Finding a Majority to Be In

I think a lot about being the only woman. I talk a lot about it. It's one of the first things I notice when I work with a new team. How many women are there? How many men? What's the precise ratio?  No, seriously, I spend time in meetings with new teams or with aggregations of teams reducing fractions to find the exact ratio of men to women, what the percentage is, how much of the percentage I make up.  Partly that's because, well, it's a meeting, and as a coop, I don't get a merit increase, so I could care less that they'll be calculated by next Wednesday EOD, but mostly it's because I focus so heavily on gender in the workplace.

And that's wrong!

I shouldn't do that! It's sexist!

Because gender doesn't matter in a professional environment.  It doesn't define what I can do.  Just because I am the minority, a member of the group that has been wronged in the past, doesn't mean that that's all I am.  That's not what's most important about me.  What's important about me is that I'm a programmer, and I like low-level code, and I have experience with higher-level code, and I like skiing and hockey.  And tons more.  In fact, just about everything is more important than my chromosome set.  And even though I have a different chromosome set than the other 14 humans on my team, there's plenty of other stuff that I have in common.

So I am challenging myself.  Instead of counting gender ratios, I want to count numbers of majorities I am a part of.  I want to take note that I'm a member of the software developer majority.  The engineering background majority.  The hockey-watching majority.  The video-game-playing majority.

Because when gender matters more than all that other stuff, that's sexism, period.  When any attribute - attractiveness, race, sexuality, nationality, whatever - that you didn't opt into matters more than all the other stuff that you did opt into, that's bigotry.  In the workplace, on TV, dating, at school, anywhere.

So, let's quit it.  The American dream is that people can be whatever they want to be, right?  That people can choose who they are.  And I don't think America is too different from the rest of the world, not any more. None of us have an excuse to focus on something we can't help unless someone else did it first, and then only to find equality and fairness.