Ladies' Night

I joined some classmates and our teacher tonight at The Keg, in Bellingham, for a little end-of-quarter celebration. Kind of nice to get to know some of the classmates on a more personal level. We were a table (two tables pushed together) of eight women. The majority of paralegal students are women, though there were two men in the Intro to Paralegal Studies class, and one of them also took the Torts class. But the Real Estate Law class happened to be all women this quarter.

Quite different from my seminary days at Regent College. In the more general classes, taken by people in all different degree programs, it was a fairly even split, but once I funneled down into the classes that were specifically for M.Div. students, the classes were usually mostly men with me and one or two other women.

Some of my past jobs were also in majority-men settings. I taught high school English 1985-86 at San Jose Christian School, in San Jose, CA, and 1986-87 at Central Valley Christian Schools, in Visalia, CA. Back then, those were both small high schools with one teacher for every discipline--math, science, history, etc. In both schools, the two women teachers were me, the English teacher, and another woman, the typing and P.E. teacher. (Meanwhile, the elementary school teachers were nearly all women.)

Then I worked for seven years editing and writing automotive technical materials, and in my department I was the only woman among eight men for many years. For the last several years there, I had one woman co-worker. There were other women in other departments. All the proofreaders and typographers were women.

Later I worked a year for a Herman Miller furniture dealership, where throughout my building the women were a noticeable, though not overpowering, majority. Now I'm back in a woman-dominated field--paralegal, that is; lawyers themselves I suppose are about 50-50.

It would be invidious to make sweeping statements about the differences. As far as working in a male-dominated place, I'll say that my experience in the schools was better than among the automotive writers. The teachers had better manners and genuinely respected women. Some of the automotive guys were the same, about, well, two out of the eight. The others mostly meant to be nice (with one glaring exception), but they just seemed uncomfortable with women. They could not behave naturally while conversing with a woman, but seemed to find it necessary to posture, strike attitudes, and try (not always successfully) to be clever. In retrospect, I feel kind of sorry for them; at the time, I merely found them tiresome.

Having mostly women around at school feels pretty comfortable to me; I hope it feels fine to the two men. I don't notice any problems.