Around three years ago, I attended a conference of employees working for a popular tech company that had recently landed on campus to promote their new intern positions.
I sat around the fourth row away from the panel of two women and three men sitting down, all facing the crowd directly. They started the conference with an introduction of each employee’s roles and hobbies. They later went into further detail about the programs that the company offers, along with people that they tended to associate with. They ended the conference by opening up the panel to a Q&A with the crowd. There were a few of the typical questions tossed around. “What are your favorite perks of working there?” “How would you describe the hiring process?” A woman in the back raised her hand to ask the panelists yet another typical question. When she was acknowledged by one of the employees, she asked about something having to do with the difference between male and female colleagues’ interactions.
The employees all looked at each other. One of the two female panelists, after a small, yet noticeable moment of tension, spoke up. “This place is kinda rife with… all that.” The female colleagues started laughing with each other. Then, the guys joined in. Suddenly, this panel had turned into a laughing stock… about sexism in their workplace. Like it’s just… normal. Acting as if this isn’t supposed to affect the audience’s level of interest for working for the company they’re promoting (and any other company with employees like them, on that note). The woman sitting next to me gave me the biggest side-eye I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t help but side-eye her too, while chuckling a bit uncomfortably.
I’m a cisgender guy who graduated from a public high school for STEM students, I currently study computer engineering, and I’m an Eagle Scout. Needless to say, I’ve always had that sense of belonging. Meanwhile, most college women, especially in the engineering department, usually carry themselves in a mostly solitary manner. What’s worse: most times, it’s not because they want to, but because they feel like they have to.
When I walked into a Her Campus meeting for the first time, I couldn’t help but feel strange thinking about how I found myself in a room in college where I was the minority. I was only one of two men in the room full of people in the chapter working on either writing, editing, social media, or administration. I introduced myself to everyone, which subsequently led to everyone else introducing themselves as well. Following that exchange, I found myself quite surprised that there were so many women studying engineering in the room. Thinking back, that was very much a naïve feeling to have at the moment. A woman reaching out to women-led communities in a field where they are the corner of the industry makes complete sense. They crave that sense of belonging that I don’t need to go and constantly seek out.
It took a bit of time for me to adjust to those new emotions, but I quickly realized that being a part of this chapter could also be a way for me to empathize with everyone who doesn’t identify as a man trying to finish a STEM degree. The sense of walking into classroom after classroom where you don’t see many of yourself would easily make me question my degree, too. And yet, every class I go to these days, especially as I near the end of my Bachelor’s, is a sausage party with one or two girls at most in the corner next to the door. While seeing so many men in my classes does make me feel this sense of belonging, I can’t help but always feel for the women that are in the opposite situation.
We’re definitely seeing a recent wave of more acceptance and praise for women in STEM. Just last year, Christina Koch became the first female astronaut assigned to a lunar mission, Claudia Goldin became the first solo woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Barbie reminded us all of the importance of being your truest self in every sense. But these achievements always lead me back to the concept of survivorship bias, the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not.
Is there a certainty to how society will continue treating women in STEM? Women in general? I wouldn’t say so. In the future, there exists a possibility that we all start reconciling our differences in virtue of simply being with each other.
Funnily enough, this reminds me of the ancient Greeks and how they did not categorize sexuality into the binary of heterosexual and homosexual. Instead, their sexual practices were part of a broader spectrum of behaviors without the strict sexual orientation labels used today. Their language and literature reflect these practices, focusing more on the nature of relationships, the beauty of the human form, and the virtues of love rather than on labeling orientation.
By embracing a similar thought process, and prioritizing the value of human connections over rigid categories, we could help reduce the sexist treatment and interactions society still perceives and shares currently. Since a total acceptance of what men and women are in society may not be, a flesh of this basic human experience could serve as what we all need to gear towards having a clearer understanding of what it means to be and coexist with each other, especially in a year as unforeseeable as this one. Until then, I anticipate it won’t be much longer before I encounter another man at a promo table for a company, situated near one of my classes, asking a woman who’s halfway through her degree the age-old “Are you sure you can handle this project?” ■