counting

Do you ever look around a room and just count? This is something that i picked up in college. How many people in the room appear to identify as women? How many people in the room appear to look non-white? What about non-white and non-Asian in tech world? How many might be read as queer? How many might be read as identifying with a less-than-mainstream subculture?

I started this in college when (during one of the "how to be a better teacher" lectures) i heard that when the room is 30% women, it feels like it's half and half. Scan a room. Guess the percentage of men/women and then count. How good are you at guessing?

I wasn't the only one who counted. I remember talking to a student of mine, asking why he stopped participating in class. He asked me if i counted how many other black students there were, how many gay students. He said that he was afraid to speak up, afraid to say something wrong, to make it seem like all blacks are stupid, that all gays are stupid. I knew many women who were afraid to speak out of fear that they were speaking for the women missing from the room.

When we count, we can be aware. But sometimes awareness is paralyzing.

Semi-related tangent... During the "how to be a better teacher" lectures, professors were told that they should call on women as often as men. Unfortunately, my computer science professor took this literally and would cold call man than woman than man than woman. There were only 10% women and thus each woman was called on significantly more frequently than each man, only magnifying the women's feeling that they were speaking for their gender, not for themselves.