Progress?

[solarwind]

Yesterday I witnessed about the most misogynistic thing I've seen in a long time. As a first year chemistry grad student we are all required to take this first year seminar course were we take turns presenting on papers. Because of scheduling conflicts, a bunch of second year students are also taking the class this year so in all there are around

Comments

[zhukora1]

I totally don't think you're overreacting. If this was just an offhand remark once that was maybe poorly worded, I could see some potential legitimacy to your concern of overreaction. Instead this is a repeated ongoing negative attitude and clearly offensive bias on the part of the Prof. She's definitely an ass, and maybe in denial about how hard things are for women in academia because she has either never wanted the things academia makes it hard for her to have, or because she has to live in denial about it in order to cope with how heavily it's affected her life.

It's not super active, but I'd definitely recommend the community women_academics for frank discussion of this topic, as well as (more active but less specific) academics_anon. Reading through the topical posts of each will help reassure you you're not crazy!

[arks]

It sounds as if she doesn't want to be a professer and ought not to be besides. Please talk to your department chair. As many direct quotes as possible.

I bet you could run the seminar more effectively without her.

[scififreak]

I don't have time at this moment to properly rant and rave at this like I want to, but I will say that you are not overreacting. At all. This perfectly illustrates that one has to be more than female to be a feminist. Fight the good fight and tell your dept chair what has been said and what is going on in that class! This is totally NOT cool!

[rhythmia]

Okay, first of all, a class full of frosh. Second, this is academic, learning time. It's not only not professional for the professor to be making statements like that on class time, what she's saying also offends me on several levels. Why are you discouraging groups from meeting, and saying that it's only for discussing pregnancy? How is that fostering the rounded education of your students?

And yeah, some of the strongest proponents of patriarchy are women who've bought into it, and learned to live with it and justify it as, well, they had to suck it up and deal, and so should you because that's the way it is.

Please speak up about it, document as much as you can about what she's saying, maybe see if other students will go with you so it's not just a he says-she says deal. I'm rooting for you! ♥