Global Crisis

"Only hotel guests can use the accessible door."

Logo of the ADA 25: 1990-2015. From http://www.adalegacy.com/

It's 11 at night on the 25th anniversary of the ADA and the four of us have just arrived at the W Washington hotel. They have a spectacular bar on the rooftop with a view looking out over the White House and a gloriously illuminated city. After a hot and humid day, the air is a little cooler at night, and the car from the Kennedy Center, where we had just celebrated the signing of the ADA and heard from leaders and felt the strength and power of our community. It ended with the fabulous Diane Schuur playing a short set, and her "Louisiana Sunday Afternoon" is still ringing in my head.

S, one of my companions, directs our driver around to the side door where she knows its more accessible. L and M, the other two, have physical disabilities and, after a long day, would find it much less painful to avoid going up steps. From this door, we can just walk through straight to the elevators and up to the bar. Honestly, I need a drink.

And the security guard says no. He says the door is closed. We sputter a little, looking at each other, wondering if this is really happening. One of us, probably M, speaks first, saying that we need the accessibility this door provides. At that point, accessibility should be a magic word, but instead the guard hardens his commitment to compliance. We each speak, hesitantly, then more forcefully, trying to get the guard to realize he's making a mistake. On tonight, of all nights, to this group of four - journalists, writers, performers, disability rights experts - he just doesn't do this. He asks, "Are you guests of the hotel," and we reply that we are not, but want to go to the bar (it's a bar open to the public, of course, so this is not unreasonable).

His reply is that only hotel guests have the right to accessibility.

M has had it. Despite the pain it causes her, she literally runs around the corner, up the steps, and right at the desk. I trail behind, just in case she needs anything, but not to get in her way or play abled savior. She does not need my help. Outside, the guard opens the sacred door, seems M at the desk, and perhaps realizes he's messed up, and just lets L and S in.

At the desk, the manager on duty apologizes for the inconvenience, to which I reply, "it's not inconvenient, it's illegal."

This is discrimination. It's a micro-aggression, the small acts of control that an ableist society asserts over people with disabilities. And it matters. It shows us that the ADA may be great and powerful, and it is, but we have a lot of cultural to do before this kind of denial of accessibility, when explicitly invoked, becomes unthinkable. 

I've called the hotel for a comment and we'll see what they say.

Updated with tweets from L and M (used by permission)

SHAME ON @WhotelDC! Went there to celebrate last night after #ADA25 @kencen & They REFUSED to let us use accessible entrance! @LCarterLong

— Maysoon Zayid (@maysoonzayid) July 27, 2015

@maysoonzayid @WhotelDC @kencen Turns out they'd never heard of #ADA25. Not Inconvenient, Illegal...! @Lollardfish @Waelkyrie

— Lawrence Carter-Long (@LCarterLong) July 27, 2015

Two recent pieces in the national media provide more evidence for the ways that women get driven out of the scientific profession, as well as the continued questions of the meaning of that evidence.

First, from the New York Times, a piece on harassment in science. It begins with the author relating her experience (a senior prof booking a hotel room with only one bed for the two of them), then continues:

I’d forgotten about this experience from two decades ago until I read a report published July 16 in the journal PLOS One. Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and three colleagues used email and social media to invite scientists to fill out an online questionnaire about their experiences with harassment and assault at field sites; they received 666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors. Very few respondents said their field site had a code of conduct or sexual harassment policy, and of the 78 who had dared to report incidents, fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the outcome.

Fieldwork, it is clear, is a dangerous place to be a woman. It's also where you make your break your career and take your first steps. The piece ends with a powerful call for clear standards, pre-emptive anti-harassment policies, and most of all, people to be willing to call out their friends and colleagues. We cannot rely on the victim of harassment to challenge the system herself.

And yet, I suspect many people will not heed the call. NPR has a new piece on women in engineering.

Over the course of three years Nadya Fouad, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, surveyed 5,300 women who earned engineering degrees within the past six decades in order to figure out why so few stayed in engineering. Fouad reported that only 62 percent of respondents were currently working in engineering. Those who left the field provided their reasons for doing so in the survey.

"It's the climate, stupid!" she said during her presentation, referring to the "old-boys club" workplaces that she says still exist in many engineering organizations.

Respondents in her study reflected her sentiments, with many calling the engineering workplace unfriendly and even hostile to women. They also said that they felt many of these companies did not provide opportunities for women like them to advance and develop.

"Women's departure from engineering is not just an issue of 'leaning in.' " said Fouad, lead researcher of the study. "It's about changing the work environment."

Changing the work environment, not just individual women taking action. What I thought was especially important, if depressing, was this response to her work:

Not everyone agrees with Fouad's findings.
"Women aren't leaving engineering to go and hide in a corner. They are leaving for many reasons which a study like this may not find," said Elizabeth Bierman, president of the Society of Women Engineers and an aerospace engineer for 20 years. "The work environment may be one reason but for the majority it is not the case."
Her organization recently conducted its own retention study and found that although women do leave the engineering workplace faster than men, they do so for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons, such as lack of a work/life balance, also resonate with men, Bierman said.
The bigger problem facing women and engineering, she said, is getting more women into the engineering pipeline. Bierman says companies looking to retain both women and men should improve their work/life balance policies.
"We've found that women stay in engineering because they want to make sure they are making a difference," she says. "If women feel they are making that difference, retention levels will be higher."

Yes, make a difference. And how do they make a difference?

Well, first we have to change the climate so that women's work is valued, women are protected from harassment (oh, the stories I have heard from a few aerospace engineer friends, now all working in other fields), and we change the culture.

Choice is fine. Choice is stressed by everyone defending the lack of women in sciences. But when the pressure is coming at women through harassment, through bias, through diminishing women's work, through all the factors we know that run rampant in our patriarchal society, there is no real choice. You either go with the flow and find something else to do, or spend your life spitting into the wind (warning, mixing metaphors!). It's no surprise so many women drop out.

To end on a good note, for the first time in 80 years, the winner of the Fields Medal in mathematics, the "Nobel prize" for the discipline, is a woman! May there be so many more that it's no longer news.