I wouldn’t either. You talk over me, I’ll shut up and write you off as an arsehole.
And then I’ll do my own thing and when you’re shown to be wrong, your loss for not listening to me.
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Even that response is overwhelmingly male: implied challenge and attack.
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I would also not play that game. Loudest does not mean “rightest” it just means loud asshole. Either you’re there to be part of the problem solving team or you’re there to blow you’re own horn and be a dick. Im not going to play a game of who has the biggest dick. I’ll wait and feed info quietly and secretly to the people that are right and who will defeat you.
Also it’s well studied that women who assert themselves in the way you are describing are seen negatively and that impacts their career.
It’s almost as if women are damned if they do damned if they don’t.
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Among reasonable peers, this isn’t dominance games, this is a precise back and forth.
Let me illustrate how it works (and until this occurred, I had no idea of the subtle play here).
- I bring up a point. About 10 seconds into my explanation, you think that I’m covering old ground and wasting your time. You cut me off (not loudly). Implied message: we’ve already looked at this.
- I make an instant evaluation of what I am saying. Is this material old hat? Or am I definitely bringing something new? If it’s old, then I’ve learned they’ve already looked at this, and I cede the floor. If not (i.e. there’s a point beyond the obvious), then I escalate. Implied message: there is more to what I am saying - wait for it.
- If I’ve escalated, then the other person now evaluates. He didn’t back down, so there’s more to his point. If I am certain I know his entire point, then I escalate again, and tell him so.
- At this point, I learn that my entire point has already been made, and I back off. If he turns out to be wrong, there’ll be a slightly sharp reminder later when that becomes clear.
Instead of me wasting 40 minutes, (5 minutes x the 8 people in the room) on a point that everyone either knows or has already discounted, by being willing to cut me off, it could have been 30 seconds. Your ‘consideration’ has wasted everyone’s time. Even worse, it becomes a typical non-technical meeting, with me droning on while everyone starts looking at their phones, so even if I have a decent idea, nobody is going to notice.
Instead, I want to get 8 people’s active participation. By playing this Australian rules conversation football, the team can sift through dozens of ideas very efficiently. It’s not being a jerk, it’s active participation. Moreover, it also is far more modest, in that there is no implication that the idea that I put out there must be right. Your “shown to be wrong” has a strong implication of automatically being smarter than half a dozen of your peers. And maybe you are, but I most certainly am not. That’s why I want their feedback, and want it quickly.
Now, having said all that, as I said, this does not culturally fit everyone, and especially not many women, which is why things have to change. But I want to make clear, it’s not about dominance, it’s about being able to realistically evaluate your idea, and being willing to defend it when you’re certain it’s strong, and to cede when you learn differently.
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I suspect that you are quite correct about that the view of women asserting themselves in such a fashion (although it’s never hurt my wife). If it’s any consolation, my experience is that women who refuse to play the game are not judged nearly as harshly as men who refuse. There was a reason both women were the senior programmers on the team - there relative silence was not viewed as either inability or arrogance. The men who didn’t play, however had a little more problem as being seen as unable or worse, unwilling, to support the team.
You’re quite right. But the cultural divide is strong if you cannot understand that for many groups of men, this is how you solve problems quickly and efficiently. If anyone on the team has an ego that gets in the way, then the whole thing falls down, and they tend to get shown the door. (Little more career damaging than repeatedly demanding attention, and then not having anything to back it up). That’s why it’s a fast-motion ballet. Louder is simply a conversational shortcut.
My point is that business has to move from one paradigm that works for a subculture to another paradigm that works for all cultures. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that a monoculture can be exclusionary not for the sake of exclusion, but because it works efficiently for a socially homogeneous group. Sure, some idiots will feel that that justifies excluding huge swathes of humanity, but they’re, well, idiots.
But I think it’s also important to understand why some people cling to exclusionary behaviours. It’s not easy for any of us to see beyond our own culture, and I found this an interesting example of how the virtue of consideration in one culture can be construed as actively refusing to help your colleagues in another.
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I’ve known plenty of women who can command respect from even the conceited of men who have very good careers. The subtle dominance game the vast majority of men play is amateurish and easily defeated if consciously and skillfully attacked.
I was in a meeting with a female COO of a company I was considering doing some consulting work for. She had just gotten back from maternity leave and a new VP she had not interacted with much was in the meeting with us. At one point, he started to try to drive the conversation. She stopped him very politely, asked him what his job was again (which of course she knew) and then asked him who was running the meeting. I’m pretty sure me and every other person in the room held their breath the whole time. After he answered, she thanked him and continued running the meeting. It was a pure display of power and it came across as nothing but.
It can be done. It just requires the right skills and knowing when and how to use them.
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I agree - where it’s done properly and contribution is expected from everyone who has something worth saying, it’s a system that works and self-regulates in certain contexts. In many ways it’s a system I’m more comfortable with on a personal level, because I find it’s often possible to cover more ground and there’s less of a concern about maintaining the consensus. I’ve learned a lot in discussions like this, although they do have the weaknesses that dominant voices can take over and defeat the regulating influence, they can exclude people who don’t want to or can’t play that game and prejudices can have a big influence on how well someone will be received (women can “lack gravitas” basically just because people don’t assign much weight to what a woman has to say).
I think there are a number of options to work with the current situation, but I like the way that quotas are being introduced in different areas. Germany is currently implementing a 30% quota for supervisory boards, which is quite a large increase on the current level even if it doesn’t represent equality. I’d say an important part of cultural change involves more people getting used to working under women, especially in certain sectors.
Citation required.
From your own anecdote this is not true. You needed to find an alternate way to run the meeting because of HOW the men were talking and not working together.
There is a difference between “it works” and “I’m good at this mode of communication and don’t want to change it for something that works for more people.”
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So far, I’ve learned on this thread that a lot of men are unaware of what they are doing. I think some education and confrontation could go a long way to help the situation if thoughtfully done.
For me with the women’s group at work, that fear of letting the men know what we were up to was a huge problem. We needed to gather our male allies, and I know they are there.
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Dammit woman! Don’t let them know we TALK to each other! What are you thinking!!
The first rule of Lady Club is DON’T LET THE MEN KNOW ABOUT LADY CLUB!
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At a previous job, I was the one guy hired into a team of women. My boss at the time (a woman) related that having at least one man working in the group seemed to help with balancing out the team as a whole (less arguments, less infighting, etc.). Having worked in primarily male-dominated fields up to that point, I’d never heard a male supervisor consider the inclusion of a woman in an all-male group as being a good thing for the group as a whole, and if anything, any similar discussions would likely have focused on the perceived (and utterly incorrect) negatives of a woman being added to the group.
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This is from a few years ago, but it seems relevant. While I can see advantages to male styles of discussion, higher proportions of women can often correlate strongly with improvements in communication.
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@awjt - Reading this 10 days later, I wish I had left off the second paragraph.
I hold to the belief men should be treated like cats. Ruffle their hair when they are good, cuff them and/or use a spray bottle when they misbehave.
I am being literal here.
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Feel free to edit! That is why edit exists! (there is a max age on allowed edits, though, but it is far from 10 days).
In this case, it’s been viewed by the respondee in situ amongst others. I could <strike> it out, and add a note that I did that later, but I stand by the retraction.
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Understood, in any case you would need to manually notify the person you originally responded to of the edit. That’s kind of the point, I get it, but I think editing the original post in some way should be done as well for future readers, if any.
This sums up this whole thread and everyone like it. Either way, it’s our fault. I’m pretty sick of it.
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So… I really regret saying what I did to all the people I’ve insulted here in this thread.
More… That I’ve seriously fucked up what was a safe place for people to talk about these things.
The BoingBoing community is a great place.
I’m a man with some deep problems. And I decompensated and it might have seemed like a personal attack.
I was punching at shadows from another place and time, and conflating a bunch of sensations with what was happening and I was reading here.
And I responded to something from six months earlier. Here in this thread. At a bunch of people who didn’t deserve it at all.
Very sorry for the people I’ve hurt and insulted.
I hope this thread can be productive again. I won’t be participating.
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Thanks!
(are we sure this just happened on the internet?)
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