Reason #502 there are no women in physics
Two conversations I had with my labmates yesterday:
LM1: Does BOSS have something against women or something? All of them have left except for you.
ME: To be fair, they left for legit reasons: W1 left 'cause her project wasn't working; W2 left because she wanted to do more clinical stuff; and W3 left because the group stopped doing research in the area she was interested in.
LM1: Oh yeah, I forgot about W3.
ME: But it sucks, doesn't it? I was looking at the group members page of this group we're thinking of collaborating with and it was, like, half women.
LM1: Well, yeah, but if you get enough women, you get the cattiness factor.
...right. Because cattiness isn't like an individual personality trait or anything. It must be something that's inherent to all women and if you get enough of them together, it will inevitably manifest. D:<
And later we were having a coffee break and talking about our weekend excursion to see The Hunger Games with one of those unfortunate labmates who couldn't join:
ME: Funny story I saw on the interwebz: they asked the guy who plays Peeta what's the weirdest sign he's seen, and he said that there were a bunch of signs that said, "WE LOVE PEENISS!" Like, an amalgamation of Peeta and Katniss's names?
LM2: Where did he see these signs?
ME: You know at the movie premieres or whatever, with the fans? That have signs?
LM1: Oh you mean, like, screaming teenaged girls and stuff?
LM3: You know for the longest time--like, the whole movie--I thought Peeta's name was Peter.
LM1: Yeah! And that Katniss was doing an English accent or something.
ME: But none of the characters had normal names! Haymitch, Katniss, Primrose, Rue? Why would Peeta be the only character with a normal name? And have I mentioned recently how much I love that a post-apocalyptic dystopian setting apparently means that everyone must have weird made-up names?
LM4: Haha, yeah, like Leto in Dune. Actually, I'm trying to remember: most of the characters in Dune had normal names, didn't they?
ME: You know I never really got into Dune. I mean, I tried, back in middle school or whatever when everybody was reading it, but...
LM4: Huh. Yeah, I guess Dune is one of those books that's really geared towards teenaged guys.
LM3: Seriously, though. You should try to read it again sometime; it talks about politics, and religion, and technology, and it's really good.
LM4: But back to The Hunger Games, how was it? What's it even about?
LM3: This girl who's in love with two boys--
ME: Man, don't even--
LM3: --and also a bunch of kids killing each other.
LM2: Actually, if you read the books, she's not really in love with either of them. That's kind of her flaw.
ME: That's not actually a flaw.
I'm not saying anything about the relative quality of Dune versus The Hunger Games. Obviously I haven't read either of them. But to go from seriously talking about Dune-the-teenaged-boys-book to jokingly demeaning The-Hunger-Games-the-teenaged-girls-book in a matter of minutes is pretty damn annoying. (And for the record, associating either book with mainly teenaged boys or mainly teenaged girls was already annoying.) And the fact it was "just joking" just makes it worse because I can't say anything without coming off as a over-sensitive feminazi.
Basically, I've just about hit my threshold, and I'm ready to switch to a career that has a reasonable gender ratio for roughly twenty years to make up for the previous thirteen.