| I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually universal. I've lived and worked pretty much all my life in India, and something like what the OP describes would be pretty much unthinkable there. Disclaimer: I grew up in urban and small-town India, in a lower middle-class and middle-class environment. I have no first-hand knowledge of how it is in rural scools. Also, anecdotal evidence, so feel free to take it all with heavy dpo Math and the sciences in school: Every memory of school I have has girls and boys in equal measure doing well in math and science. The teachers's pets are all the kids who do well in class, the well-behaved ones who were focused on studying. In our early teens though, you could actually see the girls doing better than the boys in every subject. This pattern continued through college as well. Most guys handled
this situation by relying on their female classmates for notes and help with schoolwork. I did the same. College: My engineering class had something like a 40% female to 60% male ratio. This varied
by specialization. The mechanical engineering department had a grand total of 3 female students and a 100 male students. (This was because Mechanical Engineering was perceived as something physically demanding, and the jobs involved factory floors in far-flung remote towns and villages.) The computer science department had somewhat more than a 50% female student ratio. On the whole, apart from the Mechanical Engineering department, every department was hovering around a equal distribution of females and males. Note that this was not deliberate on the part of the administration. Engineering school admissions in India are purely a function of score in State-level and National-level entrance exams.
For that matter, the faculty was also a fairly even mix of male and female teachers. From the OP's post : "At an old job, someone in authority pats me on the head to dismiss an argument I’m making about something at work."
In an Indian setting, this would be near impossible because Indian culture is terribly touchy
about men touching women in general. So the condescension would probably be expressed in some
other manner, possibly verbal. Plus, with close to half the employees being female, there's never really a sense of female
co-workers as a minority in the workspace. And even in the few all-male teams I've been a part of, most of the men have spouses or sisters who work in tech. This means that no one
thinks of male techies as the norm over female techies. Conferences: Just like the workplaces, there's a good mix of men and women at these. And alcohol is hardly ever an issue because no one serves alcohol at these events in India, not
even beer. It's a bit of a social taboo. Another thing to note is that in India, engineering, and specifically, software, is something
of an aspirational field. It's considered one of the most desirable careers, and everyone
wants in. |