I got a comment on my blog post last week, and it made me think. Did I believe what I wrote?
Yes. Yes I do. And yet, it isn’t the entire story.
I remember a scene in a book I read[1] 20 years ago, and it stuck with me. The hero told the heroine that we were all, always working to have things our own way. The heroine was resistant to this idea because she considered herself nice person and thoughtful towards other people. The hero agreed the heroine was a good person, but he also thought his mother was a good person. The difference, the hero told her, was that she thought she had a right to want to run her own life and his mother thought she had a right to run the heroine’s life. That created their conflict.
If I did not want something in my work relationships, I would not enter the power struggle at all. There would be no fight or flight reaction since I wouldn’t notice the bad behavior. I would not care if I got invited to the meeting or not.
Did I really want to get invited to the recurring meeting? Yes. And No. Did I want to go to the recurring meeting? No. And Yes. Did I get the meeting invite I requested? Yes.
I used to think ambivalence meant that one did not care. I often have to look up the word in a dictionary[2]because I can’t seem to internalize the concept. Ambivalence isn’t about the intensity of the feeling, it is about having conflicting feelings. You can hold contradictory convictions quite passionately.
My ambition is to be the best. When I chose to study engineering when I was 27, one facet that appealed to me is that I would be evaluated on something concrete, and therefore I could control my own success. When I was studying history and English, the Rubrik always seemed more nebulous. In engineering, how I performed would never be evaluated on how someone perceived me. I would simply be judged on the value of my work[3].
I have a colleague who once told she never, ever felt that being a woman in engineering meant she was treated differently than a man. She never saw that happen and it had never happened to her. At first, I was flabbergasted. Then, I realized if I wanted people to take my experiences seriously, I need to take her statement seriously.
What we see, and how we see it, is a reflection of what is important to us. I had a TA from Asia once tell me that all round-eyed people looked the same to him. He could not see eye color, only eye shape.
I don’t really know my colleague well enough to dig down into what she sees or ask her more about her experiences. I admit it is hard for me to imagine that during a 20 year career she never saw biased behavior based on apparent gender. When I was doing my undergraduate studies in engineering, I felt everything was equal. I used to have a professor who would give you a quarter if you found a mistake he made on the chalkboard. I kept track, and the quarters were distributed about how the male/female split was in the class. But in both graduate school and in the working world, I have felt that it isn’t just about solving the problem anymore. It is about who is solving the problem and what other people think about the problem solver.
I become irritated when my ambition is thwarted. When I have to try again and I am not getting the respect I feel I am due. I don’t think my adversary should have the right, or the power, to attempt to thwart me. But I am also ambivalent about my ambition. Passionately ambivalent.
When I read headlines saying that women leave jobs in engineering, I always want to make the point – you can take yourself out of the engineering job, but learning to be an engineer is partially about learning to think in a certain way. So, yes. Study engineering. Everyone should study engineering. But working in engineering? That is going to depend a lot on what your ambition is.
[1] The Shadow Matrix, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
[2] I mean I google the word, but a dictionary sounds classier.
[3] Oh, how naïve I was!