Bianca Gibson <bianca.rachel.gibson@gmail.com> writes:
I agree there. To me, were a lot of groups tend to fall short is including women or other minorities in the group without making us feel like the odd one out. Very similar stuff can be said for age, someone I know that is male and went to his first LUG at 15 felt like the odd one out, the next youngest person was 21 and he found it daunting.
Here is a relevant article, on the experiences of women and the sexism they encounter in what may be today's most-respected scientific project <URL:http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2011/07/20/is-it-cold-in-here/>. As that article explores, sexism in such environments is less often overt harrassment, and much more often an atmosphere of being treated as strange and otherly, in somewhat contradictory juxtaposition with a plaintive why-can't-we-treat-them-like-the-boys attitude.
If I'm complemented like the example I don't take it in a bad way, to me it's just a complement.
Thanks for that perspective. I must make conscious effort to give that account more weight than my internal imaginings of “how would I feel if everything else was the same but I was a woman”. That can't apply: if I were a woman, *huge swaths* of my upbringing would have been quite different, and “if everything else was the same” would not be the case. So, as is the case far more often than we might like to admit: it's not about me. I have to listen to others describe their experiences, and suspend my own bafflement at not being able to empathise completely. -- \ “Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening | `\ our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole | _o__) of nature in its beauty.” —Albert Einstein | Ben Finney