{"id":48420,"date":"2024-12-07T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2024-12-07T10:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=48420"},"modified":"2025-05-28T21:18:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T03:18:04","slug":"in-defense-of-gender-segregation-of-certain-callings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/12\/in-defense-of-gender-segregation-of-certain-callings\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Gender Segregation of Certain Callings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"<\/p>\n

So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society\/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed <\/span>parts of elsewhere<\/span><\/a>, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even if it touches on some of the same themes. So here I will take the fact that the leadership positions are male as a given, and address where we go from there in terms of sex segregation of callings (I\u2019m going to use sex and gender interchangeably here, so sue me).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the outset, I should note that If we want to make the practice\/doctrine distinction, <\/span>which I typically don\u2019t<\/span><\/a>, this is clearly in the practice, and not doctrine, category, and if the Church were to change on this it wouldn\u2019t cause any great consternation on my part. Still, all things being equal I think the current course is the wisest for two main reasons; both of them, I am sure, contentious no matter how carefully worded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

First, if leadership positions are reserved for men for gender complementarian reasons, it then follows that some spaces should also be carved out and reserved for women. Gender complementarity is one of those things that are implied in the D&C and more explicitly in the Proclamation. The particulars of which things are assigned to which genders is another whole post or twenty, but suffice it to say that I doubt any framework for maintaining a male-only priesthood is internally very consistent without some sense of complementarity, that the two genders need each other to fulfill particular but differing roles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And again, you may disagree with the notion altogether, and think that supposedly telos or ontic aspects of one sex or the other should be flattened in regards to Church functions, but again assuming a gender complementarian perspective it makes sense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Point two is the potential risk for sexual mischief (cue eye rolls). \u201cBut Stephen C., responsible, functional adults in the real world work with members of the opposite sex all the time without getting into sexual mischief.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But do they? Yes, most cross-sex employment situations do not lead to affairs and sexual mischief, but by the same token it’s incredibly naive to pretend like that’s not a major thing in the workplace where they work in intense, close quarter situations, travel together, etc. (Jobs where you only interact with your coworkers at the water cooler and the occasional weekly meeting presumably are less so, but I imagine they still happen.) Heck, even as a male of middling attractiveness I was invited up to a hotel room at a conference by a colleague in my younger and skinner days.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, in the real workforce gender segregation is not and should not be an option. Such interactions, formal or not, are part of ladder climbing, so having some kind of workplace segregation would negatively affect the member of the sex with the less power, typically the woman. (That being said, I would be okay with a norm that, for example, male executives typically have male secretaries).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, these dynamics are simply irrelevant to non-leadership Church callings. No woman\u2019s career or ability to feed her family is going to be affected by not being a Young Men\u2019s president, and people aren’t exactly Machiavellian about getting assigned the ward clerk job with all its attendant power, prestige, and wealth. Ward clerks spend a lot of time in close quarters with other clerks, spend an awful amount of time in traffic with them driving the tithing to the bank, etc. All things being equal, it would probably be better if it were members of the same sex on that team, and the same would go for members of other presidencies (e.g. Sunday School presidency).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other callings, like Sunday School teacher, are more in the category of \u201cwater cooler\u201d jobs. There might be the occasional mixed-sex meeting, but that is relatively benign compared to the sometimes intense and time-consuming involvement one typically has with fellow members of an auxiliary presidency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m having a hard time finding really solid survey stats on this, but one survey<\/a> cited by Forbes suggests that about one in five people at a workplace in a committed relationship have cheated on their spouse with a coworker, and nearly half of people know somebody who has cheated with a coworker.\u00a0<\/span>These numbers seem high considering that the GSS reports about one in five respondents have had affairs overall, but as far as I can tell that includes all respondents, married or not, so presumably the number is higher once you remove the never-marrieds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless, cheating in the workplace is a very real, much-too-common, thing, so nobody is served by simply rolling eyes or snickering at the implications of that fact. <\/span>If you want to accept a certain number of intra-ward affairs as the cost of having mixed-sex clerks and Sunday School presidencies then so be it, but it’s naive to not think that there would be some trade-offs on this point.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One could easily rejoin with taking this to an extreme. Well, in that case why don’t we go full Taliban and require complete sexual segregation? And sure, across thousands of units taking such draconian measures would probably lead to a handful of fewer affairs at immense cost, but again it\u2019s a cost versus benefit trade-off, and assigning auxiliary presidencies to one sex or the other is a relatively painless way to avoid some of the major risks incurred by having mixed sexes spending a lot of after-hours time together in intense, close proximity in a ward context.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers.\u00a0 In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society\/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male.\u00a0 These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed parts of elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even if it touches on some of the same themes. So here I will take the fact that the leadership positions are male as a given, and address where we go from there in terms of sex segregation of callings (I\u2019m going to use sex and gender interchangeably here, so sue me).\u00a0 At the outset, I should note that If we want to make the practice\/doctrine distinction, which I typically don\u2019t, this is clearly in the practice, and not doctrine, category, and if the Church were to change on this it wouldn\u2019t cause any great consternation on my part. Still, all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2970],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Update2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48420"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50296,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48420\/revisions\/50296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}