blatant discrimination against women

My interview for my current position was an interesting one. Clocking in at 10 hours, 2 meals, 2 deans, and 6 faculty members, it felt a lot like what I imagine a faculty position interview would be like...minus the job talk, of course. The day held a number of surprises, mostly pleasant, but a few nervous-making. Some of the questions that X and Y asked that day were difficult, and I had to choose my words carefully. The interview as a whole probably deserves its own post -- and I'll get to it at some point. But I was reminded today of the question that surprised me most during my interview: Have you ever experienced discrimination in academia because you are a woman?

I have an answer to that question that I give to my friends: Uh, yeah. We recount experiences with advisers, interviewers, and colleagues. We shake our heads and wonder when it will end. We cringe at the revelation of our own subconscious gender biases.

This issue infuriates me so much that it's difficult to talk about it without getting up in arms. So how to answer a question like that during an interview when you're face to face with a male interviewer? For that matter, how should you answer any sort of question that hits the nerve of all womankind?

This blog could easily become a litany of experiences we've had, incidents we've witnessed in which our female colleagues were treated unfairly. We could write ten blogs about all the things we do subconsciously, if only we knew what to write. But I'd probably start foaming at the mouth and biting if I made that the focus of this blog. So I'll limit myself to the extreme cases, which hopefully will only happen every once in a while.

Today was one of those extreme cases. I was at a symposium that was tangentially related to the work I'm doing. The event included a really really cool mix of people -- from museum educators to real estate developers -- and was focused on a big report that just came out of the university. In response to this report there was a panel of four state senators (two men and two women) who were responding to questions and offering their opinions. The panel was moderated by a male professor at the university.

The panel members sat at a long table at the front of a packed auditorium. In order from the moderator's podium, they sat male, female, female, male. The moderator asked the male senator closest to him for his opening comments. He spoke. The logical thing would have then been to move on down the line, asking the next senator -- a woman -- for her comments. Everyone on the panel was certainly expecting that. But the moderator chose to jump to the end of the panel, to the other male senator, for his opening comments first. Both he and the women that were skipped seemed surprised.

"Okay," I thought, "don't get all worked up about this. He'll come back to her." And he did. He introduced this woman -- a state senator, remember -- as being the mother of a graduate from our university. Turns out that she herself had gotten a law degree from our university.

When I see things like this, I hear the voices of my mother and grandmother in my head. I hear my mother telling me to be ambitious and career oriented as she cleans the house and cooks us dinner every night after getting home from her full-time job. I hear my grandmother telling me how glad she is that I have a nice fellow in my life as I set off for a new graduate program. With every generation, we get a little bit closer to equality, but there is still so far to go.

With those voices echoing in my mind and my own experiences stored within me like heavy black coals waiting to be stoked, answering the discrimination question with grace wasn't easy. I said yes. I gave an example of an extreme incident that occurred in a foreign country, something so clearly cultural that it almost didn't apply to American academia, hence letting the male interviewer off the hook. Then I moved the discussion away from myself to gender in general in our society because most of the discrimination I've witnessed and experienced has been subconscious on the part of the perpetrator. These guys aren't mean. They aren't chauvinists. They're just fucking clueless.