Issues+Faced

In this space, we can share some of the issues we've faced as women in science and engineering, as well as problems our clubs have encountered. Feel free to pose questions about issues you are currently facing. The answers given could be invaluable to other groups or individuals!

=Poster Defacement=

//Originally written by Terri [|on the CU-WISE blog]//.

Yesterday, I had a CU-WISE poster removed from the lab in which I teach.

It was one of our older First Year Experience posters, which had the face of a young woman in a classroom on it. It had been defaced some time ago with the words "psychology student" -- the implication to me being that a pretty girl couldn't //possibly// be in CS.

It irked me, but I didn't bother to do anything about it. Frankly, Carleton does do photo shoots where they take whoever volunteers and shoot them pretending to be students of which ever department needed photos; maybe she was a psychology student who someone knew?

But this week, someone had added further defacement to the poster in the form of pornographic stick figures, labelled so you could tell exactly what they thought their very male computer science student should be doing to the female psychology student.

Um, yeah. Not Appropriate. I had the defaced poster removed.

It boggles the mind that I even had to do it.