Still not able to properly think this through

[shermarama]

Is there such a thing as a consulting feminist? Because I feel like I need to talk to one, on how I got to where I am, and where indeed I actually am, on gender issues. I don't spend a lot of time reading around the topic, and I'm not likely to either, but things come up where I find my experiences of being female, and of being a female that does

Comments

[juggzy]

I think the thing is - particularly with the current talk of intersectionality - to be able to recognise that, even though you may not be able to experience something, one needs to recognise what other people say of their experiences as real. To be fair, this has more relevance when the other has experiences you *can't* have e.g. when I am listening to a trans woman's experience of street abuse and name-calling, but I think it should be extendable to the situation where one *could* have had the other's experience, but just haven't.

FWIW, I've not ever had any experience of other physicists treating me as a lesser physicist because I am female; the only thing holding me back there is that I am an enthusiastic physicist but (I thought) not a particularly great one. I have, I think, experienced *non*-physicists treating me as a lesser physicist because I am female, particularly male non-physicists. However, I'm fairly sure that when I was teaching I actually got to interview a couple of times because I was a female, and they wanted to demonstrate a gender balance in their interviewing. Is this just as sexist? I don't know. It could be called positive discrimination.

So, I don't think that your experiences are unusual - I've never had any doubts that I'm a female, but I never really played with dolls to the extent that when a schoolfriend had a Cindy party when I was eight or so, I had none to take along. I always had books and trees, and wanted to be a superhero, so I had comics as well. I think this was because I was a middle child and strangely precocious, but, looking back on it, I don't think my mother had much time for girly things, either. However, I accept that other people had different experiences.

[motodraconis]

I've never had to wonder if people thought me inferior at my job for being female. Plenty of people would be quite happy to tell me so to my face.

Most of the promotions I got in the games industry I had to get by trickery - by submitting work anonymously and winning the job. Then when it was revealed to be me behind the work, if the producer didn't know me they would refuse to allow me on the team until (male) lead artists who did know me made a scene.

The point being... when my work was anonymous and assumed male, they couldn't wait to get me on board, but would change their mind when told "Moto did the work." They'd change their minds because "she's a girl, she can't have done that work by herself."

Sorry, I could write reams of such examples. I suppose the final nail in the coffin was asking a trans friend of mine if she'd noticed any change in the way people valued her work and skills since becoming visibly a female programmer. She became quite sad and said that yes, there was a marked demotion.

[lozette]

Adding my anecdata to the pile - I have never had issues getting jobs (in web dev); in fact once or twice I've had interviewers say they are glad to have a woman on the team (usually for some BS reason like they think I'd be a "calming influence" or some crapola).

But I get the crap once I've started, usually from peers. It definitely feels worse for me these days, too - not sure if that's just me becoming more intolerant of the BS, or no longer being willing to be "one of the lads" to get by, or because attitudes actually are worse. Current job is particularly awful, but I'm determined to stick it out as I need a long-term position.

[shermarama]

What sort of crap do you get, if you don't mind me asking? Direct comments, or uncomfortable assumptions, or what kind of thing?

[lozette]

Mansplaining, mostly. E.g. Me: "Ugh, I'm struggling to debug this, I can't inspect the element because when I right-click it it takes the focus off" Colleague: *walks over to desk, grabs mouse from my hand, tries doing exactly what I've been doing, fails* "Hm, for some reason when you right-click it, it takes the focus off". Me: "Yeah, that's what I was say..." Colleague: *has walked away*

That sort of thing. I realise it may not sound like much, but constantly having the fact that you are very experienced completely overridden gets tiring.

Also, I wanted to second what was said above about intersectionality. I know I have a ton of privilege, being white, cisgendered, hetero etc, and I try to remember that & take others' experiences into account.

[shermarama]

That's something I don't find I get much, I suppose. Now and then someone being surprised that I'm fine with tools and wiring and things, but relatively rarely - and, as I said somewhere else, I'm not particularly aware of it happening to the other women in my company either. There have been a couple of strange moments recently with one man in particular, who I've been working with for about a year already and who never questions me in matters to do with chemical stuff or research, but for some reason finds it amusing when I do things in the workshop. But there seems to be all kinds of stuff mixed up in that that's not just sexism. He used to be a (small-scale) farmer, so thinks of himself as very practical, as farmers generally are, but given tools he's actually a bit cack-handed - tending to turn the spanner the wrong way first, like, not just the first time you put the spanner to a joint, when you haven't worked out the geometry properly yet, but when re-fastening the same thing you've been working on all afternoon, when the spanner has always gone in the same direction, if you follow me. He can get things done eventually, yes, but it's probably going to get done quicker and better if I do it, so I do, and then he laughs because he thinks that makes me some sort of unexpected female workshop genius. It seems to me to say many things about his world-view, including his ability to estimate his own skills as well as his view of what women can do. And it is a sort of sexism, but somehow a quite innocent one? More that he's never had his assumptions challenged rather than that they're born of misogyny or resentment, and now they're being challenged he seems to be taking it well enough.

The assumption that female means inexperienced is pretty damn annoying, yeah, but I don't run into it much. This may be because I've done quite a lot of hopping around my field, so I'm often working with people with different areas of expertise - they're usually right to assume they know more about something specific than me. But in return I seem to get thought of as a specific expert in something they don't know about, to an almost scary degree. I keep telling people I don't really know that much about chemistry, but I've become the departmental go-to person for it anyway, from questions about safe handling of concentrated alkalis (which I can help with) to detailed grilling about pKa values in polyprotic acids which, frankly, I had to have a skim through wikipedia before I understood the question, and yet that still didn't stop the engineer in question trusting my answer. I suppose he just wanted any sort of confirmation that he was barking up the right tree.

[shermarama]

How do you find things in your current job, by the way? I assume universities are generally homes of fluffiness, although I've also run into some quite unnervingly unreformed types in universities too.

[shermarama]

I think the thing is - particularly with the current talk of intersectionality - to be able to recognise that, even though you may not be able to experience something, one needs to recognise what other people say of their experiences as real.
I think I'm happy enough to do that (not that it doesn't take thinking about sometimes) but recently I find myself wondering why my experiences are different, and what that says about me and other people and where we all stand in relation to society and stuff.

(I did have a Sindy but then my sister had loads of them so I think it was bought for me on automatic pilot, and I never wanted any more than the one. In later years she was mainly someone to sit in the Lego motorbike/wing-flier/space-ship mash-ups.)