In the early 1970s, Carmita Wood, as the sole provider for two children, at age forty-four had worked for eight years in Cornell’s department of nuclear physics, advancing from lab assistant to a desk job doing administrative work. During her tenure in the department she had been singled out by a distinguished professor for persistent, unwanted sexual advances. This came at a time when few women had garnered the opportunity to advance professionally. Such lack of gender diversity in the work place meant that a nuanced understanding of professional gender relations remained woefully undeveloped. Carmita Woods was subjected to continuous, unwanted sexual advances in the work place during a time when there was no conception of sexual harassment. As…show more content… Carmita Wood found herself at a loss for words when tasked with describing the trauma and crippling shame and embarrassment to which she had been subjected in her place of employment. This is the moment, Fricker argues, when Carmita Wood struggled and was unable to describe her experience, that she became a victim of hermeneutical injustice. She failed to find adequate language to describe her experience owing to the fact that there was a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource. There was a lacuna in our collective social understanding where we now have the concept and language of sexual harassment. As such, Carmita Wood could not make sense of the gravity or greater social meaning of her experience because the experience of sexual harassment was obscured from collective appreciation. Once Carmita Wood found a herself in a women’s group that provided a space among other likeminded women who were able to openly share their own similar experiences they were able to conceptualize and give a name to that
