@alh: How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?
I have a dream: not far into the future, we will have a female President! (BTW, by merely mentioning the female gender and the President in one sentence, and this act is considered as Politics, then IMHO, it is a mild form of Microagression on the part of CC moderator.)
if it’s Fiorina vs. H Clinton… we will…
Airline pilots are unusual in that they are a union shop with highly skilled members. The non-union world does not care about seniority (or maybe considers it a negative since you are expensive) and hiring / promotion decisions are made on an individual basis. Is the guy who says, wow you are good in math … for a woman … going to really make you the head of a department or the chief engineer on a project? How about the guy who favors people providing for families over working women?
The micro-aggressions are more than just unfortunately little phrases that can insult an overly sensitive woman, they are … very likely … an undercurrent of negative stereotypes and discomfort with change.
Women have made inroads into male-dominated fields, in pilots through the Air Force and other flight training, in STEM through education and by good performance in fields where there is a single correct answer and folks that believe those who can get those answers are qualified. These are still male-dominated fields, so still filled with good-old-boys and people who are not really looking to be bossed around by women.
I think there have been some generational changes, I see better attitudes now among the young.
I think this also all holds true for minorities, but not being one, don’t want to narrate their experience.
That is the problem with being dismissive, unless you have had people say really thoughtless and important (I think belittling comments are important since they lower the status of those they are directed to), it is hard to really understand what that means.
I am a woman professional in her 50s trying to stay in the top tier of profession. So certainly the doors to STEM education and beyond were open, but you still have to handle the glass ceiling and what appears to be some hostility amongst the white men who think they own these fields.
VH: I am about to turn 60.
The southern state law school I briefly attended had professors who had taught there when it was still all male, and told us every class that women were taking up spaces they weren’t going to use. I had female friends told they were denied at graduate programs because of their sex. Others were told by their advisers there would be no letters of recommendation for college positions, but support for high school teaching positions. This was a bigger issue for our older sisters, of course.
In the early 90s, I was hanging around NE universities with no official maternity policies for faculty. That seems really unbelievable to me today.
I am speaking for (white, middle class) women, because my kids have explained to me I shouldn’t speak for classes of which I am not a member and that really made sense to me.
…
crossposted with PickOne1
@alh, I am older than you.
“My age mate female friends were told, point blank, they were not going to be hired, or admitted to certain programs, because they were just going to quit work when they had babies and the jobs were more important for men”
Yup. This was my mother’s experience in the early 60s.
“I am a woman professional in her 50s trying to stay in the top tier of profession. So certainly the doors to STEM education and beyond were open, but you still have to handle the glass ceiling and what appears to be some hostility amongst the white men who think they own these fields.”
I don’t believe white men think they own the STEM fields. If there’s an area of highly paid work that is more loaded with non white workers, I can’t come up with it.
I probably should not have specified white men. Non white male workers from societies or cultures where women are not employed can be worse. STEM fields are still predominantly male, while there are a good number of engineering women graduates, the attrition rate is very high (lots of good material out there to analyze why, the most positive spin is that women STEM graduates have lots of opportunities outside of engineering). I have been in high-level meetings with 150 attendees and was the only woman other than a secretary or two.
@aih, I am (slightly 
) older than you, also.
When I go to structural engineering meetings in our state, I am usually one of two women in the whole room. I was elected to be on our board of directors. The token woman, but that’s OK! Still looks good on my resume.
^baby steps
Well, I guess I win the prize. I’m about to turn 67. That’s what happens when you have a child two months before you turn 41, and hang around a college website too long. 
I have lots of stories. I’ll get to them tomorrow. (I’m old and need to go to bed early!!)
“I don’t believe white men think they own the STEM fields. If there’s an area of highly paid work that is more loaded with non white workers, I can’t come up with it.”
True, but the higher up the corporate ladder you look, the more white men you will see. Since the C echelon executives are usually given more stock per person than all working bees combined, you can say that white men OWN the field. 
I heard of something along this line from one of my coworkers whose spouse is old and has been retired:
“I’m old and often go to bed EARLY IN THE MORNING.”
He/she could not get into sleep at night (due to the lack of activities in the day time) and often surfs the Internet all night.
So, @VeryHappy, you are in a much better shape! (Also, I am younger than you. I rarely met anyone who is older than me, either in my real life or in my online “virtual” life.)
I don’t think you can say that. There are tech execs with backgrounds from India and Asia all over the place.And I don’t think you can begrudge people like Gates and Zuckerberg for having been CEO, when these people have actually started their own companies. If you start your own company, yes, you deserve to be the CEO of that company, no matter what sex or color you are.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/13/apple-diversity-report-white-men
http://fortune.com/2015/05/06/silicon-valley-asians-report/
And I’m not even talking about biotech where this number would be even higher.
For those saying baby steps and change will come with time in terms of women’s opportunities in the workplace, that’s what folks were saying 30 years ago when I graduated college and entered the professional workforce. I don’t think very much progress has been made in my field. Women still earn much less than men on average. Opportunities for advancement are still scarce. Sitting in a conference room with one or two women for every 10 men still happens. HR in the company I worked for would talk about the number of women but included the administrative assistants in the number. Very few of us were higher up. We’d joke that there were so few of us, we could each assign ourselves our own stalls in the women’s bathroom.
Daily microaggressions in the workplace. You just had to let 99.9% of them roll of your back for survival.
297: I read the most recent mention of "baby steps" (#291) not as saying change will come in baby steps and we should all be patient, but rather as a sardonic commentary on the state of things.
(Edited to make what I meant a bit clearer.)
I woke up looking forward to Very Happy’s tales.