When I started writing this newsletter I started to see things that happened in my professional past far differently than I had perceived those same things at the time they happened. It’s not that I’ve become wiser. Instead, when we’re in male-dominated spaces, we perceive things differently. In a way, we have to perceive things differently in order to survive.

At first I judged myself for my own failures to see things as they were. But as I’ve done increasingly more reading about women in similar environments, I’ve learned to view my perceptions more compassionately. There are reasons that we sometimes don’t see things as they are—and those reasons aren’t of our own doing and are not our fault.

In case some of you are like me—and are very hard on yourself about where you are, the path you’ve taken, or what you failed to do in the past—I wanted to spend this week’s issue of the newsletter talking about the reasons we may not see things in the moment. I hope that these concepts will allow you to extend compassion most importantly to yourself, but also to other women.

How We Don’t See

I recently finished Kate Zernike’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science. Nancy Hopkins was a noted molecular geneticist and cancer researcher at MIT. The book tells her story and that of several other female scientists who suffered discrimination for decades at MIT.

The book was remarkable in far more ways than I’ll talk about today, but one thing that repeatedly struck me was how long Hopkins resisted the idea that she was being discriminated against. For at least the first twenty years of her career, she viewed science as a meritocracy where the most talented and hardest working would rise to the top. She discounted the stories of older female scientists who told her that they had been discriminated against and assumed that the women who felt they’d been discriminated against had done something to deserve that treatment. She assumed that the recently-passed civil rights laws would prevent discrimination in her profession. She took for granted that she would have to make life choices that male scientists never had to make, such as whether to have children or pursue a career. And she blamed herself for her inability to rise as quickly as the men who surrounded her did. Every time she saw discrimination, she assumed that it was because of something unique to her circumstances.

Part of the reason Hopkins took so long to see the sexism at MIT was because it would have been emotionally and physically draining to see—much less to confront—such discrimination every day. In addition, unlike the discrimination some older women scientists had experienced—like being groped while working in a lab—much of the discrimination Hopkins and women of her generation experienced was much more subtle. In the book Mary Rowe, the MIT president’s new advisor on women and work, explains that the women who came to her had not, in fact, described “sexual assault or the rank discrimination that civil rights statutes had made illegal,” but instead what she called “the minutiae of sexism,” “the slights against women that were so casual in isolation they weren’t ‘actionable.’” p.162. Faced with those minutiae:

Indeed, when Nancy Hopkins finally begins to see the sexism surrounding her, she resists bringing it to anyone’s attention. The prospect of confronting it “exhausted her, and she was already tired.” p.195.

Why We Don’t See

It turns out that Nancy Hopkins’ story is not an aberration, and that many studies have attempted to explain why this is the case.

While most of us understand why many women don’t report discriminatory conduct at work (particularly when that discrimination presents itself as “the minutiae of sexism” or microaggressions), it turns out that an even greater number of women fail to acknowledge that discrimination even within themselves.

In the early 2000s there were a number of studies that asked men and women to keep diaries while they observed behavior in their workplaces. Several of those studies found that women are less likely to observe discrimination, especially when it occurs on a daily basis. For example, one 2009 study found that women who experienced low levels of discrimination were more likely to engage in coping strategies to deal with it, while those women who experienced pervasive levels were more likely not to see the discrimination until it had gone on for a long time. This led the authors to conclude that “perceiving discrimination to be isolated appears to ultimately promote an acceptance of the status quo while recognizing the pervasiveness of discrimination can have motivational qualities over time.”

Other studies have found that women who strongly identified with their careers were less likely to perceive sexist incidents as such, and that women who achieved success in male-dominated fields were more likely to deny or minimize personal experiences of gender discrimination. According to one study particularly relevant to Nancy Hopkins as well as women in the legal profession, both men and women in fields that value objectivity can be particularly prone not to see discrimination or sexism. In essence, the more focused a woman is on her career—particularly in a field dominated by men—the less likely she may be to see daily acts of discrimination.

Researchers posit a variety of reasons that women in these circumstances fail to see discrimination. Some suggest that, as discriminatory acts in the workplace have moved from more obvious things like groping or quid-pro-quo harassment to more subtle conduct that may appear nice on the surface, it’s just harder to see sexism for what it is. This was certainly true in the case of Nancy Hopkins; however, I tend to think that, because they now have the vocabulary to do so, younger generations of women see these things more easily.

Additional studies posit more complex reasons that we can’t see sexism in our own lives. Some suggest that the failure to see is simply a coping mechanism. It is simply too painful—or saps too much energy we need to exist in male-dominated environments—to see injustices on a daily basis. Others state that women in these circumstances have internalized misogyny. This was true of Nancy Hopkins, although it wasn’t the term she used to describe it.

Regardless of the reasons for this behavior, it is clear that being a woman in a male-dominated profession has concrete effects on our abilities to perceive what is happening around us. I sympathized with the stories Nancy Hopkins and her colleagues often told themselves simply to survive. It helped me to see that even highly-intelligent and accomplished women—women who in a more just world would have won Nobel Prizes—had trouble seeing when they were discriminated against.

Here’s hoping that the story of Nancy Hopkins and others like it not only help us to have more compassion towards ourselves, but also ensure that future generations of women learn to see far better than older generations did—so they can get what they so richly deserve.

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If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. I draft it on Beehiiv (Comes Now (beehiiv.com)) and distribute it on Tuesday evening, but also provide the issue as a LinkedIn newsletter on Wednesday mornings.

I used to publish a Thursday issue called What I’m Reading & Thinking but have decided to discontinue that publication in lieu of some writing I want to do related to complex litigation, my “day job.” But don’t worry! I’ll continue to talk about relevant articles and books in future issues of Comes Now.

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Want to tell me where I got something right or wrong? Send me an email at [email protected].