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This past weekend I was traveling to another state for my younger brother’s wedding. We had about a 6-hour drive to and from our destination, so during part of the drive we were catching up on some back episodes of one of our favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible. One of those episodes was this one, titled Invisible Women. It was an interview with Caroline Criado Perez, the author of a book also titled Invisible Women, about the problem she calls the Default Male.

The Default Male

The problem of the default male is the tendency that most people have to think of a man when they are thinking of a generic human being. The problem with the default male is that causes researchers to focus on men as they default, when they are collecting data, instead of collecting data relating to both men and women. The reason this is a problem is that data drives design, policy, practices, and procedures in the modern world. One striking example that Criado Perez points to is that for decades, there has been no female crash test dummy. As a result, all the data that designers use to create safety systems in cars have been focused on how the average make body is affected by a crash, and so all the design of safety systems has been geared toward making cars safer for men. But women’s bodies are different, and they are affected in different ways by crashes than men’s bodies are. Even seatbelts are not designed with breasts in mind. The result is that women are less safe driving cars than men are.

Angela gives another great example of the problem of the Default Male in her post this morning: men who don’t shave their legs are unlikely to think about the convenience added to a shower by a foot shelf, and so a shower designed around the Default Male is not going to meet the needs of women as well as one designed with input by women. (Angela and I came up with these posts independently, but they sort of go together. Her post does a really great job of laying out some important ways how this problem comes up in the church. My post is addressed primarily to priesthood leaders, and focuses on some suggestions about what we can do to mitigate the problem.)

Criado Perez makes two important points about this: (1) you don’t have to be consciously misogynist to experience the problem of the Default Male, and (2) there is a solution: collect sex-disaggregated data to drive policy, design, etc. To illustrate these points, consider another example she points to: a small town in Sweden decided to review all its policies for gender equality, and when it came to the policy of the snowplowing schedule, it seemed that gender was not an issue, but it turns out that gender was an issue because men and women use roads differently. Men tend to drive on main arterial roadways to the city center to work and then drive back home. Women, meanwhile, tend more often to string multiple trips together, dropping off kids at school, shopping for groceries, visiting a friend or relative, etc., which means that women use side-streets and backroad more heavily than men. Women also tended to use public transit and walk more often than men. So they decided to change the snow plow schedule, plowing side streets first, and then moving on to the main roads. The result of this change was that ER admissions (which were mostly women) on snowy days dropped dramatically. It turns out that it’s a lot easier and safer to drive through a few inches of snow on main roadways than it is to push a stroller through a few inches of snow on an unplowed side street.

As Criado Perez points out, the old snowplow schedule wasn’t written by a bunch of chauvinists who were out to get women by forcing them to walk through icy roads and fall and break their pelvises; but it was designed by men who thought in terms of the Default Male. And once they were willing to collect sex-disaggregated data on the actual usage of the roadways by men and women they were able to create better policy–policy that was better for women, but that was also better for everyone overall.

The Default Male and All-Male Church Leadership

Yesterday, as I was in an Elders Quorum lesson about the importance of honoring women (based on this talk by President Nelson), I began thinking about the problem of the Default Male and how it applies to church leadership. One thing that struck me is that our belief in gender essentialism makes the problem even more acute. If you are going to retain a commitment to the idea that men and women are not just assigned to different roles, but are fundamentally different on some level, that only makes it all that much more important to know how policies and decisions will affect women and men differently. If men and women are fundamentally different, then the Default Male is an even more spurious basis to make policies and decisions for women.

I have no doubt that we who serve in priesthood callings all have the Default Male problem to some degree or another. I’m sure we could come up with all kinds of examples in the church of the Default Male. Perhaps most famously, Joseph Smith seems to have thought of the issue of tobacco only as it affected the men who smoked and chewed it until his wife Emma alerted him to the ways it affected the women who had to clean up the mess it caused. Once he rid himself of the problem of the Default Male on that issue, he was able to receive the revelation that forms the origin of what we call the Word of Wisdom today. The Default Male was an obstacle to revelation, and being open to receiving sex-disaggregated data allowed Joseph Smith to remove that obstacle. (We stopped to visit the sites in Kirtland on our drive, so this story comes to mind.)

There are a couple features of church leadership that can make the Default Male problem especially troublesome: first, we don’t do a ton of data collection in our leadership callings. The church does some research at the general level, but we don’t very often collect data at the local level. We tend to shoot from the hip, relying on intuition about what feels right. Sometimes we get it wrong, but I do believe that divine inspiration plays a role in these decisions. In my experience, though, better information results in clearer inspiration and better decisions. The problem, though, is that we often don’t have the time or the resources to comprehensively collect data before making church leadership decisions. Second, our leadership councils, both on the local level and at the highest levels, are dominated by men, and that, combined with a lack of sex-disaggregated data can leave us especially vulnerable to the problem of the Default Male.

What can we do?

So what can we do? Short of ordaining women to the priesthood and integrating them into priesthood leadership quorums and presidencies (which at least for the foreseeable future doesn’t seem to be an option) what can we do to overcome the Default Male problem? I have a couple of suggestions:

First, we need to repent and pray to be purged of our biases, including the Default Male bias. God is no respecter of persons. And while we are human and subject to our own biases and faults, I do believe that through the atonement of Christ, the Holy Ghost can purge us of our blindness and our failure to see others that are different from us just as it can sanctify us of any other sin. So we must repent of the Default Male, we must pray to be forgiven, and we must pray for the ability to be purged of the bias of the Default Male.

But faith without works is dead, and such a prayer will be meaningless if it doesn’t come with a sincere commitment to do all we can do to collect sex-disaggregated data to the extent we can. We should consider whether we ought to collect data more, and to make sure, when we do, that we are collecting sex-disaggregated data. And even when we don’t collect data and are relying on intuition and inspiration, it is essential that we include women in our deliberations. Women are sometimes invited to sit in council with the priesthood quorums in governing the church. This is something that Elder Ballard in particular has encouraged for more than two decades, and his counsel about this has now even been incorporated into the handbook (see Handbook 2, 4.6.1). If the ecclesiastical priesthood is to remain male-only, then increasingly moving the governing bodies of the church from gender-segregated quorums to gender-integrated councils is something that has the potential to at least alleviate the problem of the Default Male in church leadership.

Third: we need to tell and listen to the stories of women in our own heritage. At one point in the interview, Criado Perez points out that the Default Male can even be an unconscious bias that women have. If somebody says “doctor” or “lawyer,” or “journalist,” most people, even women, will as a default, picture a man. My daughter, who not that long ago, completed a project for school about Nelly Bly, piped up to say that she pictures a woman when she hears “journalist,” because she spent so much time learning about a woman who was a famous journalist. The stories we hear and tell have the power to shape our thinking and reorient our biases. Our church historiography has been male-dominated for a long time, and I think efforts to unearth and tell more of the stories of women will be a very good thing.

Conclusion

I don’t know if the church will ever ordain women to the priesthood. I do believe it’s possible, but it would seem to require a revelation that I’m in no place to receive. But I do feel confident that in the meantime, if we’re going to have a gender-segregated ecclesiastical priesthood, and if we care about making policies and decisions that are fair to women, then we’re going to have to work hard to try to rid ourselves of the problem of the Default Male.

I’ll end on a hopeful note: I know one Elders Quorum President that has spoken to me about how dramatically increasing counseling with the Relief Society President in his ward has made a huge difference in the ward. Following the change from home teaching/visiting teaching, this Elders Quorum President and Relief Society President got together and decided to make all ministering assignments in consultation with each other. He has explained how the Relief Society Presidency has opened his and his counselors’ eyes to the impacts of certain proposed assignments that they weren’t aware of, and how discussing the assignments with them, they’ve been able to have much better information. He has described the result as a flood of revelation, and told that he feels much more confident that his decisions about assignments are inspired than when he and his counselors made those decisions by themselves.

I’m glad I heard this interview with Criado Perez because it has forced me to think about the ways that I am still stuck with the Default Male in many ways. I am confident that listening to women and integrating women into the governing councils of the church as much as we can will make a significant difference and will result in more divine inspiration.