We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
I’m a guy so I realize I don’t see or understand everything from women’s perspective, but I’m genuinely surprised by this. I’ve worked for decades at companies with mostly engineers and mostly men, and my experience is that engineers have on average much more progressive views than, say, my neighbors. My current company recently switched from a male to a female CEO and I haven’t even heard anyone mention her gender, much less express any negative views in connection to her gender. My previous employer also had a female CEO and it just wasn’t a thing on people’s mind. At my current employer we have anonymous surveys to find problems in the workplace, and there were exactly zero people who reported observing any sexist actions.
I’ve heard sexist remarks twice in 20 years, and both times I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t know what to do or say before the conversation had already moved on. So if I’m bad at speaking up when it happens, it’s only because I didn’t get enough practice.
