The Subtlety of Sexism: Barriers to Success

With the advent of Disney+, I started rewatching some childhood favorites. One of them was The Proud Family, a TV show about a 14-year-old black girl named Penny and her adventures. In one episode, Penny is playing football for fun with her friends, and finds out that she’s actually good! She decides to try out for the school football team, and even though she is just as good on the field as the boys, the coach refuses to put her on the team. He makes comments such as “There will NEVER be a girl on my team,” refers to her as “Babydoll” and even tells her to go bake a cake because he’d “like that even more” than he likes her spunk.

I have the privilege of having forgotten that things like that happened. That things like that probably still do happen in some places, some sports. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still happens in Judo. I just am lucky, more than anything, that it doesn’t happen to me.

That does not mean that this is the only kind of sexism. The sexism I face, as discussed in the last post is more subtle, harder to identify. It’s easy to justify it as something else, almost anything else, besides sexism. It makes it difficult to have conversations about it, because if there’s no danger involved, how do you bring it up? “One of the students said something to me that was slightly rude, it may or may not be because I’m a woman”? Is it my place, as a mid-level student, to call out other students on behavior, or to privately talk to instructors about their behavior?

The what to do of it all will be discussed more in depth on Friday, but to start exploring solutions, we first need to address what the causes of it are.

To start, the definition of sexism I am using encompasses barriers to entry, barriers to success, and barriers to staying power that disproportionately affect women, and the assumptions it can cause towards women students by other students and instructors.

In short, I believe that Judo is taught in such a way that it is difficult for women to be comfortable in Judo, be successful even in basic throw completion at lower levels, and these make it difficult for women to stay in Judo much past yellow belt. Because women tend not to stick around in Judo, and tend less towards competition, instructors take them less seriously as students.

This is not inherently bad. Human brains categorize things within schemata. In psychology, schemata are patterns of thoughts and behaviors by which we organize information. Some also use schemata to refer to a framework representing parts of the world, or preconceived notions. Essentially, we take in information, and it either is processed through a schema, or creates a new schema.

It is natural that if you spend your entire Judo career working with a small handful of high level women Judoka, and most of the women that start Judo quit before they reach gokyu (roughly 6 months to one year of training), a schema will be created in your mind that women don’t stick around. This can influence behavior towards women students, including paying less attention to them, investing less instructor resources in them, and, for students, not bothering to get to know them as they would a man student, among others.

This happens everywhere. It happened to me. When I worked at my last job, I was a senior staff member. We have a lot of immigrants in our area. When the immigrants started at my job, the first few that got hired weren’t very good workers. There may have been a ton of reasons, culture shock, language barriers, home lives that I didn’t know about. This was a different work environment than most people were used to, so the expectations were different. Whatever the reason, most of them quit within three months. A schema was created in my head for this. When the next group was hired, I found that I struggled to want to put in the effort training them. I had to check myself to make sure I was really challenging my own schema, and putting in the effort to train them properly that I did for everyone else.

Schemata can be powerful. Some research has indicated that a schema can go so far as to alter how people remember things. There are other ways that our brains try to maintain the “status quo” of our worldviews. The power of schemata extends beyond just the brains.

So what does that mean for Judo?

It is easy to create schemata around women in Judo, especially when there are so few of us. If a man in Judo only encounters a handful of women in his training career, and even less of them turn into long-term Judo practitioners, it is natural that his brain will develop a schema around women not taking Judo seriously.

Given the power of schemata, it of course affects our behavior on a subconscious level. Even if you think that you are treating women equally in the dojo, or paying equal amounts of attention to them, your schema of women not staying will cause you to behave differently towards them without you even realizing it.

What is it that is making it so hard for women to try Judo, stay in Judo, and be successful in Judo? This question is important because it is largely these things that I believe creates the schemata of women in Judo.

The points I would like to address today include how techniques are taught, what techniques are taught, lack of progression for training and safety, and aggressiveness of Judo.

The first point has probably been the most important in my Judo journey. Techniques are often taught poorly, or at worst, incorrectly. This is a problem for anyone, but affects women more. Especially at lower levels, throws are taught as the “outside” first, and the “inside” later. This means that we teach techniques as a step-by-step progression, without really talking about the principles and mechanics that make the throw work. This isn’t bad, exactly; most of these things are a little too advanced for beginner students to really understand the importance of. But for women, we often struggle to complete techniques with just the outside of the throw. Sometimes, like with a few throws I’ve tried, we can’t do it at all. Men can usually muscle a throw over regardless of how good it is. Their bigger bodies and broader shoulders can usually make almost anything work. For women, we can’t.

The opening story in my first post involving the yellow belt was a good example of this. The yellow belt I was working with wasn’t setting himself up properly for me to complete the throw we were practicing. As a man, I likely would’ve been able to muscle him over the throw anyway. It wouldn’t have been pretty or good, but a yellow probably doesn’t know the difference. Instead, I couldn’t do the throw at all. I could hardly get into position for it. Because the yellow belt was probably used to men just muscling him over, he assumed I didn’t know how to do the throw, instead of assuming he could be a better partner for me. I think he was probably trying to be helpful by asking if I knew how to do the throw, but instead came off as a little condescending.

When we can’t succeed at the lower level of throws, it enforces a few things. First, in our own minds, it tells us that we’re bad at Judo. In the minds of our teammates, it tells them that we’re not as talented or skilled, that we may not know what we're doing. And in the minds of the instructors, it typically does not tell the instructor that they could be teaching differently, or that the women may need a little extra external encouragement, or that the instructor may need to adjust the throw to make it easier. No, it more likely is going to tell the instructor that women are at an almost insurmountable disadvantage, and may never be as good as the men.

Some techniques that have been this way for me due to both teaching and size/body distribution disadvantage are hiza guruma, uki goshi, osoto gari, seio nage, tsuri komi goshi, tai otoshi, harai goshi, and uchi mata. Out of the first 16 throws, I struggled completing 8 of them due to teaching style and my size disadvantage. The remaining throws were primarily foot sweeps, and I don’t understand those well either, but my size hasn’t necessarily been a disadvantage.

In addition to throwing techniques not being taught well enough, other techniques simply aren’t taught enough. These techniques are the safety based techniques, ukemi (falling), and supporting your partner.

Judo hurts! It never really stops hurting, you just eventually figure out how to fall properly so it hurts less. My first four months of Judo, I had the wind knocked out of me on more than one occasion. I didn’t learn how to fall correctly, and to this day, it gets glossed over. I don’t need to know how to fall, I just have to trust my partners to throw me nicely. But I can’t always trust my partners, and I shouldn’t have to. I should know how to protect myself.

I don’t think that works well for women. I watched a white belt girl get power bombed, and she never came back. Being thrown is intimidating. When we don’t spend the time prioritizing safety, it becomes a discourager for everyone, but especially for women. It’s safety on everyone’s part. It’s not enough to teach people how to fall properly, we also have to focus on teaching white belts how to support their partners in a throw, and how to control their throws.

For me, my anxiety disorder was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I was far more sensitive to the lack of safety training. I would sit out of entire classes with anxiety attacks if I got thrown too hard. I still cry if I hit the mat too hard. The sound of people hitting the floor alone became triggering for my anxiety. The blessing, however, was that I already knew how to get through it. I knew how to sit out when I needed to, and come back when I could. It didn’t make me quit Judo forever, just made training harder for a little while. But I was able to work through it. I also had a background in Martial Arts, and so I already had a passion for what I was doing.

For women without anxiety like mine, they may not react as strongly as I did, but they also may not be as used to the intimidation as I was. They may not have a background in Martial Arts that encourages them to hang in there like it did for me.

Related to that is the lack of progression in training, specifically with safety. We don’t start slowly in Judo. We just go right in. I was learning sacrifice throws before I’d finished the first eight throws. When classes go from 0 to 60 in a week, it can be really hard to keep up, and really hard to not get hurt.

I think everyone knows this isn’t a preferable way to train. Unfortunately, I think this is more due to a lack of students to be able to split classes by level. Perhaps if it were easier to have beginners and advanced classes, there would be more progression and a slower introduction to Judo. I realize there are outside factors to the way Judo is often, though not always, taught. But it is more intimidating to women than to men, and therefore affects women’s desire to stay more so than it does men’s.

The speed at which we start new students also contributes to the aggressiveness of Judo. When we don’t teach proper safety techniques, we also fail to address partner courtesy as fully as we should. Safety is partner courtesy. By not giving new students the tools to keep their partners safe, we communicate to them that partner safety is not a priority. And as time goes on, we just have aggressive Judoka. Sometimes, they’re aggressive because they simply don’t know how to do Judo any other way. Sometimes they’re aggressive because they’re in a competition oriented club and every randori round is preparation. Sometimes they’re aggressive because they just like being aggressive, and no one has ever told them it’s not always the best way.

I refused to do randori for a year and a half, in part because the randori I saw was downright scary at times. I couldn’t do that! I’d get hurt! And even the ones that weren’t scary, I wasn’t confident in my throwing abilities enough to do moving throws. I may have been able to stick around in Judo for the long haul unlike most women, but I stunted my own growth by being too afraid to do randori, and having to sit myself out of training on a regular basis.

These, among other things, are all barriers to everyone starting Judo, staying in Judo, and being successful in Judo.

No one wants to stay in an activity that they can’t do it even at low levels, or activities that are painful, or activities where safety isn’t encouraged, so it’s intimidating and aggressive. Unfortunately, in a lot of places, Judo is all of those things.

It just so happens that women are more likely to struggle with the techniques, more likely to be in pain from hard throws, and more intimidated by aggressive teammates and randori.

So they quit.

And then the schemata are created that women don’t stick around, and they aren’t as successful when they do. When women are successful, they are shoved into the existing schema of being very masculine, and doing Judo aggressively.

That is part of what makes Judo sexist.

Part 1: https://roseyhorse12.wixsite.com/mysite/post/the-subtlety-of-sexism-in-judo

Part 3: https://roseyhorse12.wixsite.com/mysite/post/the-subtlety-of-sexism-a-way-forward