I’m going to get a little real and a little controversial today, so before I say anything, let me say that these are my opinions and my opinions alone, and not to be taken as any official opinion or statement from my erstwhile employers. Let’s remember that this is a personal blog where I talk about personal issues but where I also talk about fashion, food, and fluffy stuff. Official political statements are published elsewhere.
I walk past this chalkboard in the hallway every day, and every day, I slow down just a little bit to look at the questions it asks. I don’t know what the original purpose was for these questions, but they’re ones worth considering. For ourselves. For society. Are we doing things right? Are we doing “right” things? How do we know?
Anyone with a working internet connection has seen the discussion going on over military sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. Whatever the reality of the statistics {as a statistician, I’m always trying to trace the numbers and I haven’t had a chance to comb through all the reports yet}, the talk is at the point where people find out I’m serving and ask if I’m afraid, not of war but of my fellow service members. It’s at the point where venerated mentors question whether or not they would want their their children to serve. What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? Are we doing “right” things in all of this mess? How do we know?
Sexual harassment is prevalent everywhere, not just in the military, and while more and more men are reporting and dealing with sexual harassment and assault cases, I can’t speak to their experiences. And frankly, they don’t concern me as much as what I’m seeing happening to women. This article from a woman who talks about her experience coming up through the world of computer programmers is just one of many I’ve found talking about issues going on in other workplaces, but when she talks about workplace prejudice against women, I find a lot of her words resonating with experiences I’ve had early on in the military, but also in academic environments, on project teams, and while consulting. And I’ve found dozens of women who have felt the same, no matter what workplace they’re in.
It’s been a slow awakening to the problem. I’ve seen it in myself and in other women who have been successful in their careers. Maybe we just don’t realize it, because we’ve made things work, or maybe we just don’t want to upset the apple cart by drawing attention to a controversial problem. When I break it down, I can honestly say that I’m not afraid for myself. I know the legal procedures, I know how to say “no” and give people the look of death, and if worse comes to worse, I’m a combatives instructor and I’ve done MMA. But the fact that I know all of this, that I’m grateful I have all of these skills, that I’ve had to use all of these skills, and that I’m not alone in this, and I know there’s a problem.
Lately, it’s begun to scare me because there are a lot of young women cadets who have sought my mentorship. I look at them, and the strength coach in me realizes that I probably outweigh them by fifty pounds, the jaded part of me realizes just how innocent and naive they are, and I know that their skill sets haven’t been honed by what’s out there, that they don’t even know what’s out there, and I’m not just afraid. I’m terrified. It ticks off some primeval instinct in me and I want to alternately cry for them and kill anyone who touches them. It’s not too much different for my male cadets, because they’re just as young and innocent and liable to walk into bad situations. Is this a mothering instinct or am I just crazy? If this is what parenting is like, shoot me now. I’ll never make it through it without killing someone.
So what are we doing right in all this?
Talking about it, for one. Starting the dialog that helps us identify the problems is the first step to effecting change.
Determining what “right” looks like, what is and is not acceptable, and holding that line. As a society, we’re not good at this. We either scream “I’m offended” at first blush or we sit on a complaint for fear of making waves until it’s gone too far. We have to figure out what “right” behavior is, draw and communicate the lines clearly, and enforce them. It seems like we’re all working on that.
Figuring out the metrics. The statistics look frightening right now, but extrapolation isn’t the best way of finding a trend. Let’s look for some correlation and causality here. Are more reports coming in because there are more incidents, or because the reporting procedures are getting better and more people are reporting? Or is it a mixture of both? Let’s figure out why the reports are going up, figure out the right statistics to measure, and figure out whether or not what we’re doing is any good. In the military, there are tons of programs in place, reform of our judicial code, improved reporting procedures, and victim advocacy programs. Those are getting continually measured and revamped.
Does this mean we’re doing “right” things?
Yes and no. There’s pressure for action, but the wrong action is taking place. You don’t fix a societal norm by training it away with Powerpoint slides. This is being trained into society early. We’re training society how to treat women – how to treat each other, frankly, and right now, we’re not doing a good job of that. What are we doing wrong? What wrong examples are being perpetuated? We need to figure out where all of this is coming from before we can hope to address it.
Also, I’m not keen on all these programs that go into effect after the incident. There are a lot of us who don’t want the incident to happen at all. I’d like to see a lot more preventative measures going into effect. Deterrence. Massive punishment for perpetrators. Procedures to enforce safe work environments. Inspections. Something to address what my EOD brethren call “before the boom.”
Then there’s addressing societal norms when they’re not conducive to fixing the problem. It seems like for all the advances women have made in society, the farther we go, the more we suffer for the dissonance in society’s models of what a woman should be. I’ve thought about this a lot while looking for role models. Society somehow has contracted the notions that a woman can’t be both beautiful and smart, can’t be tough without being a bitch, can’t smile without being considered dumb, can’t be kind without being considered a flirt, can’t refuse to flirt without being considered frigid and cold, and so forth. And yet we’re expected and encouraged to idolize and seek out intelligence, toughness, beauty, humor, kindness, warmth, and professionalism all at once. It’s enough to give you a personality crisis. It’s one of the reasons I’m self-conscious about this blog. Am I just making life more difficult for myself? Not only am I a woman, but while I blog about science, math, travel, and my job, I also blog about considerably more fluffy stuff.
More and more, I have to ask myself, why shouldn’t that be okay? Why can’t I just embrace that as part of myself? One of my office mates loves fly fishing to the point where he’s talking about opening up a fishing business when he retires from the Army, and the other is an amateur woodworker, a charity running fund-raiser, and learning photo editing and graphic design. That doesn’t detract from who they are as professionals. These are our hobbies, our interests, pieces of our personality. In a social world, these are becoming not only more sharable thanks to technology, but thanks to social etiquette, things we’re encouraged to share. It’s an insight into our personalities, and we should be okay with that.
So what changes can we make right now?
It’s going to take a lot of work. Changing society’s perceptions is like steering the Titanic’s gargantuan brother. Spin the wheel, and about fifty years later, things start to move. But we need to keep working on that. That’s a long term goal. In the near term, I’m supporting advocacy groups that help support and mentor young officers and soldiers and tell them how to deal with negative environments and situations before an incident can happen. Our Margaret Corbin Forum at West Point {named for the Revolutionary War heroine who took over her husband’s cannon when he fell and became the first woman in America to receive a pension from Congress for military service} does a great job of matching up young women with mentors who can help them navigate rough waters in the workplace, and runs a very proactive dialog about these issues.
I’m also trying to figure out where on the scale I need to be in order to be successful as a mathematician in a technical field, as an officer, as a wife to my husband, eventually as a mother, and as a woman in general. Lord knows I have my issues, but I’m trying to learn and I’m trying to teach, and I’m keeping the dialog going.
Thanks for listening.
