Those to Come

[CW: SA]

You’re a high school student. Your calculus teacher always calls on the boys first. One day you call him out on it. You get sent to the principal and it goes on your permanent record. But the teacher calls on girls, sometimes, now, too. You figure it’s worth it.

You’re an undergrad. Classes are getting harder, and your classmates are buddying up to get homework assignments done. But no one invites you to study. You tell your academic advisor, who alerts your professor. He now assigns study groups, and everyone knows it was you. Now they have to study with you, but they definitely won’t invite you to the bar later. But at least you fixed things for students to come.

You’re applying to graduate schools. You can’t read your rec letters, but you’ve heard the nightmare stories. You email an article about the gender disparity in rec letter language to the undergraduate chair who forwards it to the department. You lose sleep over what this has done to your rec letters. No one else seems to worry about their letters.

You’re in graduate school. Classroom policies haven’t been updated since the 70’s. Your professors have a strict attendance policy for their 8 AM classes. But you’re a parent. Or you’re disabled. Or you can’t afford a car, and the bus is frequently late. When you complain, your classmates call you a slacker and your teacher grades you harder than everyone else.

Classes end and research begins. Why does your professor assign all the male graduate students theory work and everyone else busywork? You bring it up to the graduate advisor but he tells you you’re imagining it. You go to the department chair and he doesn’t believe you either. You go to the dean. The dean emails the department chair who is forced to scold your advisor. Now your interactions with him are cold, and intimidating. You take on extra research to prove you’re worthy of a Ph.D. and a good letter of rec. But the incoming grad students won’t have to put up with this, right?

You’re still in graduate school. Your male classmates think you’re a bitch because you won’t sleep with them. One of them grabs your ass at a bar, but you’re too scared to report it. You’re dismissed. You’re spoken over. You’re spoken about. Your classmates speak badly about people who look like you and think you won’t mind. All of this takes a toll on you, every day. At least you’ll graduate one day, you tell yourself.

Your former classmates are still best friends. They play Fortnite together. They get each other jobs and go to networking events together. You’ve never been invited. You look back at your actions in graduate school and hope you made a difference for the next one of you that comes along.

You’re a postdoc. Your department doesn’t have a DEI committee, so you organize one. None of the men show up. Since you’re the head of the committee, everyone brings their problems to you. You know that if you don’t care, no one else will. You’re exhausted. You white colleagues don’t have to deal with this. But maybe someone else will pick up the DEI committee when you leave.

You’re applying for faculty jobs. Over and over, you hear You’re going to get a job, and I won’t, because you’re, you know… diverse. This doesn’t ring true in the job market. You spend way too much time looking at the online rumor mill. Everyone who got a postdoc fellowship gets an offer, but everyone who got a postdoc fellowship went to Harvard. Everyone who went to Harvard went to MIT first. Everyone who went to MIT did so because their parents could afford it. Every day you eat less and less, and every night you wake up sweating. But you have to get a job, because you’re the only one who actually wants to make a difference.

You’re faculty. You take on extra marginalized students from unprivileged backgrounds. You attend DEI meetings and work to make real changes. You volunteer for the admission committee. You volunteer for the faculty search committee. You volunteer to be the graduate coordinator. You try so hard to make a difference, but you know that one person isn’t enough. You try to change minds. You take leadership workshops. You run for department chair. It’s not enough. Students still slip through the cracks. Your privileged colleagues are too busy to notice. Your research slips because you spend all your time trying to make your department a better place. You don’t have enough papers to make tenure but our activism must count for something, right?

Your all-male tenure committee evaluates you on the same scale as everyone else. That’s what equality means, they say. This is purely merit-based. Did you meet someone else’s standard of professional dress today? Does your natural hair make them take you less seriously, or did they actually attend the anti-racism workshop? Let’s take a look at your teaching record, they say. You sigh a sigh of relief. Just kidding, they say, looks fine. Next. The men spend most of the hour interrogating your research. Have you published in Nature recently? No? We hired you to do high-impact research, you know, to elevate the standing of this department. Not to make the bathrooms gender-neutral.

We’ll email you later, they say, at the end of the hour, but you already know what the email is going to say, because there are 500 white men waiting to take your place, and half of them have the time to get the funding to hire the students to do the work to publish in Nature, and the ‘moment’ has already passed for you and for people who look and think like you and who cares about retention rates anyways, what are you, some kind of social justice warrior?

You quit.