Ask The Flytrap: Can I Yeet the Willfully Ignorant Directly Into the Sun?
I'm so tired of being told gender discrimination doesn't exist in my STEM field.
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Let's get into it:
Hi Fabulous Flytrap!
I am a woman in a STEM field. I got a ton of encouragement for my interest as a child but rapidly ran into a giant wall of sexism when I left the protective bubble of high school and immediate family. We're talking women openly and systematically denied opportunities that were allowed for men, sexual harassment, sexual assault, all of it reported and left completely unaddressed, except for the ONE time it got reported by a MAN.
Recently I was catching up with some of my old teachers and they, to a person, were telling me how companies were just falling over themselves to hire smart young women like me. I tried telling them that discrimination was alive and well, but they wouldn't believe me.
How big should I make the cannon to fire everyone into the sun?
Signed,
Science Gal
Howdy, Science Gal!
I am a writer and not a rocket scientist. I don't know what the specs are on the most optimally engineered sexist-yeeting cannon. Something something, weight versus time versus velocity versus dipshittery, multiplied by assholery, divided by taint? Am I getting close? I stopped doing math after pre-AP physics in the 10th grade.
Obviously it's necessary to ensure that the sexists get burned entirely the fuck up in the sexist-yeeting cannon to such a degree that the sexists remaining here on earth fear for their own lives lest they contradict the lived experiences of women who have been fucked over by the sexists who very demonstrably had to be yeeted in said cannon as a message to other sexist deniers of STEM-field misogyny. It's a rocket-fueled ouroboros of questions!
So: I support the sexist-yeeting cannon, though I cannot help you build it. (If you need marketing copy for this thing, holler.)
If what you are looking for here is commiseration, we at The Flytrap have plenty and more to spare.
It's possible that, as your former educators suppose, STEM outfits could be "falling over themselves to hire smart young women," although research on gender bias in hiring strongly suggests that is ... not generally true. Research also shows racial bias is rampant in hiring. And in this particular era of enshittified job markets, resume-reading LLMs are also essentially just faster at applying bigotry and bias to their tasks than human resume-evaluators are. Ahemm: "The results of the research showed clear evidence of significant discrimination based on gender, racial identities, and their intersections" and that's from Brookings, not exactly a bastion of woke lefty propaganda. YIKES.
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Even if, against the evidence, employers were absolutely rabid for "smart young women," it could still be true that STEM outfits are nevertheless rife with gender-based harassment and worse. These things are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are directly related to each other.
In any field where members of a historically privileged demographic enjoy priority or legacy status vis a vis their identities regardless of their skillsets, those privilege-holders might nevertheless seek to hire people who hold marginalized identities, perhaps for genuine reasons motivated by good business and diversity practices, or perhaps simply for a public- or industry-facing profile boost. Hiring people may not be an issue, especially in These Economic Times. Retaining them, however, absolutely is, and you are allowed to challenge people to show their work when they claim a long-term, fulfilling career entirely devoid of sexist bullshit awaits you around every corner.
I can't speak to STEM, but I know a lot about the media industry. It's hard enough to break into this field; it often takes not a little amount of privilege and willingness to put up with fuckshittery just to get your foot in the door. But take a gander on up the masthead at most publications, and things get ever paler and maler. Not because white guys are better at journalism, but because the system was built for people just like them, and the longer you stick with it if you aren't pale and male, the more likely you are to experience some terrible shit and dip out.
People who aren't inclined or equipped to register why their industries are hostile to the long-term success of people who hold marginalized identities may be quite good at the parts of the work they know how to do, while being absolutely the fuck terrible at understanding their industry writ large, especially when it comes to people-management. Academics, perhaps especially in a field like STEM, which claims to operate as a direct study-to-job pipeline, are probably especially the fuck goofy.
And: a lot of folks straight up don't hear directly about discrimination and harassment in their field(s) because they aren't safe, responsible, or trustworthy people to tell about such things. Perhaps they have, I don't know, historically brushed off their colleagues' or students' experience-based concerns about misogyny in the workplace? So people stopped talking to them about it? Because they didn't want to get into it one more time with a willfully ignorant coworker, instructor, boss, or business owner? Or couldn't afford to do so without putting their job, scholarship, or appointment at risk? HMMMM!!!!??!?! JUST THROWING THAT OUT THERE
Here's what I hope you take away from this, and it's something you already have: The expertise of your own lived experience, and of the lived experiences of people like you who have been bold enough to share them, privately or publicly. Your old teachers are probably kind and smart and well-meaning people who know you as a kick-ass talent; they also live in an entirely different world than you do! They are not on the job hunt the way you are. They are not thinking the way you are about life and work and relationships and family and the future, because they likely needn't do so. They are comfortable and established and bored and so don't take your concerns seriously, or they are precarious and scared and flailing and hope your concerns don't apply to them, too. Academia is weird and tenuous!
Nobody knows more about your business than you do. And you are the only person who needs to understand your business. Sure, it would be satisfying to see the light in his eyes when your old comp sci prof realizes, finally and because you are the most convincing person with the most water-tight argument and receipts, that misogyny exists in his precious, bias-free field of objective scientists!
But you can't program people. You can, however, find people who fit into your program. Those are the people you will build something new and fascinating and meaningful with. It will take time and effort and it will be annoying and hard. You may zig and zag. You'll be annoyed in ways you never expected, about things you can't believe people are annoying about. You will probably have to put up with some fuckshittery, wherever you go. But the only person who needs to feel good about your path is you.
I'm just saying, the misogyny space cannon is a pretty good idea. On the recruitment front, I hear SpaceX has a hard time retaining talent these days.
— Andrea
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