I have three or four sets of tech­ni­cal writ­ing papers to grade this week­end – I am teach­ing two sec­tions this semes­ter – and I was think­ing to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of hav­ing to deal with stu­dent writ­ing so I am going to pro­cras­ti­nate by telling you briefly about a dis­cus­sion I had Mon­day with the sec­tion that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assign­ment they will be hand­ing in to me next week. I am using a text­book called Ele­ments of Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chap­ters of which deal with the tech­ni­cal writ­ing process. Each chap­ter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incre­men­tal assign­ment into the sequence of chap­ters: Stu­dents are to imag­ine that they work for a start-up com­pany that is think­ing about invest­ing in group­ware so that employ­ees can work remotely. They have been asked by their super­vi­sor to do some research and write a report on group­ware that she can use to per­suade man­age­ment to spend the money. The first two steps in the writ­ing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a descrip­tion of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be com­pleted. On Mon­day, we were talk­ing about the audi­ence analy­sis sec­tion of the work plan, and I was ask­ing my stu­dents to list what they knew about their super­vi­sor that might be rel­e­vant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvi­ous things about being a man­ager, and then some­one said, “She’s a woman.”

“Is that rel­e­vant to the writ­ing of your report?” I asked.

“Of course,” some­one else answered.

“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.

“Because women are more skep­ti­cal than men.”

“Because women over ana­lyze everything”

“They pay too much atten­tion to details.”

“Women ask too many questions.”

“Because women never for­get when you make a mistake.”

“Because women in the work­place always feel they have some­thing to prove; she’s prob­a­bly going to be really pushy.”

There were a cou­ple of more that I don’t remem­ber clearly, but all of them – with the excep­tion per­haps of the last one – were such unam­bigu­ous instances of sex­ist stereo­typ­ing that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard any­one any­where assert those stereo­types as if they were sim­ple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assump­tions?” I asked. “Remem­ber, she’s your super­vi­sor.” A few of my stu­dents laughed; a cou­ple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and pre­dictable con­ver­sa­tion about sex­ist stereo­typ­ing; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in gen­eral, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base work­place behav­ior on those kinds of assumptions.

Then, as the con­ver­sa­tion was wind­ing down, some­one said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fight­ing us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfor­tu­nately, class was over and so I couldn’t pur­sue pre­cisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feel­ings. On the one hand, there is wis­dom in what that stu­dent said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in hav­ing to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to won­der about how to struc­ture a les­son, or lessons, around the prob­lems of sex­ism in the work­place and eth­i­cal behav­ior in the work­place, that would remain true to the course descrip­tion but also go a lit­tle deeper than some ver­sion of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s some­thing I will be think­ing about, since it looks like I will be teach­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing for the fore­see­able future.