Does anybody work in a STEM field?

I saw this on Tumblr today: Link

That left me speechless. I expected teasing, but not that.

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"Be yourself, no matter what. Some will adore you, and some will hate everything about you, but who cares?

It's your life. Make the most out of it."

Wow. Speechless...

I work in Engineering, and I am currently in possession of a vagina, FWIW. I don't have a degree though, so I always wonder how much that counts when asked about STEM.

The workplace is nothing like those horror stories of school. The more I hear about college, the more it sounds like high school really is just creeping into extended education in many ways.
Sure, we do get a few wet behind the ears interns/first job placements, and it takes them a bit to adjust. And then there are some old farts who are untouchable who like to encourage the fresh morons and help them get themselves fired, so blatent sexism is not completely absent... But HR WILL do something about it if you document document document and don't retaliate, keeping your own nose clean.

I bet though, that some of the big money players in the tech world DO allow this juvenile behavior in their workplace. All in the name of keeping their "top producers" feeling big and manly. *sigh*

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Presto
Wow. Speechless...

I work in Engineering, and I am currently in possession of a vagina, FWIW. I don't have a degree though, so I always wonder how much that counts when asked about STEM.

The workplace is nothing like those horror stories of school. The more I hear about college, the more it sounds like high school really is just creeping into extended education in many ways.
Sure, we do get a few wet behind the ears interns/first job placements, and it takes them a bit to adjust. And then there are some old farts who are untouchable who like to encourage the fresh morons and help them get themselves fired, so blatent sexism is not completely absent... But HR WILL do something about it if you document document document and don't retaliate, keeping your own nose clean.

I bet though, that some of the big money players in the tech world DO allow this juvenile behavior in their workplace. All in the name of keeping their "top producers" feeling big and manly. *sigh*

As a last year college student (thank freaking God!). The bolded is true. From where I attend, it's exactly like high school, with school loans. As an undergrad, I thought that going to college will make people "grow up". Boy, how wrong was I.

As with that tumblr post, what the hell was that?

Wow. I work in engineering, and back in the day females were an oddity as far as school but it was not like this. The workplace is different, but I suppose it helps that I can curse you into tears.

I am betting that most of the men speaking are the neckbeard type with zero social skills.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."

I will preface this by saying I am in the South - east Texas, to be exact - which has it's own special level of sexist fuckery.

I dealt with it from elementary school, unfortunately. I'm incredibly thankful my parents were and are supportive of me being my geeky, nerdy, science-y self. My teachers? Not so much. I had a select few teachers that supported me, and to this day I remember their names and feel grateful to them. My pastor? Forget it. Adult friends of the family? Forget most of them too. I was repeatedly told I asked too many questions "for a girl" and that I need to stop being who I was and be who men wanted. I went to high school in the late 90s. Even then, I was harassed simply for being in advanced classes. I thought college would be a kind of utopia. Community college was fantastic - most of the people attending are female, so the STEM classes were fairly even. But once I transferred to a university it all went out the window. I was the ONLY female in a few of my classes. One of the boys was a football player - he wasn't even B-squad and he was treated like the second coming of Jeezus. (There are three religions in Texas - Gunz, doG, and football).

The harassment was much more subtle than what the story up there was like, but it existed just the same. On our "group" day/project, they ordered pizza once I got there - all of them claiming they would split the cost of it. Once the pizza arrived, every one of them had conviently "forgotten" their wallets. The implication was crystal clear to me - I was the woman and I was expected to feed them. The professor in one particular class would also turn a blind eye to *them* cheating, but refused to answer my emails and pleas for help. I didn't get an answer until 10 MONTHS after class had ended - and that was only to inform me that he was retired and so he couldn't help me. He never even remembered who I was. There were 8 of us in the class. I was the only female. On day one, he greeted every one of the boys by name. I was inconsequential, and forgotten. The person I bonded the most with was my female TA in lab. She understood was it was like there, to be a woman in boy's club. She understood my depression and made me feel like someone cared. (To be fair, I had a few teachers who were extraordinarily supportive of me, and my advisor adored me. It was the school culture as whole that was extremely oppressive. Most of the girls were there to find a wallet. I was there for the science.)

I eventually had a nervous breakdown over the way the school treated me. I went back to my community college and enrolled in a STEM certification sequence there (networking). While there were only a couple of females in it too, the vibe was completely different. So if anyone is dealing with it at school or afraid of dealing with it if they go (back), then I'd take a good look around campus and sit in on a class if they'll let you. Even schools in the roughly the same area have completely different cultures and views and treat people completely differently.

As far as the workplace goes? It's just like the schools - work cultures vary as wildly as the school ones do. I've been lucky - the only place I've worked with an awful view of women was Wally World and they treat everyone equally contemptfully. It helped that at the time, I didn't need the job, and so they learned that I didn't take any shit. I learned how to stand up for myself to a superior in the workplace. I wish I had remembered that when I went off to school.

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." - Oscar Wilde

I work in STEM. I never had an issue in the workplace or school, but I wouldn't be surprised if the harassment is getting more vile. I hear people widely saying things which I just cannot imagine having been said in public in the '90s.

It's not that there wasn't sexism in the '90s, but it was more impersonal and non-violent, based on ignoring or dismissing a woman, not a targeted campaign to destroy her emotional well-being. Rape culture in particular seems more pervasive than I remember. It seems like many people actively hate women, whereas before they would have simply have considered women irrelevant.

I come from the other side of this coin. I'm in a very female-dominated profession and have seen men get treated poorly by female coworkers and essentially become segregated in the workplace. Often the hens want to maintain a hen house atmosphere and don't like the changes that a man can bring into their environment. I often wish I'd gone into a male-dominated profession instead (but I'm sorry for you ladies that have to put up with sexist crap). Sigh.

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Ketchup
I come from the other side of this coin. I'm in a very female-dominated profession and have seen men get treated poorly by female coworkers and essentially become segregated in the workplace. Often the hens want to maintain a hen house atmosphere and don't like the changes that a man can bring into their environment. I often wish I'd gone into a male-dominated profession instead (but I'm sorry for you ladies that have to put up with sexist crap). Sigh.

Sad isn't it? Men and women are equally awful...they just differ in how they go about it.

And @yurble,

What you wrote is quite scary. Society should be improving and not devolving.

@Amethyst,

Nothing you can say about the south surprises me. I am from the south and I can tell you that they are backwards as hell and proud of it. I had a dude at the bus stop get mad at me because I didn't have any lotion because women are "supposed" to always have lotion with them. If you look at my siggy, you'll know I think the majority of people are shit no matter where they are from. But the South has a special brand of ignorance with it when it comes to age, race and gender.

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"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all."
~Sigmund Freud

I looked at that site, SMH that's all I can say... Currently I am in a STEM field as a software developer. Fortunately I haven't encountered any of the blatant BS that some of the other posters have described. But then again my case isn't the usual as I entered this arena quite a bit later in life. I had to totally switch careers after having worked as a chemist for nearly 20 years. After having been unemployed for 13 months after my last chemist employer folded, I snagged the current job that I have in 2010 after which I then completed an accelerated Comp. Sci Masters program. There were roughly an equal number of men and women in the program. Although I'm the only female developer in my workplace, I luckily haven't had any issues with my fellow developer colleagues-they've been very nice. It also helps that we all work from our homes.

That kind of thing happens in todays' world? I cannot believe it, holy shit. It seems like story from my dad's era in 70s! I can imagine old men in engineering do that kind of harrassment, but young college students? What is wrong with humanity? i am glad my college classmates are generally nice; it is inevitable that some of them (girls included) think women belong in the kitchen, but they were polite and would never think of making rape jokes...because they are not sick fucks.

Rape threats are entirely on different level. That's very low.

I currently work in STEM field too, and I work in Japan-which were notorious for that kind of shit. This is a moderately large research group with 30-40 people in here, but only 4 females. But as far as I observed, never a single time a coworker or a supervisor undermines me or other women in my department because of our gender. In fact, they don't recognize it at all. All researchers are researchers, no matter male or female, as long you work hard, you stay, safely...it is not like we have time to taunt our coworkers either.
The company has strong policy against that kind of things too.