Hostile Environment
It's an ongoing struggle to get more young women to enter traditionally male fields. Engineering is certainly one of those fields that is heavily male-dominated. Sometimes people argue that it's just that women aren't as interested in these areas of study. But when stories like this hit the news, I find it more remarkable that any women are brave enough to puruse an engineering degree in the first place.
It's kind of a textbook example of a hostile environment. The engineering students' society's newspaper, the Oral Otis, published a mock sex-advice column* which included some pretty nasty language. (Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the column in question, and it seems to have been pulled from their web site.) People complain. The vice-president of social affairs for the Engineering Students Society, Rob Arntfield, admits that it's sexual harrassment, but says that's okay, because sometimes people say engineers can't get dates.
No, seriously. That's what he said. To the media:
That little quote was on the news yesterday morning."For myself, personally, I think some of the content in the paper is meant to be humorous," he said. He added that engineers "have taken a lot of flak for being engineers," and are often the subject of jokes about engineers rarely touching women or getting laid.
"I believe that when we take this sort of thing in stride and that sexual harassment, if we dish out a little bit of our own, who's to say who's more right?"
I have to give some (mild) props to the paper's editor, Zacharie Brunet, who did give a radio interview this morning accepting responsibility and acknowledging that the column was inappropriate. His excuse was that he was really busy so he only edited the article enough to take out the really bad bits (so what was left in was presumably only moderately bad). But at least he took some responsiblity. And indicated that steps were being taken to prevent it from happening again.
The VP-Social hasn't corrected himself, as far as I know. It would appear his position is still that sexual harrassment is okay, and that it's just like getting teased for datelesness.
When young men think sexual harrassment is perfectly okay as long as you claim you were trying to be funny, is it any wonder that women would rather study something else?
This is what we're up against.
It's also why we need to encourage women to get into these fields. Not just because women should be able to do whatever they want (although, obviously, they should), but because we need a critical mass of women to prevent the boys'-club mentality that allows this kind of behaviour to flourish.
* incidentally, why do student newspapers insist on publishing these? They're pretty much never funny or clever; and yet they're forever getting written and published.
