I knew exactly how she felt

[shermarama]

(Because of course having broken the oh-I-haven't-posted-anything-for-ages barrier I can now stick something short up without having to think about all the other things I was going to put up)

“I’m so glad to meet an engineer,” she enthused, “all the other women I talked to here were in marketing or law or something. I thought it was meant to be about IT.”

Which is the story of a woman who works in computing going to an event designed for school-age girls to meet women who work in IT, which covers one large reason I generally stayed away from all the Women In Science And Engineering events. They were mostly full of women who didn't really do science and engineering. (The other is that I really don't like being told I should socialise, network or otherwise bond with particular people just because we're the same gender, rather than because we've got something that's important to us in common. (Maybe lots of women have 'being a woman' as something important to them?))

I can't remember why I was looking at something involving QMUL's WISE group a few months ago, but I discovered that the main people running it were two sociologists and a sound artist, which, you know, I don't care what technology you use to make sounds, it's still being done for the purposes of art, not science or engineering. Generally in the past if I've wanted to talk to people who were actually enthusiastic about science and engineering, I've talked to other people who are studying it or working in it, not people who enjoy going to events which are based around the sociology of women in science. I don't have a problem with people who have an interest in the sociology of women in science, I'm just not very interested in it myself, or at least much, much less interested in it than I am in actual science. But, I'm really not keen on the people who do that being taken as, because they declare themselves to be, representative of women working in science and technology.

This article, though, makes me wonder if I should start going to events like this after all. If I think these sorts of events ought to go away because their unrepresentative cross-section makes them more of a barrier than an encouragement, perhaps I should make the effort to make them more representative? To break down the barrier and let some girl who's still at school know that it's not all sociologists and lawyers? Or maybe, you know, we should stop telling schoolgirls that women going into science and technology still need specialist support networks to do so?

Comments

[shermarama]

If 'incredibly posh' put you off Imperial, why not Oxford? Perhaps I got it wrong by going for an interview at St. Hilda's, but nowhere else has anyone ever told me to 'oh, go on, say something. Your accent is so quaint!'

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

ack its sad you didn't try Oxbridge and afaik other colleges such as wadem are much better

[shermarama]

I did try Oxbridge, as in I had interviews at a couple of colleges, but didn't get any offers. And then I went to Durham, and transferred to Sussex after a year because I was fed up of being one of the Novelty Non-Posh.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hah, this is something of a sore point! I was dead set against Oxbridge for ages! But my (good, but not posh) school organised a trip up to Ox on a sunny summer day, hardly any students about, our teacher being v careful to cherry-pick our college visits to get a broader picture of things. My best friend (who now has a Phd in Biochemistry) was sold immediately. Another of my best friends (in the year above) had already accepted a place. There'd be at least two 'normal' people there... so I applied.

But I still wanted to go to Bath! My Mum, my teachers and even my interviewer for the Bath CompSci course said I'd be better off at Oxford if they offered me a place. I eventually caved in, went to Oxford, made three sets of friends almost entirely from state schools... and nearly failed my first year, upon which Mum said 'maybe you should have gone to Bath' and I was VERY ANGRY with her. I prob would have dropped out then (my boyfriend at the time did!) if I hadn't been enjoying the social side of things so much. I hated most of the (highly theoretical) course and it put me off programming for a long time.

[shermarama]

I did tours of the various universities with my likewise good but not posh sixth form college, and I wasn't sure about Oxford but it seemed less poncey than Cambridge, and since it seemed I ought to apply to one or the other I picked Oxford, but then I wasn't really that bothered when I didn't get an offer, especially after the interview experience at St. Hilda's. (I don't think I'd even considered Imperial. All the London places seemed to merge in to one from up north, and not a particularly special one.) So I went to Durham, because that was notionally the best (or most Oxbridge-like) of the ones I got offers from, and there was someone else I'd been vaguely friends with from my sixth form college doing Physics there too (incidentally a girl; two out of the ten women on a course of 150 or so were both from an old mining college in Wigan) so we both had that minor head-start on friends, and then we found ourselves a bunch more 'normals' to be friends with. (Easier because our college had very helpfully put anyone Northern, state-school or otherwise non-posh in the small block across the river from everyone else.) But although the non-posh were there if you looked, and there were several reasons I left Durham after a year, at least one of them was that it was tedious being such a sidelined cultural minority there. Durham was full of public-school types who weren't bright enough to go to Oxbridge but really wanted to cling on to a boarding-school-esque environment, which just turned them even more hideously stereotypical, I think.

Anyway, I think I would have done better at my first time round at university if it wasn't for the tremendous reverence there is for Oxbridge and its wannabes. It's not always the best place for people but there's this thing that says they're the best so you have to try. Ho hum.