Double your fun, double your standards June 26, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in career, engineering, feminism.Tags: decisions, double standard, optimization, social interactions, women in engineering
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I had an extremely bizarre experience recently. I’m sure others have had similar experiences, but I still can’t help but wonder what surreal world I’ve stepped into.
It’s basically dealing with an optimization problem. All of engineering really is that, of course. In fact, much of life is.
I’ve been trying to understand all the factors that deal with a particular widget, and one of my colleagues has spent a lot of time trying to basically tell me that I’m overblowing something I saw as a concern or potential problem. They broke it down numerically for me (making sure to be rather condescending in the process). After enough time, I became convinced that this thing I initially thought was important was not and most certainly not worth the brain power I might waste on it.
At least, it wasn’t important when I thought it was important. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more silly it seemed when someone else would bring it up as an issue. Based on this information, I made a decision about how to deal with this issue with the underlying assumption that the factor we’d been discussing was not important. Isn’t that what this colleague was trying to get me to do?
The result was that this colleague got very upset with me about this decision, implying (though not directly saying) that I’d made a big mistake. How could I have been such an idiot?
It was bizarre for me to have to repeat this person’s arguments back to them to explain the basis for my decision.
This has left me wondering, though, what happened. Why did something unimportant suddenly cause so much uproar? One potential explanation is that this was because I made the decision and not this other person. It’s quite possible that this person is a control freak. However, if they are not, this leaves me feeling like the more probable cause is that there is a double standard. This factor may or may not be important, but its importance depends on who is bringing it up. The times I’ve brought it up, it’s been downplayed multiple times. However, when it came up this last time, it was someone else who brought up the issue. When this other person brought up the issue, suddenly it was of high importance and, because of that, I’d made a bad decision.
Unfortunately, the whole scenario reminds me too much of the experiences I’ve had where I’ve said things and people have ignored me, but as soon as a male says them, everyone will agree and jump on board to accomplish or deal with whatever it was. (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you can read about it here.) It doesn’t matter what the topic is or how technical the issue is, it happens all. the. time. The only thing I’ve noticed is that some individuals are much more prone to doing this than others…and the one who did it this time has done it to me frequently in the past.
This leaves me with a quandry: how does one work effectively with people who obviously don’t take you seriously and probably never will?
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Well, I’m looking at becoming an engineer, so it’s useful to know even some of what I might have to look forward to. As for your quandry at the end there, I hope you manage to make things work better for you soon. I’d like to be able to give advice but given my complete lack of relevant professional experience there’s not much else I can say. Good luck