On That Time It Was Definitely Because I'm a Girl...

A while ago, I got turned down for a tutoring job because I am a woman. There are several layers as to why this experience was so frustrating to me. The first, and obvious, one is that I was denied a job because of my sex, which is absurd yet not uncommon in this time period. Another layer is that the mother who turned me down said that it was because her son “just doesn't respect female tutors as much.”

Now, I know how to talk to potential employers, so I wasn't going to say this to her face, (or however that phrase translates for conversations over the phone) but after hearing a sentence like that I doubt her parenting skills. If your son doesn't respect women, does he respect you? Does he respect his sister or his female classmates? If you haven't managed to teach him this snippet of human decency what have you taught him? In other words, what is the role of a parent to you, if not to teach him to treat others with respect?

This young man will grow up with the idea that women are less deserving of respect, and this idea will likely go unchecked by the people around him. This lack of respect may lead him to disregard or even engage in sexual assault, harassment, or rape of women. The fact that he has this mindset as late as high school leads me to believe that he is already set in his ways and is dangerously unlikely to change, putting many women in danger.

As a young scientist, if he chooses to continue in physics or another male-dominated field, (I was going to tutor him for physics) he will inevitably encounter female classmates and coworkers, and based on the lack of regard indicated by his mother, contribute to the issues I and my friends have already experienced. These range from exclusionary atmospheres about female classmates, assumptions that they're going into teaching, and gender segregation in labs (true story). He will continue to cause the problems that I have faced, am currently working against, and would never wish upon the next generation of female physics students.

Also, perhaps a third level, part of the reason this tutoring position was interesting to me was that he was diagnosed with ADHD. This hit a personal chord with me, as I was also diagnosed with ADHD, and struggled with the symptoms which made it more challenging to pursue my interest in the inner workings of the universe. I had hoped to help him from my personal experience, teach him tools that have helped me, and let him learn from my mistakes.

This mother mentioned that her middle-school daughter was going into an advanced class that would be studying some calculus and physics, and that she would call me back in the fall if I was interested. I was interested, especially since this clearly bright young woman was probably not getting much encouragement from a brother who “doesn't respect female tutors.” I could encourage her through the additional pressures of being female in a STEM class and tell her about all the female scientists and mathematicians left out of textbooks. However, she never called me back, resulting in a fourth level of irritation over this whole situation.

Anyway, I guess I'll just put on my apron and cook dinner, because that's what women are for, right?

Let's talk about the Friendzone

Today seems as good a day as any to talk about the friendzone. The friendzone is defined as when you want to date someone, but they only want to be friends.

The problem with the friendzone is it makes it seem like the person whose “zone” you are in is actively keeping you there. This allows the person in the friendzone to blame them and get bitter about it, believing that they are the passive participant in this social exchange, that this is happening to them. However, if you are stuck in the friendzone state of mind, it’s your fault. You can stop being friends with them, you can try and stop feeling that way about them (fake it ‘til you make it, amirite), there is something you can do to get out. The person “friendzoning” you is only acting according to their feelings, which will not be changed by your complaints about the friendzone. Men and women have found themselves in the friendzone, and if they deal with it like responsible adults, no one gets hurt.

Many men complain about being “stuck” in the friendzone of a woman and don’t think of these ways out. Men often have a sense that they “deserve” women, “deserve” to have sex with them, regardless of what the woman wants (because that is what society and media have taught them from childhood. The hero always gets the girl after all that hard work, because he deserves her, regardless of any reason the “girl” would want the hero). This leads a man “stuck” in the friendzone to believe even more strongly that it is the woman who is causing the problem, because this is the sex he deserves because he has worked hard feigning friendship and must deserve it by now, right?

What has actually happened here is that these men are no longer stuck in the friendzone as they believe. (In fact, if his understanding of their relationship with this woman and his entitlement have become even a little bit apparent, the woman might not even want to be friends anymore.) The man has moved past being interested in friendship and only wants a romantic and/or sexual relationship. On Tumblr, this has become known as “Girlfriendzoning.” The man cannot perceive the woman as a friend but a potential girlfriend. Notice that here, the active verb is given to the subject who actually does the action.

This can also be linked to what I like to refer to as “Nice Guy Syndrome,” where a man believes he is being a perfect gentleman yet gets turned down at every attempt to “get the girl,” leading him to believe that “girls only like douchebags.” Little do these men know, often their behavior reflects this attitude, ironically making them douchebags.

Unfortunately, sometimes this entitlement and need to prove that they “deserve” women leads men to violence. This violence is often attributed to mental illness, or- our favorite scapegoat these days- video games. The women involved may even wrongly get the blame for it. The real problem? Toxic masculinity. Men are told to “man up,” which apparently means assert their strength through violence. This results in shootings because “I deserve girls much more than all those slobs” or stabbings because of a rejected prom proposal.

(If you need more explanation on how those translate, I encourage you to watch the documentary Tough Guise, or its sequel Tough Guise 2, unfortunately not available on Netflix at this time. A ten-minute intro can be found here, and Jackson Katz’s Ted Talk on men’s violence can be found here.)

However, women are not prizes. You do not “deserve” to have a girlfriend. Stalking is not an acceptable response to rejection, nor is harassment, nor is murder. Threatening women with violence is not the way to their hearts, it's the way to avoidance and a restraining order. Blaming women for not responding favorably to these threats puts them in danger.

Elliot Rodger may have had some mental health issue (ETA because I couldn't figure out how to word it: mental health issues are more likely to result in self harm than outward violence), but his actions were not caused by the actions of young women. His actions were caused by a society that tells young men that they deserve sex, that to be a virgin at 22 is a tragedy, and that men must prove their manliness through acts of violence. 

The Women I Never Learned About

When I was younger I was a huge fan of Marie Curie. My elementary school class did a "wax museum" where we all did a report on someone and dressed up as them. I naturally picked Marie Curie. The reason I was so stuck on Marie Curie was because at that point she was pretty much the only female scientist I had heard of, the only woman in science that had come up in my elementary school curriculum. This is interesting, considering the important contributions women have made.

• I learned about Watson and Crick discovering the double-helix shape of DNA in middle school. I didn't learn about Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photos were used without her knowledge or permission, and who was not credited with this large albeit unwitting contribution.
• I only heard about Lise Meitner because I wrote a report in high school about the atomic bomb. She discovered nuclear fission, and should therefore be at least mentioned next to the Manhattan Project that used that concept, but instead it took me some digging to discover her.
•  Mary Anning was a palaeontologist who discovered many "firsts" of dinosaur fossils. I only learned about her because I stumbled upon a small book about her when I was bored and out of things to read. She revolutionized palaeontology and most people have never heard of her (unless they were curious about the google doodle that reminded me I had a subject to rant about today)
• Computers are a guy thing, right? Wrong. Charles Babbage may have built the first computer, but Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs. In fact, computer programming was first considered a woman's job, until male programmers decided they wanted less competition for jobs. Grace Hopper (another person made slightly more well-known via Google) developed the first compiler, as well as popularizing the term "debugging."

This is hardly a complete list. In fact, these women are mostly white, meaning I will have to dig deeper to learn the names of female scientists of color who have been even more obscured by ignorance. Ignoring the achievements of people who are not white men is incredibly prevalent in many fields. I read a back-of-the-book summary on an H. G. Wells book proclaiming him the father of science fiction. An interesting title, considering Frankenstein was written (by Mary Shelley, a woman) nearly fifty years before H. G. Wells was born. (Interesting how a genre effectively created by a woman is now considered a male-dominated genre, and any women who express interest are accused of doing so for male attention... but that's a whole other post.)
In science, many women who made discoveries received no awards for them or had co-workers steal their work, and then were ignored by history. This is absurd, as it makes it seem like female scientists are rare and unusual. This is wrong, because it dismisses the advances that women have made in science. This is unfair, because it takes away potential inspiration from young women like me who have an interest in science. So when people learn I'm studying physics, it's virtually unheard of for them. They are impressed that I'm studying a field that women rarely go into, when they should be impressed that I am in a field that makes it difficult for women to succeed.
One of my professors, when introducing a concept, often says "we love famous dead people, because they've already done the work for us." Unfortunately, it seems all the love is given to the famous dead white men.