Expand your mind [quote=“anon61221983, post:82, topic:74908”]
With all due respect, do you know if everyone there felt the same way, or that they didn’t experience problems because of their gender/race/etc?
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Yes, we talked about it and occasionally there were “office notables” but we tended to band together. Communication issues were generally directed towards understanding our native Chinese colleagues who could be extremely hard to communicate with at times. We didn’t have much in the way of man/woman issues or race and yes we did talk about it. We more had problems with getting PIs to stop being dicks generally and listen to the analysts and epidemiologists and people neck deep in the data because we know what we are talking about.
I didn’t say that. We all stood up for each other, man, woman, American, Chinese. But it would suck to have to be in that world.
I can’t speak for the hypotheticals because I’ve never had job after job of crap culture. Had crappy times, for sure, but not going from job to job and having a shitty culture at each place.
At the new place, when sexism pops up, you can be sure I will say something. I highly doubt it’s going to, though, by everything I’ve seen in the last 4 months.
Kinda blaming the victim here, just a little bit. If we quit every job where someone was just a little bit racist or sexist… none of us would have jobs or ever be employed, ever.
Also, this kind of blanket statement of “I’ve never seen sexism at work” pretty much guarantees that the people that do suffer from discrimination in the work place will never talk to you about it.
We formed a women’s group when the Lean In book hit big - the larger organization did and as it so happened, the woman in charge of our bigger group at the time was the Lean In head for the big organization. About 12 women jumped in to Lean In.
First off, we started with our goals. I was like, hey, we are Lean In and so the goals must be: when we all get pay raises and we all get promotions, right??? No, most women would not push it that hard, even these people who worked with men all the time and we were, some of them, in pretty high up positions. They wanted more responsibility, or the chance to give a presentation, or anything but to poke their heads up too high. I was SO disappointed.
We all met for a while, even when the organization was bought out, and we had a lady who was putting together some nice non-Lean In propaganda which was thoughtful. We learned about each other.
Mostly I learned that we ladies were not going to stick up for each other much, or push too hard, and that even the people who were high up the ladder were scared to be noticed.
Not an accurate characterization, per the first post The Boss is the person causing and seemingly wallowing in the problem. When The Boss is the number one bad example of what not do do, I would not say the odds of anything changing there are good.
Compare with coworker who is The Problem. That has some possibility. But the boss? Slim to none.
I agree with this, any all male group tends to devolve over time. You can see this as early as preschool: a group of only boys will be freaking the hell out, bouncing off the walls, daring each other to do crazier and crazier stuff, engaging in rougher and rougher play – but add a few girls to the mix and it is a way saner situation. All dudes is just a bad scene on so many levels.
I did not say that I’ve never seen it. I did say that my groups stood up against it when it did happen in small ways, and, that as a group, we did not allow it to take root. Men and women. Working together. (Mass hysteria.)
I say expand your minds because, really, not every workplace is the same and so the feeling I am getting here is a one-size-fits-all judgment that all American workplaces are full of sexist asshole pigs running the show. “Just not so,” I am saying. Because, really, it is just not so.
It sucks that there are sexist assholes. When it’s 1 of them, then stand your ground. When it’s your boss, do your best and stand your ground, … but hedge your bet and get the fuck outta there asap. I did. I’ve had asshole bosses that I needed to get away from, and I did. It’s a struggle. But we’ve got to go where it’s sweet. If it’s a shit situation, a job is one thing we CAN change. We might be stuck in relationships, stuck with family, even stuck with friends. But a goddamn job is the one thing we can definitely change up if it really sucks and the turkeys are getting us down.
I will attest to that. There is no way in hell I would work with only men. Fuck that. I can’t do the sausagefest thing. I need variety and other shit to talk about besides sports, chicks and one-upping each other.
Someone doesn’t need to be a blatant asshole to be sexist or discriminatory. (And we’ve talked at length how some perpetrators make sure they have no witnesses, but thats another topic for another day.)
What we’re talking about here is the insidious and quiet ways these things happen. Why do teachers give more speaking time to boys in class. Why do academic hiring committees give men starting salaries higher than women despite identical qualifications. Why was autism in girls misdiagnosed for decades? Why do people of colour earn less than white people?
Its easy to stand up to assholes, because they’re assholes, they’re easy to spot, and yes, if you can, get away from them as soon as you can and report the to HR on your way out.
But we’re not talking about loud assholes. We’re talking about people who don’t know they’re being discriminatory, who don’t notice that women aren’t talking, who don’t notice that men dominate conversations, who don’t notice that women leave entire industries because its just so exhausting, we’re talking about death from a million paper cuts, not a sledge hammer to the head.
So yes, what you say is “common sense” when someone is being an asshole. But it does nothing to help us address the root causes or how to change our society at large so that we divest ourselves of these ideas in the first place.
I think it is mostly an aggression and competition thing. Dudes are suuuuuper into this stuff, thanks testosterone, and all it takes is a few competitive aggressive types to tip the balance and flip that switch on the rest of the men. Massive genetic / hormonal predisposition to this stuff.
Consider this, even the language used in job descriptions can be too aggressive / competitive and turn women off from applying:
What would it mean to transfer such insights to ordinary work environments? A good starting point is to ensure that the language in job advertisements is gender neutral. Research by Danielle Gaucher and Justin Friesen of the University of Waterloo and Aaron C. Kay of Duke University, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011), found a clear pattern in how men and women responded to certain words on job search websites. Men were drawn to jobs looking for candidates who were competitive, assertive, individualistic and ambitious; women, to jobs seeking applicants who were committed, supportive, compassionate and understanding.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just religious men who can hold themselves back from becoming animals (ETA: not really). I was on board when they let women join the deck and engine room teams on our ship for the first time. Apparently the women who did join found their male colleagues very supportive. We also had dry docks where it would just be men for months at a time (it became more mixed in later dry docks). It didn’t turn into Lord of the Flies. I was in an all-male part of the ship, and we got on pretty well (we were mainly college-aged, too). It certainly can be very problematic, but this is a cultural issue, not just some inevitable result of testosterone.
If the subtle discrimination has snowballed into something unpalatable and worthy of posting on the Internet, then it’s incumbent on one to get out of that situation. There’s no “handling” it. It’s gone beyond retrievability. As @codinghorror said, chances are slim to none you are going to change a boss, even a million paper cuts type boss. He, or she, is not going to change. YOU will have to change… jobs. Or be their slave. Your choice.
When subtle stuff happens occasionally, what about friends at work? Women AND men? Won’t they help out or at least give you an ear or help you plot how to deal with that person next time? Or in meetings, talk with friends beforehand and say look, it’s hard to get an opening, let’s try to create openings for each other OK?
Meetings are hard. I’ve been in many meetings where there were NO assholes, but the subject matter was so heated that few people could get in a word edgewise and everyone in the room left feeling unresolved and addled.
I think teaching our daughters to be solid human beings is a good start. But also teaching all kids that making friends at work is important. We need allies and trust. And getting skilled at working as an alliance with your work-friends is really important too.
“I think what he means is…” I’ve had a number of colleagues, women and men, help clarify something I garbled, using that lead-in, even cutting me off. But it was support. We need to help each other, not tear each other down. Even on here, on the Intertubes. Expansion is necessary.
A zillion times this. Wish I was still a Regular (and a halfway-decent editor, and you all know I’m not) so I could distill this paragraph down to its essence and re-label the thread thus.
This phenomenon is so deeply and subtly baked into Western culture that its roots and tendrils inhabit every facet of professional discourse (and most non-professional conversations as well) with most of us being completely unaware it’s there. Er, that is, I mean most of us guys being blissfully unaware of it.
I suppose it could change with constant hammering into our heads, of a degree similar to how us clueless guys have been gradually made aware of just how much women actually don’t want us pinching their butts and waggling our tongues and whistling at them as they walk by, or that gay people don’t really want to violate our buttholes in the gym shower, or that people who look different from us aren’t necessarily dumber/meaner/uglier/less valuable than we are. I mean, sure, there are plenty of us who still believe some or all of these idiotic ideas (idiocy is a particularly stubborn and virulent weed), but most (I hope) of us have begun to show signs that we can eventually be taught and civilized… if we’re hit over the head often enough with how dumb our underevolved thinking is.
I publicly stand with @Missy_Pants (not a phrase I ever thought I’d say, but thank you Missy for allowing me to say it )
@awjt I know exactly where you are coming from. Self supportive, constructive environments where asshats get discovered and jettisoned.
It wasn’t until my wife and I took our rings off last September that I saw how awful men are to women when they don’t think anyone is looking. How do you quit a job to avoid harassment when every fourth dude harasses you? That’s more like quitting life.
I sympathize with your opinion, but you and I have it a bit different from most women. When it’s bad, it is truly ugly.
That’s a Hell of an assertion (pardon the pun), especially given the most common joke about Catholic priests, and the tendency in more religious cultures (including, historically, Christian Europe) to blame women for “tempting men into sin.”
I can’t prove that they’re causally related, but the past century’s advances in women’s rights, incomplete though they may be, have come aside an increase in secularism and atheism.
I’m certainly not saying that atheists are, by necessity, better people than the religious are. However, asserting that “only religious men can hold themselves back from becoming animals,” is absurd.
Naw, I don’t think religion has that much to do with it, except insofar that older religious people who perhaps have not thoroughly interrogated the inconsistencies of their faith might be less likely to interrogate what else might be wrong with their ideas of “civilization.”
And a double-Naw to that idea. Discrimination, however subtle, is unpalatable. Why should the discriminatory boss get a free pass, and just keep his job without having to change? Fuck that.
My workplace is in the sciences… data science. Hard core programming
and statistics. There is equality. So there are places to go. People
do not have to jump ship of their discipline. I was not suggesting
that.
That’s interesting. Two female students I mentored have gone on to data science at different corporations. Both have contacted me for advice with dealing with overtly hostile male colleagues. One was just run of the mill sexism, one had sexism against her nucleated around pregnancy.
I’m glad you stand up for your colleagues, and that you don’t often perceive discrimination. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there (from your comments here, I would not speak to you in my workplace about sexism. If these opinions are public, I would guess other many women would make the same choice.), and that doesn’t make ‘just give up your income!’ is helpful advice for dealing with sexism.
Of course not, I’m not religious anymore and wouldn’t make that statement in earnest if I was. I just have to conclude that if we were able to have peaceful all-male groups then, discounting divine intervention it must be possible elsewhere (and that wasn’t the only place I’ve seen it at all). I certainly welcome women in any group I’m part of, but I don’t think they’re a prerequisite to acting in a civilised way.
ETA: to add to this, I’ve seen better and worse situations than the ones that have been described in this thread. The way men act in single sex groups and the way they treat women varies immensely. I have a possibly unpopular theory that certain school systems, social philosophies and business practices encourage sociopathic tendencies, and a lot of improvement from this point is both possible and realistic.
ETA again: this is getting a little off topic and male dominated. Sorry about that.
Since when is getting a better job and moving to a better situation “giving up your income”?
Since when is getting a better job and moving to a better situation giving the last boss a free pass? They lost YOU for chrissakes; that’s a huge loss to them and you get to leave all those dipwads in the dust and bask in the sunshine at your new place.
I swear, talking to you people on the Intertubes is like trying to squish a rat into a cup. Every time you press on one side, more of the rat pops out of the other side.
These jobs and workplaces exist. Scout’s honor. I swear they do. I would even go so far as to say that they are MANY. Find one. Go there. Love it. Bring a friend. Don’t look back.
Ah. I apologize for jumping down your throat. I’ve recently misplaced my own religious beliefs, and am still, it seems, rather sensitive to the implication that it has made me any less of a good person.
Every single woman posting on this thread has stated that this is the norm, for all of us, over many decades of employment. Individual workplaces can be better, and some (but not all) of us have experienced that, but we are all in agreement that on average the problem is pervasive. Several men have have confirmed how difficult it is to witness because the mere fact of being a man in the situation means the behavior is usually hidden while they’re there…and yet despite that subterfuge, they’ve seen it too, so they know it’s a real problem.
Are we all wrong? Are we all too weak or lazy to figure out a simple solution? Could it really be as simple as you say to solve the problem? Hmmm…
)