Tom Graves / Tetradian

Is ‘identical’ always the same as ‘equal’? Not in service-design – and one of the issues we need to watch for is to ensure that identical service-provision does not lead to far-from-equal service-outcomes.

If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues outside the women’s toilets – queues that you’re unlikely to see outside the men’s.

Those queues don’t happen because “it’s just the women are all putting their lippy on”, as one sarcastic male colleague put it. It’s actually a fairly serious service-design failure – and it’s the kind of failure that happens whenever anyone fails to understand that identical is not always the same as equal.

By ‘identical’, I mean that the same service is provided, usually occupying the same physical or virtual space – typically the physical or virtual dimensions, in terms of the asset-tetradian.

By ‘equal’, I mean that the service is experienced as leading to the same or equivalent outcome – typically the relational and aspirational dimensions of the asset-tetradian.

To illustrate the point, let’s explore that specific example of service-provision: toilet-space in public places.

[This is solely about service-design: nothing else. It happens to be a particularly clear example of this kind of design-flaw, that's all.]

Many cultures – most ‘Western’ cultures at least – provide separate toilet-spaces for males and females.

[We'll ignore the cultural drivers for this - they're not particularly relevant for this example. All we need to note is that this is so.]

Toilet-spaces typically include one or more of three distinct forms: individual cubicles, individual urinals, and collective urinal. Individual cubicles take up the most space, collective urinals the least.

For reasons of simple anatomy and – dependent on culture – clothing-design, in general only males will be able to use urinals.

Again dependent on culture and clothing-design, usage of cubicles will often usually involve partial removal of clothing – especially for females. Again for social reasons, this means that in most cases some form of privacy would be expected, typically requiring the cubicle to be large enough to incorporate a closable door.

A typical truck-transportable ‘portakabin’-type toilet – such as used at many event-venues – would be able only to accommodate a single row of perhaps ten cubicles, compared to a double-sided collective-urinal that could accommodate at least a dozen people either side.

A simple time-and-motion study [pun not intended!] indicates that usage of a cubicle takes some two to three times as long as using a urinal.

If we put all of these factors together, we’ll recognise that women will probably need more than twice as many toilet-units as men, occupying around five times as much space as that for men, in order to achieve an equal outcome – same numbers of relieved customers in the same time – from the same nominal service-provision.

Conversely, if we provide the same amount of space – as is still all too common in, say, a theatre-design – then the same usage of service-provision overall is going to take around five times as long for women as for men. Hence those inordinate queues…

The all-too-literally painful lesson here? – Identical is not the same as equal.

In most societies now, structural-inequality is pretty unpopular. In most businesses, inequality of outcomes can create not just loss of future business, but increased risk of serious anti-client problems. In short, it’s not a good idea.

Hence it’s not a good idea to allow our service-designs to create that kind of unequal-outcome by default, through carelessness on our part in the service-design process.

Which means that we need to be careful to distinguish between the service-provision itself, and the outcomes of that service-provision – and design counter-mechanisms to cope with contexts where the circumstances themselves would tend to create unintended inequalities.

Just another not-so-unimportant point to ponder, perhaps?

Whilst working on a previous post on rights and responsibilities, I needed to hunt out the original of a phrase attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. A quick search brought me to Jone Johnston Lewis’ ‘Women’s History‘ site, which showed me that the correct quote is “mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention”. What I’d written was close enough, I guess – especially as I was only paraphrasing it anyway.

But what then caught my eye was this longer quote:

The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist — a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children — a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.

The anthropologist’s eye indeed – perceptive, insightful, yet also respectful of ‘the Other’. Almost the exact antithesis, in fact, of so many of the self-styled advocates of ‘gender-liberation’ that I’ve had the misfortune to deal with for most of my adult life. Where Margaret Mead had argued that the core principle would have to be that “every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man”, instead far too many feminists and self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men both then and since have patently believed that the only way to ‘liberate’ a woman was to enslave a man – and preferably via as much pain and prejudice as was practicably possible. In short, their method for reducing gender-violence was to increase it as much as they could: and then, when that didn’t work – because it doesn’t, and can’t – keep on ratchetting up the pain in the relentless pursuit of Other-blame.

This mistake affects different countries in different ways. Australia is perhaps one of the worst: for example, for the first ten years that I was there, the Melbourne newspaper The Age never published a single piece that was overtly respectful of men as a gender; and for the next decade, although such items did occasionally appear, they would each invariably be juxtaposed with another much larger article stridently reaffirming the ‘truth’ of the inherent evils of men. As I discovered whilst I was helping two of my lesbian friends recover after they’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight, the domestic-violence agencies defined violence as inherently ‘male’: there was no support available for lesbians (unless they blamed a man – my friends didn’t and wouldn’t, and were firmly told to go away because they were ‘rocking the boat’…!), and certainly no help for any man at all – even though the unlaundered hard-data showed that men were (and still are) the majority of domestic-violence victims in that country. And in my home state it was (and I believe still is) not merely a dismissable but criminal offence for a male primary-school teacher to comfort a crying child. All of this in the name of so-called ‘gender equality’…

Again in Australia, it was clear that many if not most of the ‘pro-feminist’ men I came across were not pro-women at all – in fact far from it, in several cases I personally knew. Instead, they were either lost in a vaguely-Marxist delusion that “it is impossible for one to have more without others having less” – and hence attacked men-as-a-gender (or all men other than themselves and their co-religionists, to be precise) under the mistaken belief that this would somehow automatically make things better for women (it doesn’t) – or else were still obsessively trying to hurt men-in-general as ‘payback’ for childhood hurts from other boys (which is a seriously dangerous form of self-dishonesty). It’s true that I did meet a few ‘pro-feminist’ men who genuinely were pro-women – but in every case they understood exactly Mead’s point that to be ‘pro-women’ we must also be ‘pro-men’. The blunt fact is that the only way that works is to create a frame in which everyone wins – otherwise everyone loses.

It’s not much better in Britain – there’s still the same massive dishonesty about domestic-violence, for example. In so many ‘Western’ countries, the main result of so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in employment has been to re-entrap women back in the same paid-workforce mess as men – a feminist tragedy of epic proportions, given that the main aim of the women’s movement for much of the previous century was to get women out of the paid-workforce, and free up at least some part of the community to repair the ongoing damage created the myopic self-centredness of the ‘money-economy’. (The real need, then and now, is to challenge the inanity and insanity of that economic model – not merely argue about who should or should not have the ‘right’ to not be enslaved in it!)

The Latin countries – for all their complexity and chaos – seem somehow to have a much better understanding of what gender-equality really means in practice, and to me seem much more human overall. In Portugal, for example, it was a huge relief to find it was considered normal for me to play mime-games and visual jokes with small children in their family and social settings; by contrast, back in Australia it was frequently assumed that, as a middle-aged man, I must be some kind of dangerous sexual-pervert if I merely smiled at a child in the street. Which hurts, a lot, that aggressive, pointless, baseless “exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in … the most engrossing, delightful care of young children”: a human, natural smile is merely an expression of the human need to be in and part of – rather than enforced apart from – the society that I’m in. In other words, as Mead put it, ”a man … who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person”.

The sad tragedy is that so much of feminism started out from a drive towards a true equality, but somehow lost its way in a paediarchal flight into a blame-filled fantasy, an increasingly-desperate addiction to ‘Other-blame’ as a means to evade responsibility in any form. Even now, forty or fifty years later, so much of it is still rampantly and obsessively anti-male, even rabidly sexist at times in the worst possible way. Yet it doesn’t work: and the reason why it doesn’t work is that too many feminists have forgotten the simple fact that, just like women, men are human too. Equality cannot truly exist for anyone unless all of us are considered equally human – with all that that implies.

Margaret Mead never forgot that fact: it’s one of the reason I value her work and life so much – and likewise those other rare, amazing and courageous women alongside whom it’s sometimes been my great privilege to work. Yet what strikes me most about Mead, I suppose, is her simple humanity:

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

Contrast that brief sentence, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher’s inane assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. I don’t think anyone but Mead could have described the human condition and the true nature of society any better or more poignantly than that.

Interesting insights indeed.