I love it down here. I love our project, I love the weather, I love the food. One thing that I can't seem to get used to is the sexism. I am constantly hearing our supervisors ask for some guys to come over and move this or that. "I'm gonna need...Mike, Joe, and David to move that scaffolding over there." What? I admit that many some may have more upper body strength than some women, but there isn't anything on this job site that I can't lift with a minimum of one other person. I've stood on the worksite and listened to supervisors and other older male volunteers talk about being married to women and how much it sucks and how
"all a woman is good for is...". I've heard them make sexual jokes about women. I've heard one supervisor (Tony) who constantly talks about how he raised 6 daughters, talk about how he brings his 11 year old twins out when he drinks, because they are "chick magnets". One day at lunch after we spent the morning hammering in a subfloor, we had lunch delivered by Olive Garden and one of the older men said "which one of you women cooked this up". A few of the women on our team were offended by this, and were talking about it later. The two guys on our team said "Well, it is a compliment, it was good food!". Grrrrr.
Today Tony was sending Erin and Anna to the warehouse to move some things and he called over to another supervisor and said "you don't have anything too heavy over there right? for these girls?" I actually thought he was being sarcastic, but he wasn't. Luckily, Erin spoke up and said "what is that supposed to mean?" Tony got all defensive and said he just meant that sometimes there were things that girls couldn't lift. Erin informed him that she could lift anything a guy could lift. He said "don't take it personally", and she responded with "well I am taking it personally", which is exactly what I was thinking in my head. Then she told him he shouldn't generalize like that, to which he responded that he wasn't generalizing, blah blah blah. So basically, Erin is my hero of the day, and I can't wait til I am back in a place where women are capable human beings and not just blobs that cook and clean and pop out babies. I thought about what would happen if the women on our team went on strike for a day, leaving a team of three guys to do all the work. It would be interesting to see how much got done then.
