#stemwlwstudies

it’s an ochem day today,

I had an interesting conversation today about how tiring it is to be a woman in male dominated fields, even just in classes. Like all of my classes this term are math or chemistry, and my calc 3 class is over 75% male and its just so tiring to be seen by men all the time and while I don’t give 2 shits about their expectations of me, it’s exhausting knowing that they’re there and it takes a conscious effort to reject falling into that state of “well if I do what they want they’ll maybe stop expecting x, y, or z from me” and it tiring to do that all the time. My math classes this term are all big. What will happen when I go from a 150 seat registration to 50 seats?

I gave the example of being in chem labs. I’m in an analytical lab where we self pace our experiments and the TA’s are there to make sure we finish things before deadlines, but they aren’t teaching anything like in other gen chem or undergrad labs (keep in mind I am saying this as a second year undergrad but this is my 9th lab course). In the analytical lab, I’ve been consistently fast, efficient, ahead of schedule, and getting good results from day one. And yes, the TA’s do notice when you do succeed in the lab. But because it’s an analytical lab based course, it’s very much full of men and despite the fact that there are so many other women succeeding and doing well in these labs, myself included, I have not met a single one of us who shared or celebrated these successes, and yet, all of the men in these labs have been loud about their achievements, or even just about how good they think they’re doing, even in the midst of restarting and experiment they messed up. 

Being really damn smart and good in labs is one of the few things I think I actually deserve credit for, and still, my own feelings of pride and accomplishment are overshadowed by this outside noise of men celebrating their own mediocrity. 

math and messy hair is my life rn

biochem, tea, and John mulaney