I’m all out of likes for hours, but that was seriously honest, brave, and compassionate. Thank you.
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Thanks dude. Appreciated. 
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@awjt here, my final post. My response is that I got tired of being tone policed. Especially since suggestions were asked for, as the premise of the thread. Mine were twisted and taken out of context and used as a hammer back on my head. Sure, you (all) have a right to do that. It’s your community and you set the rules and enforce the tone you want to keep here: fair, balanced, unbalanced, reactionary, mean-spirited, cordial; whatever you want it to be like here, you can do it. But I also have a right not to participate any more in a conversation that is so easily contorted into a baseless personal attack. That would be insanity to want to keep stepping up for more beatings. So, I’ll take my fingers elsewhere.
As a very busy person, I don’t have time for trying to convince people of anything online. Especially considering that I am the least unfriendly person to women, actively including them at every turn in my own workplace and viewing them as complete equals and friends, and I just cringe and hate it when men shut them down, talk over them, belittle them and make their lives hard, just for being female and I have no hesitation to shut HIM down for being an asshole. Plus I have a daughter, and do you think in your right minds for one second that I’m going to be the kind of dad to teach my daughter to carry herself through life as subservient to men? LOL on that. I do not even think so. You clearly took no time of your own to listen and stop and think about what you were saying to me.
So, carry forward knowing that you all participated in a live friendly-fire incident, and I’m outta here. Peace, mutants. Be nicer to people, OK? It will pay dividends. I promise.
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Not to be snarky, but isn’t this just a bit “I told you so” and “I’m taking my ball and going home”?
I feel like 99% of dude communication problems here, and everywhere else on the Internet for that matter, could be helped immensely by One Weird Trick:
- Say your piece
- Maybe follow up with one reply
- Walk away. WALK AWAY!
I’m not saying you should stop caring about the convo — not at all — but just, y’know, maybe spend a bit more time really listening and letting other people talk, instead of frantically replying to every single thing other people say in exhaustive, recursive detail. It’s like we dudes care so very very very veryveryvery much about a topic that we end up crushing it in our hands not necessarily out of malice but just out of… jeez, I dunno… obsession, really. Arguing. Getting the last word in. Showing people who are Wrong On The Internet what’s up, yo.
Dudes (Including Me), Try this One Weird Trick to improve your internet communication skills!
Say your piece. Walk away. Say your piece… walk away.
It’s kind of the same thing documented here:
Again. I am NOT saying, “stop caring”. I am saying, say your piece… then take some time away. Maybe day or two. Then come back, process everything, and chime in again with a nuanced reply. Then be done.
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Dawww, it’s sweet loki…
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If you can’t listen to people telling you that they found what you said insulting or offensive then you need to be a little less self-congratulatory about your positive attitude.
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Just read an interesting NYTimes Magazine article from a month ago that made me think of this thread, especially this section:
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.
In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.
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And in the mean time… women and minorities are punished for talking about diversity in the work place while white men are not… funny that eh? 
when white men promoted diversity in the workplace, it did not improve how bosses rated their performance and competence. When women and non-white executives promoted diversity in the workplace, their evaluations from bosses were worse
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Color me surprised. /s
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If you want to convey information, SAY IT. The “left unsaid” is crap that nobody should be expected to deal with, to “infer”, to second-guess. Just say what you want to say. The requirement to “pick up” such things is discriminating against those who just cannot “read” this. Who, coincidentally, can be the workhorses of the whole team.
You can have a B-team that communicates well, and designs crap because they don’t have that one A-team member who knows the intricacies of (say) switching power supplies, but does not enjoy gossiping about colleagues, unlike the bulk of the team B where he doesn’t fit in.
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And remember! No matter how far down the rabbit hole we got, no matter how many studies we have about gender or diversity or modes of communication you’ll always have one dude yelling at you that YOU NEED TO SPEAK MORE CLEARLY because obviously that is the problem. LOL - seriously I think my eyes just rolled out of my head. ;D
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From the sounds of it, you have found it to be common that you are in a situation where an individual who is part of a team is so competent as an individual that they can make up for a lack of team cohesion by essentially just being able to do it themselves. If I were to go from my experience, I’d agree that is a very common situation. I think in reality is a very, very rare situation, it’s just one that a very small number of people tend to find themselves in over and over. Of course, for every person who genuinely finds themselves in that situation over and over, there are thousands who think they do and are dead wrong.
Telling other people to just say what they mean in a way that you understand it is no more valuable than them telling you to understand what they said in the way they said it. It’s an argument between a French and and English speaker about who ought to learn the other language.
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It’s an argument between a French and and English speaker about who ought to learn the other language.
Yes! And I think the issue is that for women, we are assigned the role of translator a lot of times. It’s our job to be on high alert for signs from men, but not so much vice versa. Then if we don’t do it “right.” men slam us for not understanding or being sensitive.
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This!! I don’t understand how the way others communicate is the issue if 99% of the listeners can understand it! That is not a problem. That is not a failure to communication. That is the definition of success!
@ChickieD - Bingo! Need to be on high alert at all times and adaptable to every mode of communication there is because god forbid anyone else adapt to our preferred mode of communications! Seriously, I’m going to go blind with all this eyerolling. (Do I need to explain in words why I’m rolling my eyes? I mean it is non-verbal but I do hope you understand me!)
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@funruly posted this excerpt in the “Obama was ‘raised white’, says Ben Carson” thread:
I was thinking about it earlier when I saw the post about how awful normal people are. No comment on that article at all, really, but in my head, I connected the idea of “normal people” with people who assume their “code” is not a code, it’s the uncoded way of communicating. Women know how to speak to women, but they also know how to speak to men. Black people know how to speak to black people but they also know how to speak to white people. Everyone has to learn how to speak to their own cultural subgroups as well as to the dominant groups (and those that don’t have their prospects severely limited).
What’s been happening with the privilege paradigm is white/male/cis/able people have been encouraged to recognize that their code isn’t the “correct” way, it’s just another way. Instead of always expecting women to understand men, maybe men could try to understand women too.
Francophones (who could be a metaphor for women or a minority group or who could literally be Francophones, since language minority groups have a similar experience in some ways) living in my area have to know English, Anglophones don’t have to learn French. It’s as if some English people are being asked to learn a little French and yelling back, “Why don’t you just learn English?!?” because they haven’t noticed that the Francophones have been speaking English to them the entire time.
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Look, I just want to you tell me exactly what you want, not why you want it or what it’s supposed to do. I can’t be bothered with such gossip.
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There could be more if they’d spend time reading something good instead of gossiping and “socializing”. Or at least talking shop instead of crap.
More like telling somebody blind to just read what you wrote. Attempting to track all that what is not said and only weakly hinted at, if ever, can take all your cognitive abilities, not leaving enough to the actual task on hand. Tracking who said what when and who did what with whom is rather hard when they all look similar to you and their visual representations in your mind are pretty much interchangeable.
Just say openly what you want to be transmitted across. Or don’t wonder why it doesn’t get across. How hard can that be?
Most blind people recognize that things won’t always be written in braille, and that, in fact, they very rarely will unless they specifically ask. The number of different ways people communicate are many, and there is no one mode that works for everyone. Being able to communicate about your own communication needs is important. But in any even that’s interjecting into a conversation about how 45% of the population has trouble communicating with 45% of the population by saying, “How about everyone just communicate the way 1% of the population does?”
It’s not hard, it’s outright impossible. There is no uncoded communication, and I would expect that you would know that.
Do you think you’ve done it? If you have, why doesn’t everyone understand you?
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This sounds a lot like the positive parts of stereotypically male communication that @tlwest was talking about. It works if everyone is respected and people are nudged in the right direction, whether that be not dominating the conversation, speaking up, allowing others to speak up, overcoming prejudice to give everyone a fair opportunity to contribute etc. It doesn’t work if someone feels that they know more than everyone else, or that they have to be invited to speak. Replacing it without seeing its benefits isn’t helpful - but it may need to be replaced or adapted if a previously successful system is excluding women or another group.
This is one of the reasons that I really think it can’t just be women disrupting male speech domination. There are many issues that need to be addressed, and you are more likely to be successful and less likely to be penalised for being seen as promoting your own interests if the pressure to include women is coming from both women and men.
This is good, but I think there needs to be understanding on both sides that there are (at least) two legitimate ways of communicating that may be preferred by different members of the group, but may exclude other members. The direct communication that often involves talking over others requires awareness of why women are excluded - maybe women (and some men, for that matter) need to be given more time and space to speak, rather than assuming that it will just happen? Forms of communication that women may prefer can give them more of a voice, but it requires some things to be said more explicitly than might be the case in a room full of women.
I’m not sure that all women are that bilingual or that all men aren’t, and both need to adapt to improve their own ability to communicate and to recognise areas that are difficult for others, but that they find easy. “Just speak your mind” and “just understand what women mean” are both impossible under certain conditions that others don’t see.
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See the problem is, there already is understanding on at least one side its getting the other side to admit that their way is not “the right way”, thats where we’re stuck, it’s where we’re stuck in this thread, and generally where we’re stuck in society.
I think @anon50609448 is on the right track. Its not about genders, its about privilege.
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