This was an important topic, thank you for having the courage to stand up in front of this [overwhelmingly male] group and bring gender issues to the open. If you deliver this presentation again, here are some suggestions:

Don't refer to yourself as "a girl." Near the beginning of your talk, you labelled yourself a girl several times. You are a woman. Girls are children. Don't give men an opportunity to treat you as less-than-equal by giving yourself a subtly inferior social role.

Define more succinctly what the problems are, and why they are problems. Some young men have no idea why it could be offensive to wear a pornographic shirt, or make insensitive remarks, because they have no idea WHY their actions are offensive or insensitive. I'm not sure exactly how you would explain this in a short seminar... it's hard. I once had an hour long debate with a very intelligent male friend of mine as to why the bumper sticker "Ditch the bitch, let's go hunting" is offensive.

Offer more concrete suggestions on how to fix these problems. Sure, awareness is an essential first step. Encourage people to call out shenanigans when they see them. It can be in private, between two men, or between a woman and a man... "hey man, that thing you said about such-and-such, that wasn't cool." Sometimes it takes a neutral, respected third party to get through to someone.

I hope my comments were constructive. Keep up the great work!

Dougal zeleftikam@gmail.com

Renee, I think your talk is very important. One way I think you might make it better is to remove the blindness metaphor from it. I'm married to a blind woman, so it's no surprise I'm sensitive, but I don't think your points would lose any strength by replacing blindness with obliviousness or thoughtlessness, or ignorance. In other words, unwind the metaphor. That way people who recognize the metaphoric use of blindness to connote negative things won't be distracted from your argument.

Regarding one of Dougal's points above, I don't think you'll ever successfully "explain" why a pornographic shirt is inappropriate in the work place (or in public in general). If the person wearing the shirt really doesn't know he's doing something he shouldn't, then he's a sociopath. Seriously, they're not that rare. Assuming he's actively trying to be an ass, then peer pressure from others is the only way to change his behavior, if not his thinking. There's a point where polite "awareness raising" doesn't get the job done. The other men in the office should take him aside and tell him he's being an ass and he has to stop.

Rock on.

I second Michael's comment - awareness and anosognosia (a deficit of awareness about awareness) is often referred to as "being blind", but I'm not sure that the glasses analogy came through as well as you were hoping. I love trying to get the audience to participate and see that this is really an issue that everyone needs to address (that theme was expertly woven throughout the talk start to finish), but at best you're leaving out the people who don't wear glasses. The standard group-segregating attributes (height, birth month) don't have enough bite to get your point across, but I'm at a loss about what would be better. Besides gender (and race, and sexual orientation, as was raised in the comments), when do you really notice that you're different, or an outsider, or an insider? Maybe the point is that no one thing can relate to everyone in a way that will really sink in.

Thanks for keeping this in the forefront; hopefully I'll keep the discussion going.