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

[shermarama]

This is interesting stuff. I was a pretty late starter on the puberty thing, so while a lot of my peers were at a stage of messing around with boys and make-up, it all felt kind of irrelevant to me... and then by the time it became relevant I couldn't buy women's clothes anyway, so maybe there's stages I just never really passed through along the way.

I'd be inclined to avoid an all-girls school myself, but then there's a large range of opinions about that. I know women that went to all-girl schools who say their confidence in technical subjects came from there, from never having to fight assumptions that the best people in the science classes would be the boys, and from never having the excuse to let their own standards drop. Then again I've met people who went to all-girl schools who then spent too much of university working out how to deal with to these strange new boy creatures they were having to be around, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I went to somewhere sort of inbetween, a school that had been girls-only that was in the process of becoming mixed, and I much preferred it mixed; that school was shit enough without also missing out on learning how to socialise with half the population.

I doubt careers advice is better purely for somewhere being single-sex - I suspect it's going to depend more on whether there's anyone there who gives a toss about it, or has any understanding of the world outside of teaching. All the female teachers from the female-only bit of my school were quite traditional, had studied nice lady-like things like English or languages and then gone into their acceptably lady-like teaching careers, and so they just didn't know what else there was to tell us about. It was clear I was good at science and should carry on doing something science-related, but beyond picking which of the three standard sciences I liked most or maybe doing medicine, that was about it. If only any of them had even known what engineering was, someone might have been able to tell me about its existence.