Tales from the Shark Tank

My friend Dorothea has been going on at length about the need to change the basic culture of IT, and of Library Tech specifically, pointing out that it is male dominated and decidedly unwelcoming to women due to blatant sexism. It seems to me that that’s true, not just for librarianship, or even IT, but across the board. She’s called more than one group on sexist jokes. In response, she’s been asked to point such behavior out to them in the future, which she has rightly declined to do. It isn’t up to her to think for them or teach them basic manners, and she knows it.

I remember clearly the resentment when ethnic and racist jokes were becoming unacceptable in general company. It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that what the resentment is about is being forced to think about what they’re doing. More, it’s about being forced to see outside their own small minds, forced to actually consider the effect of their words on others than their intended audience. In their own small cliques, they speak as if they were just talking to themselves, though what it says about them that they talk to themselves in such terms is another, and much longer, discussion.

This is the same issue, really; only the names have been changed. And I suspect it will play out in much the same way. I’m not sure we will ever change the way the men who have currently offended Dorothea think. I know that there were a number of older lawyers and judges (like the one who called me “little lady”) who never quite learned to take female attorneys seriously. They did learn that they had to work with us, that they had to treat us respectfully, and that the law could no longer be a “men’s club”. Now I don’t see nearly so much of the underlying attitude or patronization. When I began practice I was seen as a “lady lawyer”, and slotted into family law because of it. Now I’m as likely to be seen as an attorney who happens to be a woman. So if the boys in the IT locker room change their behavior, that is enough for me. Because if the next ones coming up don’t hear this sort of sexism as acceptable, then they won’t think of it in the first place. And that is how change occurs.