This particular passage sticks out at me as the author not being able to examine their own bias: > Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled

This particular passage sticks out at me as the author not being able to examine their own bias: > Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled up intentionally fast and close to me and I hopped out of the way, scared. The men with me who did not jump roared with laughter, and this sparked a conversation (monologue) about innate personality differences (rather than, say, height differences). In that moment it was impossible for me to be a PhD who studies how we maintain beliefs about innate characteristics and generates empirical evidence around them and their impacts, even though I am. We are always constructing. In that street, my identity could not be made real against the identity that was offered out of the situation that aligned with a world they preferred, one in which some men could laugh at scared women. Obviously I don't know these particular men, but from my experience "laugh at scared women" isn't what was happening in their minds. I think they would have laughed no matter the sex of the person who jumped, and if it was a man, he probably would have laughed at himself too - it was more like "laugh at reacting to a situation that didn't need that reaction". When stuff like this happens, men tend to use laughter as a bonding and tension-relief valve, not as ridicule.