{"id":2295,"date":"2014-11-23T01:54:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T01:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/?guid=3e96c03c55ad701cccd6324f30e46485"},"modified":"2015-01-28T22:58:43","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T22:58:43","slug":"coming-out-to-the-new-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2014\/11\/coming-out-to-the-new-office\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming Out to…the New Office"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Downward Trajectory?<\/span><\/h3>\n

<\/span>I recently relocated from London to a small town in Scotland for work.  The move is good for my career – I get to spend time doing practical engineering work as my new role is more field-based. Of course, I knew moving would complicate things in other ways – flying to Bangladesh from this place is a logistical nightmare, and trying to get visas to other parts of the world is even worse. Admittedly, <\/span>I’ve never actually lived in a small town so part of me has been looking forward to the experience. On the other hand, I knew a place like this would have some downsides compared to the UK’s more cosmopolitan capital. The posts I’ve published on the blog so far have mostly been positive, and thus in a way I’m almost glad to be talking about something negative for a change. <\/span><\/div>\n

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Of course, people in the office are as pleasant as ever. Most of my new team and other co-workers I socialise with know about my male partner, and my sexuality has been a complete non-issue. This includes my boss, who has been happy to give me advice on approaching my career and a long distance relationship. I’ve even tried dropping hints to let them know I’m bisexual (though I’m not 100% sure they’ve understood!). The environment on site, however, has been more complicated. <\/span>One of the field offices, for example, has a poster up complaining about political correctness and how some people hide behind discrimination all the time. <\/span>I’ve been witness to small occurrences of racism and homophobia, and a more poignant episode of sexism. None of it was particularly shocking: the racism involved a white co-worker aping a “typical Indian accent” to tease someone about their food choices. He wasn’t making fun of South Asians per se, but I’d argue the imitation was inappropriate nonetheless – laughter at the expense of someone else’s language skills.  <\/span>The homophobia was similarly casual, where one of a group of older white men seemed to be using “shirt-lifter” as a neutral substitute for the word gay. They were discussing a gay man they knew and it seemed to be more a case of ignorance as opposed to directed malice but again: the original term has historically been a homophobic slur. <\/span>

<\/span>The sexism was a little more elaborate, and involved a group of reasonably senior men on site discussing the attractiveness of women in the office and detailing what they liked or disliked about several individuals. I don’t expect a male-only team (a sad but common engineering demographic) not to talk about women, but I wouldn’t expect that talk to include women who are colleagues or the conversation to go into such physical minutiae while on the clock. <\/span>Furthermore, I’ve spent extended periods of time on site before, and I haven’t encountered anything like any of these scenarios on those occasions. <\/span>Sadly, the trend in the field seems to be something replicated in the town itself. A group of white teenagers decided to have a party at my apartment complex this weekend, and I walked through a bit of “Indian accent” banter on the way to my front door. <\/span>

<\/span>Of course, nothing that has happened so far is something that couldn’t happen in London – in fact I’ve heard of people having similar if not worse experiences down there too. But what I describe here is my experience of Scotland as it currently stands, and if I’m being honest I have to say it’s been a mixed experience. Nothing yet has happened that I can’t deal with and I’m hoping it’ll stay that way. In the meantime, perhaps I will be able to tactfully bring up some these episodes at work, and maybe it will bring about a little bit of awareness and positive change. <\/span><\/div>\n

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A Downward Trajectory?I recently relocated from London to a small town in Scotland for work.  The move is good for my career – I get to spend time doing practical engineering work as my new role is more field-based. Of course, I knew moving would …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133,116,387,235,200,279,388,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bisexuality","category-coming-out","category-engineering","category-english","category-homophobia","category-racism","category-sexism","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}