Ugh,
@SOC. That's awful.
But familiar. I was always blown away by the level of incompetence men could get away with at one ex-workplace in particular. All the women knew we were pedaling faster, too, which made it even more awful.
Want the cherry on top? The woman who got as much leeway as the boys perched on the boss's desk and flattered and flirted. She behaved as though all the men in the building were her superiors, worthy of tender attention. I mean, you gotta love the classics.
-J
Yep. My most annoying story in this vein came from a sad situation. One of my classmates (a male) developed Hogkin's Lymphoma and was trying to stay in engineering school during treatment. Another female student and I were taking notes for him when he missed class and helped him with homework. We all had a couple of years of engineering school under our belts, so we knew our abilities at that point. We women were A students and our friend was a C student.
One day we got a homework set back with F's on it, even though it was perfect. Both of our papers had notes that said our work looked too similar to that of our male friend so we must have copied off him and that we should learn to do our own work instead of copy off our classmate.
Apparently it made more sense to this idiot that two A students would copy off a C student rather than that we had taught that C student so his work looked like ours.
Despite the fact that our friend went to the professor and explained that he was missing a lot of class due to his therapy and we, his friends, were teaching him the subject and that if anyone should be accused of copying it should be him (not that he was copying, he was just working the way we had taught him), the professor refused to believe that the women were not the inferior students. We never got our grades on that homework set changed, even though tests demonstrated that we were the A students and our friend the C student.
Fortunately, that ass was the exception, rather than the rule, in my department. Unfortunately, he went on to become head of the department a couple decades later. I can only hope he learned something in the intervening years.
My daughter, who spent 6 years in the same department 35 years later, had none of those kinds of problems. At no point did she feel discriminated against or that she had to be better than the boys.
I believe that is because all
her professors went through their educations and careers with those of us in the main wave of women entering engineering and knew first-hand what women in engineering can actually accomplish -- exactly the same things the men can. Things are improving in some places, at least.
We women in engineering used to say that things are not going to get better until a bunch of (bigoted egotistical old fart) men die out. That seems to be the case.
