We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
Are they less likely to behave this way after meeting you or is this sentence the essence of how you would react to their behavior?
(I haven’t done any of the things mentioned and they are inappropriate, but in retrospective think that maybe I should have, since being too polite and shy at the same time is apparently even less attractive, and reduces experience in communication, which is the only way one can learn to communicate.)
I always hope people learn from their experience. I have no idea if they learned anything after interacting with me or assumed I’m some crazy female.
I meant that this quote is extremely humiliating, especially to people for whom it’s true. It’s hard to learn from cruelty, even if it’s unintended.
From your perspective, what was cruel? I’m interested in how different people interpret the same scenarios. What would be a more constructive way to address the situation?
I assumed quite a few things. If I guessed correctly, then:
Telling somebody that they are not good enough to talk to because of not knowing how to do that is cruel because it gives them no escape, since they can’t change their past, and can’t catch on since you won’t talk to them.
A constructive way to address the situation would be telling them something more rude and direct, but also less humiliating, like “I didn’t ask you to do that”, “I wasn’t talking to you” or just telling them to fsck off. Just imagining what you’d say if it were a girl behaving this way and reacting accordingly.
That quote doesn’t simply lose gender roles in conversation, it uses them to say that the other side is inferior in that regard.
Not really… First, I don’t think they ever said that those people “weren’t good enough” to talk to. Those are your words.
But also, there is a very obvious “escape” when you’re ignorant or uneducated about something. It’s called learning.