Sexism had always been something of an abstraction to me. I knew it existed, but I assumed that it was the product of backward and parochial cultures. It might show up in entrenched corporate bureaucracies dominated by old-boy networks, or in ethnic groups governed by male-dominated traditions, or in working-class communities in which Rambo still reigned. But surely no such noxious bias would be found in the overwhelmingly liberal, intellectual, worldly, and high-minded university community that we safely inhabited.

Yet a string of white males had been voted tenure just before her. Most had not written as much as she, nor inspired the same praise from specialists around the nation as had her work. None of their writings had been subjected to the detailed scrutiny -- footnote by footnote -- to which her colleagues had subjected her latest manuscript. Not one of the male candidates had aroused the degree of anger and bitterness that characterized her tenure decision.

Why? At first I was bewildered. I knew most of the men who had voted against her. A few I knew to be narrow-minded, one or two I might have suspected of misogyny. But most were thoughtful, intelligent men. They had traveled widely, read widely, had held positions of responsibility and trust. I was sure that they felt they had been fair and impartial in judging her work. They would be appalled at any suggestion of sexual bias.

Gradually, I came to understand. They were applying their standard of scholarship as impartially as they knew how. Yet their standard assumed that the person to whom they applied it had gone through the same training and had the same formative intellectual experiences as they. It assumed further that the person had gained along the way the same understandings of academic discipline, and the same approaches to core problems, as they had gained. In short, their standard was premised on the belief that the people they judged had come to view the modes and purposes of scholarship -- of the life of the mind -- in the same way they had come to view it.

Through the years she has helped me to see the gender biases of these assumptions. Her experiences and understandings, and those of other women scholars, have been shaped by the irrefutable reality of gender. The values and perspectives she brings to bear on the world -- and in particular, the world of ideas -- are different from theirs, because she has experienced the world differently. In fact, it is the very uniqueness of her female perspective that animates her scholarship, that gives it its originality and intellectual bite. They had applied their standard as impartially as they knew how, but it was a male standard.

Not that they were incapable of appreciating her scholarship simply because they were men: after all, the experts in her field, whose opinions had been solicited during the tenure review, and who had overwhelmingly praised her work, had been male. And the majority of the men on her faculty had voted to grant her tenure; she had failed only to get the necessary two thirds. Presumably, the men who supported her had been able to imagine the life of the mind from a different perspective than their own. They had been able and willing to expand their standard -- not to compromise it or to reduce it, but to broaden it to include a woman’s way of knowing. I suspect that those who did not, did not care to try.

And why would they not have cared to try? Here again, I was momentarily stumped. Apart from the few diehards, they were kindly men, tolerant men. But perhaps they did not feel that she had invited them to try. Early on, her closest friends on the faculty were a group of young professors who took delight in challenging the sacred cows of prevailing scholarship. Her early articles openly proclaimed a feminist perspective. She had not played at being a good daughter to the older and more traditional men on the faculty, giggling at their jokes and massaging their egos. Nor had she pretended to be one of them, speaking loudly and talking tough. They had no category for her, and to that extent, she had threatened them, made them uncomfortable. So that when it came time for them to try to see the world from her perspective, they chose not to.

Since the vote, she has remained strong and as certain of the worth of her scholarship as before. Many women colleagues, and many men, rallied to her cause. There were student demonstrations. She pondered a lawsuit. She was offered a faculty position elsewhere and is happy with her new job.

But the experience has shaken me. First came the rage and confusion. Only later came insight into the insidiousness of sexism even in our most enlightened institutions. It has made me wary, in addition, of my own limited perspective -- of the countless ways in which I fail to understand my female colleagues and students and their ways of knowing the world.

I have begun to notice small things. A recruiter for a large company calls to ask about a student who is being considered for a job. "Does she plan to have a family?" he inquires, innocently enough. "Is she really -- er -- serious about a career?" It is not the first time such a question has been put to me about a female student, but it is the first time I hear it clearly, for what it is.

A male colleague is critical of a young woman assistant professor: "She’s not assertive enough in the classroom," he confides. "She’s too anxious to please -- doesn’t know her own mind." Then, later, another colleague, about the same young woman: "She’s so whiny. I find her very abrasive." It is possible, of course, that she is both diffident and abrasive. But I can’t help wondering if these characterizations more accurately reflect how my two colleagues feel about women in general -- their mothers, wives, girlfriends -- than about this particular young woman.

At a board meeting of a small foundation on which I serve, the lone woman director tries to express doubts about a pending decision. At first, several loquacious men in the group won’t give her a chance to speak. When finally she begins to voice her concern, she is repeatedly interrupted. She perseveres and eventually states her objection. But her concern goes unaddressed in the remainder of the meeting, as if she had never raised it. It seems to me that this isn’t the first time she was ignored, but it is the first time I noticed.

In my class I present a complex management problem. An organization is rife with dissension. I ask, "What steps should the manager take to improve the situation?" The answers of my male students are filled with words like "strategy," "conflict," "interests," "claims," "tradeoffs," and "rights." My female students use words like "resolution," "relationship," "cooperation," and "loyalty." Have their vocabularies and approaches to problems always been somewhat different, or am I listening now as never before?

The vice president of a corporation that I advise tells me he can’t implement one of my recommendations, although he agrees with it. "I have no authority," he explains. "It’s not my turf." Later the same day, his assistant vice president tells me that the recommendation can be implemented easily. "It’s not formally within our responsibility," she says, offhandedly. "But we’ll just make some suggestions here and there, at the right time, to the right folks, and it’ll get done." Is the male vice president especially mindful of formal lines of authority and his female assistant especially casual, or do they exemplify differences in how men and women in general approach questions of leadership?

If being a "feminist" means noticing these sorts of things, then I became a feminist the day my wife was denied tenure. But what is my responsibility, as a male feminist, beyond merely noticing? At the least: to remind corporate recruiters that they shouldn’t be asking about whether prospective female employees want to have a family; to warn male colleagues about subtle possibilities of sexual bias in their evaluations of female colleagues; to help ensure that women are listened to within otherwise all-male meetings; to support my women students in the classroom, and to give explicit legitimacy to differences in the perceptions and leadership styles of men and women. In other words, just as I seek to educate myself, I must also help educate other men.

This is no small task. The day after the vote on my wife’s tenure, I phoned one of her opponents -- an old curmudgeon, as arrogant as he is smart. Without the slightest sense of the irony lying in the epithet I chose to hurl at him, I called him a son of a bitch.

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