Is this really a microagression?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

If the training were really good, led by a skillful trainer, with employees who were genuinely interested in thinking through what a “microaggression” is (and I heartily agree with @Ulfreida that it is an awful term) it would not teach that lesson at all. It would lead to thoughtful discussion and new insights by everyone. Whether the OP’s training was meaningful, or just box-checking, I have no idea.

I sense that some posters in this thread (not singling out any one) do not understand this: Most microagressions are completely unintentional, and the people guilty of them are often blind to what they are doing. If you talk to them, they’ll insist they are good-hearted egalitarians, not the least bit sexist, ageist, racist, ableist, etc. And in their hearts, that may very well be the case. But that doesn’t mean they are innocent of unconsciously perpetrating stereotypes, and doing hurtful, exhausting acts toward others.

If you are not a member of a group that is subject to microagressions, it can be hard to understand the toll they take. I used the word “exhausting” for a reason. When you are constantly being reminded that, consciously or not, other people think of you as belonging in a particular box or not quite as smart, you can never let down your guard. You have to prove yourself all the time, unlike “the boys’ club” members who can kick back and let loose with each other because they know their station in life is just fine.

I repeat, many perpetrators of microagressions are not consciously intolerant. They truly mean well, and they believe they are not bigoted. 95% of the time, they probably don’t behave in a bigoted manner. But that other 5% of the time … well, if you haven’t lived it, you should listen to the people who HAVE without dismissing their concerns as trivial, or unimportant because the microagressor is a “good guy.”

62

[quote=“Stranger_On_A_Train, post:59, topic:1006485”]
If I’m in a meeting, I assume that I’m there to participate, not to be a stenographer focused on capturing all of the discussion.

You live in a different work-world than me. My organization is quite flat - Most of us take on a variety of different duties, including minute taking at meetings. Nobody feels insulted, or thinks that doing these tasks are demeaning, or “lesser” in any way. It’s part of the team culture here. There is no shame in being a “stenographer” and I think that thinking this is an insulting role is actually quite telling.

As I said, this is just my personal work team culture, and I realize that others may be different, and may think that taking notes in a meeting somehow makes you a lesser person.

ETA: Our work team is probably 70% female/30% male, and our director and managers are all female… Not sure if this is a relevant data point.

63

Not at all. I routinely volunteer to take minutes at meetings and don’t feel the least bit demeaned. The problem is not that there is anything insulting about the task itself (few if any posters here would think that), the problem is that historically it was viewed as the task of a woman who would take notes and not otherwise contribute. As is evidenced by the fact this training video/discussion exists at all, that perception continues to echo through workplace cultures.

64

If it is a designated role of meeting recorder, such as in “Agile” management, or someone is designated to capture action items for review, that’s a bit of a different thing, I suppose. But just capturing a comprehensive set of minutia is a full role in and of itself, and it really isn’t possible to participate in active discussion while keeping detailed record of everything that is being discussed without missing something important.

And I’ll reiterate that my notes as written aren’t going to be useful for the hypothetical superior or anyone else, nor am I going to spend another hour transcribing those notes into a legible record unless I think they would actually be useful for anyone else.

I did not say and do not think that there is “shame in being a ‘stenographer’”, so please don’t read such intention into my post. What I am saying is that focusing attention on capturing everyone elses’ words and ideas makes it essentially impossible to actively participate with my own. Just turning to someone and saying, “Take notes, will you?” is (in my opinion) essentially saying that the designated notetaker has the least if anything to contribute except to take a record and for the manager to explicitly demonstrate that they are the superior to the group.

Stranger

65

Agreed.

If, in a three person team, one person leads and the other two follow, then note-taking should just be an alternating task.

I’ve experienced this; I’ve been the only woman in a meeting and I write my own notes for context, actions, things I want to review on my own, etc. It has happened that at the end of the meeting some random other participant has turned to me and asked “will you send out the minutes” simply because they saw me writing stuff and assumed that was my role. Usually from people who clearly write nothing down because they made that assumption as soon as they saw me.

“No, I’m here in a technical role and only took notes pertinent to my part of the project” is a phrase I’ve had to use more than once.

It is exhausting, as others have said. It takes away from what I am perceived to be able to contribute and it sucks.

66

Yes. “Jane your notes are always the best. Could you take notes for this meeting?”

67

Training video: Supervisor is planning an office party with a black male worker and a white male worker. Supervisor assigns black man to bring the watermelon and fried chicken, and assigns the white man to bring in the potato salad and the cake.

BUT, we have no idea what the supervisor’s motives were for asking each to bring what he did! In fact, the supervisor gave no reason why he asked the black guy to bring the watermelon. Presumably someone had to bring watermelon and it wasn’t likely to be the supervisor, so that left the black man as one of only two potential choices. I don’t see how we can say this was a micro-aggression without more information. Am I way off base here?

68

Even that, or Dinsdale’s suggestion in post #16 that the man is a fuckup, can be sexism: weaponized incompetence is a thing.

69

If people don’t want to see the minor but irritating ways that sexism and racism can make the workplace uncomfortable then they simply won’t. They don’t care enough to try. They will whine about it though.

70

Only if followed by “John, I expect your notes to be as good as Jane’s. Pay attention to how she structures them, what she does and doesn’t include and ask her if you have any questions to help you improve. You’ll take next week’s notes.”

I am sick and tired of babysitting my male coworkers (not all, by far, but a fair number of them) because they weaponize their incompetence and just default to “you do it well, so no one else has to, so please act like a secretary while we all talk.”.

It is not ok.

71

Data point: I (male) work in a heavily female-dominated environment. This happens exactly the same when the shoe is on the other foot. It’s not ok to happen at all, but everyone should recognize historical norms that are outdated and work to change for the better going forward.

72

I’ve worked in two industries where the majority of my coworkers were women. I ended up being the employee most often called upon when something needed to be lifted or there were “weirdos” to be dealt with. But then it has also made me a bit more understanding about how someone might feel like they’re the odd person out even when their coworkers are being completely nice.

73

Absolutely! It can and does go both ways and it’s also not ok. The historical weight of certain types of moments like these, however, still means a skew towards women being the primary targets of the specific issue described in this thread; other groups are primary targets of other micro aggressions of course.

It doesn’t invalidate the moments it happens in other contexts, but sometimes the solutions are different and they need to be discussed separately. Or, unfortunately, one context has to be adequately addressed (maybe not perfectly) before the solutions to other issues that are very similar can be addressed.

74

Fully agree. And well stated.

75

Oh, fucking tell me about it. To be fair, most of my male colleagues do their best to be thoughtful about such situations. But branded in my memory is the time I attended the second of a series of meetings with some male co-workers, and one of them asked at the beginning “Who’s going to take the minutes?” Team player that I am, I had volunteered to note-take at the first of the meetings, and I thought, “well, I’m not going to lock myself into this stenographer role permanently, let somebody else take a turn”, and I didn’t speak up.

And then this happened:

They.

All.

Just.

Sat.

There.

Like for literally twenty seconds—and twenty seconds is a long time for a bunch of people around a meeting table to sit silently—none of them said a word. None of them looked happy, but it was clear they were damned if they were going to agree to be the note-taker.

I didn’t think it would be professional to just point and laugh at them, but I was gobsmacked how childishly obstructionist they were evidently all willing to be, just to cling to their tiny little point. Finally I said something like “well, I guess I can take minutes again, if noone else is able to”. And they leapt right into action with the meeting discussion, with a very brisk and businesslike air, as if nobody had noticed that they’d all just sat there like a bunch of sulky toddlers, wasting their own and their colleagues’ time so they could get out of doing “secretarial” work.

They just all carried on playing Mr. Businessman, once they’d succeeded in getting me to play Miss Secretary. And they got away with it, because they were not going to call out each other’s bullshit, and if I’d tried to call them out on it, they’d have closed ranks. None of them were particularly stupid or selfish people in a general human way. But the thing is, you don’t have to be personally stupid or selfish to perpetuate baked-in cultural patterns of stupid and selfish bigotry.

I don’t have to deal with those people anymore, and I don’t think I’d deal with such a situation in quite the same way now. But it really highlighted for me the fact that the problem with cultural toxicity isn’t simply that, inevitably, some individuals are sometimes going to be selfishly uncooperative about something they don’t want to do.

The problem with it is, for example, that in a historically and persistently patriarchal culture, men often don’t face any real consequences for being selfishly uncooperative in ducking tasks that they perceive to be “feminine”. (Similarly, as noted by other posters, women often don’t face any consequences for being selfishly uncooperative in “masculine” tasks like moving furniture. But women perhaps tend to feel more pressure not to try to dodge such tasks at work, because they don’t want to be seen as less competent.)

76

I so vicariously wish you had let the silence stretch for as long as it took.

77

:grin: I sometimes wish so myself in retrospect, buuuuut…

…have you ever been in a situation like that, where a bunch of people are all tacitly trying to avoid the knowledge that they’re behaving badly, and you are in the position of being able to flip some conversational switch to allow them to avoid that knowledge, and you don’t, and you can feel them getting madder at you because of it?

On some level, I saw three possible scenarios for the breaking of that silence, if I wasn’t the one to do it:

A) One of the guys laughs and says “wow, those of us who didn’t take any notes last time are really acting like a bunch of sulky toddlers to get out of doing it this time, huh? I’ll do the minutes today and then all the rest of us can take our turn in subsequent weeks.”

B) One of the guys blinks, and grumbles “well, I guess I can try, but they’re not going to be very good minutes, I don’t have experience with this.” During the meeting he continually and ostentatiously interrupts people to ask for a repetition or to clarify a point, making as heavy weather of the process as he can manage. Everybody comes out of the meeting with the firm impression that I’m the uncooperative one.

C) Senior guy finally says “well Kimstu, you took the minutes last time and they were very good and appreciated, how about you carry on for this meeting too since you’re familiar with it?” If I then say yes, the general impression is that I’m a lazy shirker who needs prodding to do my expected tasks, and if I say no, then I’m definitely perceived as the uncooperative one.

Call me cynical, but I just did not see scenario A as looking most probable in that situation.

And look. Gentlemen. I do realize how these reactions can come across to some of you as gratuitously paranoid and resentful, making microaggressions out of molehills and assuming the worst motives in others and so on. You personally don’t approve of sexist behavior in the workplace, and it seems obvious to you that if male co-workers were really intending to treat female co-workers in a sexist way, you would have noticed it. It can’t really have been the sort of belittling disrespect that I’m making it out to be. I must have somehow misinterpreted something about it. Or something.

That’s a very natural reaction to have, because mostly we just don’t realize how much we don’t notice about other people being treated badly in culturally expected ways. Think about some unpleasant minoritized-group experience of your own—where you got subtly but genuinely disrespected for being short or Hispanic or elderly or Jewish or disabled or Asian or whatever—and remember how easy it was for other people not to notice or understand it in the same way that you did.

78

I should have added that I understood the pressure you felt and why you volunteered. I’d likely have done the same.

79

Oh I know, it’s not you I’m exhorting there.

And in any case, I fully and freely admit that such things are typically, as the name says, “micro”. Taking minutes at one meeting is indeed no big deal, which indeed is why I was fine with being the (sole) volunteer to do so at the previous meeting.

But it’s not only the endless accumulation of individually insignificant straws that ultimately breaks the camel’s back. It’s also the obstinate doublethink insistence that “THIS IS NOT A STRAW”.

When people are acting in accordance with culturally entrenched prejudices, they’re on some level really super-invested in not achieving conscious awareness of what they’re doing. “I am not a sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. person, so this thing I’m doing can’t be sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. You are just misunderstanding me.”

80

I call it the cosmic background radiation of bigotry. It originated in the far past, it’s not something that anybody today is responsible for, it’s very minor and hard to detect clearly, but it’s totally pervasive.