things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:
- an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn’t reply to my e-mails for months
- he later delegated part of my master’s thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval
- a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i “looked exotic”
- a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us
things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:
- being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position
- male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before
- lenience toward my work in a way I haven’t experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.
- conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that’s very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.
like. yes some PI’s will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I’ve lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women’s careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.
After getting into the role of Woman in STEM I was told to be more “warm and approachable” at a pitching workshop because I focused too much on stating the facts about what the team I’m on was doing and where to go to read more about it.
Plainly stating the scope of our work was “overconfident”.
People routinely go off in the wrong direction when I say the name of the field I’m in, but I was told not to underestimate what people completely outside of it might know about the details of my work.
And that was after I made an effort to downplay my own contributions by attributing the stuff I did entirely myself to the team, not just the stuff I had help with