Trying to Change a Culture of Sexism

One Graduate Worker’s Story

Here are comments from a female graduate worker who, after some disturbing personal experiences, became active in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues at MIT. They are presented anonymously but represent the experiences of many people.

“My experience at MIT has been unfortunately riddled with instances of gender harassment and inequality. As a vocal critic of this environment and someone who has been willing to share my stories with others, I know my experiences are not an anomaly and represent the repercussions of a system that exploits its workers, with underrepresented and vulnerable people often carrying the bulk of the burden.

In classes, I watched my male colleagues exhibit much higher confidence than  my female peers, and many of my female colleagues, including myself, experienced debilitating mental health issues at a disproportionate rate during this initial period of our time at MIT. Data from an internal survey showed this gender discrepancy clearly: females, on average, spent ~12 hours more per week than males on work in our program’s core classes, and experienced much higher rates of stress and loss of confidence. Reading the select survey quotes was heartbreaking, but incredibly familiar. It feels like we are intentionally broken down and re-oriented to a lower standard of acceptable treatment and expectations. Similar instances of gender-discrepant outcomes on academic milestones have been reported at MIT before.

Joining a lab didn’t make things much better. One day, a male colleague told me that I had worn an outfit that made him believe my values and priorities were off. I was in shock, I started to get upset and explain why that’s not acceptable to say, only to have another senior male colleague jump in to defend him. I left crying. He never apologized. I proceeded to get similar inappropriate and superficial critiques during internship placements from my program, while my scientific contributions were ignored. These incidents have stayed with me and permanently damaged my self-confidence.

Even when I’m minding my own business, walking the halls or attending project meetings, I am still bombarded with reminders I do not fully belong here. I’ve had multiple male professors judge me based on my appearance, expressing disbelief that I am a grad student here. Even titular authority does not relieve women from this sexism: there is a clear distinction (that is, a lack of respect) in how many male professors speak to female professors.

There have been large-scale scandals too. I witnessed the institute disregard the safety of its community members by sneaking a sex offender on campus, violating his probation terms, multiple times, for the sake of money. I watched this scandal come and go with remarkably little lasting effect on MIT’s reputation, with bad actors left unpunished.

I have seen MIT provide so much lip-service to addressing these DEI issues, watching them create a string of working groups and committees that lack the appropriate structure to make real change, instead slowly providing lukewarm recommendations that never get enacted. I bought into this rhetoric, joining many such efforts and expending tens of hours of uncompensated and emotionally taxing labor each week, only to see insultingly minimal progress. I’ve sat on an institute DEI committee for years and not seen it even attempt to make measurable change, instead spending time to pat themselves on the back for anything and everything possible. I founded a women’s group, helped execute anti- harassment and bias trainings, and developed a lab climate best practices guide. While I’m proud of these contributions, I knew they were not enough to make lasting systemic change. But when I tried to push harder, to hold MIT to their lip-service commitments to DEI and students, I hit walls. Eventually, after over two years of dedicated DEI work at MIT, I was excluded from all future DEI conversations and opportunities, despite my status as a prominent DEI student advocate and member of multiple DEI-related groups and committees.

These experiences have had lasting, negative effects on my research, mental wellbeing, and self-esteem. I have had to experience sexism, then waste my time trying to address the structures that allow it, burning personal and professional bridges along the way. I would never have pushed as hard as I did, had I not been following the empty promises of leadership. But they only want you involved as long as you remain within their bounds and, ultimately, under their control. This is the experience of many student advocates, who are all executing copious volumes of this thankless and uncompensated labor to develop initiatives that end up being co-opted by leadership. 

I support unionization and will be voting yes in the upcoming election, because I wholeheartedly believe that our union is necessary for correcting the systemic power imbalances that perpetuate harassment and discrimination by bad actors.”

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