14 October 2010

Culture Shock, or, How I Learned to Enable Sexism Without Even Noticing

We had a department meeting last week. Sub-department, I suppose, since my group is only part of multi-scale physics. The point was to update everyone on what we were all doing, since we're a group of two profs, an adjunct, 6 PhDs and one remaining MS student (most of them graduated this summer, and the next group isn't here yet). I have spent the past six months trying, among learning new software while everyone was on holiday for two months and coping with this whole moving thing, to figure out what I'm actually studying. I'm still not sure, to be honest. Eventually I'll be working with another PhD, incorporating his large-eddy-simulation results into my model to try and improve it, but a lot of things need to happen first. For instance, the academic idealized-case not-tied-to-weather-observations version of my model needs to be finished. Or, um, started? It's behind schedule. But anyway.

So I went to the meeting feeling very awkward, because my accomplishments are learning to use some software, and some sensitivity tests that I'm still analyzing, so I really didn't have anything I thought was worth talking about. To be fair, it absolutely did NOT help that I was busy getting sick and learning that sinus headaches can trigger migraines, but still. A lot of that is due to my own tendency to consider my work inferior, not good enough, whatever, if it isn't amazing. I don't know how much of that is me, and how much is imposed, but I'm working on it. The profs filled us in on a couple new PhDs who will be joining us shortly, and some new projects they're looking in to, and some office politics, and then we all got some time to talk. The other talks ranged from 10 to 30 minutes, although a lot of that is because Dutch people just like to talk and rehash stuff like you wouldn't believe. Consensus is huge here. Because I felt like my accomplishments were non existant, I had a very short summary of what I've been doing. Like, 2 minutes, maybe. (Incidentally, I'm blaming this mostly on being sick, because now that I'm getting over the cold I've thought of stuff I could have talked about.) When the MS student asked for more background on my project, since he wasn't familiar with my model and I was absolutely not at my most coherent, I was very tentative in explaining, and looked for confirmation from the profs a lot. At one point, one of them said, "You know that!" and I had an epiphany.

I have never, in this kind of small group setting, been encouraged to be an authority. I could have the test results, but it wasn't up to me to explain them. I could offer an opinion, but not an argument. One on one, I'm fine. Giving a presentation to a crowd, I'm fine. But a small group without a clear structure has me unsure and afraid to speak up.

That in and of itself is pretty good to know. After all, I can't fix something without defining the problem. But what really struck me was how I had to move to Holland to even NOTICE that I do this. I'm pretty introspective, and you'd think at some point I would have maybe noticed how I get super nervous before informal meetings, how I can take charge of project groups with 4 or 5 people (or friends) in them but sit silently in a group of 8, how I blush and stammer and lose my train of thought in a small group but get through presentations to a large crowd with a smile. This is not subtle. I am awkward only in certain situations. Move me to a purely social gathering with the same group of people, and I'm fine (if they speak in English, anyway) and have fun.

Because I am introspective, I wondered why I do this. It's kind of weird, after all. A hint came from my taking charge in tiny groups. I will take charge only if no one else does. If someone else wants to be in charge, I'm not going to fight for it, even if I think they'll suck at it.

I am babying other people's egos. Specifically, I am babying other guys' egos, because I absolutely do not do this in all woman groups. I do not claim any authority, even when I should, if it means threatening a guy's sense of superiority. As a feminist, this makes me sad. I know better. If someone gets all upset because a woman knows more about a subject, or disagrees, or has an alternative idea, or moves outside typical gender roles, that's his problem, not mine.

Except when he makes it my problem.

The kind of guy who finds me threatening is the kind of guy who can't let that go. If he could accept that there's a woman who is better at/more knowledgeable of something than he is, he wouldn't be threatened in the first place. He has to put me back in my place, and reestablish his awesomeness by virtue of a Y chromosome, and that's usually, at the least, irritating as hell. Doing homework with the Aeroboys, after a couple months I was very selective in who to show a possible solution to. Because one of them simply couldn't accept that I had figured out the problem, especially if he was working on the same one. Working on a different problem was another strategy I employed, in fact, because there was never enough time for everyone to solve them all. If I offered a solution to this one, he would argue over random points until one of the other Aeroboys sided with me. He'd re-explain the solution to me, as if I wasn't the one to figure it out. Or he'd sulk, and as someone who's a born hostess, I have a lot of trouble ignoring that sort of thing. Given that I didn't recognize the behavior for what it was for quite a while, and lacked the concepts to explain why it was stupid for even longer, ignoring his displeasure was even worse. Eventually, after he either got bored with it or decided he'd been restored to superiority or whatever, he'd be back to normal and deny anything was ever wrong. It was tiring, it was impossible (then) to explain why it bothered me, and I knew perfectly well he wasn't going to take responsibility for his own issues anyway, so I, without ever really thinking about it, started accomodating him. I let the other guys check my work and explain the solutions to him. I made coffee, and sandwiches, and accepted the nickname of "Mom" and generally did my best to appear non threatening. Asking questions to present an idea, double checking stuff more often than I needed to, that sort of thing. It makes me sad to think about. Although, there was a guy of similar temperament but greater misogyny (seriously, you have no idea. His blatant sexism defeated my good manners more than once) in my grad school homework group and standing up for my work when I knew I was right didn't do any good. He once argued with me for nearly an hour over how to use the chain rule when taking the derivative of a product, and was undeterred by both the rest of the group eventually siding with me and a calculus textbook, and opted to turn in his homework with an obviously wrong solution rather than admit I was right. And honestly, I don't have it in me to fight that all the time. In more subtle ways, too, grad school guy strove to keep the other woman and I in our places at all times. From hitting on her incessantly (I was engaged by then, thankfully) despite her repeated "no" and protests, to merely implying we weren't capable enough to do "real" science (or take charge of our lives in any way), he made our lives unpleasant whenever he wandered into them, and we developed a lot of avoidance strategies, babying his ego instead of confronting him for being sexist, immature, and ignorant.

I'm a little disappointed in myself for that.

And now I'm in Holland, where I apparently don't have to baby egos at all, and in fact they'd prefer I be an (and speak with) authority on my research. I am no longer a threat. This is hands down the biggest culture shock yet. I may never leave.

Now I just have to figure out how to deprogram myself.



1 comment:

  1. Congrats on recognizing what you're doing to yourself! I have such a hard time taking an objective look at my own thoughts and actions. My biggest problem here is male coworkers who try to "protect" me from the big, bad construction industry. Sorry folks, it's not chivalry, it's offensive.

    ReplyDelete