviewed, not the answer. The idea is that if the question is interesting and the methodology is sound, then the result of the experiment is interesting whether it turns out to be positive or negative.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“I have found that sometimes when people want to use the phone it's just because they don't want to take the time to organize their thoughts into a written form. But sometimes it's because they want to put me on the spot and pressure me into doing something I don't really want to do, like take on more work, or accept less pay, or cause some other inconvenience to myself. In such cases, this is ingressive energy that I want to neutralize. I can do it quite simply: by using email instead of a phone call.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“As Ruth Whippman writes, "Enough leaning in. Let's tell men to lean out." But, again, it's not just men: sometimes it's women who are too ingressive, especially in careers like academic disciplines, where they may have felt the need to emulate such behaviour to succeed and, having done so, might be rather proud of it and suspicious of any suggestion that another way is possible.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“As we have described, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as something that happens when resources are scarce, From here we get the idea that competition is a "natural" behaviour, because "in nature" resources are scarce and so we have to compete for them. The thing is that, as with education, in many situations in modern life there isn't any real expendable resource at play, but a scarcity is fabricated in order to create artificial competition.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Why is it possible to pay your way through college by means of competitive sports but not music or theater? Note that there are scholarships for musicians to study music, but the difference is that you can get an athletic scholarship to pay for your degree in something else. Why can't you get a music scholarship to pay for your math degree?”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“If children are exposed to competitive games, they learn to become more and more competitive, but Kohn finds no studies showing a preference for competition once children have experienced cooperation. Preference is not the same as innateness, but if children prefer to be cooperative, this does throw doubt on the idea that people are "naturally" competitive.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Research involves collaboration, reference to all the existing literature, and doing things nobody knows how to do yet, in a timeframe, usually, of years.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Potential teachers are chosen carefully, trained extensively (at the state's expense), and then allowed to have responsibility for their teaching instead of being saddled with accountability. Sahlberg says "There's no word for accountability in Finnish. Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“In No Contest, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as coming from situations where resources are scarce. But education involves a resource that can never be scarce: one person having knowledge and wisdom does not prevent someone else from having it. It might be scarce in the sense that not many people have it, especially when it comes to very specialized knowledge, but the whole point of education should be to share knowledge and wisdom with the next generation and thus ensure that it keeps growing. So the fact that we make education competitive is at worst contradictory and at best a choice that we should acknowledge and question.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Some people, in some situations, are from Mars, and others, in other situations, are from Venus, and it's often men who are one and women who are the other but not necessarily, and you might be both at different times in different situations." That is a somewhat less catchy title.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Society doesn't have a general widespread assumption that men are not experts in their field (though it does happen in some specific areas such as childcare), and so women by definition cannot engage in mansplaining. It's a bit like picking on someone smaller than you: if you're smaller than the other person, you cannot be described as picking on someone smaller than you.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“[quadrant with "addressing issues of character" on the x-axis and "addressing issues of gender bias" on the y-axis. "maintaining the status quo" on the bottom left; "miserable women and accusations of "reverse sexism" on the top left; "progress" on the top right; "gender blindness" on the bottom right”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Take the debunked image of hunter-gatherers: we now know that around two-thirds of their food came from gathering and only one-third from hunting. The hunt was dangerous and often unsuccessful, but—surprise—is still popularly celebrated and used to prop up justifications of male domination.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“So to say that these gender words really were descriptive of men and women's behaviour in the past is to ignore this inextricable circular relationship between expectations and behaviour: [figure with a circular arrow pointing from "behaviour" to "words" with the subscript "description", and vice versa with the subscript "prescription"]”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“...if something about the environment is preventing women from being as successful as men, then imposing a quota without thinking about the environment is going to increase women's representation without necessarily increasing their success. This is perhaps encapsulated as the difference between diversity (which is about numbers) and inclusion (which is about environment).”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“...there is a trade-off between how measurable something is and how meaningful it is likely to be in terms of actual behaviour.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Why is anyone trying to prove that there are innate differences between men and women in intelligence, scientific ability, competitiveness, or any other traits that seem to confer high status in society? One general reason to cling to the idea of innate ability is to give ourselves an excuse for not being good at something. [...] The more invidious reason to claim that people are born with certain traits is to avoid having to help people do any better.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“But we've made up everything in abstract math, really. We've made up the ordinary numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on—what in fact are those? They are just ideas. So we can make up the idea i too. We can make up any idea as long as it doesn't cause a logical contradiction.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“It is often pointed out that individual experiences do not generalize to large groups, but the reverse is also true: the average experiences of a large group do not apply to individuals. So how are we to think about people?”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Who benefits from these meta-arguments? I suggest it is the people who currently hold power and who want to keep it that way. While women fight each other about what feminism should mean, and about which intersectional branch of feminism should be given the loudest voice, and about who is the most oppressed, and while men oppressed on the grounds of race, sexual orientation, wealth, status, upbringing, education, gender expression physical strength, or prowess in sports fight to be heard too, while all this disagreement rages between people who feel disadvantaged in any way, the people currently holding power can rub their hands in glee and consolidate that power.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Some people use the narrowest possible definition so that they can obviously justify denigrating it. for example: Feminism means believing that women are better than men and that men are all bad. Other people use the broadest possible definition in order to persuade everyone to support it, or even to convince themselves that they are working toward its causes no matter what they're doing. For example: Feminism means believing that women have as much right as men to choose how to live.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“When I finally did start thinking about being a woman, the aspect that struck me was: Why had I not felt any need to think about it before? And: How can we get to a place where nobody else needs to think about it either? I dream of a time when we can all think about character instead of gender, have role models based on character instead of gender, and think about the character types in different fields and walks of life instead of the gender balance.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“what is at stake here is nothing less than our humanity itself.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender