Anyway

When I was at uni­ver­sity in Auck­land, one guy said to me that he had­n’t real­ized he was sex­ist until he met me. I’ve always found dis­crim­in­a­tion based on the bio­lo­gic­al cap­ab­il­ity of bear­ing chil­dren to make about as much sense as dis­crim­in­a­tion based on eye col­our. It seems much of the world does­n’t agree, pre­fer­ring pre­judging abil­it­ies to the hard work of fig­ur­ing out real, rather than pre­sumed, cap­ab­il­it­ies. A lot of dis­crim­in­a­tion is simply not think­ing, accept­ing the movie or tele­vi­sion view of the world and the roles that women and men (or for that mat­ter, people not of west­ern european extrac­tion) have in it.

There’s quite a lot of sex­ism in tech­no­logy. One woman I know hates start­ing a new job, since, as she says, it takes six months to con­vince the guys I know how to turn on the light. Shelagh Cal­la­han told me of an exper­i­ence she had doing booth duty at a con­fer­ence. She was start­ing to explain some­thing to this guy when he inter­rup­ted her, said she did­n’t know enough and he knew Dr Cal­la­han, the lead­ing expert on this top­ic, and he (Dr Cal­la­han) had a dif­fer­ent opin­ion. At which someone stand­ing next to him sug­ges­ted he look at Shelagh’s name badge. I’ve had my fair share of con­des­cend­ing males assume I would­n’t under­stand what they’re talk­ing about or be able to con­trib­ute any­thing of value to a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion. One could argue that most women would­n’t under­stand a tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, but that’s no excuse for the assumption. 

Of course, this prob­lem isn’t lim­ited to tech­no­logy. A female law­yer friend of mine takes some pains to dress dif­fer­ently to the way sec­ret­ar­ies dress, for example, so it’s clear she’s a law­yer and not a sec­ret­ary. She says it’s been inter­est­ing watch­ing the devel­op­ment of some men, who at uni­ver­sity assumed every­one was a pro­fes­sion­al and treated them all equally, but once out in the leg­al work­force star­ted treat­ing men and women dif­fer­ently, assum­ing women were sec­ret­ar­ies and men were law­yers. With the large num­ber of women gradu­at­ing from law school these days that should change. Wheth­er the prac­tice of push­ing women law­yers off into fam­ily court (“you’re so good at being under­stand­ing”) where they earn less than crim­in­al court law­yers changes soon is an inter­est­ing question.

There are lots of aspects to sex­ism, quite a few where people don’t under­stand why I find them irrit­at­ing, or even upset­ting. As an example, send­ing mail addressed to Mr and Mrs {hus­band’s name}. Hav­ing people assume mar­ried people share a sur­name is not unreas­on­able, but assum­ing we also share a first name is. To me it smacks of Vic­tori­an-era treat­ment of women, where they were an append­age of the hus­band, not beings with sep­ar­ate iden­tit­ies. I guess it seems petty to worry about these sorts of things when women in so many coun­tries have it so much worse, but on the oth­er hand sex­ism cre­ates an envir­on­ment that is not wel­com­ing. If you don’t feel your pres­ence is val­ued in a soci­ety, then you’re not going to be a full part of that society.