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Kathleen Raven, a blogger at Scientific American, offers a new twist on how hearing loss can be used against you, sometimes inadvertently. In a series of posts recently she discussed sexual harassment she'd experienced from two supervisors. In a post titled "Mixed Up" she lists the kinds of harassment she's endured. One of them in particular caught my eye:
"You cannot take advantage of the fact that I am, by default, a nice person. I have a hearing loss since birth that requires me to concentrate hard (lip-read) on what you are saying. It may come across that I am acting like you are the only person in the room, but really, even with my hearing aids, I am simply trying to hear you."
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Another young woman, who attended a talk I gave recently, spoke up during the q and a to share a kind of discrimination she had experienced. She was open about her hearing loss at work, and managed quite well. She wasn't especially self-conscious about her hearing loss. But what hadn't occurred to her was how aware of her hearing loss her colleagues were.
This came to her in a particularly humiliating way.
Towards the end of a long meeting the woman sitting across the table from her suddenly assumed an intent position, staring fixedly at the speaker. As others noticed, they began to giggle in an embarrassed way. The woman realized that she was being mimicked. She flushed and immediately got up and left the room.
Later the guilty party apologized, saying she was just trying to lighten up a deadly meeting. Apparently it didn't occur to her that the person being mocked wouldn't find it amusing.
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Have you had a similar experience? As Kathleen Raven said in an email to me, giving me permission to share her post: "Sure - you are most welcome to use my name, blog link, whatever you need. I don't want other women with hearing impairment / deafness to suffer from the same situations."
