A Small Victory

Hey all!

I’m fairly new here and haven’t posted before but I think this fits. Some background, I’m a 23 year old woman currently pursuing my PhD in Applied Physics. As you would expect, the staff in my graduate program is predominantly male. And by predominantly, I mean entirely.

This semester, I had to take a class in a subject that has never really been my favorite but I knew the professor and wasn’t too worried. Well, I should have been. I’ve had this professor twice before and out of seemingly nowhere, he started acting like a sexist jerk. Our class had less than 15 students and of those, only myself and two others were women. In general, I felt that he treated the three of us as though we didn’t belong in his class and weren’t as smart or capable as the men in the room. He made some “jokes” that I found incredibly inappropriate (none were sexualized but many were sexist). I wasn’t comfortable confronting him during the semester and due to his condescending attitude, I didn’t think he would take me seriously if I did.

So, at the end of the semester, my university sends out anonymous course evaluations for the students to review their courses and professors. I let loose on mine and stated how his ego, attitude, and sexist jokes severely impacted my experience in the course. I was not kind and did not hold back. Earlier this week, an email was sent out to the entire class. The email came from the chair of my departments Diversity, Inclusion, and Access Committee. The chair is a wonderful woman who has always made me feel safe and heard. I actually considered talking to her about the professor during the semester but chickened out. Apparently, my professor reached out to her to ask that she serve as an intermediary in hopes that the student who left the review (me but remember anonymous so he doesn’t know that) would feel comfortable giving her more information so that he has the full picture and can start to address the things he did that made me upset enough to leave the review I did.

I met with her yesterday and told her everything. She is going to spend the next week processing what I told her and drafting a plan of action for his to address. She will send me her thoughts and ideas before telling him anything. The things on the top of her list so far include: the environment he is creating is unsafe for all students but especially the women in his class, he needs better rubrics to prevent his TAs from grading based on their bias (of course the TA this semester, also a man, was sexist too), and he needs to work on his language and facial expressions during student-interactions. I told the woman I talked to that the information I gave her would give my professor the means to identify me and that I am still okay with her sharing anything I told her.

I’m a little afraid that he is going to know it’s me but I would rather him have the tools to grow and change so that nobody has to feel the way he made me feel again.