I've been pondering my experience in
the workplace and wondering if it's unusual. I've had a (mostly)
happy career with supportive people around me, most of whom were men.
My only truly lousy work experience was due to crappy management and
a workhouse atmosphere, not sexism.
I don't think I've ever experienced
true
sexism/sexual harassment. If I did, it wasn't anything
that registered high enough on my radar to worry about. Yeah I
know... I'm sure there's women out there that have had someone make
their condition of employment based on sexual favors (I'm looking at
you, Hollywood), or were not fairly considered for employment or
schooling because of gender. However, I'm not sure how prevalent it is these days. And I'm talking about real, straight up harassment
– not “Oh, a guy at work told me he liked my new outfit. I find
that offensive.... boo hoo.” Sorry, but that's not sexist or
harassment.
I began thinking about this because of
an IT news story that popped up a couple months ago:
In a nutshell, a woman at a programming
conference overheard two guys talking to each other about “forking
a repo”, and making a dongle joke (“Forking a repo” is actual
programming slang). As for the dongle joke – so what? It's silly,
adolescent and kinda funny, but certainly not offensive.
The guys in question weren't even
speaking to
this lady. If she was really bothered by their comments, she could've
put on her big girl panties and asked them to keep it down because it
was distracting from the lecture. (She claimed she didn't say
anything because she didn't want to be heckled, or ruin her
experience. Geez Louise. That's fucking life, isn't it? For everyone,
male and female. If you're going through life avoiding confrontation,
you're not living.)
But no, she handled the situation in a
passive-aggressive manner meant to publicly shame them. She took
their photo, posted it to Twitter and her (apparently popular) blog,
indicating she was offended by their sexual remarks. One young man
lost his job. The young lady lost hers as well. Some morons made rape
and death threats. On top of everything, her company ended up with a
denial of service attack courtesy of Anonymous.
Scenarios like this really frost me
because throughout my career I've been told to look for any
form of sexism or sexual remarks. Anything that could possibly insult
my delicate female sensibilities should be reported immediately to
human resources.
I didn't get into IT thinking I could
behave as a hot house flower. The field was male dominated and the
work was hard. I didn't want special treatment, I wanted challenging
and interesting work. I wanted to be treated fairly and move forward
in my career because I did a good job, not because the guys were
afraid of being reported, or because I met a human resources diversity
requirement.
Back in the 1990's, I had an HR
director that would pull me into her office almost monthly to make
sure I was “doing okay, since I was working with all men”.
Seriously, she said that. HR Lady made it sound like I was working
with a team of sex-starved maniacs that have never seen a female
before, have no manners and behave like animals. In that scenario,
who was the one actually being sexist? Two guesses and the first one
doesn't count.
I went through great pains trying to
explain to her that nothing weird was going on, I didn't feel the
least bit uncomfortable and yes, I really enjoyed working with the
guys. These are the same men that gave me the opportunity in the
first place, trained me, and most of all treated me well. She
couldn't wrap her brain around this so every few weeks she'd “check
in on me”.
After a while, the HR Lady realized she
wasn't getting any juicy details from me and tried a different
tactic: she would regularly try to persuade me to join the local
“women in business” group that she belonged to, which I declined.
She sold it as a support system for career women - which at the time
sounded reasonable especially if you're looking for a job, but based
on her behavior it put me off.
In retrospect, maybe I should have
joined if only to say that in order to succeed, sometimes you need
some perspective and a sense of humor.
Were there dongle jokes? Nope, most of
them were way worse - especially by today's standards. And guess
what? We all had fun.
Did I have some men say rude things to
me? Yep, and I said rude things back. In my experience, dishing it
back usually put an end to it. Sometimes people are just assholes and
it's not about gender.
On the other hand, I'm sure there were
people I worked with who thought I was inferior simply because I'm
female - but they didn't articulate that. Nor did they prevent me
from being promoted or doing my job. In other words, their personal
thoughts about me weren't acted upon, and therefore have no impact on
me.
Like I said at the beginning of this
post, maybe my experience is unusual. I still don't work with a lot
of women, but the ones that I do work with seem to have similar
career experiences as me.
Are there women still being harassed,
or being treated in a sexist manner? Probably. I'm not saying it
doesn't happen. Maybe certain career paths attract it? Guys get
harassed too, but that rarely makes headlines.
It just seems like I'm constantly
hearing about how sexism/harassment/chauvinism is rampant, and it makes it sound like women are still being treated like it's 1950. The thing
is, the article above demonstrates the extreme consequences of making
a mountain out of a dongle.
