Women are required to meet a higher bar in part because it's assumed that two men meeting for coffee are meeting for business, but it's less clear what is going on if a man and a woman are meeting for coffee.
The relationship between trust and a character trait of trustworthiness is not necessarily straight forward. If people think you simply aren't in a strong position to hurt them, they expect less of you.
Women are often in a position to inadvertently harm a man without meaning to do so. Important men often want no appearance of impropriety. This makes it unclear how a woman can even establish a trusting relationship to a man.
Sometimes, husband-and-wife teams work as an effective in for the woman. Her relationship to him helps establish intent for everyone. It helps prevent muddy Waters in that regard.
If a meeting over coffee reads as a date if it's mixed gender, it may not matter how trustworthy she is. It may only matter that he doesn't want there to be talk, so he won't meet with her.
I attended GIS school in my late thirties. It's a two-thirds make field. I have a strong math background and argued with one of my professors that his math on the board was wrong.
He said "I bet you lunch." right before realizing I was right and saying "I feel a lunch coming on."
He was probably around 50 years old. He didn't really want to be seen buying lunch for a relatively pretty, young female student. After class, he quietly thanked me for standing my ground and correcting him and he slipped me a twenty dollar bill to cover lunch.
If I had been male and we had actually gone to lunch together, this would have been an incredible networking opportunity. But we never did have lunch together because he didn't want any appearance of impropriety, even though he respected my mind and appreciated my class contribution. It wasn't enough to overcome the question of "What will other people think?"
Of course, that story and conclusion involves a lot of inference and assumption on my part. Maybe he would have slipped a twenty to male student as well and not actually eaten lunch with them.
And that's part of what makes it so intractable. If I accused him if excluding me based on my gender, it would only deepen the rift, not bridge it and I can't actually prove it's a gendered thing, which makes women look histrionic when they complain about things like that.
And, yet, we continue to be subtly shut out. And I think this is a major way in which doors just never open for us.
If you can't even have coffee in public with someone for fear of what others will think, how on Earth do you even begin to network and get known well enough to establish a name, get referrals for work, etc?
I'm not sure what GIS school is. Was this an undergraduate program? Having lunch with professors is something that I am not really aware of people doing non-romantically, and certainly never did myself in college.
When I went back to try to complete my degree in my late 20s, I thought I needed to find an internship if possible, and I went to the office of whatever they called it, and asked for suggestions on where to start. The guy responded that (as I was a transfer student that hadn't been there for long) he didn't know me and couldn't recommend me. I was taken aback and said of course I wasn't asking for a personal recommendation from him, just general hints or advice on what to do.
After that, I applied to be a volunteer at a local hospital, which made me jump through a lot of hoops just to work for them for free. I did things like putting educational material in binders and assembling nametags until I graduated, and created a resume based on that and my one-day-at-a-time assignments at a temp agency. And it got me my first corporate IT job a month or two before graduation - they let me work part time until then.
So, I wasn't sure where I was going with this (other than comparing my experiences) until I finished, but it seems like a pattern that when I've gotten a cold shoulder from men, I've gotten a break from women. Every time I've really needed to get back on my feet employment wise, I've volunteered to prove I was able to cope with a job, and at a place that was disproportionately women. And after years of being underpaid, a woman offered me close to a market rate salary (although I have reason to think she may have considered it a mistake).
If you feel you've always been disadvantaged by how men treat you, I hear you implicitly saying women can't substitute in your platonic relationships.
My choice to use personal anecdotes to try to elucidate the problem was not intended to turn this into a personal discussion about my life.
There are tons of aggregate statistics out there about how men generally make more money, disproportionately take up top positions in corporations, etc. Iirc, only 17% of people in the C suite are female. Less than 5 percent of S&P 500 have a female CEO.
So when you turn it into a personal question, no doubt trying to be sincerely helpful, that kind of implies it's some kind of personal problem and I must be doing something wrong. It inadvertently implies it's not really a societal level issue.
And I think people generally tend to do that to women and women -- including me -- tend to go along with that and reply in kind and it leads to women giving out an excess of personal information and feeling like they are being treated dismissively, etc. It also quickly gets into muddy water territory where it isn't clear what kind of relationship this is supposed to be.
And that's where that private-public framing is helpful to me personally. It helps me to remember that most people aren't behaving with malice aforethought and aren't trying to force me into a particular role. They just respond to a combined set of social signals in a way that seems appropriate at the moment without connecting it to the larger context and it just happens to keep those patterns alive that invisibly exclude women from money and power to a large degree.
Declining to post that first draft I tend to write that actually answers all those personal questions and, instead, turn the discussion back to "the issues" and aggregate data has been helpful for me.
Maybe someday those larger patterns will change. In the mean time, having a tool for figuring out where things went wrong without screaming about sexism on an overwhelmingly male forum has been better than not having it.
Italicizing platonic is rude and I have no right to insinuate anything about your personal life nor do I expect you to share anything further. I regret the tone.
Since you shared a meaningful experience with me/the world, I responded in kind, because to me, my experience is also essential truth.
However, I'm not sure that I was trying to be "sincerely helpful" to you. That's not how I would automatically think of it when I respond to some random non-gendered username on the internet.
...I also don't think asking if you were in an undergraduate program is such a personal question.
I'm absolutely not accusing you of anything whatsoever.
I wrote out this long reply answering all of your questions and felt weird about it and wondered why and didn't post it. Then I decided to try to use this as an example of exactly what I'm talking about.
Thank you for talking with me. I'm running a fever today, so I no doubt could have said something better than I did.
Edit:
In fact, I'm mixing up two discussions, because I talked about the private-public divide to someone else. So I apologize for the disconnect there.
The relationship between trust and a character trait of trustworthiness is not necessarily straight forward. If people think you simply aren't in a strong position to hurt them, they expect less of you.
Women are often in a position to inadvertently harm a man without meaning to do so. Important men often want no appearance of impropriety. This makes it unclear how a woman can even establish a trusting relationship to a man.
Sometimes, husband-and-wife teams work as an effective in for the woman. Her relationship to him helps establish intent for everyone. It helps prevent muddy Waters in that regard.
If a meeting over coffee reads as a date if it's mixed gender, it may not matter how trustworthy she is. It may only matter that he doesn't want there to be talk, so he won't meet with her.
I attended GIS school in my late thirties. It's a two-thirds make field. I have a strong math background and argued with one of my professors that his math on the board was wrong.
He said "I bet you lunch." right before realizing I was right and saying "I feel a lunch coming on."
He was probably around 50 years old. He didn't really want to be seen buying lunch for a relatively pretty, young female student. After class, he quietly thanked me for standing my ground and correcting him and he slipped me a twenty dollar bill to cover lunch.
If I had been male and we had actually gone to lunch together, this would have been an incredible networking opportunity. But we never did have lunch together because he didn't want any appearance of impropriety, even though he respected my mind and appreciated my class contribution. It wasn't enough to overcome the question of "What will other people think?"
Of course, that story and conclusion involves a lot of inference and assumption on my part. Maybe he would have slipped a twenty to male student as well and not actually eaten lunch with them.
And that's part of what makes it so intractable. If I accused him if excluding me based on my gender, it would only deepen the rift, not bridge it and I can't actually prove it's a gendered thing, which makes women look histrionic when they complain about things like that.
And, yet, we continue to be subtly shut out. And I think this is a major way in which doors just never open for us.
If you can't even have coffee in public with someone for fear of what others will think, how on Earth do you even begin to network and get known well enough to establish a name, get referrals for work, etc?