Feminist pub no 12: The Bluestocking Returns, this time with goats!

[YonicScrewdriver]

Welcome!

I decided a while back to take what I was given, whether it was positive discrimination or not. It's not a meritocracy, so why should I worry about lack of "fairness". It's hard to do, I have to constantly remind myself that men have been in charge of the world for no particular reason for thousands of years and now it's our turn

But it's common for women to worry about upsetting men or being perceived as a token I think. I guess partly conditioning to accept coming second and partly believing the lie that the world is fair?

When I was younger I thought being an academic sounded brilliant - you get to basically live in a university! Reading people's experiences here, I'm glad that route didn't work out for me. Sounds far too stressful. and for those of you having difficulties.

I can't add much on childcare - I'm unemployed and my daughter won't qualify for free hours until she turns two in a few months. But from two weeks to nine months, every Friday my dad took my daughter to his for a few hours. Those few hours kept me sane, and I'll always be grateful (and sad that ill health meant he had to stop doing so). So I'm definitely in the "pay for a bit of time off if you can" camp.

Yes I think in terms of mentoring, references etc., some sectors are much worse than others. Where you're operating in a small world, there's so much more control.

I had the opposite experience to planet - I was basically left alone to do what I wanted. The result is that after years I'm still at the bottom of the food chain. But I'm still more or less (a bit less these days) doing what I want. I got it into my head, for some reason, that the way to do what you want was to forego promotion. Why did I think that?

My view of positive discrimination has changed - not about whether it is right, but rather who is and always has been at the receiving end.

Now off to a place with no internet reception for a few hours.

Really need to think hard, and talk to someone, about work and it's effects on me right now. Buffy, did you talk to someone this week? Friend, shrink, boss, priest, professional guru... Anyone?

Jeanne thanks for saying I sound like a good boss. Every little helps! Even from someone I don't work with who knows me on the internet.

Big and to everyone today. And thank you all for such interesting detailed posts

stormy - erm, well, I can confirm that the academic side of my job has been 99% perfect. But then, I have only been doing it for 18 days!

I agree with basil it is everywhere. I am furious at the moment seeing what is happening with a very bright friend of mine. She is probably going to give up a job she used to love, and is good at, because there is a culture of people simply not bothering to tell her things. She has gone to HR to say it is seriously hampering her ability to work, if no-one passes on messages (which they do to the men in the team) and has been told it is her job to seek out information. Now how can you 'seek out' whether someone has cc'd you on an email or not if you don't know it's been sent?!

I am being manslained to on FB.

I keep posting links with, you know, facts. But he just ignores them totoally and then (not using facts) says I am wrong. Because he knows better basically.

I would love to have that kind of blind confidence. I second guess everything I do and will never assert I am correct in something unless I know without any doubt that I am 100% correct and can prove it. Even then I always worry I am wrong

And, vezzie, seriously, you do. I would much rather have someone who is thinking about the process than someone who believes it doesn't need thinking about. And so many people don't seem to think, they just accept they would obviously recognize a good candidate when they saw him/her, and would obviously notice a bad atmosphere too ... but they don't question their own biases in these things.

What's the argument about, ferret?

That's awful Jeanne. The sheer sexism is so structural and yet HR is unable to recognise it because it's not a specific "event".

Your friend should start keeping a diary so that she can show systemic exclusion. Easy for me to say though, I know.,

I suspect I have Mners as facebook friends so I don't want to out myself. It's a totally unimportant topic but it's the fact that he is so wrong and won't admit it that annoys me. I've just said I will bow out as this is a friend of a friend and feel a bit awkward. He responded with something that actually makes feel a bit embarrassed for him. So I declare myself the winner of argument.

Yep.

I think it sounds like bullying. She has had a couple of would-be innocent 'oh, I forgot you were on this level too' comments.

Thinking about that, I do really notice how many of my (female) friends who're young academics get students assuming they are fellow-students, or, when this is corrected, assuming they don't have much authority. Men don't seem to get this so much (and, er, I don't either though I don't know what I'm doing. I did get some of the 'you are woman: you will help stuff the other day, though).

It seems to me all of this ties in to the same attitude we see MRAs displaying, when they insist you must never judge someone for sounding sexist as it might be innocent. We're taught never to pull someone up on the way they speak or act if it could possibly be an honest mistake. There should be more of a sense that it's socially bad manners to 'mistake' a woman for someone junior.

Fair enough, ferret. And glad you 'won'.

buffy - your prof sounds good. I might nab that inner voice.

We're taught never to pull someone up on the way they speak or act if it could possibly be an honest mistake.

Yep this is something I have realised about myself, that as a woman, I was taught I should never do this. However these days, I have had loads and loads of epiphanies about what it means to be a woman in today's society, and I realised that if someone is never challenged, never pulled up on what they say (innocent or not), there is no room for growth, no room for change, no room for the challenging of perceptions.

An example is a man I work with, who belongs to a culture that is notorious for its misogyny. He believes he is 'enlightened' because he goes home after work and bathes and feeds the kids - granted, I give him that above many many, other men. However we were at a customer conference, and the table top needed to be cleaned off, and he fumbled at it - too much water poured on the table, and not enough tissues (all we had) to mop up the water. I calmly said to him "You don't do the cleaning in your home, do you?" [nice smile] I have realised that I can politely and calmly challenge perceptions and not get people offside, and guess what - he still likes me as a person. Win!

You're not waffling.

I love how reading this thread makes me keep questioning things and pushing away at things.

zaz - oh, yes, that's telling! And good on you for challenging it as you did.

I wish I could do that with my dad. I remember one time he got into a ridiculous argument with my mum about the price of different types of food ... she buys the stuff, FFS!

Oh yes Jeanne, what was even more telling was that I was the only female around while this was going on, and all the men stood around and watched me clean! So glad I said something to him...

I'm actually a complete mess at the moment. I am really ashamed of how I have treated my children yesterday and today. I have really screamed at them, more than once. It's awful and I have never been like this before and I hate myself for it.

what is happening is that I am constantly working with people who are refusing to listen, in what has become actually quite a personally insulting way that I am reacting to emotionally in entirely the wrong contexts.

My direct team in the UK are very pleasant and supportive. but for my work I am very dependent on working relationships with people in LA who are frankly fucking insulting. they are stupid, late, don't listen, tell blatant lies about what has been said or not said (when you have the thing in front of you in writing) waste your time by patronising you telling you things, at length, that are mind-numbingly obvious (as a distraction from the actual issue which is the work they are producing sub-standard work), they talk about things that they don't know the facts of in the most bombastically bullying way, etc etc. This all happens between 5 and 8 pm while I am missing my dcs for the day at work instead of being at home with them.

I am not allowed to react at all. I have to sit there smiling while they lie to me and try to think of cleverer and cleverer ways to get them to do the work that we need them to do. We are categorically not allowed to outsource it to local contractors. Nor is there any way we can manage without this work being done. we just keep going into endless meetings that are the equivalent of someone shoving a duster at you and saying "there's your ballgown, now fuck off and wear it to the ball" and screaming at you when you try very nicely to point out that the duster will barely cover one tit and while everyone else at the ball is in Versace, we need to have something that at least looks like a dress,whereas the duster leaves us essentially naked.

anyway. When my children pretend they can't hear me and don't do what they asked immediately and break things for no reason (entirely normal for children) and I realise that more of the smiling patience is demanded of me, I lose it. It is awful and unforgiveable and each of my children has been genuinely scared of me at least once today and yesterday.

What pushed me over the edge was that P did more of the same. I asked him to help me with the car seat that I think dd2 broke yesterday and he came over and just as I was about to say "don't -" he did the thing that means there is no hope now. So now I have to replace a fucking car seat. I shouted "I knew you were going to do that! Why don't you listen!" and he just walked off. I shouted at dd1 for absolutely no reason whatsoever because P is the last (and first in a way) of a long line of idiots who are insulting me by not listening AND creating more work for me, more work that I simply cannot do.

I just can't go on treating my dds like this and I can't do anything today except cry and drink coffee. dd2 is out with P and dd1 is eating a sandwich and then I have to decide whether I am going to deal with the carseat, get the clothes I need for work which I was going to do today (I haven't got enough because I am so fat), do something nice with dd1, do something about the state of the house... I can't face any of it. And there is another week ahead, and another and another and I just can't carry on.

what is confusing the fact that I don't know what to do about any of this is that I know I am not robust and that a lot of this is just basic normal corporate dickery and if I want to be in work I have to deal with it. I know that the emotional response to all this - the delayed response that no one at work sees - is dysfunctional and then it makes me think well this isn't about work this is about my inadequate make-up and maybe I just need to give up and admit that I am not very good, like people who can't do maths have to just give up and not be engineers. (although presumably do something else, but my lack of resilience seems to be huge barrier to doing anything at all)

Vezzie I'm so sorry you feel so bad. So much of what you write describes how I felt in a similarly difficult period a few years back. For me , it resulted in a long time off sick, followed by an attempt to go back to work and renegotiate the situation which ultimately resulted in me becoming a SAHM. I couldn't see how I could make it work and knew something had to go, either DH, or maybe even DH and DD so I could work properly, or my job, or my sanity. I try not to think about the situation too much as if I do it makes me want to fall to my knees and howl with rage and anguish, its so unfair. The whole situation became about "my mental health" and not the total fucking inability of DH to share domestic labour, of my male colleagues to just do their fucking work and be straight with me and the huge expectations I felt about the kind of mother I ought to be. I've lost so much and the strength you need to deal with this shit is enormous.

So it's not you, Vezzie, you're doing a fab job just surviving and I'm sure your kids love you passionately. And fuck the housework. Do something lovely with DD1 that takes minimal effort (cinema?) and just be with each other.

Have had some of those feelings Vezzie.

Text DH and tell him to buy the car seat on his way home.

Oh god DemisRoussos, that sounds awful, I am so sorry.

the contretemps that P and I had earlier in the week, or last weekend, was sort of not-resolved-but-brushed-over and he said, in the middle of a half-arsed very hedged not-really-apology "you don't understand that it's not always about you".

that infuriated me because it isn't up to him to decide what is about me. he seems to think that what matters is his intentions, and then I should know my place in responding to his view of the matter from his viewpoint. Actually MY view of the matter (and I live in my head, not his, all the fucking time, unfortunately, so in that sense it is always about me to me, and I get not to everyone else, but to me I have no choice but to be me) - my view of the matter is that he was really fucking insultingly unprovokedly rude to me and taking the piss out of my time and labour. That remains the case no matter whether I understand his intentions, and his lack of intention to hurt me, or not.

One of the ideas that we have been kicking about is that he drop one day a week to do house stuff and be there for the girls around school. I oscillate between thinking that it would be good not to have to do all the laundry, to utter terror of the rage that will no doubt engulf me when the reality of him dicking about in the house all day, one day a week, hits, which will be

• I will never be able to find anything, which has been moved around with no reference to any sane way of ordering anything or who uses it. Things like my weekly used sewing box will turn out to be in the loft that I can't get into (because he doesn't use it he will think it is not needed). Things used daily will be put on shelves I can't reach. Most things I won't be able to even locate as they float around for no rational reason at all which will be positioned as "sorting out" (pulling the things front of his mind right now for some reason to the front and bugger the rest)

• there will be weird random expensive food shopping and much waste

• a drip drip drip of demands for more ikea stuff that will be badly assembled and not really solve any of our storage problems and every time we drop a few hundred quid we don't have

• bad painting (I love painting. P has never painted ever but thinks he must be better at it than me, obviously. We have some painting that needs to be done, I dread him thinking he can do it and not knowing how to prepare walls, use masking tape, wash brushes, use dust sheets etc. I absolutely dread it and I cannot raise anything on the subject because just the fact that I have painted about 200 hours worth for money to a great standard (aside from the no doubt dodgy ones I did as a teenager as practice), and he has painted not a single one, will not be considered good enough grounds for me to question his expertise and this will become a row). There will be ruined brushes, room-wide splatters from mis-used rollers, bristles in the paint, and astonishing waste of £££. this is all annoying but what I find gutting is that I love painting!

• there will be fetid crumpled "laundry". there will be a weekly audit where I have to pull things out to be rewashed and ironed and will have to try to be surreptitious about this to avoid a row.

• he doesn't drive and will not be able to do any of the car maintenance I am desperate to do / get done

• etc

Then there is the resentment that I am always knackered and yet dealing with putting all this right; and the possiblity that if we split, all this pathetic and wasteful dicking about, at expense and inconvenience to me in money and labour, could be positioned as an argument that he is "primary carer" and I should support him to take the children off to his own place and I would lose them.

If I agree to this I basically have to give up my occasional dream of just leaving him. I am not sure how serious the dream is but it's a horrible thought that I can't even dream about it. Dream about me and my girls in a little cheap house that takes an hour to clean and where I know where everything is.

Looking at that list of impatience with incompetences it looks as if I should be taking the time out of work to do all these things. but if I try to do that I will lose my job

Sorry that is so long. thank you for the replies

It's not the fact that people aren't all great at everything that bugs me. I mean no one is great at everything. It's the fact that somehow the hierarchies that I have ended up in seem, repeatedly, to have fallen into a pattern where I have to keep being fawningly subservient to people who are incompetent relative to me at certain things. It's not the incompetence that gets me, it's the demand for subservience that chips away at me over time