My first interaction with RMS was at a hacker con at 19. He asked my name, I gave it, whether I went to MIT (I had an MIT shirt on), and after confirmation I did, asked me on a date. I said no. That was our entire conversation. Christine, yes, no thanks.https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025 …
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I am still struck by the idea that all of the professors in the lab would keep special charms and amulets to ward off a specific person — if nothing else, this is an incredible illustration of the lack of functional recourse that professional women there previously had.
Furthermore it was a somewhat appalling welcome/training on how to navigate MIT which, as an idealistic teenager, I thought ("meritocracy") would be free from such base stressors. (Though it probably counts as one of those practicable "broken step" insights that get handed down.)
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This reminds me of my sister, who is a mechanical engineer, turning down Caltech for undergrad because on her campus visit they told her about the resources that would be available to her when she got stalkers. Not if. When.
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I declined to even apply to Caltech for undergrad, although I have other family who did attend. The student body gender ratio (and resultant interpersonal dynamics) was one of my two main reasons.
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This was actually, now that I think about it, the moment that I stopped feeling that there must be some qualification you could get to where people would let you alone to just be a thinking woman — seeing women need to fend for themselves this way even at the professor level.
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