Not being a bitch

Ran into an interesting interview in the New York Times' Tuesdaily "Science Times" section. After all the furore last year about women's brains not being science-oriented, and the old-boys'-club phenomenon, and whatnot, the NY Times interviewed a neurobiologist called Ben A. Barres...who used to be Barbara until 10 years ago. The part of the interview that jumped out at me, however, was this:

Q. Why didn’t you see these episodes as sexism?

A. Women who are really highly successful, they are just as bad as the men. They think if they can do it, anyone can do it.

Learning that that's not true makes all the difference between being an intelligent person liked for their helpfulness and being an arrogant ass whom everyone wishes would go away and stop flaunting her/his brains. It took me forever to learn that. I didn't realize it for all of primary and most of secondary school.

It took me so bloody long to learn not to be a bitch.

Another interesting bit:

And it may be that some women — and African-Americans, too — identify less strongly with their particular group. From the time I was a child, from the littlest, littlest age, I did not identify as a girl. It never occurred to me that I could not be a scientist because I was a woman. It just rolled off my back.

What's funny is that although I'm quite comfortable with my gender, I generally can't stand other women. They drive me crazy. An acquaintance through Phases was recently freaking out because some of her stupid friends were threatening to sue each other because of a flamewar about someone's hair rebonding.The girls that I'm friendly with themselves tend to be toward the tomboy end of the spectrum.

I like wearing pretty dresses but somehow it never occurs to me to. I just spent an afternoon prancing around in my never-worn finery, preparatory to packing it away for five months. But I hate clothes shopping.

[brag]One of my proudest moments in college was unexpectedly winning the Sophomore Prize in Computer Science - as the only girl in a class of 8. I think one of the things that might have done it was using a very short and unusual solution to a problem on the final. We had to write a program that would convert decimal to octal. You're "supposed" to do this by diving the input by powers of 8, but I remembered from secondary school maths that if you have a number in binary, you can convert it to octal by grouping the digits in threes, e.g. 110,001,000,110 = 6106 in octal or 3142 in decimal. So instead of dividing by 8, I used bitstream operators to push off three-digit chunks. The prof called me in to his office to ask me to explain what the toot I was doing; apparently he'd never seen that solution before. Funny thing is, I was taking the class for fun but everyone thought I was a CS major after that. [/brag]