It was in the week before Christmas. An older friend of mine dropped by, as he does so every few weeks. He is a university employee, not faculty, with whom I struck up a passing friendship shortly after starting at Oregon State.<\/p>\n
We chatted for a while. He asked me how a recent work trip went. I told him that it was okay – not wonderful – it was a little tiring. He asked why. I explained that while I knew many people at the workshop, I didn’t feel at ease with many. I rambled mildly and idly about how I thought that it was a side effect of there being few women in the field, that I may feel more at ease if I had more female companionship on such work trips.<\/p>\n
Well, he says, it won’t change.<\/p>\n
Well, I counter, I hope it will.<\/p>\n
No, he continues, it shouldn’t. You [points at me] should be at home, raising children. That is what women are good at.<\/p>\n
My jaw drops. I pause. Hoping for him to chuckle. That it’s all a joke. It’s not a joke though. He went on to say that he’s old fashioned, but he thinks that engineering is for men. That women shouldn’t be doing this work.<\/p>\n
I was caught off guard. What I expected to be an uplifting social visit, of the type that I had quite enjoyed in the past, resulted in my being on the defensive. My stunned state prevented me from making a commanding speech about equality and sexism. I did manage to say a few things along these lines. But I hardly made an impact. In the desire to not deal with this at present, I made it clear that he needed to leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was in the week before Christmas. An older friend of mine dropped by, as he does so every few weeks. He is a university employee, not faculty, with whom I struck up a passing friendship shortly after starting at Oregon State. We chatted for a while. He asked me how a recent work trip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106186],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sexism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}