Feminism at Cornell

It was really interesting hearing about the experiences other women had being females in STEM at Cornell. One experience which was especially interesting was one student told us about a time that she was in a group project for a Chemistry class, and her other male teammates offered to do her part of the group project for her. To be honest, I was very surprised to hear that she had experienced this kind of discrimination at Cornell. No one has ever implied that I would be less competent than them since I am a woman in tech. If I were in her position, while I would have been happy at the idea of not having to do a group project and tempted to have accepted their kind offer of doing the work for me, I would have also been really discouraged and surprised at receiving this kind of treatment. Luckily though, it has never happened so far.

Another interesting thing we talked about was the percentage of females in office hours. It seems that whenever I go to office hours for 4000+ level CS classes, it is more than half female, despite the CS major being about 30% female. People hypothesized that this may have been because women more readily admit their mistakes. I am not sure I agree with this, however I think that it is an interesting thought.

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