Regarding gender stereotyping and discrimination: yeah, it is a pain in the neck. And it isn’t just annoying to women in the field! Plenty of my younger male colleagues don’t really see that there is a problem at all, and I’m often at the point of shouting at them… If you have any ideas, I’m happy to listen!

You didn’t mention it, but there are have been some interesting conversations about this sort of thing in the AASWOMEN mailing list. The Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has a lot of resources:

http://www.aas.org/cswa/

I figure you probably already know about them, but others might not. More advertising for CSWA is always a good thing, I figure…

Jean was known as the savior of the Department. Morale went up appreciatively.

One day myself, my immediate boss Randy, Don, our network person, and Jean were in an office. A vendor came in and was just talking to us informally about something, I don’t remember what. He left and Randy just quietly said, “Do you believe that?” Don responded, “Amazing.”

You know me – everything goes over my head. “What? What?” I asked.

Randy looked at me sand said, “The vendor never once looked at Jean. Never once.”

“Why?”

“He couldn’t deal with a woman being the head of a technical department. You’ll notice that he directed all his questions and pitches to Don and I. He ignored you because you weren’t on the radar being under me. He ignored Jean because she was a woman.”

I was absolutely livid. Oh there have been woman leaders I’ve not liked (my undergraduate college president), and woman leaders I’d disagreed with (Margaret Thatcher on a cold day), but ignoring them just because they’re a woman…no.

Oh, I may fall into the old societal problems of assuming the man is the doctor, yea, but then again I’ll tend to assume everyone in an AAS meeting, or anyone teaching in college is a Ph.D just to be safe.

At my workplace, my company is publicly and outwardly supportive but the day-to-day reality is quite different: I’m seeing the same thing described here, where my ideas are ignored unless one of my male colleagues support it. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon: at the start of my transition, when people were still having difficulty with the correct pronouns and whatnot, my ideas could stand on my own. When people got used to me in my (to them) new identity, that’s when I started seeing this needs-male-advocacy bit.

Having been male in my previous life, I’m intimately familiar with the lingering idea that women expect to be treated differently in the workplace, as if we expect to be cut slack or accorded special privileges. I’m very cautious to avoid that; all I want to do is to do my job and get paid and advanced on merit. It will be interesting to see how my next performance review goes.

I’m currently taking online courses and the phenomenon is reversed here. My classmates (who don’t know I’m transgendered since I took a year’s medical leave) are treating me less brusquely and with more politeness, similar to the phenomenon of women gamers.

I think it all comes down to whether the men see the women as a threat.

But the suprized comes in that most of my teachers are female,
It’s somewhere around a 2/3′s.

Hmmmmm… how to help. Try this, have a big meeting at Haloween where everyone attends in costume. Get a voice deeping device and a mean gorilla outfit then take charge!

Besides, northern VA is the place to be!

Ultimately, once we’ve mandated equal treatment to what extent we can through policies and laws, we have to find a reasonably humane way of reaching into people’s heads and forcing them to self-monitor. Education on the topic is one way, but institutions tend not to require this training unless forced. In the corporate world, it often requires a class action lawsuit that demands training. While I find this a little distasteful, it may sadly be the only way to continue progress in this area.

In my (very) large company, I think one reason women are perceived (and treated) as lightweights is that they tend not to stay around as long because they choose the family track at some point. They can overcome this, but it requires a lot of self-assertiveness, which can backfire. Classic Catch-22 for them.

Part of my problem is to do with my clothing as I’m usually quite casual. I’ve tested this in the past couple of years by occasionally wearing smart clothes or clothing more typical of an academic. It is pretty cool to see the change in the way people behave towards me. This works in ‘real life’ too.

Luckily, I can do something about my clothing, so this isn’t as big a problem as gender discrimination.