Guest post: The instructor never sits the males down
Originally a comment by iknklast on A notoriously testosterone-charged profession.
Where I teach, we frequently get female students in the automotive department. The instructor sits them down and explains to them that they will face discrimination and hostility from the males. The instructor never sits down the males and says “They will not face discrimination and hostility or you will answer to me”.
I can be charitable, and accept that he believes this is in the best interest of the female students, that he wants to prepare them for the eventuality they will face outside of the classroom, and that it never occurs to him to try to change the situation, or that he can. I can be uncharitable, and assume that he is trying to persuade the female students to leave them alone. I have no way of knowing, other than my own experience in the world, as men tried to persuade me (and women – especially my mother – tried to persuade me) that science was no field for a woman. Of the people I knew, their motive was always the same – get me out of science, married, and pregnant as soon as possible, and keep me in my place. Therefore, I tend toward the uncharitable assumption, because I have very few examples of the opposite.
I do not think he means to harm the female students, but he is going about it in an obtuse way. He should be constructive to the females. Along his path of experience he surely must have learned some success stories that he can anecdotally retrieve some good, strong advice for females. He probably knows he cannot solve the American male culture problem, but that doesn’t mean he can’t give the females hope rather than lowered expectations even if those expectations are realistic.
He is teaching down. He should be teaching up.
Could you ask the instructor these questions?
Kevin, I’m not so sure. At first, I thought that, too. I thought, boy, I wish he would approach this more positively, especially since all those women already know they will face discrimination. They are not coming into this field out of the blue, and they’ve encountered years of resistance to their passion.
But he treats me with such misogynistic contempt, I believe otherwise now.
‘Along his path of experience he surely must have learned some success stories that he can anecdotally retrieve some good, strong advice for females.’
Unfortunately this kind of thing doesn’t benefit ‘females’, by which I assume you mean women, or members of other underrepresented groups, as much as the management would like to think. I have seen and attended lots of workshops, talks, etc. where people from underrepresented groups explain how they succeeded, presumably so the rest of us can do the same. But the occupational success of those of us who don’t fit the pattern typically depends on a fortuitous connection with someone who does fit the pattern who can provide us with patronage, and that’s not something we can arrange on demand.
I remember one woman talking about her career path, who said ‘I went to my boss to ask for honest feedback, so that I could progress in my career. He told me two things–that sometimes I came off as too harsh or angry, and that I didn’t support him enough.’ She said she took this on board and changed her behaviour, and consequently succeeded in gaining promotion/whatever it was she was after. In the Q&A I asked her ‘how could you determine that this feedback was, in fact, individually directed at you, personally, and not just something that any man would say to any woman?’ No answer from her; one of the other panellists (male) blustered that it would be terrible if men treated women that way, and any man who did should be reported and disciplined. And we women should stand up for ourselves in these situations, and ignore or challenge feedback we thought was sexist. Uh huh.