Are you ‘the woman’?

A SYTYCB entry

“Are you the woman?”

“What?”

“Are you ‘the woman’?”

“The woman what?”

“Are you the only woman in your office?”

Bewildered by having to re-frame my thinking in terms of gender when my perspective on the conversation up until this point had been as an engineer discussing engineering-y things with another engineer, I just said, “Oh, uh, well, I work from home.”

Later, I realized why the question had bothered me. I had suddenly gone from feeling like “part of the group” to “other” because the label I was given did not match up with how I thought of myself. I briefly wished I’d had the quick reflexes to snark back, “Are you ‘the black guy’?” But that would have been petty and simply increased the number of people feeling alienated. Instead, I decided to take it as an opportunity to become more concious of how I use labels, even innocuous-seeming ones, both for myself and others.