Feminist Pub 15: The Bluestocking hangs up its, err, stocking and hopes for a chatty Christmas and a Feminist New Year

[YonicSleighdriver]

Festive greetings!

This is the 15th incarnation of the Pub and is meant as a place to drop by with random thoughts and meandering chats, on feminist or other related themes. Anything you want to mull over but not necessarily start a thread about. Alternatively, get some booze and snacks and hang out! Lurkers, newbies and oldbies welcome.

We have a pub goat, a feminist cannon for firing at crazy sexists and we cheer each other up when patriarchy grinds us down...

Last pub drinkie linkie:

Pub 14

I clearly need to come and whine on here every time I have imposter syndrome.

Btw, how are you doing with the chick at the moment?

He is doing well thanks. Sleep is slowly getting more manageable, but he still throws in a night of hourly waking at least once a week. He's a happy little thing in the day though - so smiley and easy.

Aw, lovely.

Hope the sleep continues to improve.

Thanks.

In ref to the women in STEM, an area I work in and though we had a female CEO, there aren't that many women in our place of work.

I was wondering what are young girls wanting to aspire to now compared to the past? and are there certain ages where girls get put off these careers? Or is they are just never really pitched to girls?

I don't know Breaking. I teach Maths and we always have a fairly even split between boys and girls taking ALevel. There usually seems to be a fairly even split with Chemistry, but Biology has more girls and Physics has more boys.

Things like Electronics, Computing and Engineering are almost exclusively chosen by boys, even at GCSE. Girls are put off choosing them because they know they would probably be the only girl in the class, or at best one of 2 in a class of 20+ boys. Dd1 chose to do Computing for GCSE and she's the only girl in the class, she was warned that would be the case and I think they expected her to choose something else, but she is a stubborn strong-minded young woman, who took that as a challenge to show them she's the best and that boys don't intimidate her. So far, she is right up there in the top 2 or 3, and she's holding her own in terms of the banter in the classroom. I think more girls would choose it if they knew there would be other girls in the class but it's much more difficult to be the only one, especially if you are warned that it could be a problem.

My rant for the day is; some of the girls in my year 10 class arrived straight from Childcare where they had been watching a video of a woman giving birth. The ONLY thing they were talking about was that she hadn't shaved her pubes! They didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered about the miracle of new life, the pain she was going through, the mess, etc (all the things I was shocked by when we were shown a similar video at school) it was all about "how disgusting she looked because she hadn't shaved and she really needed to". I'm really, really sad that they just have no concept of a woman's natural body hair as being anything other than something disgusting to be removed :(

Thanks for the insight Dragonlette.

Kinda sad w.r.t the video as they already getting indoctrinated into what they should have below, and also what boys should expect.

nowadays women are doing better than men in almost all fields right up to leaving college. This year there will be more women graduating than men in the US, and the numbers in different subjects are far more even.

BUT women still earn much less (If you compare same degree, same industry, same employer, two people sitting side by side, the difference is 9%, and that is the LOWEST amount of discrepancy. Some geographical areas have a 54% difference in pay, in the US) . The areas with the least inequality are 'lower professional' jobs such as teaching, where there are guidelines and pay scales. The job areas with the worst inequality are either very low paid or much higher paid sectors, particularly where the jobs are 'traditionally male'.

So - even where women (teen or fully adult) are interested in STEM, they have to overcome the 'joy' of potentially being the only female in the room (although this is quite rare now), male 'banter' and other sexist shit, then face the hurdles of actually getting a job and they get paid less. Not many work incentives there, really.

I think the question really should be, "How the fuck do some women stick it out and manage to keep going every day?" or, even better, "Why the fuck aren't we just paying men less and firing some of them?"

"How the fuck do some women stick it out and manage to keep going every day?"

Quite. In academia, it's not quite so much getting women in than keeping them. At Maths undergraduate level women do better than men and the numbers are about equal. They just don't stay on. I wonder why.

Dragon at the shaving pubes business. I didn't even know people did that until a couple of years ago.

I did an arts degree, despite doing maths and chemistry at a-level. There are reasons behind that but they are too complex and identifying to list. However there was in part at least a feeling that I wasn't clever enough or wouldn't fit in at degree level in science or maths (this isn't false modesty)

However I am now doing some further studies in sciences, and in the next few weeks I will have the opportunity to goose whether I go in a more maths/physics direction (where my skills lie) or more life sciences (which is very interesting but I'm not as good at it)

The thing that is stopping me making the clearly obvious decision? The men on my course who ahve indicated that they are planning to go down the maths/physics route. They are by no means unpleasant, they are interesting and friendly. But they also talk over me, are keen to show me how much more they know than I do (and they often do know more, I don't have a problem with that, but I don't enjoy being belittled), and they treat the female tutor with less respect than they do the male tutor

This isn't all the men on te course, and of course it is a small group and there are other men who I am sure will choose the same route who don't behave in this way (they just haven't made their intentions clear, and they take up far less of te airtime). These are also older professional men, not teenagers, so obviously it is different to what school leavers will be experiencing

But if it is an indication of what the classes will be like from now on it is quite off-putting. I don't think it will stop me choosing the route that most interests me (I am good at tuning out) but it does take the shine off it a bit I have to admit

Ahem *choose

No goosing will be happening

Dragonlette that pubes response is really awful

It's interesting, petula, you having experience of both sides.

I possibly could have done sciences, but looking back, I think I partly did English because I found it really comforting that you can be partly right, and no-one is telling you you're categorically wrong. I was noticing this Christmas that my parents' favourite mode of communicating is to have a big debate. Which is kind of fine, but it made me aware how incredibly tiring it is to be constantly assessed in terms of whether you're right or wrong.

I don't know, but I could believe women might incline away from maths/sciences for those sorts of reasons.

Maths is not confrontational. :) People are.

Having said that we have heated arguments about how things should be written.

Yes they're less confrontational, more keen to show how clever and knowledgeable they are, which is just tiring more than anything else

The problem in IT is keeping the women. They drop out in spades around the ten year mark and frankly, I don't blame them. I myself have thought of packing it in many many times.

But I'm not going to rant about being a woman in IT again . I'm alone this weekend and seriously considering a binge watch of Alias. Because she can look sharp in corporate clothes and can fight in ludicrous outfits, while I always have post-yoga mad hair and my lower back hurts when I wear heels too often.

Confrontational...I've been told that I should go back to school and learn some computer science. This was just a few months ago, and I'm an IT manager with an Oxbridge degree

No, I don't think maths is confrontational either.

But I do think that, for some women/girls, it feels more comfortable to be working in a subject where you don't have absolute wrong answers. I am aware that not all answers in maths are absolute right/wrong ones, and I know that when you get to the higher levels it can be interestingly uncertain. But I am thinking of, say, GCSE maths. If you are someone who constantly feels you've been told you're wrong, you might really hate a subject where this happened.

I'm not sure I am explaining well.

No I do understand. One of the things I love about reading about feminism is similar to what I felt when reading about art history - when suddenly you see an image or read a phrase or passage or chapter that just seems to unlock a vista into a different or more nuanced way of thinking about something. And it wasn't that you were wrong before, just coming from a different angle

That right/wrong thig isn't quite what it's like for me with maths though (I often feel the same way) - it's more that I find it frustrating that I'm not permitted to work towards an understanding in a way and at a speed that suits me, because around me are people jostling to show their way and understanding and how quickly they got there. It's not that I'm especially slow or struggling to keep up, it's just that I'm not interested in proving my own intelligence in a way that impinges on other people's learning and comfort

Noting of course that this is just a particular group that have chosen to do further study at a later stage in their lives, so not representative

Reading back I may not have really explained how I understand your POV jeanne. Mind you, I do remembe some STONKING arguments about in particular war photography, where it is possible to be both right and wrong at the same time IMO

Petula, I hope you stick with what you love more.

I agree that up to A level or even a lot of undergraduate maths there is a right and wrong answer. But I blame the whole stupid society (and perhaps I'll blame our education system too) for not allowing people to get things wrong. In many cases getting things wrong is the opportunity to learn. Getting things right is a bit of an end to the conversation... Though I wish to goodness my PhD student would get things right.

Oh, I completely agree with that, upto. I think it is a real problem, and it is related to feminism, IMO.

My mum tutors maths, and she finds it quite depressing that even her A Level students sometimes aren't very interested in anything speculative, or anything with more than one right answer. Those were the bits of maths I liked most.

Ultimately this is epistemology, isn't it? So we need buffy.