beetiger

(Several days of stress, panic, fatigue and other not-so-pleasantness omitted for your convenience.)

This office has some of the oddest, most conventional gender politics I’ve ever seen. For one thing, the men and women eat lunch separately. When I’m not eating lunch at my desk, I sit at a big oval table in the lab, with a largish collection of the female lab folks. We talk about kids, diets, exercise, and food, mostly. Over in the cafeteria, there’s a big table of men that always eat together. I sat there one of the first days I was here, trying to check out various social groups. I was welcomed, but it was quickly obvious that there was something weird going on. They talk about politics, weapons, cars, and sports.

The person who delivers packages here calls me (and all of the women here) “lady”. One of the men I’ve been working with in the pilot plant calls me “girly girl”. Last night, I was having trouble hammering the lid on to a pail, so I grabbed a strong looking passer-by to help. I meantioned to another coworker that I’d gotten someone with a better swing to help me. She smiled and quipped. “Oh, good. You found someone male.”

The weird thing is, I get absolutely no vibe of any sort of disrespect here. It’s as if a “separate but equal” style of diversity training had taken effect, where everyone really believes in the competence of all of their colleagues while not having adjusted their personal schema of gender in the slightest. Part of me wants to stand up and protest, that knee-jerk feminist in me. But part of me wants to recognize it for what it really seems to be, an odd sort of camraderie. Anyway, I’m not sure if I’d rather be known as “that politically-correct girly girl”.