Being an expert and a woman can be very painful in STEM. While the vast majority of the guys I've worked with are great, the exceptions sting all the more for how glaringly obvious the...
Being an expert and a woman can be very painful in STEM. While the vast majority of the guys I've worked with are great, the exceptions sting all the more for how glaringly obvious the discrimination is.
I had a class in uni where the students collaborated on assignments and came up with answers together. In the class of ~30, I was one of the students that usually had the answer first and would explain the solution to others. There was one guy though that refused to ever ask for help from a woman. Even when the other guys in the class would point him to me, he'd still try to find another man to explain things. I could see his brain shut off and stop listening whenever I started talking. It was frustrating being treated as an expert by everyone in the class except one misogynist.
I had a professor who basically hated me, and I later heard from other females they experienced similar vibes/responses. I was the star in one programming exercise that simulated FEA (finite...
I had a professor who basically hated me, and I later heard from other females they experienced similar vibes/responses. I was the star in one programming exercise that simulated FEA (finite element analysis) on a 15-point joist. I had the most efficient code he had ever seen (said so himself), and after comparing to a number of other students (as we were not supposed to show our code until after it was submitted), I was the smallest in size and still easily readable with the required comments.
I got a B on the project... I dunno, just doesn't seem like the grade was proper.
This behavior is difficult to wrap my head around. How does one even arrive at this point? Is it really "just" from having spent time around somebody espousing misogynistic views? A person's brain...
There was one guy though that refused to ever ask for help from a woman. Even when the other guys in the class would point him to me, he'd still try to find another man to explain things. I could see his brain shut off and stop listening whenever I started talking.
This behavior is difficult to wrap my head around. How does one even arrive at this point? Is it really "just" from having spent time around somebody espousing misogynistic views? A person's brain shutting off is such an extreme and deep-rooted response that it's difficult to imagine what led to them doing it.
Insecurity. Likely this person found comfort in the social order they were raised within and a woman threatening that order made them uneasy in ways they probably couldn't explain even to...
Insecurity. Likely this person found comfort in the social order they were raised within and a woman threatening that order made them uneasy in ways they probably couldn't explain even to themselves.
Probably also some garden variety confusion caused by the sexual power some men feel women have over them which is mitigated (in their mind, though likely unconsciously) by women's traditional deference and position in society.
A woman vying for a man's place in society upends that impressively fragile set of rationalizations.
On a similar note, I find it funny how many men and women consider height the most important part of attraction. For many people, if the man is shorter or the woman wears too-tall heels, it's...
On a similar note, I find it funny how many men and women consider height the most important part of attraction. For many people, if the man is shorter or the woman wears too-tall heels, it's somehow such a turnoff as to kill any conscious attraction. I personally cannot understand it.
Honestly I'm not a tall woman, but the only thing I've ever found unattractive about men's height is when they spend all their time saying how unattractive they are because they're short. I've...
Honestly I'm not a tall woman, but the only thing I've ever found unattractive about men's height is when they spend all their time saying how unattractive they are because they're short.
I've dated guys shorter than me. I'm queer, height is not even beginning to be on my list.
If I were ever to be looking for a date again (highly unlikely, gonna remain married or widowed till I die), I would treat complaining about supposed shortfalls of themselves before a second date...
If I were ever to be looking for a date again (highly unlikely, gonna remain married or widowed till I die), I would treat complaining about supposed shortfalls of themselves before a second date as a yellow flag. So many people look for relationships instead of a therapist.
I'm not an objectively short man, but I'm short by manosphere standards (5'8). I've never had the supposed horrible struggles in dating I'm supposed to have by being under 6'. Most of my friends...
I'm not an objectively short man, but I'm short by manosphere standards (5'8). I've never had the supposed horrible struggles in dating I'm supposed to have by being under 6'. Most of my friends are pretty tall, probably averaging 6'2 or so, and I've consistently had better luck attracting women than any of them. Another friend I have is the same height as me and has a... questionable attachment to casual flings with women (sex addict, another story entirely), and he's slept with more women than anyone I've ever met.
I haven't seen nearly the importance on height in female attraction as I've seen constantly emphasized online.
I'm sure if I was 6" taller, I'd be marginally more attractive to all women on average, but same goes for if I was better looking, was in better shape, had lots of money, had more interesting hobbies, was famous, was funnier or dozens of other things. No one is perfectly attractive, and outside of extreme edge cases, based on my experience, height is rarely the most important, and definitely not ever the only factor in why someone finds someone else attractive.
As other posters have highlighted, guys on the shorter side obsessing over their height to a weird degree is much more likely to be the off-putting part.
The article gets at some of the potential causes. I can only hazard some sexist guesses about why this guy in particular was so sexist. The best I got is some men (and even women) simply don't...
The article gets at some of the potential causes. I can only hazard some sexist guesses about why this guy in particular was so sexist. The best I got is some men (and even women) simply don't believe a woman can know much about certain subjects.
Everyone has preconceived biases (conscious or unconscious). I've met misogynistic women that inherently distrust female or non-white doctors. This isn't even getting into any of the affirmative action nonsense...
As a man this rings true. I’m not sure I’m qualified to really speak on the nuances of much of this. But one part stood out to me as odd. I wonder how true this is. I have female friends. And...
As a man this rings true. I’m not sure I’m qualified to really speak on the nuances of much of this. But one part stood out to me as odd.
In our society, men are generally not friends with women (unless they have been friend-zoned and worthy of pity)
I wonder how true this is. I have female friends. And almost all of my male friends have their own friends that are women. One of them has a “platonic soulmate” that is a (lesbian) woman. Some of my friends are gay with stereotypically larger numbers of female friends. Most are straight but manage to have more than a couple of female friends. Since leaving school I have found that making female friends is often easier than making true male friends.
When I read about the gender dynamic of “friend-zoning” (in particular, the idea that merely being friends with a woman is worse than not knowing them at all) it reminds me of the caricature of American schools that we saw in 90s and 00s movies. Sure, it’s loosely tied to reality. But how many times do people actually get into food fights, trapped in a locker by a bully, or swirlied?
My take is that this depends a lot on the field you go into and whether your personal life also has people in that same field. I don't think it represents our entire society by any means. Plenty...
My take is that this depends a lot on the field you go into and whether your personal life also has people in that same field. I don't think it represents our entire society by any means. Plenty of men and women have healthy meaningful friendships with the opposite sex, myself included. For tech and tech adjacent people though, the part you highlighted feels true for me. I worked in tech for just about a decade and I had a pretty fucking horrible time. I did constantly get baited into what I thought was a networking or friendship opportunity only to be ghosted and/or treated rudely when I rejected their romantic advance. It felt like navigating land mines that were invisible to me and then getting punished for not knowing they were there. It honestly felt like high school so your analogy is great. Guys tricking me with friendship then ambushing me with horniness and being angry that I was surprised (after literally misleading me on purpose). That trend started in high school and persisted into my tech career. And like I am not even great looking I am a fully average female human. And when I say they punished me, I mean they did weird threatening shit. In high school it ranged from vandalizing my parents house, sending me a picture of my car to imply they knew where I was, circulating printed out fake text conversations between us, describing my anatomy to other people in the peer group even though they never saw it, inviting me to parties that weren't real, calling my cellphone from an unlisted number to say they know I am home alone right now, etc. "Come on, it was just a joke..." In adulthood, it meant emailing my boss to request that I be reassigned from a project, inviting me to a networking event that wasn't real (this fucked with my head so much), asking me in front of my team if I need help understanding something (that I built).
I'm sure it's not true for everyone, but it was definitely true for me. I think it would be especially hard for many men to see this, because the men who behave that way don't treat other men how they treat women. And the worst things they do are not done in front of other people. I eventually stopped telling any of my male friends about this type of thing because it really hurts a LOT to hear "he was just joking don't take it so seriously" or "I'm sure he didn't mean it that way" or worst of all "what did you do to make him do that?" I would rather never bring it up than find out somebody I love will tell me I deserved it. It's good odds that there are women in your life with some gnarly experiences that they just don't talk about. Some caricatures exist for a reason though.
And this is why I always mention I'm happily married and wear my ring. It nips so many problems in the bud which I'd prefer never coming up. It sucks how awkward and toxic some people are when it...
I did constantly get baited into what I thought was a networking or friendship opportunity only to be ghosted and/or treated rudely when I rejected their romantic advance.
And this is why I always mention I'm happily married and wear my ring. It nips so many problems in the bud which I'd prefer never coming up. It sucks how awkward and toxic some people are when it comes to romance.
Wow. That's... really fucked up. I'm sorry. I'll admit I've mistaken female friendship for romantic interest once. I already feel bad enough for making things awkward that one time and souring the...
Wow. That's... really fucked up. I'm sorry. I'll admit I've mistaken female friendship for romantic interest once. I already feel bad enough for making things awkward that one time and souring the friendship. But I had no idea that it would be that common for guys to become full blown stalkers once rejected.
Edit: For the record. I'm not so oblivious that I didn't know that would happen sometimes. My friends have indicated the caution with which they need to approach friendships with men. But it sounds like this is just the default?
I hope it's not the default!! Approaching with caution does seem to be the default, but wildly varying levels of experience are driving that. I think being a person with a fucked up home life, and...
I hope it's not the default!! Approaching with caution does seem to be the default, but wildly varying levels of experience are driving that. I think being a person with a fucked up home life, and being drawn to other people in similar situations, probably increased my odds of negative experiences to be higher than average. I also hope that it has gotten less common with time. I graduated high school in 2004. I have faith in the younger generations. But bullying nerds was standard in the 90s/2000s and probably did a lot to fuck up these dudes that were being horrible to me. I can look back now and have some empathy. Like the dude who invited me to a fake party so i would show up at a strangers house, he had a really bad home life and was himself bullied. It doesn't make it okay, but I'm like, we were 16 and neither of us had great tools to cope with life.
There have been way more men in my life that are wonderful than there have been monstrous ones, it's just that once you find out about the scariest ones it shapes the way you live. Some weird internal risk assessment stuff.
I agree. To me the statement you quoted seems immature? Or maybe I'm just not part of the larger societal group where this happens. I have a number of female friendships that have never had the...
I agree. To me the statement you quoted seems immature? Or maybe I'm just not part of the larger societal group where this happens. I have a number of female friendships that have never had the slightest hint of romance on either side.
Since leaving school I have found that making female friends is often easier than making true male friends.
There have been posts here about the difficulty in finding true male friends after school, and I have definitely felt it. It's been especially obvious since I started working from home full time. I haven't exactly made any new female friends since the pandemic either, but It does seem to be easier to find places/conversations where it could happen for some reason.
I have picked up 2 very good male friends since leaving college. And a couple other male friends transitioned from online to IRL friends. So things aren't impossible there.
I have picked up 2 very good male friends since leaving college. And a couple other male friends transitioned from online to IRL friends. So things aren't impossible there.
Guys, even whole friend groups of guys, having zero meaningful friendships or platonic connections with women, aside from their mothers and sisters, is definitely a thing. In university, I had two...
Guys, even whole friend groups of guys, having zero meaningful friendships or platonic connections with women, aside from their mothers and sisters, is definitely a thing.
In university, I had two distinct groups of roommates. The first group (who all graduated before me) were sexually diverse. Almost half of them were gay men, and the group had tons of friends who were girls and who we hung out with regularly.
The second group was all straight dudes, and every single one of them had exactly zero friends who were girls.
One of my roommates from the second group was having some serious relationship issues when we first met. After talking about it for a while, he eventually and openly lamented to me that he did have any girls that he felt like he could talk to about his problems with his ex. I told him pretty bluntly: "that's because you keep trying to fuck all of them" and I could see the neurons firing behind his eyes.
It turns out, some guys never learned how to just be friends with girls. At least in my experience, for a lot of them, if they couldn't hook up with, or date a woman, they didn't have any interest in her otherwise.
I would hope that this is a phenomenon that becomes less prevalent with age, but among 20-something college guys it seems to be a pretty common thing.
It was true for me in college. Not so when I was younger, and not so now. But the linked article seems to be about people beyond the age of undergraduate studies. I looked around to see if there...
but among 20-something college guys it seems to be a pretty common thing.
It was true for me in college. Not so when I was younger, and not so now. But the linked article seems to be about people beyond the age of undergraduate studies. I looked around to see if there are studies on the proportion of men with female friends. All I found were:
Studies on how men have no friends
One study on how college-aged men that are friends with women often hope to be romantically involved with the woman and assume they reciprocate this feeling
It would be interesting to see a study across different age groups.
The word "generally" is doing the heavy lifting in that quote. You and I, and maybe even most folks on Tildes and folks in the queer community, generally have platonic opposite sex friends. But...
The word "generally" is doing the heavy lifting in that quote. You and I, and maybe even most folks on Tildes and folks in the queer community, generally have platonic opposite sex friends. But once I step out of the more niche online/nerd/gamer communities, I'm often surprised by how different things are for the general public.
I do feel like things are changing though, and the gender of friends are becoming less one sided with gen Z onwards .... hopefully
Yesterday I got caught next to a group of high school children on a field trip. At first I was (internally) rolling my eyes at their conversation, but I was generally happy to hear what they were...
Yesterday I got caught next to a group of high school children on a field trip. At first I was (internally) rolling my eyes at their conversation, but I was generally happy to hear what they were saying. It was a 50/50 gender ratio and given their discussions on dating they seemed to have pretty healthy romantic relationships.
Yeah! From what little contact I have with regular teens they seem to be a far healthier bunch than when I was one. On random transit rides, I'm more likely to see them get up and give seats than...
Yeah! From what little contact I have with regular teens they seem to be a far healthier bunch than when I was one. On random transit rides, I'm more likely to see them get up and give seats than putting their feet up, and if I listen to their conversations they're more likely to reprimand each other for slur slip ups than to make them.
A few years ago when we lived in a really poor rust belt type rough neighborhood, late at night a bunch of older teens were making noise and swearing/shouting at each other on the street. My partner uncharacteristically lost their cool, opened the door and told them to "keep it down, there's a young child trying to sleep". The pack of rough looking teens apologized to my partner and shhssh'd each other as they walked away.... My partner said, in hindsight, movies like Robotcop that we grew up with in the 90s would teach us to expect quite the opposite.
I went into the article expecting something more along the lines of the moral dilemmas unique to women in stem as they become successful, such as turning a blind eye to certain things in order to...
I went into the article expecting something more along the lines of the moral dilemmas unique to women in stem as they become successful, such as turning a blind eye to certain things in order to advance. I was a little disappointed in the actual content, because while true, it is well trodden discourse, and not just in STEM.
I remember the difficulty I ran into one time advocating for one of my employees, a woman and an expert in STEM, who was having what I felt was sexist harassment from another woman. I suspect it was because my employee was confident and outspoken. But because the harassment was coming from a women it was really hard to get anything done other than to just organizationally separate them, e.g., have me and my employee turn a blind eye.
I was hoping for content exploring those sorts of hard situations.
The woman-on-woman toxicity is real and under discussed. It's part of why I avoid participating in women-only networking events (plus they're usually marketed as being for everyone except cis-men...
The woman-on-woman toxicity is real and under discussed. It's part of why I avoid participating in women-only networking events (plus they're usually marketed as being for everyone except cis-men which I have serious problems with).
Being an expert and a woman can be very painful in STEM. While the vast majority of the guys I've worked with are great, the exceptions sting all the more for how glaringly obvious the discrimination is.
I had a class in uni where the students collaborated on assignments and came up with answers together. In the class of ~30, I was one of the students that usually had the answer first and would explain the solution to others. There was one guy though that refused to ever ask for help from a woman. Even when the other guys in the class would point him to me, he'd still try to find another man to explain things. I could see his brain shut off and stop listening whenever I started talking. It was frustrating being treated as an expert by everyone in the class except one misogynist.
I had a professor who basically hated me, and I later heard from other females they experienced similar vibes/responses. I was the star in one programming exercise that simulated FEA (finite element analysis) on a 15-point joist. I had the most efficient code he had ever seen (said so himself), and after comparing to a number of other students (as we were not supposed to show our code until after it was submitted), I was the smallest in size and still easily readable with the required comments.
I got a B on the project... I dunno, just doesn't seem like the grade was proper.
This behavior is difficult to wrap my head around. How does one even arrive at this point? Is it really "just" from having spent time around somebody espousing misogynistic views? A person's brain shutting off is such an extreme and deep-rooted response that it's difficult to imagine what led to them doing it.
Insecurity. Likely this person found comfort in the social order they were raised within and a woman threatening that order made them uneasy in ways they probably couldn't explain even to themselves.
Probably also some garden variety confusion caused by the sexual power some men feel women have over them which is mitigated (in their mind, though likely unconsciously) by women's traditional deference and position in society.
A woman vying for a man's place in society upends that impressively fragile set of rationalizations.
On a similar note, I find it funny how many men and women consider height the most important part of attraction. For many people, if the man is shorter or the woman wears too-tall heels, it's somehow such a turnoff as to kill any conscious attraction. I personally cannot understand it.
Honestly I'm not a tall woman, but the only thing I've ever found unattractive about men's height is when they spend all their time saying how unattractive they are because they're short.
I've dated guys shorter than me. I'm queer, height is not even beginning to be on my list.
If I were ever to be looking for a date again (highly unlikely, gonna remain married or widowed till I die), I would treat complaining about supposed shortfalls of themselves before a second date as a yellow flag. So many people look for relationships instead of a therapist.
I'm not an objectively short man, but I'm short by manosphere standards (5'8). I've never had the supposed horrible struggles in dating I'm supposed to have by being under 6'. Most of my friends are pretty tall, probably averaging 6'2 or so, and I've consistently had better luck attracting women than any of them. Another friend I have is the same height as me and has a... questionable attachment to casual flings with women (sex addict, another story entirely), and he's slept with more women than anyone I've ever met.
I haven't seen nearly the importance on height in female attraction as I've seen constantly emphasized online.
I'm sure if I was 6" taller, I'd be marginally more attractive to all women on average, but same goes for if I was better looking, was in better shape, had lots of money, had more interesting hobbies, was famous, was funnier or dozens of other things. No one is perfectly attractive, and outside of extreme edge cases, based on my experience, height is rarely the most important, and definitely not ever the only factor in why someone finds someone else attractive.
As other posters have highlighted, guys on the shorter side obsessing over their height to a weird degree is much more likely to be the off-putting part.
The article gets at some of the potential causes. I can only hazard some sexist guesses about why this guy in particular was so sexist. The best I got is some men (and even women) simply don't believe a woman can know much about certain subjects.
Everyone has preconceived biases (conscious or unconscious). I've met misogynistic women that inherently distrust female or non-white doctors. This isn't even getting into any of the affirmative action nonsense...
As a man this rings true. I’m not sure I’m qualified to really speak on the nuances of much of this. But one part stood out to me as odd.
I wonder how true this is. I have female friends. And almost all of my male friends have their own friends that are women. One of them has a “platonic soulmate” that is a (lesbian) woman. Some of my friends are gay with stereotypically larger numbers of female friends. Most are straight but manage to have more than a couple of female friends. Since leaving school I have found that making female friends is often easier than making true male friends.
When I read about the gender dynamic of “friend-zoning” (in particular, the idea that merely being friends with a woman is worse than not knowing them at all) it reminds me of the caricature of American schools that we saw in 90s and 00s movies. Sure, it’s loosely tied to reality. But how many times do people actually get into food fights, trapped in a locker by a bully, or swirlied?
My take is that this depends a lot on the field you go into and whether your personal life also has people in that same field. I don't think it represents our entire society by any means. Plenty of men and women have healthy meaningful friendships with the opposite sex, myself included. For tech and tech adjacent people though, the part you highlighted feels true for me. I worked in tech for just about a decade and I had a pretty fucking horrible time. I did constantly get baited into what I thought was a networking or friendship opportunity only to be ghosted and/or treated rudely when I rejected their romantic advance. It felt like navigating land mines that were invisible to me and then getting punished for not knowing they were there. It honestly felt like high school so your analogy is great. Guys tricking me with friendship then ambushing me with horniness and being angry that I was surprised (after literally misleading me on purpose). That trend started in high school and persisted into my tech career. And like I am not even great looking I am a fully average female human. And when I say they punished me, I mean they did weird threatening shit. In high school it ranged from vandalizing my parents house, sending me a picture of my car to imply they knew where I was, circulating printed out fake text conversations between us, describing my anatomy to other people in the peer group even though they never saw it, inviting me to parties that weren't real, calling my cellphone from an unlisted number to say they know I am home alone right now, etc. "Come on, it was just a joke..." In adulthood, it meant emailing my boss to request that I be reassigned from a project, inviting me to a networking event that wasn't real (this fucked with my head so much), asking me in front of my team if I need help understanding something (that I built).
I'm sure it's not true for everyone, but it was definitely true for me. I think it would be especially hard for many men to see this, because the men who behave that way don't treat other men how they treat women. And the worst things they do are not done in front of other people. I eventually stopped telling any of my male friends about this type of thing because it really hurts a LOT to hear "he was just joking don't take it so seriously" or "I'm sure he didn't mean it that way" or worst of all "what did you do to make him do that?" I would rather never bring it up than find out somebody I love will tell me I deserved it. It's good odds that there are women in your life with some gnarly experiences that they just don't talk about. Some caricatures exist for a reason though.
And this is why I always mention I'm happily married and wear my ring. It nips so many problems in the bud which I'd prefer never coming up. It sucks how awkward and toxic some people are when it comes to romance.
Wow. That's... really fucked up. I'm sorry. I'll admit I've mistaken female friendship for romantic interest once. I already feel bad enough for making things awkward that one time and souring the friendship. But I had no idea that it would be that common for guys to become full blown stalkers once rejected.
Edit: For the record. I'm not so oblivious that I didn't know that would happen sometimes. My friends have indicated the caution with which they need to approach friendships with men. But it sounds like this is just the default?
I hope it's not the default!! Approaching with caution does seem to be the default, but wildly varying levels of experience are driving that. I think being a person with a fucked up home life, and being drawn to other people in similar situations, probably increased my odds of negative experiences to be higher than average. I also hope that it has gotten less common with time. I graduated high school in 2004. I have faith in the younger generations. But bullying nerds was standard in the 90s/2000s and probably did a lot to fuck up these dudes that were being horrible to me. I can look back now and have some empathy. Like the dude who invited me to a fake party so i would show up at a strangers house, he had a really bad home life and was himself bullied. It doesn't make it okay, but I'm like, we were 16 and neither of us had great tools to cope with life.
There have been way more men in my life that are wonderful than there have been monstrous ones, it's just that once you find out about the scariest ones it shapes the way you live. Some weird internal risk assessment stuff.
I agree. To me the statement you quoted seems immature? Or maybe I'm just not part of the larger societal group where this happens. I have a number of female friendships that have never had the slightest hint of romance on either side.
There have been posts here about the difficulty in finding true male friends after school, and I have definitely felt it. It's been especially obvious since I started working from home full time. I haven't exactly made any new female friends since the pandemic either, but It does seem to be easier to find places/conversations where it could happen for some reason.
I have picked up 2 very good male friends since leaving college. And a couple other male friends transitioned from online to IRL friends. So things aren't impossible there.
Guys, even whole friend groups of guys, having zero meaningful friendships or platonic connections with women, aside from their mothers and sisters, is definitely a thing.
In university, I had two distinct groups of roommates. The first group (who all graduated before me) were sexually diverse. Almost half of them were gay men, and the group had tons of friends who were girls and who we hung out with regularly.
The second group was all straight dudes, and every single one of them had exactly zero friends who were girls.
One of my roommates from the second group was having some serious relationship issues when we first met. After talking about it for a while, he eventually and openly lamented to me that he did have any girls that he felt like he could talk to about his problems with his ex. I told him pretty bluntly: "that's because you keep trying to fuck all of them" and I could see the neurons firing behind his eyes.
It turns out, some guys never learned how to just be friends with girls. At least in my experience, for a lot of them, if they couldn't hook up with, or date a woman, they didn't have any interest in her otherwise.
I would hope that this is a phenomenon that becomes less prevalent with age, but among 20-something college guys it seems to be a pretty common thing.
It was true for me in college. Not so when I was younger, and not so now. But the linked article seems to be about people beyond the age of undergraduate studies. I looked around to see if there are studies on the proportion of men with female friends. All I found were:
It would be interesting to see a study across different age groups.
The word "generally" is doing the heavy lifting in that quote. You and I, and maybe even most folks on Tildes and folks in the queer community, generally have platonic opposite sex friends. But once I step out of the more niche online/nerd/gamer communities, I'm often surprised by how different things are for the general public.
I do feel like things are changing though, and the gender of friends are becoming less one sided with gen Z onwards .... hopefully
Yesterday I got caught next to a group of high school children on a field trip. At first I was (internally) rolling my eyes at their conversation, but I was generally happy to hear what they were saying. It was a 50/50 gender ratio and given their discussions on dating they seemed to have pretty healthy romantic relationships.
Yeah! From what little contact I have with regular teens they seem to be a far healthier bunch than when I was one. On random transit rides, I'm more likely to see them get up and give seats than putting their feet up, and if I listen to their conversations they're more likely to reprimand each other for slur slip ups than to make them.
A few years ago when we lived in a really poor rust belt type rough neighborhood, late at night a bunch of older teens were making noise and swearing/shouting at each other on the street. My partner uncharacteristically lost their cool, opened the door and told them to "keep it down, there's a young child trying to sleep". The pack of rough looking teens apologized to my partner and shhssh'd each other as they walked away.... My partner said, in hindsight, movies like Robotcop that we grew up with in the 90s would teach us to expect quite the opposite.
I went into the article expecting something more along the lines of the moral dilemmas unique to women in stem as they become successful, such as turning a blind eye to certain things in order to advance. I was a little disappointed in the actual content, because while true, it is well trodden discourse, and not just in STEM.
I remember the difficulty I ran into one time advocating for one of my employees, a woman and an expert in STEM, who was having what I felt was sexist harassment from another woman. I suspect it was because my employee was confident and outspoken. But because the harassment was coming from a women it was really hard to get anything done other than to just organizationally separate them, e.g., have me and my employee turn a blind eye.
I was hoping for content exploring those sorts of hard situations.
The woman-on-woman toxicity is real and under discussed. It's part of why I avoid participating in women-only networking events (plus they're usually marketed as being for everyone except cis-men which I have serious problems with).