I don’t want to write obsessively about this, so I promise this will be the last post for a while on the subject of people hating pregnant women. Still, I really want to share this.
There is a student I mentor who is the nicest, quietest, politest, gentlest creature in the universe. Let’s call her Jessica.
Jessica is one of the most brilliant students I’ve ever had but she is very shy and rarely speaks in class. This week, she had to be supervised in her teaching by a colleague who was in her last days of pregnancy. The colleague went into labor earlier than expected, and couldn’t make it to supervise Jessica. So Jessica wrote an extremely pissy email to the Chair, starting with the words, “I want to express my anger and disappointment.”
In all the years that I’ve known Jessica I would have never suspected her capable of this kind of annoyance for absolutely no reason. A year and a half ago, I also had to miss this type of supervision for a far less respectable reason than going into labor, and everything was fine. We simply rescheduled it.
One would think that when a hugely pregnant professor doesn’t show up for a fairly unimportant meeting, an appropriate reaction (from a female student, by the way) would be to express concern and wonder if everything is OK with the professor health-wise. However, this ultra-peaceful, quiet student erupted in “anger and disappointment,” emotions that I had no idea she was even capable of experiencing in a professional setting.
Somebody needs to study this phenomenon.
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