Not feminist enough?
When I was in college, several of my good friends were leaders in the campus feminist group. While they held support sessions for rape victims and developed protocols for police officers responding to domestic violence calls, I mostly stuck to my problem sets and figured the 70’s had taken care of most of the problem.
This summer, I had the chance to catch up with one of my friends again. She was headed for a new position as assistant professor in a biology field at a major research university. We started talking about our experiences in grad school and postdoc. Strangely, I was now the one thinking (and writing– on this blog) about gender issues, specifically in academia. I got the sense that many of the themes that occupy my attention were a good deal more muted in her field and department, where the gender ratio was much closer to 50-50.
Unfortunately, one month later, she sent me an email saying that the all-male organizers of a recent conference did their networking at a strip club every night after the sessions!
That’s actually quite pathetic.
Comment by Lab Lemming — September 27, 2006 @ 3:15 pm