Quote:
Originally Posted by NShep98
I see your points about favoritism, but the fact that the girls seem to run the entire show, to the point where they are flat-out removing people from the team who disagree with them, leads me to believe that this team has taken the "inclusion of women in STEM" concept in the entire wrong direction. It certainly sounds like the boys are putting a considerable effort into contributing to the team only to be ignored, and such a significant split between "favorites" and "everyone else" is something I consider unacceptable. If it were me on this team, I would gather up the "everyone else"s to make a plan to confront the people who are apparently controlling the team. After all, you can only kick off so many people before it stops being a team. Just my speculation.
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I highlighted some key words from your post. Your speculation is based off of a lot of speculation by the other poster. His speculation could be absolutely accurate, it could also be off or jaded via the filter of the observations he is seeing and amplification of perceived slights he and others
believe they are experiencing.
My point is with that much speculation and assumption, I would recommend a first response of treading lightly and gaining insight rather than rallying the troops for battle. One thing I have learned, if you rally the troops for war, you will likely get a fight, and rarely does the team win when a fight occurs.
A gentler, more tactful approach could cause additional insight that makes the person realize they were wrong, or misinterpreted some people leaving the team due to confidentiality of the issue they were being kicked off for.
Once better aware, if the person still believes that the favoritism is real, then it would be worthwhile to have a discussion about whether or not it is conscious effort, and worth while to verify if the mentors are aware of how this is impacting the student experience.
It seems that often the villagers want to gather pitchforks and storm the castle to destroy the monster, when it might be better served to learn that the monster has a fear of fire and outburst control issues.
I had a group of about 10 friends in college that graduated a year behind me. I remember getting a call from 3 of them that one of the others was conspiring against them to try to isolate them from the rest of the peer group as he had made sure they were not invited to 3 weeks in a row Saturday night activities. When I confronted the other friend, he explained to me they were watching a mini-series
From Earth to the Moon and they were watching 3-4 episodes each week. the 3 that were "being excluded" had mentioned they did not want to spend their Saturday nights watching movies... thus they were not invited.
I once thought a little old lady had overfilled the oil in my car causing several simultaneous engine seal failures because I was using too many parking spots at the apartment complex. It made sense in the moment, but once I cooled down and talked with outside observers, I found that my rock solid case was a series of false assumptions and speculation that were far from the most plausible case.