Up: Gender Benders
Because of their unique position in the computing profession, women have to deal with some problems, caused by malice or ignorance, that men never face. This is a collection of ways women have been able to respond to inappropriate comments with wit and of cases where mistakes were so egregious as to be laughable in themselves.
Being in the minority in the upper levels of the computing profession, women are sometimes mistreated through ignorance or malice, which some women have learned to respond to with wit and panache. Janet Wixson, an executive director of academic computing, told the following stories:
Shortly after my appointment, my boss, V.P. of Administration, called a meeting to discuss the problems of the center. All of the attendees were male and deans or equivalent high positions. The discussion in that meeting was quite heated with adamant remarks about the problems in computing on campus. Towards the end of the meeting, one of the attendees started pounding on the table and reviewed the names of the previous male directors of the center, ending with the comment, ``No offense meant, Janet, but we need a man in this job.'' I responded with, ``I'm willing to do almost anything to fix the problems in the Computer Center, but a sex change operation is out of the question.''Another time, I received in the mail an advertisement from a company that sells disk drives. The advertisement was included in a box that contained Havana cigars. (Obviously, this company assumed that the mailing list they had of CIOs was all men). I wrote a letter to the V.P. of marketing for the company telling him that I thought that one of his competitors were trying to undermine the intelligence of his marketing organization by sending cigars to female decision makers in his company's name. Two days later, I received a Federal Express delivery from him - it was a bottle of perfume with a letter of apology. I thought his response was a good recovery.
Prof. Linda Ott told the following story:
When I first starting teaching 15 years ago, I was married, and both my husband and I had teaching positions in the same department. One day, when my department head was sitting in on my class, one of my students referred to me as Mrs. Ott. I was feeling pretty frustrated by that point since I had noticed that I kept getting called ``Mrs.'' while my husband was called ``Dr.'', so I looked at him and said ``What do you call Karl?,'' and he replied ``Dr. Ott''. So I told him that I'd appreciate it if he would use the same title for me since I had the same degree. Well, he wasn't the type to quiet down quickly, so he retorted, ``And what does Karl think of your feeling that way?,'' to which I replied angrily, ``It doesn't matter what he thinks; it was a helluva lot harder to get a Ph. D. than it was to get married.'' Word apparently got out to the students after that because I wasn't called ``Mrs.'' for quite some time.
Marty Hiller, a graduate student in computer science, reported the following incident:
Several years ago, a campus career recruitment poster made quite a splash. The poster portrayed two men in shirts and ties getting a printout from a line printer. They had dropped the fanfold paper all over the floor as they ogled a woman walking by in a miniskirt. The caption: ``We think about more than just work here at Company X.'' Outraged women began tearing the posters off the walls, then (insert light bulb here) they decided instead to make photocopies and put them up in great numbers all over campus. Meanwhile, the recruiters figured out something was wrong and tried desperately to get rid of them. A number of women went to the recruitment talk to disrupt it and found that they were the only ones there. Several spoof posters also appeared, for example one with two women in businesslike garb poring over a printout while a scantily clad beach-boy walked by, with the caption, ``We think about more than just sex here at Company X.''
There is another class of stories where the offending behavior is so ridiculous that one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. For example, a computer scientist who led a study of computer science departments reported:
A member of our team reported interviewing the person at a certain institute who had the primary responsibility for the first-year course. The interviewee was certain there were no problems for women and said so in all the ways that our interview asked about it. Our interviewer had trouble being polite while recording these replies because every time the interviewer looked up to face the interviewee, it was hard to ignore a huge computer printout of a naked woman that covered the door that was immediately behind the interviewee - indeed, the interviewee was framed by this naked woman printout throughout the interview.
A frequent indignity to which women are exposed is being improperly addressed as ``Mr.'' A few such incidents are classics. For example, when I received an award from the EECS department at MIT for my writings on women and computer science, the letter was addressed to ``Mr. Ellen Spertus.''
A female computer scientist with an ambiguous first name once received a letter, improperly addressed with ``Mr.'' The body of the letter was: ``I attended your presentation at the IEEE Conference on Computer Workstations. Please send me copies of your related technical reports.''
Perhaps the most outrageous story along these lines was reported to a mailing list of women in computer science. A graduate student applying for faculty positions reported her frustration with receiving a letter from one department that was misaddressed ``Mr.''. What made this otherwise ordinary occurrence unusual was that the department head whose signature was at the bottom of the letter was also a woman!
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