Sexism Wins Again

we really dislike women

A few years ago I penned this book — it had taken me years, a lot of years, to put some of my thoughts into writing but I got it done. Did I hope it would change anything? Realistically, no. But I am an optimist — even after all my years on earth — as a woman.

But this morning, after hearing that Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, I had a lot of thoughts back on how sexism has impacted my professional life.

I’m not going into great detail but in short, after completing my Ph.D. I was offered a postdoc in California and shared a huge open office space with other postdocs — all of them were male — and we became friends and did a lot of things together, often including their families. Because we were all interested in being professors with research programs, we were all applying for the same positions. What was a surprise to the guys but not to me was that I would get a return letter telling me “thank you for applying but the position has been filled.” They got letters inviting them to call for an interview — SAME jobs! We would sit in our space and talk about this and they decided that they would not want to work in those places that were lying to me because it meant that was the way they treated women.

Then came an interview at a rather prestigious university that I thought was really a good…