Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 20:45:16 -0400
From: Thomas F Brown <tombrown@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Subject: Re: tracking
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Message-id: <97Jun22.204529edt.646-1@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT

>Okay, since Tom's asking for first-hand experiences of gender tracking, I'm
>sure we can oblige him.
>
>I've been puzzled for years about why so many people in my department (both
>male and female) who've known me and my work quite well assume that I do
>research on gender.  Aside from a couple course papers I wrote early on in
>graduate school, I haven't done research on gender, and it was not one of
>my fields of specialization for qualifying.  But then some years back, my
>department asked me to teach the gender course here.  I was not exactly
>going to look a gift horse in the mouth by asking them why they would
>have me teach a class when I was only slightly familiar with
>the area, but I had to assume their decision had a whole lot to do
>with my being female.  

Now we're getting somewhere, although you left out the crucial information
we need to assess this example. For instance, what was the nature of
the labor supply? Of the grad students senior enough to teach a course,
were you the only woman? Were any men available? Could it be that your
having written a couple of course papers made you more qualified than
anyone else in the labor supply? Could it be that the undergrads at
your school are known for political correctness and would balk at
taking a gender course from a man? Was there another course that
you would have preferred to teach that was given to a man when you
were equally qualified? Did you have the option of refusing to teach 
the course or asking for alternative funding? Why do you assume that 
being female was the reason you got the job?

The answers to these questions would help us determine whether
this was an example of tracking or not. The alternative hypothesis,
to use your own words, was that it was a gift horse, and your 
minimal qualifications of being sufficiently senior and having
written a couple of papers were more than anyone else available
had going. And so you got an opportunity that no one else got,
and you're still being allowed to write your dissertation outside
of women's studies. 

If you were offered an opportunity without experiencing any corresponding 
restraint that kept you from choosing other alternatives, then this does 
not constitute tracking according to the definition I expressed in my last post.

Even if you were only offered the job because you were a woman, this
example still demonstrates a pull factor--women are more in demand
than men to teach women's studies courses. The only way we can really
construe it as a push factor is if you were denied an equal opportunity
to teach another course and were denied equal access to alternative
funding. 

If you took the position voluntarily rather than pursue alternative 
options, I would have to construe this as self-selection, taking advantage
of a sexist demand structure that does not allow men to teach gender studies. 
I agree that in this case, assuming that your only qualifications were
chromosomal, then you have described an example of a sexist disciplinary
strucure, the first example we've seen in this thread. But as long as it's 
an example of a pull factor, then I don't consider it tracking.

If you want to define tracking as including both push and pull factors,
then I would agree with your claim for this example. The problem is that
such a definition is conceptually weak, in that any measure of it will
necessarily count instances of self-selection that don't have anything 
to do with sexism or disciplinary structures. If you are arguing from
an ideological perspective, then overestimating the extent of tracking
will not be a problem for you. If you really want to know how many people
are subjected to disciplinary tracking pressures, then you will want
to count self-selectors in a separate category, and that requires
distinguishing between push and pull factors when you define tracking.