SIPB

As a member of the SIPB community, and as a female member of the SIPB community, I’ve been asked, a number of times, what I think about the SIPB environment, how to encourage people to hang out in the office and thereby recruit new members, whether there is sexism in the office or any other deterrent that is more specific to one gender than the other, etc. I’ve thought about this from time to time, when it’s randomly popped back into my head, but not terribly thoroughly. Some of my preliminary thoughts, though, follow.

Is there some sort of sexism in the office, or else something in the environment that would perhaps make girls feel more uncomfortable than guys, or vice versa? I have heard talk about how, in the past, there were more PDA in the office, and this resulted in the perception, on the part of some non-SIPB-affiliates, that SIPB was a place where the female members were required to be in some sort of a non-platonic relationship with with the male members. I was not personally around during this period, however, and it seems that this is much less of an issue these days. The office does, on the other hand, often play host to sexual jokes that are probably not unexpected in a college environment. And this is, perhaps, where my opinion requires some qualification. I wouldn’t categorize myself as the type to be sensitive to these sorts of issues; if they were pointed out to me, I would certainly see them and understand them, but I might not notice them on my own. I’ve always just wanted to be treated like everyone else, and a lot of what that meant was that I didn’t want to be treated differently because I was a girl, that I didn’t want to be treated differently from the way the guys treated each other.

This is part of the problem with sexism, isn’t it? It’s the same problem you have with other kinds of discrimination, like racism. Some people consider affirmative action to be a form of racism, which, by strict definition, it is, because it involves treating people differently based on race; racism and racial discrimination are not synonymous, after all. Going back to sexism, then: are girls more likely to be offended if they’re not treated the same way everyone else is, meaning that they don’t want people treading more carefully around them because they’re girls, or are they more likely to be offended in an environment where people casually banter about sex, etc?

I can definitely see how girls of the latter type would be turned away by the office environment as it exists on a not-infrequent basis — sexual banter is not uncommon in the office, after all, even if people don’t mean anything by it in particular. What about the former type? I generally don’t have a problem with the office, at least. There have been instances, however, where I have felt that there were insinuations made about the technical ability of girls, which is not something the office should tolerate.

Moving on to the more general topic of how welcoming SIPB seems to newcomers, the main problem that people have noted is the feeling of not fitting in. Some people don’t feel technically competent enough to fit into a situation where they feel that everyone else has some high level of technical prowess (which not all of us do, by the way). Some people feel like they don’t fit in because they feel that the SIPB is already its own community, an established social group, and they’re intruding and don’t know anyone. These seem to be the two main issues that are getting in the way of people coming by and spending time in the office.

People tend to be engrossed in whatever their current project is while they’re in the office, which could be contributing to both of these potentially problematic perceptions. The only solution that I can think of at the moment is simply to encourage people in the office to be more expressive about what they’re doing, the way that mystery hunt teams that allow for hunters who drift in and out do. For example, the Simmons team, which tries to encourage resident participation by emphasizing that one doesn’t need to be a hardcore hunter to join in for a puzzle or two, tried to have someone operationally in charge of base so that people drifting in and out would be welcomed by having what was going on explained to them and they wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the fact that there were many groups of people in the middle of  working intensely on puzzles.

Another solution that has been proposed in the past in response to the general problem of recruitment has been a mentor-type of program. Things to consider: Someone needs to be in charge of coordinating it. It has the failure mode of scaring away prospectives who are not so interested in such an arrangement because it is somewhat more formal and feels like more of an obligation than not. It should be optional, of course, but it could make prospectives who sign up for it feel like they “needed more help” integrating into SIPB than prospectives who don’t, etc. Would there be enough members interested to make this work? These questions/issues can be worked around, though, and it would be something worth implementing for the sake of the prospectives who are interested in it, I think.