Don't Take That Away From Me

I was at a party this weekend, at the home of a good friend of mine. It was a party packed with friendly, open-minded and interesting people. I brought along a good friend of mine who is a mathematician, a very good mathematician, and also one of my favorite Pittsburgh beer-drinking buddies. So here we are, at this party. We overhear a group of guys talking about math, so, naturally, we insert ourselves into the conversation. "We're mathematicians!" I say. Their eyes light up, and immediately they turn to my buddy and ask him what sort of math he does. They continue to marvel at him for the next 15 minutes as he explains homotopy type theory to them.

I'm smiling, proud of my friend for being such an all around bad-ass. And when I pipe up to add a clarifying point about proof by contradiction, they all look at me, and one says, "Oh yeah, you're a mathematician too. What do you teach?" And I say, "number theory." I instantly get the turbo-eye-roll followed by "Geez, they still teach that? What's it even good for?" Then back to the type theory.

I won't get into the fact that that this person was an obvious idiot. Nor will I get into the hilarious fact of a group of dudes who took Calc 1 sometime in the early 2000's pretending to understand homotopy type theory. But what I will mention is that this sort of scenario plays out on small and large scales all across the world all the time. People look at a female mathematician, and they instantly see their high school math teacher. They look at a male mathematician, and they see John Nash standing before them.

Or more universally, people look at a woman and assume her to be less-than, and silently rob her of her expertise, be it in mathematics, politics, art, or rock'n'roll. I know that gender inequality is really hot on my mind right now in view of the campus sexual assault train-wreck that keep crashing over and over and over again. And please understand that I would never suggest that someone annoyingly undercutting me at a party is anywhere close to the horrors of sexual assault, but it's scenarios like this that perpetually remind me of the glaring differences in how our world receives (and perceives) men and women.

That fact that a male voice explaining anything at all has more apparent real world relevance than a female voice, well, it's discouraging at best...enraging at worst. And this sort of thing happens continuously and blindly; women are denied their talents at the hands of largely clueless, and often totally benevolent, men. But who can blame them, the world is built for men, and all the great stages of the world are peopled with men.

I just yearn for a world where professional women's sports are actually a thing -- and don't "not all men" me on that one. Or better yet, a world where bars play Sports Center on one screen, and Real Housewives of New Jersey on the other. A world where men and women are directing movies and producing music in equal turn. A world where women are allowed their expertise, or at least cut the same slack as men are when they screw up. A world where women feel safe, empowered, and good. #HILARY2016.