Where to sit?

     I consider my Green Communities class to be the most openminded and progressive of my classes. I know we can talk about just about anything in there and come away feeling at least somewhat enlightened and without any hurt feelings. This is why I was surprised and yet at the same time unsurprised at the results of physically splitting the class by gender for a portion of our time last thursday. As people sat on one side of the room or the other spending on how they identified, male or female, a kind of tension arose that many of my peers pointed out was strange and unsettling. None of us really seemed to expect one thing or another from the division, but I believe that we were all taken by surprise at how much of a change we felt.

     It is apparent that we still segregate men and women in many ways in our society whether it be by the types of clothing we can shop for or the bathrooms we use or in the judgement of how much a person’s time and work is worth, and although the term segregate is avoided at all costs at present, I believe it is the right one to use now. In high school there was often a voluntarily followed non spoken rule that boys and girls would form their own clusters and stick to them in class, extracurriculars, PE, the lunch room … wherever really. This is completely outside the equally apparent trend for these same kids to separate themselves into any number of other subgroups such as race, age, and others. There seemed to be a certain comfort that came with sitting among people of the same gender, even if they weren’t necessarily friends. I can’t explain it, but it’s a problem! Not because it is wrong to find comfort in sharing space with people of the same gender, but because these early decisions of self segregation only reinforce gender inequality all the way down the road. 

     In our class I have never felt like I was a lesser of two genders. There has never been a time when I felt like them men held more power in the room. The women in our class are just as outspoken and confident, if not more so than the men. And Yet. Once we divided ourselves and set about having a chat about how it made us feel, there was a point made that I feel is a completely valid one: In academics, women feel pressure to try harder to keep the same standing as what men inherently have (again something unspoken that I feel to be true, even though no one demands it). Maybe this is true in our class as well. This outspokenness  that I have seen, the confidence as well, is maybe a sign of the pressures put on women to become “as good as” men. Then this need for confidence can be a good thing, but if it comes from a lack of equality, even one that is unspoken and/or unintentional, then it can quickly become a burden that discourages women from pursuing academics. When we divided ourselves in class this inequality that may never have been have been felt or discussed otherwise was actually recognized. Somehow the tension made us more able to speak about this issue and ones like it, but at the end of the day it was nice to go back to sitting wherever, genders be damned.