I went off to college when I finished high school. I attended a massive university where it was hard initially to find my place in the sea of thousands of faces. There were a lot of student organizations, however, and I tried a few to find my place. I chose groups with interests aligned with mine. One was the student chapter of NOW--National Organization of Women. I figured I was interested in women's rights, I should get involved with like minded young women. It didn't end up being a good fit.
Actually, I went to just one meeting. After only a few minutes of listening to the group's leaders discuss current projects and upcoming events, I quickly realized that pretty much all the attendees were lesbians. Even as an immature, not particularly sensitive teen, I had no problem with homosexuals. Not to be cliché, but some of my closest friends are gay. However, I am not. And sitting in that NOW meeting, I really felt like I didn't fit in. In fact, I kept wondering if the whole rest of the world knew something I did not. Maybe "women's rights" was code for "lesbian rights." But I was confused why that would be. I didn't understand why I appeared to be the only straight woman in attendance. And I was uncomfortable. I was worried that if I spoke, somehow everyone would figure out I was not gay and I'd be unwelcome, maybe even embarrassed for having apparently violated some unwritten rule. So, I never went back to NOW. Interestingly, the president of that group later became the president of the largest LGBT student organization on campus.
That was my freshman year. As a senior, I took my one and only Women's Studies course. I was a foreign language major and it was cross listed with my department. I was very excited and had high hopes. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. The course was not that interesting, but that was not the problem. I learned more about the country whose culture we were studying, and very little about women's history or perspectives. Oh, well. But the real problem came when I was shocked to get a very low grade on a paper I wrote. The grade itself was not even the worst part. My writing was my strength in college. I wrote a lot of papers for my courses. They tended to be very well-received. I was even told they were among the best some professors had received. So, it was odd to me that I received such a bad grade on the paper for this Women's Studies course. I had worked hard on it and it seemed to me to be solid. However, the professor had not given me much feedback to explain the grade. We had several other papers in the course, I was worried I'd bring down my GPA if I continued on that path. I've never challenged a prof's grade or even communicated disappointment or disagreement to a prof about a grade. But I did work my courage up to talk to this professor to see if she could give me some insight as to what I did wrong and where I needed to improve. That was where the real lessons and disappointment over the course came. When I spoke with her, she said that she didn't really have any specific suggestions, but she was under a lot of pressure from the university administration to not inflate grades, so she had to give a lot of low grades to avoid push back from the powers that be. She specifically said that female professors in particular are often perceived as pushovers and she had to prove she was strong. She was an un-tenured professor, and in retrospect she was apparently concerned about being perceived as weak by the tenure review board.
I thought a lot about her words over the semester and beyond. I thought about whether other female professors I had had gave in to such pressures. But then I began to realize I'd made it to my senior year with only a few female instructors. One was near retirement when she taught me. She was tenured, perhaps one of the few women in her department to have earned that distinction. But she seemed to lead a lonely life with her cat. She was an eccentric, very harsh professor. She liked me a lot because I was always prepared. But she was cruel and humiliated those who were not prepared or who did not have a real aptitude for her subject. Another female instructor I had was an untenured, but brilliant prof. I learned so much from her. She actually tended to give overly high grades to students and was well-liked as a result. I looked her up a few years after graduation. Despite being highly respected, she was never granted tenure. The other female instructors I had had were graduate students or lecturers--people who were not on the tenure track.
So, that Women's Studies course was a bit of an eye-opener. I had been raised in the post-Title IX period to think we were all equal. The women's movement was over because all the major battles were over and we were on the same playing field. It had never occurred to me this was not the case. I was perplexed that my female professors might be judged differently from the male ones. I had had plenty of male professors who were demanding--but not one whom I'd classify as "cruel" or who tried to humiliate students. I had also had male professors who were very gentle and kind. It began to dawn on me that maybe they could afford to be nice because they did not have the kind of pressures the female profs apparently had due to the way they were judged by their superiors. By then, I didn't have many classes left prior to graduation, but I did consciously consider the gender of the instructor. Frankly, I was hesitant to take a course with another female professor. I am not proud of that, but I'm being honest. I feared that out of self-preservation, the female professors would be harsher than the males.
Another gender-based realization had also slowly dawned on me in college. My high school was a high performing magnet school with near universal college attendance. We had all been groomed for college for years. It was not a question of if but of where. And many of my colleagues ended up at highly competitive, prestigious universities. I remember seeing a list at graduation indicating where we were going and what we were studying. There was not a real gender difference based on the prestige of the universities we had chosen. But there was a marked difference in terms of our majors. A significant number of the male graduates listed engineering, a few indicated accounting. The women tended to list various liberal arts majors, a few indicated sciences. Many female graduates were undecided. I too was vaguely in the liberal arts camp. Honestly, it hadn't occurred to me there was another option.
What really struck me was all our male colleagues choosing engineering. I'm completely sincere when I write that I had never heard of that major. I'm not joking when I write that I thought it had something to do with working on a train. I wasn't really sure what accounting was either, but I vaguely understood it involved business. For years, I've thought about this marked difference in our chosen majors. We girls sat in those same math classes as the guys. But somehow the guys got the message about engineering as a career, and we girls did not.
Think of the implications. The starting salaries for engineers v. liberal arts majors is huge and disparity continues throughout one's career. Having worked in the petroleum industry for a number of years, I have witnessed firsthand the incredible paucity of women in engineering. There are so few that I've heard the women describe the horrible isolation they experience and plan for a change to a different career--typically staying home to raise kids or becoming school teachers. Not only do those female engineers end up economically disadvantaged, but the whole profession misses out tremendously from a lack of a more diverse perspective. It cannot be a good thing when a profession is so homogenous. We overlook things when group think sets in.
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