Informal Special Treatment Harmful

Not only can institutionalized special treatment be harmful, but so can individual initiative. Many instances exist of mixed attempts to encourage women:

• A female professor taught an electrical engineering course and announced that she especially wanted the women in the class to do well. During tests, she went around to the few women in the class and would try to help them. The female student I talked to said this behavior made her very uncomfortable, and she felt that the men in the class resented it.

• A female computer science graduate student had these experiences:

  My undergraduate advisor consistently encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply for scholarships and fellowships, and basically gave me a strong consistent message that I was good at this stuff....[While I have had many bad experiences,] I have had a number of friends, bosses, advisors, over the years who have been very supportive, some seeming to disregard my gender, others aware of it and patting themselves on the back for being so good about recognizing my talent anyway. The classic example of this is the well-meaning professor who asks every woman student he has opportunity to talk with, about whatever topic, `How are things here for you as a woman?'

• When a female computer science student visited a top graduate school to which she had been admitted, she told me that a male graduate student presented each of the women with a rose and told each that he wanted her to come to that school. When I heard this story, I asked a female graduate student in the department whether this student was trying to sabotage female recruitment. She answered:

  It turns out a bunch of people who were doing a lot of work on organizing the recruiting weekend had decided, off the cuff, that they thought this could be nice (as in: what should we do with the leftover roses). So it wasn't this one grad student working on his own, and it was not an attempt to sabotage recruiting.

  Its effect, however, was slimy and sabotaging. As you note. Some of the women decided it was the one unsocialized nerd, others thought it was strange but disregarded it, and others realized fully how totally inappropriate it was even as the rose presentation was happening. One of these let the deliverer know, too, what she thought of it.

All these cases have in common that women are conscious of being treated differently from men by someone who is trying to encourage women. Most women do not like this sort of treatment, although they are grateful for encouragement when it is sincerely offered. Nevertheless, it would also be wrong to suggest that professors not encourage women if it does not come naturally to them and that computer professionals should be as obnoxious to women as they often are to men. Additionally, people disagree on when special treatment is positive and when it is negative. For example, one woman objected to there being a class entitled ``Women and Computers'':

I think the class is very poorly named, and I for one would not sign up for such a course. It assumes that women have different/special issues with regard to computers than men have, solely because of their gender. This gives exactly the wrong message to both men and the more `traditional' women. What we as liberated women should be doing is asserting over and over until we can make it so that, except for a few basic physical differences that we unfortunately can't deny (e.g., size and upper body strength), women and men are the same. By naming a course `Women and Computers,' all you are doing is helping to perpetuate the myth that women are somehow `different' and should be treated differently. That's how we got where we are in the first place!

This behavior is closely related to condescension, a problem described in [MIT 1983, page 9,], from which the following quotations are taken:

• ``Often, when I ask a male graduate student how to do some task, particularly something on the system, he will do it for me rather than explain to me how I can do it for myself.''
• ``I asked a male graduate student a technical question and got an answer that seemed to be aimed at someone with little or no knowledge of computer science, as if it were being explained to a high school student rather than a colleague.''