not just my boss…
How unfortunate. It’s tiring enough walking on eggshells for one person. I’m not sure if men realize that they have so many feelings.
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If it is, would it also be misgeriatry and misadolescy?
######Yes, I’m aware that those aren’t real words. BUT THEY SHOULD BE.######
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You get to decide what words mean!
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Well they’re words NOW!
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No. Just no. Not funny. Hardee-har-har, wives, amirite? No.
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I saw a quotation recently. Someone was saying the women were the canaries in the tech sector coal mine, but the sector is responding by saying, “Our canaries keep dying, how can we get more canaries?”
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For sure, it was just a question of “how can we strictly control who can reply” and that is the only way at the moment.
I know Google researched this and the number one reason women left Google was due to crap maternity leave policy. They doubled maternity leave and increased paternity leave, and their stats got a lot better. Source: NYT.
This is funny because it is true. My philosophy is, focus on the work.
I asked my wife the question in the OP, how do you deal with mansplaining when it is someone you like and respect and want to help, and she basically said it is so contextual to the specific person that it is almost impossible to generalize. There is no one size fits all or even most approach here. It’s literally… complicated.
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There are women who are comfortable in coal mines, but they are somewhat rare. My (female) boss is the CIO and a vice president of the company. This web site was built and is maintained by a woman; it has over 1200 pages.
But yeah, it seems like instead of trying to find out what makes some women happy and successful in high tech, while others are not, we (as a culture) are just throwing random women down the shaft and complaining about that not working out, without actually changing anything about the work environment, training, or job selection process.
Uh, that’s not what we keep telling @popobawa4u…
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Was he making the standard joke about wives talking too much?
I hearted the post, because I thought he was talking about how we actually overtalk our wives quite often.
Which I do sooooooooo often.
In fairness, I do it to everybody. But it doesn’t help a marriage much.
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I’ve just realised which comment @lolipop_jones was responding to, and he was probably talking in general about men who realise that they talk too much and could do with something like a chess clock. I like @ChickieD’s suggestion of a listening technique for people who have the commitment to change. I’m not as bad as I was (thanks in part to some medication), but it’s really easy to interrupt people without even realising it (especially if they are too polite to point it out right away). Where there are good intentions, having a conversation with the person and then pointing it out on the spot would help to make the event more salient in people’s memory. Maybe one of those water spray bottles would work too.
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Thank you for this terrific recommendation from the original democratic socialist publication — sharing far and wide!
. . .
On Zuckerberg’s model, social movements are a top-down method of change. Revolutions are a mode of “disruption” from above that ensures greater leverage for those in power.
Six years later, Sheryl Sandberg, also a Facebook executive, is starting another social movement with her new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
. . . With offices in Palo Alto and funding provided by Sandberg’s lucrative and ongoing investment in Facebook, Lean In bears more in common with a well-funded Silicon Valley startup than a grassroots feminist organization. . . .
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In re-reading it, I realize I might have jumped to conclusions. In my defense, however, based on the poster it seemed the likelier explanation at the time. Let’s see if we get a clarification from the source. I could be…wait for it…wrong!
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It can be really damaging, and it’s good to analyse why it happens unintentionally in order to work against it. Some people are just wanting to bulldoze their ideas through, but I think quite a few people are just clueless (especially in fields like engineering). For me, it’s not true that I don’t respect someone, I’m not interested in what they have to say or I’m not listening. In fact, it’s more likely to happen when all of that is true. I think in very lateral ways, so if we’re talking about ideas this is very likely to spark off a train of thought. At this point I literally can’t hear the other person, because my energy has shifted to thinking mode. I just want to share this life-changing idea as it develops. This is the point when I need to be reminded of conversational protocol and brought back to the present. I will not notice your glance at your female friend, but I will feel terrible later once I realise what happened. It doesn’t matter though, because the same thing will happen again without me noticing the signals before it’s too late.
As I said, it’s better than before, but it feels worse because I actually catch myself doing it sometimes. I’ve actually apologised later to some women who I had interrupted, and they said that they didn’t want to break my chain of thought or something similar. While this is very nice of them, the same thing will keep happening if it isn’t highlighted as a problem.
When it comes to a boss dominating discussions, how aware are male colleagues that this is happening (in general, not necessarily aware that it’s worse for you)? Is it possible to recruit them as allies in this?
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This is my absolutely favorite idea, but I’m not sure they’re going to let me be a teacher if I do that. Maybe after I get tenure, though…
I see this happen a lot in my classes, and while I think it’s really important to acknowledge and encourage enthusiasm as well as seeing where a discussion will go, it’s also incredibly alienating to a huge portion of the classroom. There’s a different guy in each of my classes who elicit eyerolls every time they start talking. There’s one professor who just lets him bloviate, another who tries to gently redirect the conversation, and another one who wrests away control and makes him stop talking. All three are interesting, and various levels of successful. Because I’m studying to become a teacher, I try to put myself in the position of power and ask how I would manage it. (On a personal note, I’m totally not trying to pick on you @jsroberts. Just realized that this might seem like I am, but I am totally there with you. At a cocktail party, I’d so be there digressing like a mofo with you!)
Part of what I find so challenging is that in IT, if I spoke up, I was bossy. If I talked like my fellow managers, I was brusque or a bitch. If I tried to bring up a different topic in a meeting, I was controlling. Being a woman in IT carries so many connotations, especially if you’re young and oblivious, as I certainly was. However, knowing that I’ll be a female in a female-dominated field is strange and is making me reevaluate the ways I’ll be dealing with people. It makes me incredibly conscious of the bad communication habits I’ve developed because of being shut down so much by my male peers. But more than all that, it also makes me really wary of setting up an environment that encourages this crap.
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Pretty sure every one of us has that reaction to someone else here on this very site. I think the best thing to do in many of these cases is have a “no dominating the convo” rule … that applies to everyone.
For example here on BBS that would mean (as we have long said and found) being in the most frequent poster list at the top of the topic is bad when there are big gaps in post count between 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc … basically that thing @OtherMichael pointed out with the green and red boxes.
So if you are a dude, check yourself. Say your piece, maybe a dollop of followup, then let it be. Bonus credit: encouraging others to speak up either directly or indirectly.
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Just replying to this so I can maintain my position as dominatrix. 
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We have this thing where if I interrupt then I am being rude and interrupting but if he interrupts it’s because he wasn’t finished talking yet. Sigh.
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The difficulty of changing behavior in a meeting is that research has shown that teachers (yes, even female teachers) inculcate this behavior from a very early age. Boys and girls have grown up with this phenomenon, so calling a colleague out on it at the age of 30 or 40 isn’t going to fix the situation and in fact will just make the whistleblower look like a jerk/non-team-player.
It’s like that old story about a group of people who see a baby floating down a river, so someone goes in to save it. Then a couple more float by, and more people run in to save them. This keeps happening until some guy starts walking “away”, up the riverbank. Everyone calls him back to help, but he says that he’s going to figure out where and why all the babies are ending up in the river.
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I have never heard that “old story” but it is literally the story of my life! One day we’ll find the source of all these damns babies in the river I swear to got…
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