The final report from our gendered microaggressions project is available from the CPHC site:
https://cphc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Aberystwyth-CPHC_Microbehaviours_project_report.pdf
We found all sorts of interesting things (read the report for the full story). Unsurprisingly:
- Women experience more microaggressions than other genders
- Women witness more
- Women and NB people have significantly higher experience of microaggressions than men
- This persists across microaggression types
We propose a slightly modified taxonomy of microaggressions, adapted from Derald Wing Sue’s work on racial microaggressions. Our categories are:
- Stranger in strange land: “Oh, you do computing? Really? You don’t look like a computer scientist.”
- Make the tea: “Oh, you take the minutes. I’m sure you’ve got much tidier handwriting than me.” This category (obviously) includes being asked to make the tea.
- Denial of bias: “Oh they didn’t say that because you were a woman, they say that to everyone.”
- Myth of Meritocracy: “Oh the reason there aren’t any profs is because women don’t want to do that kind of work. We’re a meritocracy here, the best person for the job always gets in”
- Gender-role-spillover: “Hey if you want to be heard in meetings, speak up more and use a deeper voice.” This category includes things like socials around traditionally guy themes, and this idea that women need to “man up” or lean in to a situation; it’s the women that needs to change (not the workplace).
- Environmental: “Yeah, all the buildings are named after guys. What of it?”. This category includes things like pornographic imagery as background images and screensavers (no, really – some women report turning up for group project meetings and seeing their peers with porn or hentai imagery as desktop images).