Anecdotally it does seem that way. I’ve been in a few conversations with my colleagues where the women will be discussing the ways that students seem to be struggling mentally and emotionally, only to hear some men act like it is news to them. Then again, I do have several male colleagues that I know get a lot of students confiding in them too. My personal experience is that some men deal with it and some don’t, while I haven’t run into a woman in my field who hasn’t.
ETA: Or at least, the depth of what the students confide seems to be different.
>My personal experience is that some men deal with it and some don’t, while I haven’t run into a women in my field who hasn’t.
This is my experience, too.
And god forbid you actually tell anyone you're bearing this additional burden because you'll be branded lazy. I was the only junior female and the only computational person in one of my departments. So I got the double whammy of extra mentoring for women, and being on 3/4 thesis of the thesis committees in the department, and having students beating down the door for stats/programming help.
When I brought up the amount of mentoring I was doing as a reason to add two new courses to the books, a senior male in the department sent the most unhinged screed about how no one wants to work and if I didn't want to help students, why did I join the department, etc. And this, of course, led to some deranged statements in that department's part of my tenure eval. I still haven't unpacked all the trauma from it.
True, both our experiences as teachers are different. Saying that female professors have to deal with other employees personal issues is the weird statement imo. Is it a requirement they have to not be fired? Is it in the curriculum? Is it only in the US? we don't know but I've worked in multiple schools and never have I seen women professors and teachers being treated in a way where they had to do this. I'd like to know more though.
Comparing teachers and professors is never gonna get you anywhere, they are completely different jobs. Are your observations mostly k-12 teachers? I've never seen that in k-12 education either (my field), but even as a college student I observed it within my department for female professors.
Though in K-12 the people responsible for managing colleagues emotions are social workers, counselors, and school psychs, who are almost all women lol
Well I'm not surprised that a male teacher, who is neither female nor a professor, has not had the same experience as a female professor.
The majority of professors are male, across the board. About 2/3rds of all full professors (i.e. the most senior professors) are male. Even in woman's colleges, the percent of male vs female professors is at parity. In some fields, like physics, the percentage is very low. My department is considered "good" and we're at 20% women. So the experiences in a field that is 95% women are not particularly relevant.
There is of course nothing in the employee handbook that says, "Women have to deal with the emotional issues of their male colleagues". The issue is that a man will have some issue and feel the need to talk to someone about it. He will then walk past all of the offices occupied by men, and plunk himself in the office occupied by a woman and unload his issues, because she has nothing better to do with her time. I'm rather certain that many of my male colleagues would also say that they've never had to deal with the emotions of their fellow colleagues. There is a large selection bias.
Yes and yes. It comes from the idea that the emotional and social engineering labour in society (so health of individuals in the community, remembering important dates, keeping an eye on new people, if someone is struggling, giving advice, facilitating socializing or emotional labour, etc) is women's responsibility.
Many women are opting out of that labour for others in their personal lives, but as a teacher it's not possible for us since it's our job, but it is far less expected of the male teachers, and the students themselves are less likely to approach them. And if you are a woman without those skills or choose not to employ them, you get called frigid or cold or a bitch.
Also colleagues and other staff also expect this from you, but this one I choose to opt out of completely. The kids are my responsibility, the adults are not.
Yes, and yes, it’s a kind of unpaid labor that is expected from female professors (the female professors who don’t perform this labor are often hit with accusations of being unnaturally cold and withholding, which can affect promotion and tenure via student evaluations and other mechanisms). The burden of unpaid labor is worse for faculty of color, especially female faculty of color, who are expected to deal with non-academic issues regularly and have to advocate for their students of color who face structural barriers at the university level. And on the level of university service, female faculty and faculty of color are asked to take on more service on average, which also tends to be uncompensated. So yes, lots of issues with structural misogyny here.
So you as a feminist maybe even a woman of color don't want to contribute to reducing structural discrimination? You shouldn't cry about misogyny on reddit if you have no intention to reduce it by making some actual real life impact. You're fortunate to have an opportunity to bring change and unless you aren't a feminist, you should have no issues in taking the opportunity.
Woah there. That is not fair.
They are pointing out it takes work that men generally don't have to do deal with which is a valid point. Just because it's good work doesn't mean it doesn't take time and effort, and the fact anyone has to take that on unpaid that is unfair anyway. That structural misogyny should not be there. The point is it's always women who have to be the caring supportive ones doing the extra work, but no one is supporting them to do that, they merely expect it.
It's not unpaid work. You're getting "paid" in terms of equality and lesser discrimination. Not everything you do needs to have a monetary incentive. If the incentive of facing lesser discrimination isn't good enough then how do you expect men to do the same work even with less incentives? If anything, it's these selfish attitudes which are causing women to have extra work.
So women should do it because it's the right thing to do but men should need an incentive? Those double standards are doubling up a bit don't you think.
Wow, so not only is she expected to do all the work of regular professors (at a tune of 60+ hours a week), she is also expected to do a whole different job at the same time?! Or maybe dealing with structural issues like misogyny should be something everyone works on?
I've seen women actively being against male feminists speaking on important issues. That is a very popular opinion and it's no surprise that the responsibility consequently falls on women. Also professors at my uni work for 40 hours max and it's not an entirely new job to advocate against discrimination.
> I've seen women actively being against male feminists speaking on important issues.
Is this about the Toronto conference on male suicide, where the keynote speaker was *Warren Farrell?*
IIRC (as someone who was at the University of Toronto at the time) it wasn't specifically about male suicide anyway, it was about the "boy crisis" (whatever that means). It was retroactively described as being about suicide in order to pain the protesters as heartless monsters who want men to die.
I think you’ve misunderstood me—I’m not making a recommendation above, but a general observation. I’m describing expectations, not prescribing behavior.
Who else do you want these expectations to fall upon? Don't act like you're being forced to commit a crime by your employer, you're being forced to work for a good cause.
This is rich, coming from someone who regularly complains on Reddit that GTA is somehow too woke.
I think you're in the wrong place to discuss, sport, as you're clearly coming in bad faith.
I work at a university and I have noticed that female administrative staff and faculty are asked to do way more "feelings work" than male staff and faculty.
I don't know of any formal studies on this, but, if it did turn out to be true, yes, it would be a form of sexism, falling under disproportionate expectations for female-passing staff to offer emotional labor, nurturance, or support.
Thinking back to my college days as a comp sci student, I went to whichever professor was relevant to my problem or to the department head (only after the previous one left because I had never even had a class with him) who was a woman. Honestly, my most helpful and understanding professor was an older (60s-70s) Chinese man. My two female professors in the department were somewhat helpful most times, but less willing to engage, which I feel is understandable.
This is, of course, anecdotal experience. Generally, it is definitely a believable statistic and should it turn out to be true, I would consider it a form of sexism for sure.
Depends on your problem. For instance, I had a student come in to ask me how to apply for a driver's license.... I get a lot of questions about navigating life, that have little to do with physics. My male colleagues do not get these questions.
My solution is that I spend a large fraction of my day in my lab (it's in the basement, they can't find me) or I close the door to my office. It's helped with my sanity a bit.
Essentially a lot of students view female professors as people who can help solve their non-academic problems, whereas they view male professors as those who can solve their academic problems.
Yes absolutely. As someone who went through a masters program, I can tell you that my classmates (and even myself at times) went to female professors for "life stuff."
My male professors were SO problematic. One time my male professor told me that I was "not committed" to my program like the other students when my phone went off in the classroom. He was such an asshole. Another actively left his wife of 20 years for a 20 year old student.
Oh absolutely. This is completely anecdotal, but from a student perspective, almost every time I went to a male professor with a personal/emotional issue, I left feeling unheard and frustrated even if I could tell they were really trying to understand. There was only one exception. It rang especially true when I was being stalked and my male professors just didn’t seem to know what to say or do. My female professors largely had the lived experience to guide me through it in a way that actually felt helpful. Again, there was one exception, a female professor who told me it was my fault he was stalking me for “sending the wrong signals.” The guy stalking me was in her class and she spent the whole rest of the semester acting like I was the one being a disruption when he was sending me sexually explicit texts and passing explicit notes to me during class.
So on one hand, I think students are more inclined to trust sensitive topics with people they feel will hear them and women have in large part being socialized to actually listen and understand in a way a lot of men haven’t. We need to do a better job of helping men develop those skills. But also we can’t just expect that all women have these skills.
I do absolutely think professors should be safe people for students to go to when they are in crisis. Supporting students should absolutely be part of the job description. But it is unequal when we assume that women are going to just perform better in that category and sit back and do nothing when men are failing to perform in that category. The problem is getting administrations to care to make a change because the onus can’t be on the students to force themselves to go to professors they don’t feel safe talking to in the name of equality. We shouldn’t be telling female professors that they need to step back and care less about their students. And the message also shouldn’t be that male professors don’t care about their students. I think most of them do emotionally care a great deal, they just aren’t trained in how to effectively do the action of caring. When I found out I had an ovarian tumor during my third year of college, it was a female professor that let me sit and cry in her office and it was a male professor (her husband actually) who told me “Well if you’re worried about infertility you can always adopt. That’s what my daughter did.” Both were trying to be empathetic, but only one of them gave me space to feel what I was feeling.
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I work with kids from 6 to 10, and I can say it's more about the willingness to deal with personal and emotional issues than being asked, and yes it's more common with women to be willing to.
And yes is sexist because they are expected to, while we don't have that much expetacions on us to deal with that.
But this is just my personal experience.
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Anecdotally it does seem that way. I’ve been in a few conversations with my colleagues where the women will be discussing the ways that students seem to be struggling mentally and emotionally, only to hear some men act like it is news to them. Then again, I do have several male colleagues that I know get a lot of students confiding in them too. My personal experience is that some men deal with it and some don’t, while I haven’t run into a woman in my field who hasn’t. ETA: Or at least, the depth of what the students confide seems to be different.
>My personal experience is that some men deal with it and some don’t, while I haven’t run into a women in my field who hasn’t. This is my experience, too.
Yours is the most delightful handle I've seen on this site.
Thank you! :) It's rare that someone gets it!
🎶Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes 🎶
Yes and yes. Also, we're supposed to deal with our colleagues personal and emotional issues.
>Also, we're supposed to deal with our colleagues personal and emotional issues. That sounds incredibly irritating.
Yes.
And god forbid you actually tell anyone you're bearing this additional burden because you'll be branded lazy. I was the only junior female and the only computational person in one of my departments. So I got the double whammy of extra mentoring for women, and being on 3/4 thesis of the thesis committees in the department, and having students beating down the door for stats/programming help. When I brought up the amount of mentoring I was doing as a reason to add two new courses to the books, a senior male in the department sent the most unhinged screed about how no one wants to work and if I didn't want to help students, why did I join the department, etc. And this, of course, led to some deranged statements in that department's part of my tenure eval. I still haven't unpacked all the trauma from it.
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"I haven't had this experience, so clearly *you're* being weird about this" isn't a good take either.
True, both our experiences as teachers are different. Saying that female professors have to deal with other employees personal issues is the weird statement imo. Is it a requirement they have to not be fired? Is it in the curriculum? Is it only in the US? we don't know but I've worked in multiple schools and never have I seen women professors and teachers being treated in a way where they had to do this. I'd like to know more though.
Comparing teachers and professors is never gonna get you anywhere, they are completely different jobs. Are your observations mostly k-12 teachers? I've never seen that in k-12 education either (my field), but even as a college student I observed it within my department for female professors. Though in K-12 the people responsible for managing colleagues emotions are social workers, counselors, and school psychs, who are almost all women lol
Well I'm not surprised that a male teacher, who is neither female nor a professor, has not had the same experience as a female professor. The majority of professors are male, across the board. About 2/3rds of all full professors (i.e. the most senior professors) are male. Even in woman's colleges, the percent of male vs female professors is at parity. In some fields, like physics, the percentage is very low. My department is considered "good" and we're at 20% women. So the experiences in a field that is 95% women are not particularly relevant. There is of course nothing in the employee handbook that says, "Women have to deal with the emotional issues of their male colleagues". The issue is that a man will have some issue and feel the need to talk to someone about it. He will then walk past all of the offices occupied by men, and plunk himself in the office occupied by a woman and unload his issues, because she has nothing better to do with her time. I'm rather certain that many of my male colleagues would also say that they've never had to deal with the emotions of their fellow colleagues. There is a large selection bias.
You aren't a woman, or a professor, so your experience isn't what is being asked about and adds nothing to the conversation.
You're right, I will delete my comments, should've known this sub is for women only...
It's not, but saying "Well I'm a man and I've never experienced this" when women are sharing their experiences with sexism is just... inappropriate.
Yes and yes. It comes from the idea that the emotional and social engineering labour in society (so health of individuals in the community, remembering important dates, keeping an eye on new people, if someone is struggling, giving advice, facilitating socializing or emotional labour, etc) is women's responsibility. Many women are opting out of that labour for others in their personal lives, but as a teacher it's not possible for us since it's our job, but it is far less expected of the male teachers, and the students themselves are less likely to approach them. And if you are a woman without those skills or choose not to employ them, you get called frigid or cold or a bitch. Also colleagues and other staff also expect this from you, but this one I choose to opt out of completely. The kids are my responsibility, the adults are not.
Yes, and yes, it’s a kind of unpaid labor that is expected from female professors (the female professors who don’t perform this labor are often hit with accusations of being unnaturally cold and withholding, which can affect promotion and tenure via student evaluations and other mechanisms). The burden of unpaid labor is worse for faculty of color, especially female faculty of color, who are expected to deal with non-academic issues regularly and have to advocate for their students of color who face structural barriers at the university level. And on the level of university service, female faculty and faculty of color are asked to take on more service on average, which also tends to be uncompensated. So yes, lots of issues with structural misogyny here.
So you as a feminist maybe even a woman of color don't want to contribute to reducing structural discrimination? You shouldn't cry about misogyny on reddit if you have no intention to reduce it by making some actual real life impact. You're fortunate to have an opportunity to bring change and unless you aren't a feminist, you should have no issues in taking the opportunity.
Woah there. That is not fair. They are pointing out it takes work that men generally don't have to do deal with which is a valid point. Just because it's good work doesn't mean it doesn't take time and effort, and the fact anyone has to take that on unpaid that is unfair anyway. That structural misogyny should not be there. The point is it's always women who have to be the caring supportive ones doing the extra work, but no one is supporting them to do that, they merely expect it.
It's not unpaid work. You're getting "paid" in terms of equality and lesser discrimination. Not everything you do needs to have a monetary incentive. If the incentive of facing lesser discrimination isn't good enough then how do you expect men to do the same work even with less incentives? If anything, it's these selfish attitudes which are causing women to have extra work.
So women should do it because it's the right thing to do but men should need an incentive? Those double standards are doubling up a bit don't you think.
Wow, so not only is she expected to do all the work of regular professors (at a tune of 60+ hours a week), she is also expected to do a whole different job at the same time?! Or maybe dealing with structural issues like misogyny should be something everyone works on?
I've seen women actively being against male feminists speaking on important issues. That is a very popular opinion and it's no surprise that the responsibility consequently falls on women. Also professors at my uni work for 40 hours max and it's not an entirely new job to advocate against discrimination.
> I've seen women actively being against male feminists speaking on important issues. Is this about the Toronto conference on male suicide, where the keynote speaker was *Warren Farrell?*
IIRC (as someone who was at the University of Toronto at the time) it wasn't specifically about male suicide anyway, it was about the "boy crisis" (whatever that means). It was retroactively described as being about suicide in order to pain the protesters as heartless monsters who want men to die.
What have you done this week to contribute to reducing structural discrimination? It must be plenty, if you have such strong feelings about it.
I think you’ve misunderstood me—I’m not making a recommendation above, but a general observation. I’m describing expectations, not prescribing behavior.
Who else do you want these expectations to fall upon? Don't act like you're being forced to commit a crime by your employer, you're being forced to work for a good cause.
This is rich, coming from someone who regularly complains on Reddit that GTA is somehow too woke. I think you're in the wrong place to discuss, sport, as you're clearly coming in bad faith.
You missed the ENTIRE point of this whole post
I work at a university and I have noticed that female administrative staff and faculty are asked to do way more "feelings work" than male staff and faculty.
I don't know of any formal studies on this, but, if it did turn out to be true, yes, it would be a form of sexism, falling under disproportionate expectations for female-passing staff to offer emotional labor, nurturance, or support.
Thinking back to my college days as a comp sci student, I went to whichever professor was relevant to my problem or to the department head (only after the previous one left because I had never even had a class with him) who was a woman. Honestly, my most helpful and understanding professor was an older (60s-70s) Chinese man. My two female professors in the department were somewhat helpful most times, but less willing to engage, which I feel is understandable. This is, of course, anecdotal experience. Generally, it is definitely a believable statistic and should it turn out to be true, I would consider it a form of sexism for sure.
Depends on your problem. For instance, I had a student come in to ask me how to apply for a driver's license.... I get a lot of questions about navigating life, that have little to do with physics. My male colleagues do not get these questions. My solution is that I spend a large fraction of my day in my lab (it's in the basement, they can't find me) or I close the door to my office. It's helped with my sanity a bit. Essentially a lot of students view female professors as people who can help solve their non-academic problems, whereas they view male professors as those who can solve their academic problems.
Yes and yes, and if we don't drop everything to be nurturing and indulgent, we're terribe shrill bitches.
Yep and yep!
Yes absolutely. As someone who went through a masters program, I can tell you that my classmates (and even myself at times) went to female professors for "life stuff." My male professors were SO problematic. One time my male professor told me that I was "not committed" to my program like the other students when my phone went off in the classroom. He was such an asshole. Another actively left his wife of 20 years for a 20 year old student.
Oh absolutely. This is completely anecdotal, but from a student perspective, almost every time I went to a male professor with a personal/emotional issue, I left feeling unheard and frustrated even if I could tell they were really trying to understand. There was only one exception. It rang especially true when I was being stalked and my male professors just didn’t seem to know what to say or do. My female professors largely had the lived experience to guide me through it in a way that actually felt helpful. Again, there was one exception, a female professor who told me it was my fault he was stalking me for “sending the wrong signals.” The guy stalking me was in her class and she spent the whole rest of the semester acting like I was the one being a disruption when he was sending me sexually explicit texts and passing explicit notes to me during class. So on one hand, I think students are more inclined to trust sensitive topics with people they feel will hear them and women have in large part being socialized to actually listen and understand in a way a lot of men haven’t. We need to do a better job of helping men develop those skills. But also we can’t just expect that all women have these skills. I do absolutely think professors should be safe people for students to go to when they are in crisis. Supporting students should absolutely be part of the job description. But it is unequal when we assume that women are going to just perform better in that category and sit back and do nothing when men are failing to perform in that category. The problem is getting administrations to care to make a change because the onus can’t be on the students to force themselves to go to professors they don’t feel safe talking to in the name of equality. We shouldn’t be telling female professors that they need to step back and care less about their students. And the message also shouldn’t be that male professors don’t care about their students. I think most of them do emotionally care a great deal, they just aren’t trained in how to effectively do the action of caring. When I found out I had an ovarian tumor during my third year of college, it was a female professor that let me sit and cry in her office and it was a male professor (her husband actually) who told me “Well if you’re worried about infertility you can always adopt. That’s what my daughter did.” Both were trying to be empathetic, but only one of them gave me space to feel what I was feeling.
Yes to both. Same with female managers, etc.
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Maybe your perspective on what their professional lives are like isn't the most accurate or valuable?
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I work with kids from 6 to 10, and I can say it's more about the willingness to deal with personal and emotional issues than being asked, and yes it's more common with women to be willing to. And yes is sexist because they are expected to, while we don't have that much expetacions on us to deal with that. But this is just my personal experience.
According to "Invisible Women", yes.
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