Today, there are 2 letters at Ask A Manager that relate to gender-specific assumptions/statements. The first is just a hot mess of internalized misogyny and doesn’t really need much dissection (though she got a ton of it from the commentariat–and I will probably add to it myself. Alison had an excellent and thorough response to the question), but the other was more interesting in part because of the brevity of what she said about the other women in her office. In addition, my immediate response was different than my follow-up opinion once I actually thought about it–but only marginally and didn’t completely nullify my original reaction.
In the first letter, the letter writer (LW), a woman, talks about her bias against women who went to all-women colleges. She thinks they are too precious, special snowflakes who need to be coddled (she actually trots out that tired old trope), that they can’t deal with reality and men, and that the colleges get too much money/endowments (yet, does not mention the Ivies here). The last is truly bizarre to me because she says that money can be used to uplift so many more women if used elsewhere. Oh, and she mentions that a men’s only college would be banned (uh, no. There are men-only colleges in the US. Not many, but they do exist. A commenter pointed out that the LW might be confusing the order for The Citadel and VMI to accept not just white men with a country-wide ban on men-only colleges. The former is because they are state institutions. Private colleges have no such restrictions.
It was breathtaking to read this letter and the ‘cool girls’ vibe to it. When I was in college, I had a ton of guy friends. My boyfriend at the time uncharitably said it was because they all wanted to fuck me (which I don’t think is true). I had female friends who complained that all the guys liked me and not them. I retorted it was because I treated them like they were human beings–which they were. I was more interested in sports than fashion at the time (no longer true. I am equally interested in both now–which means not at all), and I found it easier to talk to guys than women.
If I were to be honest, I felt smug about it. I wasn’t like those other girls, being silly and vapid. I was a serious woman–one who could talk about serious issues like football. But, also, one who could joke about sex because I was not a prude.
The cruel reality was, though, that I was there on sufferance. I was accepted as long as I agreed that those other women were silly and not worthy of attention–except as fuckable objects, of course. If I ever disagreed, I would be relegated to the ‘no fun’ zone, which is equivalent to the ‘vapid and silly’ bin. I had to tacitly agree that men were better than women in order to remain one of the gang. I did not realize any of this at the time, but it was clear to me in retrospect.
It’s similar to trying to be the good minority or the respectable queer person. It’s all based on societal norms that we would do well to question. We are not going to get rid of them overnight, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we should just go with the status quo.
When i was in college, I took a class about gender and psychology. We had a project in which we had to observe a situation for gender biases and then write a paper about it/talk about it in class (can’t remember which. Definitely the latter and maybe both). I chose a math class and the class I was in (gender and psychology). The former was more male-heavy with a male teacher (something like 4 out of 5 students were male) and the latter was a female teacher, 9 or 10 female students (including me) and one guy. I did not participate in either class–I just observed. I was judging one thing–who interrupted whom. It was a fairly simple premise, and I expected men to talk over women more often than the other way around, but I couldn’t quantify by how much.
This was nearly 30 years ago, but the results were so startling, I still remember them. And, yes, I know it was a very small sample size and decades ago, but still. What I found was that a man would talk over other men and women, including the teacher. Same with the male teacher. He talked over both male and female students (this was before I was aware of nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, and other gender orientations). The female teacher talked over the female students, but not the male one. And the female students in both classes would only talk over the other women. In other words, the men would talk over anyone whereas the women would only talk over other women. In no case did a woman talk over a man.
I think about how much energy a woman wastes waiting for her turn to talk because she’s not allowed to speak up whenever she wants without consequence. The LW’s assertion that in the real world, women have to deal with men so they should have to voluntarily choose to do that all the time is so strange to me. If you can choose a situation in which you can flourish without obstacles, why wouldn’t you? By her logic, a parent should put down their child because that’s how the real world would treat them and we don’t want them to be soft (which, sadly, is how some parents actually think).
No, we cannot control the world around us, but that doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s life. What can you do?” Several of the commenters pointed out that the LW had the cool girl mentality in that she seemed to believe since she had to deal with it, everyone did. That’s the same mentality I had in college, and it comes at a heavy cost. Because you’re constantly censoring yourself and trying not to upset the powers that be. I may return to that in a bit, but I’m more interested in the second letter.
In this one, the LW says that she had been working at her job for five years. When she started, she was pregnant and did not get along with her coworkers. She said:
I didn’t get along well with many of the other women on my team who were in different life stages and had different work ethics than myself. There was just no personal chemistry.
She got jumped on for this, and I will admit that my initial reaction was very unkind. It has that cool girl vibe to it and reads as very judgmental to boot. In addition, it’s so brief and vague, it’s hard to know exactly what she meant by it. The first part read to me as if the other women were clearly older or younger, either pre-children or post. (Or, like me, not interested in having them.) Plus the ‘I’m not here to make friends’ is such the reality TV trope, I cringed. Then she concludes by being upset about not being included (though she said she wasn’t upset), which doesn’t follow. If you deliberately ice out your colleagues, you can’t be upset when they follow suit.
But the more I thought about it, I could also see her point as long as I made some big assumptions, too. Since she mentioned that she was pregnant when she hired, the ‘different life stages’ could mean that all the other women in the office were, say, in their early twenties and into partying. Or in their late fifties and done with raising children. That in and of itself is not noteworthy, but if it meant that they all had a certain mindset such as having a baby is a drag, then I can see feeling put off by it.
As someone who does not and never did want children, I have had to cope with talking to mothers who wanted to talk about nothing other than their children. It’s ok for an hour or two at a time, but if I was in an office where that’s all my coworkers wanted to talk about, I would struggle to get along with them.
The different work ethics part is squishier because it could mean the LW has an overweening sense of her work self and doesn’t value anyone who doesn’t share it, or it could bet that the other women are slackers (but surely not all of them). There just isn’t enough to make a solid hypothesis about it.
This is running long so I’ll finish it up in the next post.