(no subject)
So on Thursday evening, I went to this dinner hosted by the campus organization Women In Science and Math (WISM, pronounced like 'wisdom' without the 'd').
The leaders of the group had sent out a request for all alumnae who had majored in math or science and were still living in the area to attend. A surprising number (ten or twelve or something like that) showed up. All of them seemed like incredibly cool human beings, particularly the older ones who had majored in mathematics and sciences back fifty years ago when women just didn't do that. Most of them had switched careers several times, going from one high-powered, intensely skilled job to another. There was a women who had majored in geology and was now working on 'catastrophe modelling' (every girl in the room leaned forward and looked interested... hee, we're all such geeks); there was a women in her 80's who had gone back to school twice and earned masters degrees in both chemistry and social work; several professors, researchers, and doctors. My personal favorite, and the only one I had the courage to talk to, was a woman in her 30's who had majored in neurobiology but was now a lawyer; she was funny, pretty, friendly, and a tiny bit awkward. (I only got a little bit of a crush on her, which was excellent self restraint on my part.) We took the same first-year course, The Enchanted Cortex (cell biology and genetics with a neuroscience focus), from the same awesome professor Lin Anonsen (weird to realize that Lin was old enough to have taught both of us), and Lin and the lawyer and I stood around making silly neuroscience jokes for a good 20 minutes. It was awesome. The food was also super tasty; soup and bread and amazing cakes from a local café.
There was one interesting thing I noticed, which has stuck in my mind for the past few days. The group roughly divided into three catagories; women age 60 and up, women between 35 and 60, and women under 35, including current undergrads. There was a very peculiarly consistent difference between how the latter two catagories presented themselves. The undergrads and younger graduates were more or less fashionably and usually fairly femininely dressed; with a couple of exceptions, we spoke in softer, higher-pitched voices and used more stereotypically feminine body language than the older catagory. The older women, the ones who had graduated more between 1950 and 1980, had almost all deepened their voices and defeminized their dress and mannerisms. It was interesting to me. I wondered if my instant assumption was true, namely that the circumstances of their lives -- most of them working in professions in which they'd probably had to struggle more to succeed than the average equally qualified male -- had made them adopt these changes. I wondered if the changes were conscious or unconscious. I wondered if they'd had to go to some effort to squash their feminine characteristics in order to encounter less anti-female stereotyping in the workplace, or if they'd survived in their jobs because they were already more androgynous than their more feminine contemporaries.
I can't really imagine what it would be like to grow up feeling that you couldn't do something, or had to change the way you presented yourself, just because you were female. I can probably count most of the times in my life I've felt discriminated against because of my femaleness/femininity (apart from the male strangers I meet almost daily who think they have a right to comment on my physical appearance and expect me to respond -- although that often does still bother me, I've gotten used to it enough that I don't remember individual incidences of it), because it's bothered me SO intensely when I have encountered it. It feels so strange, so nightmare-ish, so unreal. I'm not used to it at all... and that's a good thing.
I've wished I were more androgynous for years, partly because of some mild gender dysphoria probably connected with hitting puberty way before I was psychologically ready for it, partly because being hit on by crude male strangers gets exhausting, and partly just because I think androgyny is fun. But I like that society (at least my little bubble of it) has evolved to the point where I can be totally comfortable wearing a pretty skirt to my biology lab... in which a good two thirds of the students are also female.
Anyway, the dinner was interesting, just to see that startling visual representation of how social norms have shifted over the past couple of decades.
The leaders of the group had sent out a request for all alumnae who had majored in math or science and were still living in the area to attend. A surprising number (ten or twelve or something like that) showed up. All of them seemed like incredibly cool human beings, particularly the older ones who had majored in mathematics and sciences back fifty years ago when women just didn't do that. Most of them had switched careers several times, going from one high-powered, intensely skilled job to another. There was a women who had majored in geology and was now working on 'catastrophe modelling' (every girl in the room leaned forward and looked interested... hee, we're all such geeks); there was a women in her 80's who had gone back to school twice and earned masters degrees in both chemistry and social work; several professors, researchers, and doctors. My personal favorite, and the only one I had the courage to talk to, was a woman in her 30's who had majored in neurobiology but was now a lawyer; she was funny, pretty, friendly, and a tiny bit awkward. (I only got a little bit of a crush on her, which was excellent self restraint on my part.) We took the same first-year course, The Enchanted Cortex (cell biology and genetics with a neuroscience focus), from the same awesome professor Lin Anonsen (weird to realize that Lin was old enough to have taught both of us), and Lin and the lawyer and I stood around making silly neuroscience jokes for a good 20 minutes. It was awesome. The food was also super tasty; soup and bread and amazing cakes from a local café.
There was one interesting thing I noticed, which has stuck in my mind for the past few days. The group roughly divided into three catagories; women age 60 and up, women between 35 and 60, and women under 35, including current undergrads. There was a very peculiarly consistent difference between how the latter two catagories presented themselves. The undergrads and younger graduates were more or less fashionably and usually fairly femininely dressed; with a couple of exceptions, we spoke in softer, higher-pitched voices and used more stereotypically feminine body language than the older catagory. The older women, the ones who had graduated more between 1950 and 1980, had almost all deepened their voices and defeminized their dress and mannerisms. It was interesting to me. I wondered if my instant assumption was true, namely that the circumstances of their lives -- most of them working in professions in which they'd probably had to struggle more to succeed than the average equally qualified male -- had made them adopt these changes. I wondered if the changes were conscious or unconscious. I wondered if they'd had to go to some effort to squash their feminine characteristics in order to encounter less anti-female stereotyping in the workplace, or if they'd survived in their jobs because they were already more androgynous than their more feminine contemporaries.
I can't really imagine what it would be like to grow up feeling that you couldn't do something, or had to change the way you presented yourself, just because you were female. I can probably count most of the times in my life I've felt discriminated against because of my femaleness/femininity (apart from the male strangers I meet almost daily who think they have a right to comment on my physical appearance and expect me to respond -- although that often does still bother me, I've gotten used to it enough that I don't remember individual incidences of it), because it's bothered me SO intensely when I have encountered it. It feels so strange, so nightmare-ish, so unreal. I'm not used to it at all... and that's a good thing.
I've wished I were more androgynous for years, partly because of some mild gender dysphoria probably connected with hitting puberty way before I was psychologically ready for it, partly because being hit on by crude male strangers gets exhausting, and partly just because I think androgyny is fun. But I like that society (at least my little bubble of it) has evolved to the point where I can be totally comfortable wearing a pretty skirt to my biology lab... in which a good two thirds of the students are also female.
Anyway, the dinner was interesting, just to see that startling visual representation of how social norms have shifted over the past couple of decades.