"...I don't think most men are intentionally, actively and on purpose trying to keep women out, but it's a big, big problem that they don't want to talk too much to a woman for fear that it might lead to an affair or a really terrible misunderstanding or gossip"
It's bewildering how everybody knows there are these tremendous informal barriers, that have withstood all past attempts at equal rights, and yet everybody also knows that women have better social skills and emotional intelligence than men.
One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to be saying what holds women back is that men don't trust them. This is a very interesting point.
I have, and have had, a very negative reaction to anyone demanding trust beyond what feels right to me. The "golden rule" is central to most people's value systems, I think, and it is completely unimaginable to me that I could or should be able to demand trust as an entitlement.
However, I think your expectation of trust from men is normal, or at least common, based on my personal relationships. I do think that you might consider that not trusting women can and does have significant negatives for men too.
I don't disbelieve in your description of issues people have, but explanations I read - yours or others - tend to sound circular to me and not really explain why things are the way they are.
> One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to be saying what holds women back is that men don't trust them
Throwaway for obvious reasons.
As a man, I’m rather skeptical about trusting women in business. I will never have a one-on-one meeting with a woman (especially somebody under my management), and I will especially never interact with with woman I work with outside of the office. I will generally try to keep discussions with women in the office strictly about business and professional. I am incredibly cautious about mentoring a woman.
The risk of being accused of something untoward is just not worth taking. There’s little risk of my male colleagues taking some extreme level of offence at banter or any of the other normal interactions of friendship. None of my male colleagues are going to file a complaint against me just to spite me, or to further their career objectives. However this is a non-trivial risk with women. I know women who openly talk about having done this, and I know men who it has happened to. I don’t like it, but that’s simply the reality of the current political climate.
I know some men have this attitude but I still find it astounding.
Are you really so unable to determine appropriate behaviours that you think women are making extreme overreactions to normal “banter”? Or that the risk of a false/inflated accusation is so high that you think freezing out all women is a reasonable and rational approach?
Women finally begin talking publicly about the endemic sexism they face, which many men just don’t see, and your conclusion from that is that women can’t be trusted.
I mean, sure, some woman might maliciously make some accusation against you. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that a man makes a false bullying accusation. Or accuses you of sexual advances. There are malicious people everywhere and gender doesn’t really come into it.
I don’t have any concern about the appropriateness of my behaviour. I care a lot about the people I work with, I want them all to succeed, and I want them all to feel good about coming to work. The problem is that it’s very easy to paint personal discussions as being inappropriate. Take an example of a discussion related to family. This could be a perfectly ordinary personal topic for two colleagues to discuss. But you don’t have to think very hard to come up with a reason that family could be a taboo topic of discussions with female colleagues. Why is he talking to me about family? Does he want to know what my plans are? Is that why I didn’t get that promotion?...
> I mean, sure, some woman might maliciously make some accusation against you. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that a man makes a false bullying accusation.
It sure is. But if I catch the ire of a malicious man at work, it’s much more likely to just amount to the regular office politics nonsense. Even if a man were to make a more outrageous accusation against me, I’d expect to be treated to some reasonable form of due process. With the same accusation from I woman, I absolutely would not have such an expectation. I would also expect that such an accusation could follow me around for perhaps the rest of my life.
Now, I’ve worked with some very talented women, and I’ve done what I can to support them. But sadly I don’t feel as though I can do as much as I would like. You’re free to criticize me for that, but from my perspective it’s a perfectly rational risk avoidance strategy. It’s motivated by cultural factors that are entirely beyond my control, and it’s a perspective that I would guess is shared to some extent by a non-trivial amount of people.
I’ve heard the same in a lot of places. After #metoo got rolling and “guilty until ... fuck it, accused means guilty, #believesurvivors” became the norm, I heard a lot of guys in higher positions say they wouldn’t work closely with / mentor a woman if they could in any way avoid it. If they were accused, their career and possibly marriage would just be over. As you say, just not worth it.
I don’t share this feeling, but then, I may live to regret it. It only takes one bad actor.
I don't know how to constructively engage your points, but I appreciate that you posted.
Given how rampant this issue seems to be, I'm somewhat appalled that there isn't a more supportive response to the comment. It suggests an awful lot of men think they absolutely don't do this when observation suggests to me that it is more or less the norm.
I posted a link elsewhere in this discussion to a piece I wrote some years back called The Gray Zone.
TLDR: Establishing trust is always a long, involved process, no matter who the parties are. But it's just much, much clearer that it's platonic and for purposes of doing business when it's two (apparently) heterosexual males. The waters get muddy really quickly when it's a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman.
Edit:
One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to be saying what holds women back is that men don't trust them.
I would say that women end up under pressure to meet a higher bar for trust than men typically face. If men had to meet the same bar, they would fail more consistently as well.
When I worked in government I noticed something similar. Every department had about five senior leaders. There would be one female and she would always be the hard as nails, gruff, no nonsense type. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that they had had to behave like that to be taken seriously and trusted to be competent. The men could get away with being affable and clubby but women’s range of accepted behaviours was far narrower.
Yeah, I'm pretty personable. I've found that being more standoffish is necessary to get taken at all seriously, otherwise men just interpret everything as flirting, basically. Whether they want to be flirted with or not, it does absolutely nothing for me professionally.
That's an interesting idea, that women are required to meet a higher bar for trust than men. I've always thought trust was the most valuable currency there is.
Do you think that being trusted or not trusted has a predictable effect on whether a person is trustworthy?
Women are required to meet a higher bar in part because it's assumed that two men meeting for coffee are meeting for business, but it's less clear what is going on if a man and a woman are meeting for coffee.
The relationship between trust and a character trait of trustworthiness is not necessarily straight forward. If people think you simply aren't in a strong position to hurt them, they expect less of you.
Women are often in a position to inadvertently harm a man without meaning to do so. Important men often want no appearance of impropriety. This makes it unclear how a woman can even establish a trusting relationship to a man.
Sometimes, husband-and-wife teams work as an effective in for the woman. Her relationship to him helps establish intent for everyone. It helps prevent muddy Waters in that regard.
If a meeting over coffee reads as a date if it's mixed gender, it may not matter how trustworthy she is. It may only matter that he doesn't want there to be talk, so he won't meet with her.
I attended GIS school in my late thirties. It's a two-thirds make field. I have a strong math background and argued with one of my professors that his math on the board was wrong.
He said "I bet you lunch." right before realizing I was right and saying "I feel a lunch coming on."
He was probably around 50 years old. He didn't really want to be seen buying lunch for a relatively pretty, young female student. After class, he quietly thanked me for standing my ground and correcting him and he slipped me a twenty dollar bill to cover lunch.
If I had been male and we had actually gone to lunch together, this would have been an incredible networking opportunity. But we never did have lunch together because he didn't want any appearance of impropriety, even though he respected my mind and appreciated my class contribution. It wasn't enough to overcome the question of "What will other people think?"
Of course, that story and conclusion involves a lot of inference and assumption on my part. Maybe he would have slipped a twenty to male student as well and not actually eaten lunch with them.
And that's part of what makes it so intractable. If I accused him if excluding me based on my gender, it would only deepen the rift, not bridge it and I can't actually prove it's a gendered thing, which makes women look histrionic when they complain about things like that.
And, yet, we continue to be subtly shut out. And I think this is a major way in which doors just never open for us.
If you can't even have coffee in public with someone for fear of what others will think, how on Earth do you even begin to network and get known well enough to establish a name, get referrals for work, etc?
I'm not sure what GIS school is. Was this an undergraduate program? Having lunch with professors is something that I am not really aware of people doing non-romantically, and certainly never did myself in college.
When I went back to try to complete my degree in my late 20s, I thought I needed to find an internship if possible, and I went to the office of whatever they called it, and asked for suggestions on where to start. The guy responded that (as I was a transfer student that hadn't been there for long) he didn't know me and couldn't recommend me. I was taken aback and said of course I wasn't asking for a personal recommendation from him, just general hints or advice on what to do.
After that, I applied to be a volunteer at a local hospital, which made me jump through a lot of hoops just to work for them for free. I did things like putting educational material in binders and assembling nametags until I graduated, and created a resume based on that and my one-day-at-a-time assignments at a temp agency. And it got me my first corporate IT job a month or two before graduation - they let me work part time until then.
So, I wasn't sure where I was going with this (other than comparing my experiences) until I finished, but it seems like a pattern that when I've gotten a cold shoulder from men, I've gotten a break from women. Every time I've really needed to get back on my feet employment wise, I've volunteered to prove I was able to cope with a job, and at a place that was disproportionately women. And after years of being underpaid, a woman offered me close to a market rate salary (although I have reason to think she may have considered it a mistake).
If you feel you've always been disadvantaged by how men treat you, I hear you implicitly saying women can't substitute in your platonic relationships.
My choice to use personal anecdotes to try to elucidate the problem was not intended to turn this into a personal discussion about my life.
There are tons of aggregate statistics out there about how men generally make more money, disproportionately take up top positions in corporations, etc. Iirc, only 17% of people in the C suite are female. Less than 5 percent of S&P 500 have a female CEO.
So when you turn it into a personal question, no doubt trying to be sincerely helpful, that kind of implies it's some kind of personal problem and I must be doing something wrong. It inadvertently implies it's not really a societal level issue.
And I think people generally tend to do that to women and women -- including me -- tend to go along with that and reply in kind and it leads to women giving out an excess of personal information and feeling like they are being treated dismissively, etc. It also quickly gets into muddy water territory where it isn't clear what kind of relationship this is supposed to be.
And that's where that private-public framing is helpful to me personally. It helps me to remember that most people aren't behaving with malice aforethought and aren't trying to force me into a particular role. They just respond to a combined set of social signals in a way that seems appropriate at the moment without connecting it to the larger context and it just happens to keep those patterns alive that invisibly exclude women from money and power to a large degree.
Declining to post that first draft I tend to write that actually answers all those personal questions and, instead, turn the discussion back to "the issues" and aggregate data has been helpful for me.
Maybe someday those larger patterns will change. In the mean time, having a tool for figuring out where things went wrong without screaming about sexism on an overwhelmingly male forum has been better than not having it.
Italicizing platonic is rude and I have no right to insinuate anything about your personal life nor do I expect you to share anything further. I regret the tone.
Since you shared a meaningful experience with me/the world, I responded in kind, because to me, my experience is also essential truth.
However, I'm not sure that I was trying to be "sincerely helpful" to you. That's not how I would automatically think of it when I respond to some random non-gendered username on the internet.
...I also don't think asking if you were in an undergraduate program is such a personal question.
I'm absolutely not accusing you of anything whatsoever.
I wrote out this long reply answering all of your questions and felt weird about it and wondered why and didn't post it. Then I decided to try to use this as an example of exactly what I'm talking about.
Thank you for talking with me. I'm running a fever today, so I no doubt could have said something better than I did.
Edit:
In fact, I'm mixing up two discussions, because I talked about the private-public divide to someone else. So I apologize for the disconnect there.
It's bewildering how everybody knows there are these tremendous informal barriers, that have withstood all past attempts at equal rights, and yet everybody also knows that women have better social skills and emotional intelligence than men.
One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to be saying what holds women back is that men don't trust them. This is a very interesting point.
I have, and have had, a very negative reaction to anyone demanding trust beyond what feels right to me. The "golden rule" is central to most people's value systems, I think, and it is completely unimaginable to me that I could or should be able to demand trust as an entitlement.
However, I think your expectation of trust from men is normal, or at least common, based on my personal relationships. I do think that you might consider that not trusting women can and does have significant negatives for men too.
I don't disbelieve in your description of issues people have, but explanations I read - yours or others - tend to sound circular to me and not really explain why things are the way they are.