This article resonated with me: Why Are Men Still Explaining Things to Women? https://tinyurl.com/
This has been my experience in academia for so many years, I can't count them. How many times my expertise has been ignored by men who need to explain to me how it really works. How many times I've laughed it off, retorted with a sardonic comment, or simply stood there and accepted the idiocy of it all. Mostly the latter. How many times have I done that? How many times have I kept my mouth shut, when I should have opened it and said 'please please please please please stop talking' (like the woman in Hemingway's story). I should have said that so many times, instead of stewing about the injustice and idiocy of it all. What I have done is discussed it with other women, ad nauseam. Today in fact was another such conversation with a woman twenty years younger than me, who has been raised to be respectful and to defer to her elders. In academia, that means to older white men. She has been rudely treated by her doctoral mentor, and he continues to behave that way toward her, even when she has called him on it in a respectful way. I have also called him on it several times. He simply doesn't and won't listen. So many of his type of men are rude, crude, arrogant and conceited. They truly think they know it all. And really, how could we expect them to think any other way when very few people (men or women) have ever challenged them on anything? These men don't know what it is like to be corrected for anything they do, and they don't like it when someone tries. I tried when I was younger, but ended up being labeled as difficult. I was told to smile more. I was told that they knew best. The problem was that they didn't. Sometimes they knew best. Statistics would back that up. No one knows best all of the time. Sometimes they knew best, sometimes they didn't. I have watched men open their mouths and stick their foot in them so many times, I've lost count. They rarely apologized for their arrogant or boorish behavior. Rarely apologized for shouting people down, talking over them, interrupting them, finishing their sentences, destroying their thought processes--in other words, rarely apologized for their bad behavior. In nearly all the cases I've seen in academia, the people they did this to were women--PhD students and post-docs. You take a lot of crap in academia, and you might think you'd be prepared for some of it based on how the world is and has been toward women over the years. But you're not prepared to be told that you're essentially ignorant when you know the opposite is true. You're not prepared to be told to keep your mouth shut as has happened to me several times in the past couple of years when I tried to correct someone's rude and humiliating behavior toward women who were simply trying to be professional about finishing their doctoral work. This particular man was irritated because his student wanted to 'discuss' some ideas with him; he thought she should just accept his ideas as the correct ones. These men are pathetic. They are threatened by women, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why, because these men sit in the positions of power and prestige, not the women they treat like crap. I think what sets them off is the knowledge that some women (like me and the doctoral student) cannot and will not be broken by these men. That was tried on me to no avail when I was younger. My will and my soul would simply not be broken. What is the meaning in that? The meaning in it is that God has a purpose for those lives. God did not want me to be broken. So if I ended up where I am supposed to be, then my life has had meaning. I have stood up for what I thought was fair and just and right. I have dared to correct men, to contradict them, to state my own opinions, to believe in my own ideas. I am proud of myself, proud that I believed in my own ideas and the ideas of other women. My most cited article, and the one that I am most proud of, was one that was rudely ridiculed by a male reviewer. Rather than being crushed by the review, I became livid. I wrote to the editor of the journal to which I had submitted my article, to criticize him for allowing such a review to reach an author. It caused all sorts of repercussions, for which I am glad to this day. I doubt that the editor had ever received a letter like the one he received from me. I still have the letter I wrote and the response I received from that editor. I should have framed both. But it was a glaring indication that I was the author of research work that had threatened the reviewer, one of the reigning gurus in the field, and that was over twenty years ago. Another example of the same was when I thought I was having an interesting conversation at a conference dinner with a well-known Norwegian professor about a particular signaling pathway and the expertise my research group had with how to detect proteins on that pathway. I don't remember if I offered advice or help with some of the detection methods, but my God, how insulted he became. How dare I assume that he needed help. He regaled the entire dinner table with how rude Americans were and how rudely they had treated his sister when she had been studying in the USA. The saving grace of that experience was the Norwegian women who supported me and who later told me privately that he was an arrogant asshole. They laughed at him behind his back. But no one dared stand up to him at the dinner table; he was allowed to be rude to me.
So many 'learned men' in academia are always saying how the reigning gurus in the field in which they themselves work are wrong and that they instead are right. It's envy; they all want to be the reigning gurus. The most disappointing aspect of academia was finding out that there is very little real thinking going on. The search for truth is sidestepped in the quest for power, prestige, and money. Most of the intellectually-stimulating and creative discussions I've had, have occurred outside of academia, with non-academics. Perhaps it's always been that way. I am so glad I am nearing the end of my academic career. I will not miss the male privilege and the bad behavior, the arrogance, the rudeness, the lack of creativity and the lack of real thinking. I will not miss the staid way of doing things. I will not miss the dinosaurs. And I am fairly certain that they will not miss me.
