How can women disrupt male speech domination?

general topics
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Come on, that’s about as comforting as your mom telling you “it’s their loss” when the guys you thought were your friends last year decide to join in with the fuckers giving you swirlies in seventh grade. And again, we’re not talking about a few bad apples in isolated companies or institutions. This is a widespread, institutional, cultural problem, and abandoning a (possibly otherwise perfect) job just because some fuckwad hasn’t seen the light yet is no solution.

I have no actual solutions, as I said before, but I strongly believe that the eventual solution involves not letting those fuckwads dictate the conditions of the work environment unchallenged.

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Evidence shows that gender norms in the workplace are generally poor — esp. in tech.

…
The statistics in technology are particularly bad. On average, 30 percent of employees at big tech companies including Google, Facebook and Apple are women, 5 percent are Latino and 4 percent are black.

A diversity industry has sprung up to teach companies how to become more inclusive. Engineers attend training sessions on unconscious bias. Companies are hiring corporate diversity chiefs. …

Venture capitalists, who hold the keys to success in Silicon Valley by providing start-up money, are even more likely to be white and male than tech company employees are. …

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I’m enjoying the double whammy of “if you stay in a bad situation its your fault” + “its not actually that prevalent, if it happens at all because I don’t see it”. Amazing.

I think I will take the advice and quit this thread and find another more welcoming thread to chat in. Perhaps the MRA thread? LOL

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Good luck challenging your boss and getting anywhere, especially regarding changing the cultural norms. I’ve challenged bosses with mixed results. Cultural sea change as a result? Nope. Need to change jobs for that.

That is a complete misread of what I wrote. Feel free to think what you want, but that is not it. Also, this bbs has the tendency to pile on the people who show up for the discussion as if they are the enemy. Really, I’m not your enemy. The problem are the people who take no notice of workplace unfairness and do nothing about it even when brought to their attention.

This also is a gross mischaracterization of what I wrote. Getting a better job and moving to a better, more supportive situation is hardly easy. But it sure beats being someone’s slave, whipping post or scapegoat, no matter how subtly. The bright side is there are plenty of good workplaces.

But go ahead, friends. Keep mischaracterizing away… if it makes you feel better. Beat on me some more. I can take it. I’m here til Thursday. Try the steak!

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It really is this tweet (from Hope Jahren, who has a book out that deals in large part with gender bias in academic STEM) in message board form:

Srsly my email: Women- I read ur piece. I am going to do X. Men- I read ur piece. You should do X. And Y. And Z. And then report back to me.

— Hope Jahren (@HopeJahren) March 6, 2016

It doesn’t matter how well documented gender bias is, or how many of us experience it. It’s always going to get put back on us to fix.

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In my experience, people don’t usually get a job expecting it to be a bad one. If we put a number of 50% of the jobs out there as being hostile to women, then of eight women who choose to leave their current job, it’s likely that one will have to change jobs at least four times (I thought it was 3, but then did the math) before finding a respectful environment. And from the experiences posted here, 50% may be a lowball estimate.

Even discounting bonuses for seniority, is likely that at least one of those moves will be to a job with lower salary. Not to mention that if they leave the job first and make finding a better job a full-time job, that will cost them quite a bit in salary.

Finally, if you came home every day to find anonymous, disturbing notes left in your mailbox, then while it may be true that moving to a place where the writer cannot find you would probably put a stop to the notes, a far better solution is to deal with the person who is actually in the wrong. Why should you let some jerk kick you out of the place where you belong?

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Sorry about the double-post, but I’m just going to repost my proposed solution from the other thread:

Continuing the discussion from How can women disrupt male speech domination? (the sequel):

I really think the solution has to be to get people to respect everyone’s ideas early, and reinforce the habit throughout every year of schooling.

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Changing jobs doesn’t change the culture, it just might possibly make the day-to-day a little easier for the job-changer… but maybe not. Look man, I know you’re not the bad guy; I suspect none of us here think you’re the bad guy. But it’s not a far stretch from what you recommend to the following scenarios:

“I was almost tempted to hire that Stephen Hawking fella, might have been a real coup for our Theoretical Physics department. But the guy expects us to build wheelchair ramps for every building on campus. Can you believe the nerve? Dunno about you, but I’ve never needed wheels to get around. What makes him so special?” Hmm. Well, that’s their loss, I guess.

“Sorry, we don’t hire colored people here.”
“Neither did the last ten places I applied.”
“That’s a bummer, but you wouldn’t like the office culture here anyway. Why don’t you apply someplace… I dunno, better?”

The culture can and does change… but people have to be willing to put in the effort. And honestly, the people most affected by this issue shouldn’t have to be the only ones to put in that effort. The rest of us should pitch in, in the interest of having a workplace that’s truly fair and equitable to all. At the very, very least, we should acknowledge the existence of the problem, not write it off as the unwarranted grumblings of complainers who willfully refuse to see the easy solutions, and we really shouldn’t resort to just telling 'em to find a new job or line of work. Honestly, this issue is neither new nor even remotely rare, and should be very very high on our list of Cultural Changes We Need To Expedite Next (read: NOW), since we’ve made so much progress with the ADA and civil rights legislation. :wink:

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Yup.

Did you see this? This whipped through my friendslist last week like a tornado.

So good, so… sad.

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The solution is mutiny.

Organise a coup of sorts, in which arsehole boss is systematically interrupted every time he takes his dick in his hand, and it’s pointed out to him how counter-productive he’s being, and demonstrate the superior alternative approach. I guess it’d require some meetings of your own, likely outside work time, or at least some prior organising via email.

In any situation where dysfunctional authority prevails, the crucial prerequisite to dealing with it is solidarity.

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Maybe we’re on the cusp of something here? The implications of thoroughly pervasive communication are only just starting to play out… If everyone who gives a damn about this keeps chipping away at it by sharing these stories, might we have #FLM soon?

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I have my disagreements with Kathleen Wynne, but I have nothing but praise for her when it comes to teaching “Consent” in early Elementary school as part of the new sex-ed curriculum.

I remember that around that time, someone linked a recording from a talk radio show, saying something to the effect of, “At that age, the only thing kids should need to know about consent is the word ‘No.’” I facepalmed when I heard that, because it is entirely missing the point.

Teaching consent at a young age isn’t about teaching kids how to say, “Yes, I want to have sex.” It’s about teaching them to say, “I’m not comfortable with you touching me,” or, “Please don’t talk to me like that,” and about respecting when someone else says something like that to you. It’s got nothing to do with sex, except in the sense that communicating what makes you uncomfortable and respecting other people’s comfort zones, desires, and agency is at least as important in sex as it is in any other aspect of any relationship.

It’s not a cure-all by any means, but I’ll be interested to see if kids brought up in the Wynne curriculum are any less likely to be victimized, or victimizers, as adults.

Sorry for the tangent, but the link you posted made me think about educating people to stand up and express their discomfort, and to respect those who do.

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Hm, I struggle to understand how ditching an ill-fitting system of rigid preconceptions regarding the nature of reality can ever be regarded as a bad thing… IMO congratulations are in order.

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I imagine that if I’d been raised to think that I must keep my forearms covered at all times, wearing a t-shirt would be both freeing and, at the same time, distinctly uncomfortable.

It’s not that I think that I was right before and am wrong now; quite the opposite, in fact. However, there is still the residual perception that I’m doing something naughty, and I might be prone to overreacting for a while if someone suggests that my arms need covering.

Note: this is a metaphor; I was not part of some crazy anti-t-shirt cult.

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To sum up: You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

If you try to speak up or disrupt, you will be ignored or belittled. If you don’t, you will be overlooked.

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Old-cis-white-male person here. What has worked for me is to passively call out the behavior as soon as possible, relentlessly. It is more difficult for women to do this (see above) so it is incumbent on men, particularly those with more power and influence, to do it. Or at the very least, support others who do it.

I keep an exaggerated eye-roll on hand at all meetings. If I’ve had some coffee and I’m paying attention, I say some apparently innocuous statement of fact, like “so-and-so just had the same thought and also just said it”. Most of the time this will go right over many heads. I expect any slighted parties know exactly why I said it. When the fact trips up someone, or otherwise breaks the flow of the conversation, I have to have some passive-aggressive explanation at hand, like “credit where credit’s due” or “I think you’re mansplaining”. And then be prepared to escalate, or not.

It only takes a few of these negative interactions before everyone knows that if I’m at a meeting I’ll do it again, given similar circumstance. I hope the sentiment leaks into the hallways and other meetings where I’m not present, but I don’t know if it has any effect on language and behavior outside of my presence.

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Yep. But friends, allies, plans and, if necessary, new job.

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This is a fantastic point because sometimes people are literally not aware at all they are doing this, or that it is happening around them. And just getting people to see, forget changing behavior, just see it, is helpful.

A tiny, but I think solid, example of this is when @funruly took me up on the Rise of the Tomb Raider game offer and noted that it is odd that Lara is always wearing makeup, no matter where she is and what crazy life threatening, death defying situation she is in some extreme corner of the world. I literally did not notice this at all and would not have until he called it out.

It is not world ending sexism or anything, but it is true, I did not see it, not at all, and it made me stop and wonder how I consider women wearing makeup “normal” and that it was not a conscious choice on my part, that is just how it always was and is in media. But is that right? It did make me pause a bit and think about something I had never considered before.

So, for example, if you timed the amount people talk in that meeting and noted that hey, one person talked 80% of the time, or that in the last 6 meetings we have never heard anything from Lisa, that kind of data might open some eyes.

(I still think this is super mega risky if it is The Boss that is the egregious offender here versus a coworker.)

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Ok, I’m going to provide a little background because my experience is incredibly skewed. I’ve started 5 companies and run engineering organizations. The people I’ve worked with are 90% male software engineers and I’ve hired the vast majority of them. I’m very good at what I do, but I’m not anywhere near the best.

Domination has not been very common of a trait in people in the organizations I’ve run (the biggest of which was 90 engineers), but there were always a few people who did try to dominate conversations and they were always men. Also, the people who were dominated were largely men as well (remember: highly skewed organizations).

Maybe testosterone plays a factor, but from my experience, the people I’ve seen try to dominate are not the people I would assume had high levels of testosterone nor were they anything one would consider to be alpha males. They were largely people who were considered, by the group as a whole, as having high levels of respect, low to moderate levels of emotional intelligence and inflated egos.

Basically, people respected them and they would speak a lot and out of turn. As a manager and someone who wanted to see them grow, it was my responsibility to keep them in check, make sure the quiet people would be heard and guide everyone to a place where they consider each other’s opinions so everyone was happier and I didn’t have to police so much (because who wants to spend all their time doing that?).

But there was no universal technique to what I’ve done. Every case was different and the situations which I would decide to act in differed. Sometimes I would need to deflate someone’s ego and other times I would need to bolster it. Sometimes it required direct confrontation and other times it required (minor) peer humiliation. Sometimes it required bonding and others it required competition. Often it required mentoring along with significant manipulation (a favorite technique is to get someone with low self-esteem to prove me wrong while everyone agrees I’m right).

If you’re a peer though and not someone in my position? That’s a lot harder. Aristotle wrote on the art of rhetoric that is as true today as when was written. But if you’re combating a subconscious bias that you are not worthy of respect because you’re a woman? That requires a mastery of rhetoric beyond what submissive men would require and certainly beyond learning individual techniques from a thread like this.

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What you wrote is good - idealistic but good. Although, I suppose what’s most annoying is having my quote peeled out of context (I, and the OP, were talking about crappy bosses, specifically) and then this subsequent recharacterizing & distillation of everything I’ve written on the thread down to a highly inaccurate: “change jobs.” I have been advocating banding together in groups to address speech equality in the workplace from the first thing I wrote, as well as the style and format of how to speak with the most impact, and then the nuclear option of changing jobs as really the last step in actively addressing one’s unhappiness in a particular job.

You took it off on this tangent to discriminatory practices far afield of the original conversation- I never said anything about that, nor was it close at hand. You’re making those leaps, not me. I was talking about sexism and people talking over other people in meetings, and now you’re talking about “not hiring colored people”? Oh man, that is the biggest fluffiest straw man I’ve ever seen.

Of course I agree that discrimination is wrong. It IS wrong. But it’s not what we are talking about. The conversation is about

The conversation is about men who won’t let other people get their ideas out, as well as the sticky situation when that person is the boss.

So, do you honestly, really believe that you can go into a small or medium sized company, owned by the boss who won’t let women get a word in edgewise and change him? Do you really think you can step foot into his business and essentially take it from him? Do you really think he is going to hire and keep employed people who shut him down in meetings and present him with a list of “Cultural Changes We Need To Expedite Next”?

The answer is, no you will not. You know what’s going to happen to you? You are going to get yourself managed and HR’ed.

None of that is to say that overbearing boss is right. He’s not. He’s a dick. But you’re not going to realistically go in there and take his business from him. Your ear will be tasting the pavement out front before he lets you do that.

So I’m talking about actual stuff that actual people in the real world can do, not idealistic stuff that people in a movie can try out. Band together, form alliances, make friends, speak with impact, and the funny awesome passive aggressive stuff that Mark Dow suggested, which is gold and works.

& then… if it all goes belly up and none of the stuff you try works - your coworkers still talk over you and belittle you, you tried to band together with friends and take on the pigs, the boss is still a total asshole… what-have-you… After all of that and you’ve given it a good try and you’re done, then it’s time to get out because there are other workplaces where none of this is such a chore and people actually value you.

If I were in a workplace where the women were constantly being bullied, ignored and systematically shut down, I would definitely try to change that up. I’d do a ton of the stuff here on the thread, and the stuff I’ve said… band together, try to make friends and go at it as a team effort, etc. I would like a fair and equitable workplace. I like things equal. I hate it when people are being mean to each other. But if all of that didn’t work, and morale was low, I’d be trying to get the hell out of there.

I’m just talking about realistically how the world works. I agree idealistically, but I think we all need to behave realistically and level with each other here.

…AND stick to the topic at hand and not veer off, mischaracterizing and decontextualizing what the other person writes. It’s a common technique, but it’s sure not very fun to be on the receiving end of it.

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