The boys club

[sumanoskae]

"How do you include women into the discussions and creative process without them feeling they have to 'become one of the boys' to do it?"

This goddamn question has had the same answer since the beginning of fucking time, and it flummoxes me how humanity has yet to get it through their skulls - just don't treat people differently based on things they have no control over.

What do you do to include men in the creative process? Why are these methods somehow inappropriate for girls? I'm asking that question with absolute sincerity - short of scrutinizing the fine details Kim Kardashian's ass with every second of your free time, I'm having trouble conceiving of what you could possibly be doing in polite company that makes a (Presumably) grown adult so uncomfortable in your presence that they resign from a class that I assume is important to them just to get away from you.

Imagine for a second that the genders of that question were reversed; if you posed it to a room full of people, I guarantee you at least one or two of them would respond "What's wrong with being one of the girls?" And they would be right.

After all, we're not talking about a fucking lifestyle overhaul here; we're talking about fitting into an arbitrary set of categories, most of which concern trivial things, that somebody somewhere decided were "Boyish" or "Girly". There are a few Romantic movies that I really like - I'm not so insecure that I refuse to talk about or enjoy them because that would make me "Girly".

I've heard people talk about not being able to get along with men or women before, but I think that's only a problem if you're so emotionally invested in the trappings of your gender that you're unwilling to even try something that doesn't fit into it. I have never once in my life met someone who was 100% "Boyish" or "Girly". This is especially true in your case - all of you are taking a class together; there's your talking point right there.

You can't have it both ways - you can't organize men and women into exclusive social clubs with their own rules of conduct and also argue that they're equal.

 

[LawAndChaos]

"How do you include women into the discussions and creative process without them feeling they have to 'become one of the boys' to do it?"
This goddamn question has had the same answer since the beginning of fucking time, and it flummoxes me how humanity has yet to get it through their skulls - just don't treat people differently based on things they have no control over.

I think part of the problem is that we have become ensnared by a rapidly growing narrative that everyone is presumed guilty of sexism/racism/etc until proven innocent, and you are only innocent if you follow the narrative.
Consider the OP. We have no debate about whether or not the group was a "boy's club" (defined as being unwelcoming to women), we instead are asked "how can we fix it without making women feel uncomfortable?"
Plus, there are always going to be men and women who treat members of the opposite sex differently. Women and men are biologically very different in a lot of ways. It's when we get into individuals and personality traits that we begin to see more nuance in how people are treated and how they react to treatment.

What do you do to include men in the creative process? Why are these methods somehow inappropriate for girls? I'm asking that question with absolute sincerity - short of scrutinizing the fine details Kim Kardashian's ass with every second of your free time, I'm having trouble conceiving of what you could possibly be doing in polite company that makes a (Presumably) grown adult so uncomfortable in your presence that they resign from a class that I assume is important to them just to get away from you.

This is why this whole discussion is a farce. It is presuming guilt before innocence, presuming that because women are leaving, therefore it MUST be "boy's club syndrome" and clearly "women are not being made to feel welcome." It has already made the hypothesis the conclusion.

It makes about as much logical sense as "there are more male CEOs than female, therefore sexism."
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and all that.

Imagine for a second that the genders of that question were reversed; if you posed it to a room full of people, I guarantee you at least one or two of them would respond "What's wrong with being one of the girls?" And they would be right.

This is because of a cultural double standard.

After all, we're not talking about a fucking lifestyle overhaul here; we're talking about fitting into an arbitrary set of categories, most of which concern trivial things, that somebody somewhere decided were "Boyish" or "Girly". There are a few Romantic movies that I really like - I'm not so insecure that I refuse to talk about or enjoy them because that would make me "Girly".

Personal interests are not a reflection on one's gender. But you'd be surprised how many people feel inclined to associate gender with such things as personality traits and interests, despite the fact that these things cannot be categorized as either because individuals are not representatives of their gender.

I've heard people talk about not being able to get along with men or women before, but I think that's only a problem if you're so emotionally invested in the trappings of your gender that you're unwilling to even try something that doesn't fit into it. I have never once in my life met someone who was 100% "Boyish" or "Girly". This is especially true in your case - all of you are taking a class together; there's your talking point right there.

I think this comes from people just not being used to talking to people of the opposite gender. People do exist who are socially awkward around the opposite sex because of personal attraction, among other things. Biology drives us to find the opposite sex (and sometimes the same sex) as attractive. Plus like it or not gender is still a part of our identity; just like everything else it is a part of who we are, physically. However it is merely one part of who we are, not the whole.

You can't have it both ways - you can't organize men and women into exclusive social clubs with their own rules of conduct and also argue that they're equal.

Well this is part of the whole identity thing. A person you identify with is more approachable than someone you do not.

 

[Raioken18]

As a guy who was once a Psychology student, we had 3 males over 300 students, 5 males in the 700 psych and teaching students.
Sexual discrimination is common in certain fields for both sexes.

Oh man is it bad towards men in those lines of work, so bad.

In one lecture our coordinator came in, got the men in the room to stand up (2 of us), she says to the ~150 other students there at the time, at least 80% of men in psychology are paedophiles. See these two, chances are they are both unfit to be near children. It is for this reason that we have cancelled all practical activities this year. We just can't afford the insurance with these rogue factors involved.

Now, if it goes as far back as insurance providers, that is pretty systematic discrimination and it's not worth changing. I ended up leaving my degree, part of it was knowing that I was unwelcome and that that was the baseline to meeting a male in that industry.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

In one lecture our coordinator came in, got the men in the room to stand up (2 of us), she says to the ~150 other students there at the time, at least 80% of men in psychology are paedophiles. See these two, chances are they are both unfit to be near children. It is for this reason that we have cancelled all practical activities this year. We just can't afford the insurance with these rogue factors involved.

Bloody hell, that is almost grounds for dismissal, or it should be. Ridiculous. It's darkly ironic that this was in a psychology course.

 

[SeanSeanston]

In one lecture our coordinator came in, got the men in the room to stand up (2 of us), she says to the ~150 other students there at the time, at least 80% of men in psychology are paedophiles. See these two, chances are they are both unfit to be near children. It is for this reason that we have cancelled all practical activities this year. We just can't afford the insurance with these rogue factors involved.

The funniest of all being that we know women are more likely to abuse children anyway. Then again, who cares because it's probably not worth talking about when women do it I guess. The most serious child abuse is committed by men, as long as that's how we define serious at least.

As for "affirmative consent" legislation; let me just point out that the only reason such a thing would ever get even close to being seriously discussed is because women never have to abide by such things or worry about being accused, much less convicted, of false (often even real TBH) rape or sexual assault.
Therefore it's harder for them (i.e. most voters) to give a shit when they know it's never going to come back and bite them in the ass, and may even delude themselves that it genuinely isn't horribly corrupt at all because they simply never have to think about these things and are encouraged to be constantly afraid of threats that don't exist during their unusually long lifespans.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

1. But it's not their fault, not finding a group to belong to is always a possibility when going to a new place alone, it's a part of life.

I'm not saying that it's for sure their fault that she didn't fit in. In fact the only thing that I said they were at fault for was being condescending. What I am saying is this is an example of someone quitting a job at least partially because they felt completely out of place and unwelcome in a male dominated environment. If this happens frequently with women in certain fields (and there's reason to believe it does) then you get the boys club which this whole thread is about. You'd probably get something exactly the same if men weren't allowed into the work force for a number of centuries.

2. But the fact that if given a choice between one person overreacting or an entire subject being made to reject women with an entire class being malevolent towards a woman for her gender then guess what, the first choice sounds way more rational, furthermore if I remember correctly you said she was a single week there, meaning she probably had no chance to actually know anyone there. And lastly, if she really was the only one there for that particular line of work (painting) then there's a good chance that it was a bad career move and she took warnings on it not the way they should have.

Your argument could be turned around to defend basically every injustice that has happened in society. History shows that people tend to have pretty big blind spots to things that are the norm in their group. If it's normal for your group to make racist comments, you're not really going to examine those comments.

When it was "common knowledge" that women weren't suited for academic work, if a women considered it to be sexist when she was flat out told it you'd probably get a similar response of "Whoa there, the two possibilities here are that our whole society is sexist, or you're just overreacting. I think I know what's the rational option here".

Yeah, she only spent one week there. Maybe she would have found it to be tolerable after a couple months and find someone she can get along with slightly. On the other hand, she could find some other work which has an environment that she doesn't find completely unpleasant, and where she doesn't get treated with condescension.

For your last alternative, I'm not sure exactly how she could have mistook a genuine desire to help her avoid a dead end career path for condescension. Certainly not to the extent where she felt like shit after leaving every day.

This thread has a lot of women telling similar stories of their experiences, with more or less detail, and I can imagine it must be very frustrating to have people immediately discount their experiences as just being confused and overreacting. Particularly when there's a long history of assuming that's the cause for women's complaints.

To try to recap my stance, I don't think the people she worked with were absolute scumbags, and I think if they heard how she felt a lot of them would probably feel mortified. That being said, I don't think it's at all fair to say that she was only upset because she was confused and blowing a totally innocent situation out of proportion

 

[Superbeast]

As a guy who was once a Psychology student, we had 3 males over 300 students, 5 males in the 700 psych and teaching students.
Sexual discrimination is common in certain fields for both sexes.

Oh man is it bad towards men in those lines of work, so bad.

In one lecture our coordinator came in, got the men in the room to stand up (2 of us), she says to the ~150 other students there at the time, at least 80% of men in psychology are paedophiles. See these two, chances are they are both unfit to be near children. It is for this reason that we have cancelled all practical activities this year. We just can't afford the insurance with these rogue factors involved.

Now, if it goes as far back as insurance providers, that is pretty systematic discrimination and it's not worth changing. I ended up leaving my degree, part of it was knowing that I was unwelcome and that that was the baseline to meeting a male in that industry.

I presume this story ends with you suing the ever-living shit out of the university and coordinator? You'd have got pretty much any lawyer to take that no-win-no-fee (probably even pro-bono, for the chance to take on a large educational institution for their portfolio) it is so open and shut, both in terms of getting the money you spent on fees and lodgings back as well as personal damages. The 297+ female students in your year should have sued for false advertisement regarding practical placements as a strong argument would be able to be made that they only chose that university for those aspects of the course.

 

[LawAndChaos]

Pardon, just need to make some edits.

I'm not saying that it's for sure their fault that she didn't fit in. In fact the only thing that I said they were at fault for was being condescending. [no except yes]
What I am saying is this is an example of someone quitting a job at least partially because they felt completely out of place and unwelcome in a male dominated environment. [Circumstantial, personal feelings] If this happens frequently with women in certain fields (and there's reason to believe it does) [citation needed] then you get the boys club which this whole thread is about. You'd probably get something exactly the same if men weren't allowed into the work force for a number of centuries. [apex fallacy]

10/10

Your argument could be turned around to defend basically every injustice that has happened in society.[false equivalence] History shows that people tend to have pretty big blind spots to things that are the norm in their group. If it's normal for your group to make racist comments, you're not really going to examine those comments.

"Your group." Your group of what? Since when did a professional environment contain norms of "racist comments" or in this case "sexist comments?"

When it was "common knowledge" that women weren't suited for academic work, if a women considered it to be sexist when she was flat out told it you'd probably get a similar response of "Whoa there, the two possibilities here are that our whole society is sexist, or you're just overreacting. I think I know what's the rational option here".[False equivalence again]

Alternatively, our whole society in the present day is still predominantly sexist. Clearly the rational option.

Yeah, she only spent one week there. Maybe she would have found it to be tolerable after a couple months and find someone she can get along with slightly. On the other hand, she could find some other work which has an environment that she doesn't find completely unpleasant, and where she doesn't get treated with condescension.[guilty until proven innocent]
For your last alternative, I'm not sure exactly how she could have mistook a genuine desire to help her avoid a dead end career path for condescension. Certainly not to the extent where she felt like shit after leaving every day.

Because not everyone likes being corrected or criticized? She was doing painting, right? Well, surprisingly people criticize each other's work and often more experienced people (who have done that shit for longer) will explain to less experienced students fundamentals in an effort to help them learn. Did you even ask her what she was told, or why she felt that way? Because I think it's only proper that it be made clear what exactly was SAID, or the exact inflection of what was said (tone of voice) that made her feel condescended to in the first place.

This thread has a lot of women telling similar stories of their experiences, with more or less detail, and I can imagine it must be very frustrating to have people immediately discount their experiences as just being confused and overreacting.[Listen and believe, words in mouth] Particularly when there's a long history of assuming that's the cause for women's complaints.

There have been women in this thread who've experienced some unfair shit, and I'm not about to discount their personal experiences. However the problem with many posters in here is that everyone is attempting to use their single, individual personal experiences as evidence to support an extremely broad, sweeping statement about all of society as a whole. So most certainly their experiences are true, but single personal experiences are not accurate indicators of some sort of overreaching societal problem.

To try to recap my stance, I don't think the people she worked with were absolute scumbags, and I think if they heard how she felt a lot of them would probably feel mortified. That being said, I don't think it's at all fair to say that she was only upset because she was confused and blowing a totally innocent situation out of proportion[words in mouth again]

Unless there is no argument that she was "confused," but rather that she was making assumptions of her colleagues and rather than thinking of them as just regular human beings trying to help that instead the worst was assumed.

No one has telepathy. You can read someone's body language and hear their inflections, but you cannot. read. their. mind.

As a guy who was once a Psychology student, we had 3 males over 300 students, 5 males in the 700 psych and teaching students.
Sexual discrimination is common in certain fields for both sexes.

Oh man is it bad towards men in those lines of work, so bad.

In one lecture our coordinator came in, got the men in the room to stand up (2 of us), she says to the ~150 other students there at the time, at least 80% of men in psychology are paedophiles. See these two, chances are they are both unfit to be near children. It is for this reason that we have cancelled all practical activities this year. We just can't afford the insurance with these rogue factors involved.

Now, if it goes as far back as insurance providers, that is pretty systematic discrimination and it's not worth changing. I ended up leaving my degree, part of it was knowing that I was unwelcome and that that was the baseline to meeting a male in that industry.

And this right here is likely because there exist many professors who assisted and in fact indoctrinated many of their classes with concepts which their students now take to the streets to support. Education in many colleges and universities have become poisoned by professors who seek to spew their own personal narratives onto their students. Your professor was most likely the sort of misandrist that pushes a radical narrative onto students if that act was something she considered reasonable, especially since she was essentially blaming you, as males, for practicals being cancelled that year.

But since the general consensus of society is to fall in line with the rapid surge of cultural marxism and call for censorship, it's safe to say that everything's kinda screwed and the best thing to do now is become a misanthrope and give up on humanity as a whole.

Anyone wanna start building that space colony?

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Pardon, just need to make some edits.

I'm not saying that it's for sure their fault that she didn't fit in. In fact the only thing that I said they were at fault for was being condescending. [no except yes]
What I am saying is this is an example of someone quitting a job at least partially because they felt completely out of place and unwelcome in a male dominated environment. [Circumstantial, personal feelings] If this happens frequently with women in certain fields (and there's reason to believe it does) [citation needed] then you get the boys club which this whole thread is about. You'd probably get something exactly the same if men weren't allowed into the work force for a number of centuries. [apex fallacy]

10/10

Your argument could be turned around to defend basically every injustice that has happened in society.[false equivalence] History shows that people tend to have pretty big blind spots to things that are the norm in their group. If it's normal for your group to make racist comments, you're not really going to examine those comments.

"Your group." Your group of what? Since when did a professional environment contain norms of "racist comments" or in this case "sexist comments?"

When it was "common knowledge" that women weren't suited for academic work, if a women considered it to be sexist when she was flat out told it you'd probably get a similar response of "Whoa there, the two possibilities here are that our whole society is sexist, or you're just overreacting. I think I know what's the rational option here".[False equivalence again]

Alternatively, our whole society in the present day is still predominantly sexist. Clearly the rational option.

Yeah, she only spent one week there. Maybe she would have found it to be tolerable after a couple months and find someone she can get along with slightly. On the other hand, she could find some other work which has an environment that she doesn't find completely unpleasant, and where she doesn't get treated with condescension.[guilty until proven innocent]
For your last alternative, I'm not sure exactly how she could have mistook a genuine desire to help her avoid a dead end career path for condescension. Certainly not to the extent where she felt like shit after leaving every day.

Because not everyone likes being corrected or criticized? She was doing painting, right? Well, surprisingly people criticize each other's work and often more experienced people (who have done that shit for longer) will explain to less experienced students fundamentals in an effort to help them learn. Did you even ask her what she was told, or why she felt that way? Because I think it's only proper that it be made clear what exactly was SAID, or the exact inflection of what was said (tone of voice) that made her feel condescended to in the first place.

This thread has a lot of women telling similar stories of their experiences, with more or less detail, and I can imagine it must be very frustrating to have people immediately discount their experiences as just being confused and overreacting.[Listen and believe, words in mouth] Particularly when there's a long history of assuming that's the cause for women's complaints.

There have been women in this thread who've experienced some unfair shit, and I'm not about to discount their personal experiences. However the problem with many posters in here is that everyone is attempting to use their single, individual personal experiences as evidence to support an extremely broad, sweeping statement about all of society as a whole. So most certainly their experiences are true, but single personal experiences are not accurate indicators of some sort of overreaching societal problem.

To try to recap my stance, I don't think the people she worked with were absolute scumbags, and I think if they heard how she felt a lot of them would probably feel mortified. That being said, I don't think it's at all fair to say that she was only upset because she was confused and blowing a totally innocent situation out of proportion[words in mouth again]

Unless there is no argument that she was "confused," but rather that she was making assumptions of her colleagues and rather than thinking of them as just regular human beings trying to help that instead the worst was assumed.

No one has telepathy. You can read someone's body language and hear their inflections, but you cannot. read. their. mind.

Wow. Okay. First off, personal feelings are absolutely relevant when what I am describing is someone's personal feelings regarding a situation. That's not even an argument, it is simply a fact that she quit a job because she felt out of place and unwelcome, and it is simply a fact that it was a male dominated environment. She was the only woman.

You can argue about the frequency, or the prevalence or whether or not she was justified to feel that way, but that is not what I was saying in that paragraph. What I'm saying here is that this is an example of someone who left a job after having been made to feel unwelcome and condescended to.

As for her experience in painting, I mentioned that she has been painting for her entire life, and she went to art school in which she routinely was at the top of her class. For doing traditional art nonetheless, not abstract or conceptual. This isn't just something she's brand new to. Doing it in the specific context of set design sure, but she's painted buildings, installations and murals which are all of a pretty similar nature.

It wasn't just that they were criticizing her work either because they could do better. It was beneath them to do the painting in the first place. It was clearly delegated as a girl's job, nobody wanted to do it.

You also seem to be working under the assumption that this is a hard science. If she can't reliably read condescending tone, why should she be considered a reliable gauge for recognizing inflection? How am I even supposed to communicate what the exact inflection is? Do we need to do a full linguistic analysis of the voice pitch and word choice to see how it correlates to people who've used condescension in the past?

She described the tone as condescending, as in how one would speak to a child. At the time she told me what they said, but that was over a year ago and I couldn't even come close to something accurate, let alone the exact word choice and the exact tone.

I haven't been trying to give a conclusive proof that sexism exists in society. I specifically said I wasn't going to try to prove that. What I was describing was a situation where someone close to me quit a job in a male dominated environment in film because she felt unwelcome and condescended to.

Absolutely you cannot read people's minds. But given that the only access to their minds you have are their words and actions, that's pretty much all you can use to infer.

 

[KissingSunlight]

Hey folks.

So, this came up in my University's professional development class and it was a 'surprise' for some people but it clearly is a phenomenon that isn't limited to film studies. Let me break it down for you.

120 students in first year, around 40 girls.

80 students in second year, about a dozen.

35 students in third year, 3 girls.

The instructor who had us think about this says there is a 'boys club' culture around film. Specifically in camera department, where guys tend to team up and never let others in. We've been trying to clean up the jokes around set lately but the problem is still that a lot of women are not staying in our classes and its indicative of the larger issue. Add to that there is some stupid stigma against the career driven woman in our class[footnote](she's not bitching you idiots, she's a director who knows what she wants and yet you think you know better. >.<)[/footnote] and it makes me wonder what can be done to make a lasting, positive change.

I don't give a shit about the labeling, lets just acknowledge there's a problem.

How do you include women into the discussions and creative process without them feeling they have to 'become one of the boys' to do it?

This is applicable to every single industry, hobby and community really. Everyone deserves to succeed based on merit and not feel they have to behave like someone they're not in order to hold a job.

[sub][sub]I expect I'll be called an SJW, laughed at and ignored by a lot of people. I'm no warrior but positive social change is always something worth speaking out for. This is just what I've witnessed through my post-secondary experience.[/sub][/sub]

I took a closer look at the numbers you provided for this class. On the surface, it does look like an example of "Boys' Club" with women being 1 in 3 the first year to 1 in 11 the third year. However, there were 2 numbers that stuck out to me. The first number was how many women dropped out after the first year (28) compared to how many men dropped out after the second year (36). The total number of women who dropped out of the class in three years was 37 for men it's 48. More men dropped out of the class than there were women in the first year of the class. Make of those numbers as you will. To me, it tells me that this wasn't a class that appealed to women as much as it did men. Men were more willing to stick it out longer with this subject than women.

On the subject of "Boys' Club", having been a "girl" in a boys' club a few times. The catch being that I was a man working in a company with mostly women. Women in charge are just as exclusionary as men are. I worked in one place where they flipped the script of "Mad Men". All the managers and supervisors were women. Except for the one supervisor position that required heavy lifting. I could tell you some more anecdotal stories from that experience. I doubt it will change you mind if you are already convinced that women can never, ever be sexist.

There is something hypocritical about complaining about "Boys' Club". I think it's because no one ever complain about "Girls' Club", "African Americans' Club", etc. Only when the majority is male or white, people like to see that as a problem.

 

[AidoZonkey]

Ive recently finished university having done a sound design course. Its a film related course so we did spend a lot of the time working with other course of a similar nature, and like your course there was a quite sever gap between boy girl numbers. From my experience, working on any film, your going to have set related humor, and that generally reflects the type of people you are working with. If you are working with a bunch guys, the humor will tend to be a bit more 'laddish', if you are working with a bunch of girls, it becomes a lot more 'cattish'. The only time I've ever seen it be an issue is with people who have been working in the industry for a long time and believe they can get away with anything they say or demand. Its rare but people like do exist.

How do you include women into the discussions and creative process without them feeling they have to 'become one of the boys' to do it?

I will say this about the film industry, you need to be thick skinned. It doesn't matter if your a boy or a girl, the industry is ruff and unfortunately that isn't going to change any time soon, but how do you make women feel more included? Just treat them like anyone else. More and more women are making their way into film, and Ive worked on crews where I'm the only man. The idea of certain rolls being only suitable for anyone of a particular gender is becoming a faded idea. Will there be people who make jokes or act inappropriately? Yes but that will always happen regardless of numbers. At the end of the day, when making a film, if its not about actors, gender should not play a role in your decision making. Most people coming into the industry believe that, and those who don't, are going to find it a lot harder to progress. Of course there people already in the industry who act overly inappropriate, but they are getting fewer and fewer

 

[Something Amyss]

If any woman is going to say things like 'suck my dick', it's most likely me. ... Some women think I'm scary...

Well, I'm certainly quaking in fear.

It's also entirely possible that I always fall in with the low brow crowd, which weights things a specific way. >.>

 

[sageoftruth]

I've already covered three pages of posts so far and has anyone here actually answered the original poster's question? Here we all are talking about whether or not there is a problem and getting into gender issues, nature vs nurture and a bunch of other stuff that one cannot credibly say without links to research, and yet I feel like this could all be so much easier.

My proposal is, if you think the gender disparity isn't a problem, keep quiet just for now. He's not asking if it is. If you do think it's a problem, then answer the actual question and suggest how it can be resolved. Then everyone in the first camp can form their arguments based off of that. This discussion was derailed from the moment the second post was made. Let's stay on topic and talk about possible solutions and whether or not they're a good idea.

 

[renegade7]

I have some relevant experience in this area so I hope that I can be helpful. In college as chair of our Society of Physics students chapter, we had a lot of talks with student groups like Society of Women in Engineering and Association for Women in Mathematics, and we did spend considerable amounts of time on things like how to encourage equal representation. I also want to add that my experience has shown that it is patently ridiculous to suggest that an underlying problem with sexism plays no role here.

I think the most important thing is to not make your female classmates feel singled out.

There's a really tricky balance there, because it means not treating them differently than you would treat your male classmates, and that means being careful about both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is of course a problem because it's just plain disrespectful and insulting to your female peers, and no one wants to be in a workplace or academic setting where they feel disrespected and insulted. But benevolent sexism isn't going to help you either, because it still treats women like they're outsiders or at worst subtly implies that they can't handle themselves. Be welcoming to women, not accommodating, because when you're making accommodations for women you're still implicitly saying that women are not organically part of that environment and making their presence in that environment feel forced.

Taking the dirty jokes thing, for instance. I personally have known very few women who actually had a serious problem with sexual humor. Sexual humor is funny because sexuality is a shared experience, and that applies to women as well. The women I've known who did have a problem with it have tended to be the really pole-up-the-ass types, and that doesn't seem to be the kind of personality that's attracted to film school. For most women, and most people in general, dirty humor becomes a problem only when it crosses the line into being offensive or creepy, or when people backpedal on blatantly sexist comments by insisting that they were "just joking".

Here's the short of it if we're being honest, the Norwegian Paradox has long made clear men and women overall want to do different lines of work,

Clarification please?

Wikipedia:
The Norwegian paradox is a dilemma of Norway's economic performance where economic performance is strong despite low R&D investment.

This seems to have only to do with economics and nothing relevant here.

and no ammount of programs for schools or affirmative action is going to change that. Men and women act differently, think differently, overall want to do different jobs and as a result overall do different jobs.

And that's why turnover and dropout rates matter more than raw numbers. You can safely assume that if a young woman has gained acceptance into a college film program that she was interested in film in the first place. The acceptance committee deemed her sufficiently competent, interested, and likely to succeed, putting her at least on an even level with her male peers. Yet she's more likely to quit the program than her male counterparts, despite having been deemed comparably likely to complete the program. Moreover, the odds of dropping out per year are basically constant throughout her academic career, but are, according to OP's experience, about 3 times greater than those of her male counterparts.

If this was mainly due to individual factors we would not see that difference in dropout rate because that's what admissions controls for, since colleges accept students based on their likelihood of completing the degree program (as a function of things like prior academic preparation, grades, and interest in the program). That suggests that individual factors can't be the only force here.

There are physiological explanations for why you don't see many female lumberjacks. But I know of no reason that a female physiology would make a female film student more likely to drop out than a male film student.

It's hard coded into us to want to do different things, which is why you'll never have parity for the gender ratio in many lines of work. People can say it's a result of socialization, but as reality has shown over the past 50 years (and hell, the very unethical experiment which started the debate in the first place itself showed if one actually looks at its results) that is definitively not the case.

Socialization as opposed to what? Biology doesn't go all the way towards explaining many of the disparities. Like, there are more male than female programmers, yet there are more female than male linguists, and appealing to neurology does not work here because, by looking at cases of people afflicted with discalculia, programming and linguistics both engage the same brain structures. It's ridiculous to pretend that no part of your personality comes from the society you grew up in.

And perhaps it's just my tendency towards optimism, but I have a hard time believing that anyone could just be genetically fated to be a turkey slaughterer.

 

[LawAndChaos]

-Snip-

The problem is that when you take personal feelings into account, you can't 100 percent quantify anything that could solve the "larger problem" the OP claims these personal accounts are indicative of. I won't contest that the situation your friend was in was unfair, and potentially even sexist, but personal feelings are not relevant to that situation. Anyone with a chip on their shoulder and a persecution complex can personally feel discriminated against. Any person not being involved in group discussion can feel excluded (whether they are choosing to try and get involved in discussion or not). So with her being discriminated against (beyond a reasonable doubt), we can say she was treated unfairly which lead to her feelings which lead to her quitting in this scenario, so it was not her feelings, but the environment she was in that was responsible. Were the environment a healthier one, she would not have those feelings to begin with. We need to look at each incident on a case by case basis to ensure people are not just being oversensitive and associating their personal feelings with the reality.

If condescension was inferred from her peers, then it's clear that she was in a shitty group. Whether that's an indication of how little they cared for the subject (maybe it was their elective course rather than their major, so they were being condescending because art was "easy" and "beneath them," but that's just speculation on my part) or because they were in fact being sexist, I can't say. But to state they made her feel like shit every day while in the same breath claim they would be horrified to realize they made her feel that way either means they weren't intending to be that way or they were and the statements are contradictory.

Or would you rather I propose that she chose not to speak up and make her concerns about the unhealthy work environment known to her peers?

I haven't been trying to give a conclusive proof that sexism exists in society. I specifically said I wasn't going to try to prove that. What I was describing was a situation where someone close to me quit a job in a male dominated environment in film because she felt unwelcome and condescended to.

Which is either an isolated case and therefore is not indicative of a pattern, or indicative of a pattern that proves sexism exists in society. If your intent was not to prove something, then I can only assume you were conveying your secondhand account to relate and empathize with the OP's situation, in which case I apologize for jumping down your throat on this.
I'm just tired of this whole "patriarchy wage gap boy's club sexism" narrative that's permeating society, and statements of "we need to be more inclusive even though our efforts to be more inclusive aren't working" and "this is a constant process (which means no effort is ever going to be good enough)" are not helping, especially when people are using their own personal accounts as some sort of 'prevalent evidence of sexism.'

Alternatively we assume the personal accounts are indicative of the larger problem, where we've also had accounts of males being treated like they're unwelcome in the "girl's club," in which case we have to wonder what we can do to fix both sides of the issue, or alternatively assume that it's simply a case of "boys and girls clubs" simply taking on borg mentality and anyone against the norm is an "abnormality," in which case I can't help but wonder why it's a gendered issue in that case when it seems to be more of a case of collectivist behavior.

This is applicable to every single industry, hobby and community really. Everyone deserves to succeed based on merit and not feel they have to behave like someone they're not in order to hold a job.

If I recall the OP's professor made this statement, and the OP agrees. This "we need to be more inclusive" thing is applicable to all industries. Therefore all industries are not inclusive already, therefore discriminatory, therefore any male-dominated field = boy's club, therefore sexism.

We've been trying to clean up the jokes around set lately but the problem is still that a lot of women are not staying in our classes and its indicative of the larger issue.

"We've been trying to clean up the jokes around set" but "the problem is still that a lot of women are not staying in our classes."

Now, considering then that we look at this statement as indicative that their efforts are failing, what does that tell us? Does that make their field too "boy's club" and "not inclusive enough," or were their efforts too piss poor to make an actual difference? The only 3 outcomes are "they're not trying hard enough," "there just is not enough interest and this isn't a gender issue" or "we need to cater to women to make them more comfortable."

Unless there's additional options.

Are male-dominated fields inherently sexist/exclusionary, or is it just unfortunate circumstances that have nothing to do with gender?
Are women leaving these fields due to personal preference, discrimination, atmosphere, or a combination of factors?
Where does the "boy's club" begin and "other factors" end?
And how can we encourage women to enter into these fields without the use of affirmative action programs or attempting to reprogram people like they're somehow automatically at fault for the population discrepancy?

 

[Paradoxrifts]

From my personal experience people wash out of pursuing a career in the creative industries do so because they're not really all that passionate about their field of study. They're just looking to get into a career where the work is relatively easy and the pay is good. Once the reality of the situation settles in most of them vanish with nary a trace.

Now if I were to pick a problem that only women seemed to face while educating themselves in my field from my own observations, I would say that it would be thirsty blokes doing the work for girls they're sweet on - instead of forcing them to troubleshoot the problem themselves and apply critical thinking skills. I don't think it's malicious. It's the teacher's responsibility to impart that knowledge on their students and the student's responsibility to absorb that knowledge or at the very least write it down for later. But as a guy I don't really have the luxury of depending on others to that extent, it is expected of me to man up and get it done. Had I the option I would like to think that I wouldn't take the quick and easy route like some women choose to do, but my personal history of general slothfulness says otherwise.

 

[Karadalis]

Well in todays world interacting with female students has seemingly become incredibly dangerous for male students.

Why should you let a female into your group who could if things dont go to her liking destroy your entire live by simply accusing you of one thing or another?

Its the same reason for example that managers at companies refuse to talk to their female employees behind closed doors or without a camera running or without a third person in the room.

It SEEMS to be simply safer for a male student to not open that can of worms and have a damocles sword sitting over him that his career will be ruined and him being expelled for the slightest perceived injunction.

Sure its a somewhat irrational fear but if the last couple of years have shown us anything then its that women on campus hold incredibly power by simply pointing their fingers at male students. The media will automatically jump to their aid, public opinion will automatically rule in their favour, the university will demand that you PROOVE YOUR INNOCENCE and you will get a giant bucket of shit dumped over you with ,as i said before, lasting ramifications for the rest of your live.

Why should any male student with two functioning braincells even TAKE THE CHANCE of this happening?

Then theres the whole difference between the two genders thing: You do not act around women the same as you act around guys and women dont act around guys the same as they act around girls. Thats a fact! And people will automatically drift towards those that make them feel more comfortable, wich often means they would rather work with someone of the same gender on a project then with a different gender because youre walking on eggshells all the time.

Personally i blame social media for this nonsense.

We where on the right way but then social media blew things so out of proportions and told everyone that their "feelings" count so much more then actual facts that the whole equality thing got set back by years.

Also assuming that this "problem" automatically means theres somehow a sexiszt/mysoginistic problem is quite pretentious to begin with.

Maybe working behind the camera is simply not what those female students imagined it would be for them? From the dropout rates it seems that alot of males think so too.. going from 120 students to 35 students total tells me that theres not a gender issue but a fucking retention issue overall. Aparantly your job sucks balls and people dont want to be stuck in a job that sucks balls.

 

[NPC009]

Hey, uhm, isn't it kinda really sexist to assume women can and will accuse you of sexual harassment or even rape to get their way?