Susie Bright has a post called “Blog the Cradle of Love” at her website. In it she makes a lot of somewhat disparate observations about BlogHer ’06, a recent women-oriented blogging conference. Here’s one passage that caught my eye:
I went to one workshop on something very technical, that I’ve been wanting to master. It featured two of the best educators at the conference, who were dazzling, at the top of their game. Pardon me if I don’t remember what they were wearing.
The Q&A began… and each time a woman in the audience asked a question, one lone man sitting at a nearby table, rose to answer. He cut off the presenters, he cut off everyone. He had to be the first, and he had to have the last word.
He was blind to the eyes rolling around him. Eye-rolling was all we did: no one said to him, “Dude, shut up already.” He was indulged and allowed to sail off without realizing that he had alienated every last person in there. I doubt anyone from his mother on out has ever given him a clue. I feel ashamed of myself for sitting there and writhing in silence.
I haven’t ever been to a law-and-technology-related conference where there were many women in attendance, but I certainly recognize the sort of man she is talking about, who assumes that a roomful of women should be listening to him, because he has so very much to teach them. My experiences as an invited speaker at law and tech conferences have been along the lines of having men shout at me from the audience while I am speaking; having male co-panelists grab the microphone from me while I am attempting to answer a question that has been directed at me; and having men demand that I trade seats with them during a luncheon or dinner, because they want to talk with the person sitting next to me. I’ve heard male speakers disparage consumers who are slow to adopt new technologies as “grandmas.” I’ve seen females who ask tough questions from the audience complimented on their looks, youth or “spunkiness,” or dismissed as irrelevant or “off topic” even though they clearly were not. In one recent case, an audience member who pressed a panel on an important point was “jokingly” issued a marriage proposal by a speaker, which met with roars of raucous approval from the audience. When the hooting and applause died down, the moderator moved on to the next question, even though the wedding-worthy one had not been answered. And I sat there writhing in silence too, and I’m still ashamed about that.
–Ann Bartow
I can relate to this all too well. As a young female prof., I’ve certainly seen my share of overconfident young men who seem convinced from day one that they must know the material better than I do. Despite the painfully obvious limitations of their knowledge and skill, they repeatedly raise their hand and condescendingly attempt to impart their vast wisdom to the class. MY retrospective regret is how I’ve handled this in the past — I’ve generally thought it best to try to appease and “make nice” which, of course, only encouraged them to keep it up. In the future, I’m going to take a different tack with students like this — remain polite and professional, sure, but shut them down rather than giving them the mistaken impression that they’re “educating” the class rather than wasting everyone’s time. Past mistakes like this are how one learns but still, I do beat myself up for treating students like this with kid gloves in the past.
It’s hard though – most everyone reading this blog has been there. Too much “cracking down” chills the atmosphere for everybody, and makes a class far less fun to teach.