But Justice Ginsburg said her own influence in all sorts of cases at the justices’ conferences was uncertain. “I will say something — and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker — and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” Justice Ginsburg said.That is, she is one of the nine highest-ranking judges in the nation, with the power to define and defend constitutional law, and she sometimes kinda feels like people ignore the points she makes...until a guy says the same thing ten minutes later.
15 years ago
9 comments:
This is one of the most difficult aspects of male privilege to overcome as a man. I consider myself pretty aware of male privilege and how it makes me act like a misogynist shithead. But sometimes I, nevertheless, find myself discounting or ignoring the voices of women in contexts like a conference or other group discussion. I constantly make an effort to not do this, but it still sometimes happens. One can only imagine how bad this is when you are dealing with right-wing partisan hack scumbags like Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts.
I was part of a working group with 3 women and 10+ men. We all had our computers at the tables with us, so the women logged onto google chat and while the men were blabbing on and on. We were having our own conversation (it was hysterical). When one of the women spoke up to the group, we would reinforce each other. We kept counts of how many times were each interrupted, how many times we had to say the same exact thing over and over and over. It wore us the hell out.
CPP, I'm going to try to keep her comment in mind every time I get angry at someone for doing this to me. Because if she can handle those four, for chrissakes I can handle a scientist, who has probably been trained to behave better than the Scalia crowd.
Anon, that is oh so funny, by which I also mean sad.
Why do you assume scientists are better than the Scalia crowd? I think that's debatable. Especially older misogynist shitheads.
My problem is that this not only happens to me ALL THE TIME, but what do you do when you're alone in the room with the person who is not listening to you? Sometimes I wish I could bring a guy with me to parrot what I say just so my adviser will hear it, because it doesn't matter how many times I repeat myself and rephrase...
ARGH, and it's infuriating anyway. This just happened me to me last week in journal club, at least two comments I made were attributed by my adviser to people who didn't say anything at all!
Makes me feel totally invisible and alone when it happens, so thanks for pointing out that I'm not the only one who feels this way...
Great find and excellent point Dr.J!
>But sometimes I, nevertheless, find myself discounting or ignoring the voices of women in contexts like a conference or other group discussion.
Honest, but still disturbing. Do you actually work with many women? This seems like it would be one of the first habits to go for an "enlightened" dude such as yourself.
>One can only imagine how bad this is when you are dealing with right-wing partisan hack scumbags like Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts.
The "other" is undoubtedly worse CPP? Like MsPhd I'm not so sure. And someimes "right wing scumbags" are refreshingly polite, and at least pretend to listen to women.
Gawd! That happens to me all. the. time. I've taken to abandoning all social protocol and interrupting people to say things like, "yes, that's exactly what I said 5 minutes ago. Thanks (d00d) for bringing it to everyone's attention again." I try to take a non-combative tone of voice so the "thanks for bringing it up again" sounds sincere and it doesn't turn into a fight.
At first people didn't know what to do with me and they probably thought I was a total bitch. Now they're just used to it and as far as I can tell, no one in my lab group resents me for it. There have even been occasions when another (male) student/post-doc will say something like, "I think we should revisit what AA said about X..." Not ideal (ideal would be that it was heard from my mouth the first time), but it's better than the alternative.
In the meantime, instead of keeping a guy on a leash to parrot everything I say as per MsPhD's suggestion (I think that might actually work, but then the guy on the leash would get all the credit), I think that women should get actual parrots trained to speak in the male register to do the same job. We'll get heard, but no one will mistake the parrot for coming up with the ideas on its own.
Thanks for the inspiring success story AA. And I love the parrot idea. While preparing to co-lead a lab meeting once with a male grad student I didn't know well from another lab, I shared with him some goofy results and assertions of another researcher and my plan to mention them in my part of the presentation (the 2nd part) for comic relief (and also to help make an important point) which he seemed to find amusing and a good idea. Well I was taken aback when he stole my idea and used it first in his section - even 'borrowing' my actual slide without asking - getting the expected appreciative laugh from the other participants. I couldn't stop myself from saying something sarcastic to him right then....he acted like he had not even realized what he'd done, and I'm sure everyone else thought I was overly defensive and making a big deal over nothing, but it was just so irritating.
Loving the image of man-on-a-leash assigned to every woman scientist...that would make a great comedy skit...which would leave us all weeping with laughter and sadness at the same time.
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