Sometimes its embarassing to be female

I was sitting in the lab today working when I overheard the following conversation:

Girl in lab: but our robot looks UGLY
Her project partner: it just has to work
Girl in lab: but more than half of things is how they look! If they don't look good...

On behalf of my sex: I apologize. I don't even have an excuse.

I'm sure she has a good side. In her defense she was a lot more moronic when she was in high school. She's much less rabidly feminist than she use to be, although the irony of seeing her lean over a guy's desk in a low-cut blouse and smiling to get what she wants does amuse me. "Working to break her own path in a man's field" my ass. Put a shirt on and cry me a river.

Its not that I don't enjoy the context myself where showing a little skin is ok, its just unprofessional to use it as an academic advantage. It begs the question "could you make it if you were a guy?"

And its not that I have a problem with the core ideas of what I believe were the original concepts of feminism. I just think somewhere something got revamped and went terribly terribly wrong...for example... I was talking to an old friend of mine who I had fallen out of touch with...guess we can call her "Bit" for this story. She had invited me to join a book club she was running. I like books...the book she was reading sounded somewhat interesting when she explained the premise. I was planning to attend.

Later on I was comatosely sipping my hot chocolate. I don't like coffee but as a resident of New England I'm somehow obligated to buy Dunkin Donuts products, so I guess this is what happens. It does wake me up a little...blood sugar I guess. Maybe its just a good placebo. I don't care: it works.

Anyway, so drinking my hot chocolate catching up with another old friend...we can call her Purple when Bit comes up and the two of them start about the book club...which is apparently the entitled "Feminist Science Fiction Book Club."

Pika: Oh man, no, you didn't tell me about that part
Bit: Its not like that! Its just a book with a female main character!
Pika: Then...why is a feminst book club reading it if it isn't a feminst book?

My friend who was the victim of the Vex parts on his senior project was sitting at the table too and laughing kinda quietly by this point. Purple and Bit look at him briefly and then the topic was dropped.

I mean, seriously? How does having a female main character make a book feminist? Does that make 12th Night a feminist book? Is the Iliad a feminist book? Its about the Trojan War...and the Trojan war is about Helen...right? Hey...Lolita is about a girl right?

And while I'm on a good rant about this: fuck affirmative action for women.

All of my negative sexist verbal sparring experiences in my career and educational experience have at some point included the following insult: "You never would have ___ if you were a guy." Fill it in with anything you want, I wouldn't have had the internship I had, I wouldn't have gotten into this university, I wouldn't have recieved the scholarship I did, I wouldn't have gotten (insert award name here), I wouldn't have the job offers I had, I wouldn't have this I wouldn't have that.

Here is the worst part: there isn't a lot you can say to that because, well, thanks to affirmative action, it could technically be true. Congradulations: you have sucessfully coined a loophole which will continue to call into question the merit of any sign of recognition any female recieves for her good work.

Many universities really want to boast x% women, and some are letting standards slide to do it. Some schools publically admit to it.

This problem is so bad that I don't even blame my interviewers or professors for being a little extra skeptical of me because I'm female. How can they tell at first glance that I'm not just one of the girls who has been handed from outreach program to outreach program up through middle school and then admitted because I was pretty close to good enough and rounded out some quota nicely? One of those girls with no real desire for engineering at all? The discipline has been dressed up in these outreach programs, they try to make it look fun, easy, and even glamorous. When it comes down to the real work... well...its work. It isn't always fun. That's just reality. A lot of women were herded in not really realizing that...not given any real exposure to the field...and nobody cares. The outreach program can brag how many female engineers it put into college, the school can boast a high quota of women enrolled. Nobody seems to notice the girls who might not graduate on time because they wound up changing majors...two...three times when they found out that none of it was quite as advertized.

Don't get me wrong: I volunteer in many engineering outreach programs myself. Many of them are good, but you have to judge program to program.

Then there are the spoiled brats who believe that doing something with two X chromosomes instead of one is a landmark of itself. These are the women who will tell you the names and dates of things such as the first spacewalk done by a female, the first female congressperson...

Are you saying women can not compete as equals to men in intellectual and political pursuits? That women need their own special set of firsts and records because they can't cut it competing with the men? The only parallel to that I can think of are the Special Olympics.

...And people say I'm sexist.

Additionally, while most of the women who really don't belong in engineering do get a different major by the time they are upperclassmen the sterotypes set by the underclassmen still permeiate the environment. Now you have the worst of both worlds: the graduating percentage of females in my major at my university hovering at a scrawny 5% with the lurking full dose of skepticism inspired by all the girls who flooded the lower classes out then left.

Why do "feminists" and politicians feel a need to hand sexist persons more ammunition to continue to make things worse? Why do they continue to push a system which make people who wouldn't normally be sexist skeptical of the professional skills of women candidates due to a flooding of underqualified candidates admitted to make some quota? The policy shows a total disconnect from reality and lack of research into the realities of the workplace and academic life. I don't know if the same thing is true of minorities who also have affirmative action programs: but I sure hope it isn't. Its a pretty rotten situation to be in.

Really talented women will find their own path. You can show women some of the opportunities available, but you can't just create excellent female engineers by declaring that a certain percentage of the accepted students should be female.