I’ve stood around too long
I read an article today from the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald that gave me more hope for the future than I've had for a while. On the first day of school, a 9th grade boy wore a pink shirt. As the article says he "was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up."
Sadly this kind of response to people breaking gender roles is not unusual. And women, especially women in science, know it Indeed one of my first thoughts was about Female Science Professor's post on a campus police officer's response to a strange man who had been stalking her on campus. The title of her post: "Science Lady Asked For It.
However, as I said, the article about the pink shirt gave me hope. Two senior boys decided that this bullying was unacceptable and did something about it. "They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear… They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. [They] figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink." One of leaders said he did it because "I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something."
Now that is message we at FairerScience would like to see spread far and wide.