jump to navigation

Ambassador for the engineers May 22, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, feminism, humor, work.
Tags: , , ,
1 comment so far

After writing about my experience manning a booth at a conference (geez…even how you work a booth at a conference can be phrased in male-centric terms), it has slowly dawned on me that there is another way to view the experience.  I was rather frustrated that people seemed surprised when they found out I was an engineer.  I have realized, however, that I need to look at it in a different light: such a reaction, when not accompanied by an obvious derogatory or sexist statement (as has happened), could potentially be viewed as a compliment.  Maybe in expressing surprise that I’m an engineer, what they were really saying was: “Oh my!  You can talk to me without using technobabble or looking at someone’s shoes!  Nor do you have male-pattern baldness!”  It’s a good thing to go out and destroy those stereotypes, right?

Booth Babe May 3, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, feminism, work.
Tags: , , , ,
9 comments

Last week, before leaving for a conference, I posted the following on Twitter:

Now that I’m back, I realize that comment should’ve been taken as a bad omen.  I actually didn’t expect there to be booth babes (and if you’re not sure what I’m referring to, please read this), but I was very wrong about that.  There were, in fact, booth babes at the show.

I went to this conference because I was invited to give a talk about my research.  However, my employer said they would provide my room and board for the trip if I helped work a booth at the trade show promoting our services and capabilities.  We frequently work with private industry, and it was assumed that having a handful of intelligent people showing what we could do is good for the bottom line.  I’m in favor of having an income and love talking about my work, so this seemed like a reasonable deal for me, as well.

But back to the booth babes, I’m sad to report that this was not the most disturbing part of working our booth.  The most disturbing part was interacting with some of the people who came to visit us, many of whom apparently have interacted with them.  I was chatting with a fellow, and toward the end of the conversation, I gave him my card.  He read it and said, “Oh!  You’re an engineer?”  I responded I was, and he then asked, “And you actually work at the center?”

Then there was one person who was talking to a colleague about one of my demo projects at the booth.  When the guy asked this colleague for a card, he said he didn’t have any but said it was my project.  The visitor looked at me for a moment, open mouthed, and said, “This is YOUR project?”  I nodded and introduced myself, and gave him my business card.  He looked back and forth between myself and my colleague a few times, looking like he wanted to give me back my card.  Then he said thank you and walked away.  He apparently didn’t want to have a conversation with me.

Admittedly, these were some of the worst cases, but it was obvious that about half of the people who came to talk to us had no desire to talk to me, asking to talk to someone who was “in charge.”  Others, when I approached them while they were reading our posters, would say they were waiting to talk to an engineer or faculty.

One colleague, when I complained about the situation, said I need to just “prove them wrong.”  I agree that this is the right spirit to have, but it is overwhelmingly frustrating when you’re sitting there, and someone obviously comes to the conclusion that you’re an idiot by virtue of your sex while the people around you are obviously competent for the same reason.  It’s a horrible experience, and I seriously doubt most men really understand how hard it is to be motivated to ‘prove them wrong’ when you have to do it with every single person you meet.  Men, in similar circumstances, are accorded this respect simply by breathing.  It certainly doesn’t require the equivalent effort a female would have to put forth.

I will say that it is somewhat understandable that people would make the assumption that I’m a salesperson given that most of the women on the trade show floor were, in fact salespeople…or booth babes.  In many cases, it ended up that once people got over the surprise that they were talking to a living, breathing, female engineer, we were able to move on and have some extremely interesting conversations.  Unfortunately, the shocked look every time I was introduced as a researcher got old very quickly.

You know what they say about assumptions… March 29, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: ,
add a comment

This past week, Mike and I had a meeting with some people on a project that I had run.  One of the people was someone I’d met before as we’d interfaced on another project.  As we all sat down and finished up our introductions, this person faced Mike and started asking him questions about the current project.  After a couple questions, it was pretty clear that he thought Mike was in charge of things.  I sort of inwardly sighed and waited.  I’ve had this happen more times than I care to recall.

After about the third question, Mike said, “Well, Cherish is actually the one who came up with the idea, so I think she’d be better at addressing these issues.”  From that point on, things were a lot more balanced.

I spoke with Mike afterwards, and I asked if he noticed this person focusing on him initially.

“Oh yes, that’s why I turned it over to you as quickly as possible and then left the room for a few minutes.  If I wasn’t there, he’d have to talk to you.”

It was bothering the both of us, however, that we couldn’t tell if this person had focused on him because he knew me from this other project or if it was the stereotypical ‘the guy must be in charge’ assumption.  Either way, I would have preferred if he had asked first which of us was leading the project rather than making assumptions.

Public shaming of men March 22, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: , , , ,
1 comment so far

I’ve been reading the stories about Adria Richards…and reading, with abject horror, the comments on those stories.

The primary thing that irritated me were the comments saying that she shouldn’t have posted the pictures to Twitter.  She should, in their opinion, have simply told them to knock it off.

Obviously these commenters have no idea what they’re asking.  One of my first experiences where this occurred was in a college cafeteria.  I was sitting with another woman and two men, both of whom were loudly ogling the women in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated (ETA: it was actually the swimsuit issue).  The other woman asked them to stop.  They ignored her and kept on.  She repeated her request, and they glared at her before telling her that if she didn’t like it, she could go somewhere else…and then returned to their activity.  When she got up angrily and left, there was loud muttering about what a bitch she was.

In the twenty years since this happened, I have never seen such requests, either from me or other women, have any positive outcome.  In fact, they’re almost entirely replicas of the above conversation.  Occasionally, there’s the, “Can’t you take a joke?” line thrown in, as well.  And in the twenty years since this happened, I have encountered many such opportunities to try this tactic.

It doesn’t work.

My observation is that men who are stupid enough to think it’s okay to behave this way in public, especially in a professional setting, are also too stupid to realize that it’s sexist and that they should quit, even when told directly.  Somehow it’s okay to make jokes at a tech conference that you’d never make in front of your mother.  (There’s a bit of scientific evidence to back this up.)  If you honestly think just telling them to stop actually worked, all of them would have stopped making comments like that a long time ago.  There’s a website devoted to dealing with the issue, which would be unnecessary if just telling people to stop actually worked.

The only time I’ve seen any different outcome is when I did something similar to Adria: I publicly shamed the offender on the biggest soapbox I could find.  You see, in the twenty years I’ve been dealing with behavior head on, I have learned that men won’t listen to me on the topic of sexist behavior as they ascertain that women aren’t good evaluators in this realm.  Instead, if you want them to stop sexist behavior, you need to get other men to tell them to stop.  In my situation, it actually worked.  While I would like to think that the man making offensive comments suddenly saw the error of his ways, I think the reason he really apologized (albeit with a defensive remark at the end) was because other men and some women piled on and said it was out of line.  I’m incredibly appreciative of all of those people, too.

It’s depressing, however, to find that there so many more out there who feel like Adria just needs to get a thicker skin or are clueless to the fact that making sexist remarks go away isn’t a simple feat.  To me, this is a very clear sign that sexism in tech is still as much a problem as it was two decades ago.

(If, after reading all this you’re still frustrated, then cheer yourself up by reading this wonderful parody about how women should remember their place in science.)

Stereotypes are good because they’re true February 3, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: , , , ,
1 comment so far

stereotypes1

A couple weeks ago, I was talking with someone who mentioned an email about stereotypes of women.  He apparently thought it was funny, and I made the quip that I hadn’t seen it because obviously no one would be stupid enough to send something like that to me.  There was some effort at defending the email, but I said that stereotypes aren’t defensible because they cause you to judge all people who fall into a particular category the same way rather than viewing them as unique individuals who may or may not resemble the stereotype.

In particular, I talked about my experience when I first started going to college.  A frequently overheard comment my first year or two of college is that, “Women are only accepted here because of affirmative action.”  Dummy me, I started to believe it.

It was a couple years later when I realized it was bunk.  I was working on a website for the women’s center, and I was asked to put up statistics that compared female and male admitted students.  It turned out that the stats came from my particular class, and one of the things that I was putting up was a comparison between SAT scores of the two groups.  I found it interesting that there was only about a 10-point difference between men and women. What really got me was when I found out that my SAT scores were actually higher than the average male SAT scores.  I was livid.  I’d been told for so long that I had only been admitted because of my uterus that I would’ve never believed it.  That meant that my SAT scores were better than more than half the men in my cohort.

Going back to the conversation, I became even more irritated when someone else jumped into the conversation, making the assertion that stereotypes are just fine.  Apparently, in this person’s world, the people they misjudge are apparently acceptable casualties because “most of the time,” it’s true.

Sadly, I doubt this person would understand how their judgments impact other people.  In fact, I think they’d be especially reluctant to agree with this article about how stereotypes are bad even when they’re good.

I admit to having caught myself assuming stereotypes of people.  It’s something that I have to work on constantly.  It’s disappointing, however, that there are still people who think stereotypes are a reasonable approach to human interaction.

Typical woman November 19, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: , , , ,
3 comments

I was ribbing a coworker at a meeting, and his response could more or less be summed up with, “Typical woman.”  I was completely expecting him to say that, and I laughed when he did.  However, one of the other people in the meeting was obviously very uncomfortable with the exchange and quickly changed the topic, redirecting us back to our original focus.

After this exchange, I was somewhat troubled because I started wondering if I had some sort of double standard: in this scenario, my coworker was obviously kidding and I know that he doesn’t really believe that.  (At least, I’m fairly certain he doesn’t.  We have a very good professional relationship.)  On the other hand, I know that if certain people did it, it would probably offend me as it would just cement my view that they have issues with women.

This left me wondering when, if ever, sexist humor is appropriate.  Is it alright as long as the woman or women present aren’t offended, or ought there be a more universally applied standard?  I know some people who feel it is never okay to make jokes like that.  Or should it be situation dependent?

Telling women to smile on the internet October 7, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: , ,
10 comments

There’s an interesting phenomenon that many women have experienced:  a random stranger off the street will suddenly come up to you and tell you to smile.  If you’ve never heard of it before, just google “men telling women to smile” and you can read more about it than I have room to give you here.  The general consensus is that it’s a control issue.  Men can demand things from women (or feel entitled to) because of their privileged position.

The funny thing is that you can get this on the internet, too.  Only there, I’ve run into it several times in the form of “you shouldn’t post that on your facebook page”.  It’s happened several times to me:

I don’t want to see pictures of your kids.  I want to know what’s going on with you.

I don’t want to see pictures of your dogs.  They aren’t part of your family.

I don’t want to see your political rants.  I want to know what’s going on with you.

Interestingly, that last comment came immediately after I’d posted something about how the president of our university mentioned my research in his state of the university speech.  This same person never bothered to comment on that point.

And this leads me to believe that this is exactly the same phenomenon, as it always seems to be men who say these things to me.  They somehow feel that they can exert control over what I choose to post and they feel I am not sufficiently entertaining.

I wonder how they would feel if someone said to them, in a conversation, “I don’t want to talk about what you’re interested in.  Let’s talk about what I want to discuss.”  Most of us think people like that are assholes.

After telling my husband about this latest comment, he responded incredulously, “It’s your Facebook page.  You can post whatever you want!”  And a few hours later, another friend posted exactly that on the conversation on Facebook.  I was more polite than that in my response, but given this has happened multiple times, I think I’m going to use this as my response from now on: “Don’t like it? Don’t read it.  I’m not here for your entertainment.  Also, learn to use the ‘hide’ or ‘unfriend’ options.”

Of course, that would be rude.  And women can’t be rude.

Distracting the mansplainer August 1, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, grad school, research, societal commentary.
Tags: ,
9 comments

I used to really think that if I presented people with enough compelling facts, I could totally convince them to change their minds about things.  I try to operate that way myself, but it took me a good, long time to realize that’s not how most people think.  Not only did it take me a long time, but it took a lot of arguments and hurt feelings.  (I’ll admit that I still don’t get the way people view things a lot of times, and it really troubles me when I don’t understand how someone could have come to a particular view.  I’ll hammer at it for days trying to understand…which is usually futile because they’re basing their judgement, often times, on experiences I wouldn’t know about.)

I also discovered that arguing with a lot of men really doesn’t work.  I’ll be honest and say I’m not sure what does, but I have run into a fair bit of the “mansplaining” phenomenon.  Technical guys, in particular, love to tell women how to do things because women just obviously cannot wrap their little brains around those complex things that men do.

Even if she’s got degrees in physics and engineering.

Today I got mansplained again…and it nearly turned into a knock-down drag-out type ordeal.  Fortunately, I’ve learned that, at some point, you need to turn an argument into something constructive or it will get you nowhere.

I had to try to explain to someone that my widget didn’t seem to be compatible with their docking station.  They were convinced that my widget had a bunch of design problems and they couldn’t see how it would work in any docking station.  I tried to explain that I had already used it in several docking stations, and even in their own docking station!  But when it was in their docking station, I could only communicate with modem and not with ethernet.  It didn’t matter.  This person kept insisting the problem was that my widget was the wrong size and shape, and if I happened to get it working, it was working in only one place and as a result of luck.  And every time, I would get a lecture on how to design widgets properly.

It almost got to the point of shouting, and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I grabbed my widget and his docking station and made it fit.  He was shocked.  You see, me saying that it fit really didn’t matter.  I am obviously not smart enough to know when the widget fits properly or not, and in his estimation, it shouldn’t have fit.  But it did.

It also turned out to be the right thing to do because suddenly he could see what sorts of communications problems the widget had and was distracted from his theoretical notions of appropriate widget dimensions to that actual problem at hand.  In about a half hour, we had the kinks worked out so that the widget could use both modem and ethernet.

At this point, the person asked me why I hadn’t talked to him about the problem before.  Apparently he didn’t realize that I had and that, each time, he insisted my widget must be the wrong size.  I would assume that he knew better and would go off, searching out the problem, only to find that the problem still seemed to be with the communications protocols.  Each time it happened, I would try to provide some proof, which would be dismissed with a wave of the hand and, “That can’t be the problem,” regardless of the evidence I’d generated.  So why hadn’t I talked to him?  Because he’d diagnosed the problem before I even spoke to him and wouldn’t even look at any evidence to the contrary, citing how his own background put him in a much better position to figure out the problem.

Men are clueless July 13, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in engineerblogs.org, engineering, societal commentary.
Tags: , , ,
11 comments

I wrote up a post over at EngineerBlogs yesterday called Dating Advice for Women Engineers.  (Yeah, I forgot to post a link here…)  After I wrote it up and posted it, I reread it and realized that maybe a better title should’ve been something like “A Woman’s Guide to Dating Male Engineers”.  And then I worried that I was going to get ragged on for making male engineers sound stupid or clueless.  Fortunately, there have been no such responses, which is good because while some may assume that was the implication, that would be a false assumption.

Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand: many males, but particularly male engineers, aren’t clueless.  I know that may come as a surprise to some.  The reality is that I think engineers expect people to just be direct.  And frankly, I really appreciate that.  I like being able to just say what I think to my husband and not try to couch everything in terms that won’t injure his ego.  And I know that if he says something critical, it’s not that he’s saying he doesn’t like me or anything, he just is making a point about something.  It’s a lot easier for us to separate our personal feelings and feelings about outside issues.  We can argue passionately about stuff we do at work, and it has nothing to do with whether or not I like him as a person.

I’ve never been good at the whole ‘dropping hints’ thing.  That’s probably a good thing because I have also observed that a lot of guys think that when you say something doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t.  Being subtle and dropping hints have never been terribly effective means of communicating what you want, despite the fact I see people doing it all the time.  When I do see someone trying it, I seem to pick it up sometimes, but I usually roll my eyes and think, “Just spit it out already!”

Anyway, the point of this was that I think people ought to just be more direct.  Tactful is also appreciated and ought to be used liberally…but not to the point where it obfuscates your message.  And if someone doesn’t get what you’re saying (especially if it’s a guy), it may be because he’s clueless, but it’s also worthwhile to see how clearly you’re communicating.

 

A letter to the editors May 9, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in Fargo, feminism, societal commentary.
Tags: , , , , , ,
add a comment

This weekend, I saw a letter to the editors that was basically a “women should be kept in their place” sort of deal with a twist.  Apparently when women don’t stay barefoot in the kitchen, they are becoming tools to evil men in the world who are attempting to overthrow the traditional family.

When I get irritated with these things, sometimes I will sit down and write out a letter to burn off steam.  Usually, I don’t send these letters out, but this time I did.  And here it is, if you care to read it.  I realize it will not do anything to sway the original letter writer, but it sure made me feel better.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,087 other followers