Put Up With It or Complain?
Yes, Marian for Math and A Crone, These same battles do get old. To my perception, there was a period when the indignities decreased annually, then the trend turned around. I am not sure, but I think the turnaround was about the same time that lawsuits against affirmative action sprang up, i.e. there was a national change in attitude, for the worse from my own perspective. I only hope it turns around again before all our gains are erased.
cheers,
Laura
Dear Crone,
I'm with you. We've been fighting these battles for so many years. Why haven't we succeeded? What is wrong?
I had so hoped that my children wouldn't fight the same battles I did, now I fear my grandchildren will. Worst part, most people (aka those not women in science) I talk to think that all the problems were solved years ago.
Marian
Or what about a third option -- take matters into their own hands?
Long ago, when I was a graduate student at the dawn of "women's lib", one professor in our department always inserted a slide of a Playboy centerfold in his seminars. After he'd gone through the data, he'd say, "You've seen the data, let's look at our model," and up pops this nubile nude. Yuk yuk.
This got really old. So when the professor was scheduled to give a departmental colloquium, several of us women graduate students enlisted help from a student with photographic expertise and one in the professor's lab to replace the slide of the nude woman with a slide of the professor's face grafted onto a Playgirl centerfold!
The night of the colloquium arrived. When the professor said, "And now here's the model", he looked expectantly at the audience waiting for the yuks, but instead the audience gasped. He turned, saw the slide, and quickly advanced to the slide of the real scientific model.
We conspirators figured the faculty could guess the likely culprits, and we expected to get in some kind of trouble. But no one ever said a word. And the professor never showed a nude woman for his "model" again.
I wouldn't recommend this strategy for everyone. It's definitely risky. But it worked for us. We didn't have to put up with the nudes any more, and we didn't get labeled as whiners. What really gets me is that these sorts of things are still going on 40 years later. We fought these battles so young women scientists today wouldn't have to. Sigh....
Laura,
You have raised a very difficult point. I usually ignore issues such as you raise above. Saying something to the perpetrator, even in a very private way, usually seems to bring about more harm than good. One gains a reputation of being "hard to deal with". I've never figured a way around that. Doing somehting anonymously, or through channels never sees to work -- there are too few of us to be anonymous.
That being said, when I am in a position where I have authority, particularly if one of my staff or a junior person brings up the problem, I am quick to address problems. Putting up with something myself is one thing, making a junior staff member do it is another. However, I'm sure that most issues are never brought to my attention.
Like it or not, women who do science are still working in a mostly male world. I hope by the time I have grandchildren in college that things will start to change, but I doubt it.
Marian
Hi Laura,
Women are polite and charming, not confrontational, for the most part. So it's a lot easier for us to ignore the prof's bad behavior. I'm pretty tough, and it took a long time for me to realize that I can speak up and that it would mean a lot to other women who might feel threatened by these incidents. But I think most people would NOT speak up; that's my experience. MKS
