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When ideas are transmitted without receiving any kind of pushback (and men aren't allowed to push back against that idea lest they be called man-babies, as your post so well illustrates), people, men and women alike, end up thinking that this idea must have a solid foundation, even if they themselves have never seen any empirical evidence in its support, because we operate under the unconscious assumption that lies and fallacies are refuted and rejected as soon as they appear.Īs such, people try to fit their experiences into the uncontested narratives they learn from their cultural environment, even if a particular narrative itself is false in their case, as illustrated in the case of the doctor mentioned above.
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And one of the ideas that we have received in recent years from TV series, media columnists, etc., is this one that the female writer is communicating and you are defending here: that women do the bulk of the work in the office while the men are good for nothing, not even for recognizing the professional title of their female colleagues. My answer is this: the impression we have of reality is not neutral, but shaped by ideas that we receive from the external environment. But it would still be interesting to speculate as to why her impression of her experience was the exact opposite of the truth. I admire this professor (sorry, this doctor) for having the intellectual honesty to acknowledge in public that her attempt to denigrate her male colleagues was unfounded. It was his female colleagues who were failing to call her a doctor, preferring to refer to her by her first name. On her blog post, however, came the surprise: she admitted that after looking at her emails, the opposite was true. One of the women who made this complaint said she was going to comb through her emails to make a blog post with statistics showing this discrepancy. I was in various corporate jobs for over 40 years and the narrative that women generally get stuck with minding their male colleagues has been completely true in my experienceĪ few years ago, on Twitter (the epicenter for much of this whiny type of corporate feminism), some women from academia were in a misandrist circlejerk bitching to one another about the lack of recognition they got from men, and one of the complaints that were being made was that their male colleagues are less likely to refer to them as doctor (notice the petty upper-middle class entitlement behind these feminist whinefests). This woman is being influenced by a corporate feminist rhetoric that is trendy in social media (her very word choice points to that fact), and it seems to me that the same applies to you.
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Quit being delusional, you don't even know these people.
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The letter writer's colleague is a passive-aggressive jerk and is not entitled to his alternative facts. You have to be willing to be perceived as “difficult” even though there is nothing difficult about establishing firm boundaries and sticking to them. You have to work actively to make sure that you and the women you work with are not disproportionately responsible for administrative and emotional labor. It’s frustrating, it’s complicated, and it absolutely contributes to burnout and women not having enough time or energy to do the work they need and/or want to prioritize. Research has long shown that in collaborative work settings, women shoulder the most responsibility. Roxane: First, who cares if your male colleague agrees with your assessment of his behavior? Get it together! He does not get to dictate reality in ways that enable his nonsense. Do I have to just let this go to be successful? - Anonymous, Bend, Ore. When I had a direct conversation with a male colleague who is a particular offender, he simply did not agree and refused to acknowledge this might be happening. Their advice was (a) bring it up directly with group members not doing their fair share, or (b) let them fail. I’ve done a few things to address this, including talking to a few senior (female) leaders. Within the project teams I’m a part of, it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings. Despite this balance, the work itself does not feel fair. I’ve been lucky enough to be on a relatively diverse, gender-balanced team.