poeks-deactivated20100930 asked: Oh! Me! Me! I have a question for shoesonwrong: do you have any fun (heh) stories about working in a male-dominated field? I've got some of my own from The Life and Times of a Lady Programmer, but I would imagine the sexism--given mathematics is even more male-dominated--would be more marked for you. Just curious.
Okay, confession: I graduated a year and a half ago from college and haven’t held down a full-time job since. I’ve done freelance work, ranging from editing to writing to accounting, but haven’t experienced a male-dominated workforce.
In school, however, I never had a single science or mathematics class where women outnumbered men, and I have some stories about that. Hope that still counts!
I went to two universities, the first of which was Michigan Technological University, where my class had a “good” ratio of guys to girls because it was 3:1. Other classes had anywhere from 4:1 to 8:1. Most of the women at Tech went into, for some reason, biomedical engineering or civil engineering, so the maths and sciences were almost entirely male-dominated. I had professors who called me “sweetie”, most guys didn’t want to be in study groups with me, I asked different questions than my male classmates (maybe ones that they were too afraid to ask because they thought they would look stupid?) and I generally felt strange. Not because I am uncomfortable with men, but because they were clearly so uncomfortable with me. Some of them outright disliked me, finding me to be threatening because, I don’t know, I had a vagina and could still do double integrals or something. In one of my classes, I aced a midterm. I mean, I completely aced it — full points, full extra credit, everything — and it’s because I was visiting my professor regularly (he did not call me “sweetie”) and asking lots of questions in class (everyone else was too manly, apparently). Everyone else nearly failed it. When the professor announced that there would be no curve because one student had essentially broken it, it was clear who that one student was because I was the only one not wearing a look of crushing disappointment. Then, a boy named Kyle stood up and bellowed, “That’s not fair. I’m not losing to a girl.”
Another class decided to pull an all-nighter study group before the final — in a notoriously gross frat house’s attic. They might as well have held it in a men’s locker room, and they knew that. No one invited me, even though I was sitting right there with my other eleven classmates.
One day, we each had to do an hour long presentation on a topic in mathematics. When my day arrived, the whole class skipped. It was one of those cliquey little classes of about seven guys and me, so it wasn’t like an entire auditorium skipped out on me, but still. All the guys managed to faithfully attend every other presentation.
At my second university, there were far more women, but it was more of the same in math and science. Rude classmates, resentful classmates, etc. My favorite story from that university is when I was being an emergency TA for my favorite math professor’s lower-level math class because he AND his graduate students had separate family emergencies. I was supposed to just give out some handouts and study guides, administer a quick quiz, and get out of there.
As soon as I walked in, I was greeted with suspicious looks. When I started to explain what was going on, there was grumbling. By time I got to the “quiz” part of my announcement, one kid stood up and said, “You’re not authorized to do this, lady. I’m not taking any quiz you give me. What are you, like twenty-five?” Because yeah. I love giving surprise, non-authorized quizzes to groups of sophomores. It’s where I find my life’s joy. It’s how I roll. And I was twenty-one, thanks, but whatever. Well, with one person rocking the boat, they had enough momentum to turn it over entirely and only one kid out of fifteen stayed to take the quiz. The professor assured me that the other fourteen failed. I wasn’t with the class long enough to really memorize any faces, but I could usually figure out when one of them was passing me in the hall, because they glared at me, the bitch who made them fail that exam by not seeming legitimate enough due to my lack of a penis.
In general, there were some clearly sucky things that my fellow classmates did. They were also, on the whole, far more hostile toward me than professors were, but far less annoying than the occasional hostile professor. My department head at the second university also happened to be my assigned advisor, and I once asked him about graduate programs the school offered, to which he said (with a completely earnest tone), “Graduate school is a waste of money for women like you. You’re already married.” He didn’t say anymore on the subject, and I was too busy scraping my chin off the floor.
There are a zillion other stories of minor, every day sexism from my time spent studying mathematics, but those are some of the ones that stick out most to me — probably because most of them have to do with being publicly ridiculed and I have a low threshold for embarrassment, even without the sexism thrown in.
Math, science, and computer science are so completely lacking in women that most women don’t want to touch the fields with a ten-foot pole, and I can kind of understand. First, women have to overcome years of being told that they are just not as good at math and science as men, and now they have to deal with a field dominated by men who (mostly) think that very thing as well? Most women’s reaction to that is not “SIGN ME UP” and I can’t blame them. It’s tiring, wondering if each new professor is going to have a nice crunchy layer of sexism before you get to their possibly old and bitter center, or if all the people in your assigned project group are going to dislike you for your gender and as a result a) not let you help at all (because you must be incompetent) or b) make you do all the work (because you dared to infringe on the testosterone party and therefore should get your comeuppance).
My stories really aren’t that great, though. I’d love to hear yours sometime!
