Equal and Equity

Every time I think about posting, I have many, many things I want to say. I suspect other people are the same way, because I notice in my RSS feeds that there'll be nothing from some bloggers for a while, then suddenly several posts appear.

I had an interesting experience over the last few days. First, you should know that I've been reading quite a few feminist science bloggers lately. A lot of the time, I feel like feminists are whiners. I strongly believe that with rights come responsibilities and you can't have one without the other. But the bloggers I've been reading, even the angry ones like Zuska and Absinthe, have some good points.

For one, while it is possible and often likely that women who don't get ahead are not suffering from discrimination (but are, in fact, not that good), it is also hard to be a significant minority and much harder to do well. So some accomodations should be made due to the inherent difficulty of the situation. If you're in a swimming race and everyone else swims through water, but you have to swim through syrup, wouldn't you hope that you wouldn't be expected to swim as fast?

I've recently been working closely on some technology projects with some men. By this point, I've been burned enough times that I'm pretty sensitive to when I'm being treated poorly for being a woman. But with these guys it hasn't happened at all. They're fun, they're funny, we're working hard and getting things done. It has been a pleasure.