Really? They have to specifically tell you that a meeting was an “old boy’s network” because it purposely excluded women who are involved or should be involved in whatever project is being discussed? Even more so if that meeting took place on a golf course, or strip club.
And FYI to the “men” in this board. Purposely excluding women because you are afraid to be in the room with them creates the optics of “old boys club”.
Dude goes clean shaved? The Rapanzul decides to go for a boy cut. Noticing that is off limits?
Yes it was, you were a prison guard.
Then relax. Those younger people will get hit hard by real life. Like you did when you were a wet behind the years newbie and doubtless had your seniors exasperated.
I have been a lawyer for 14 years. Last couple of years its become a bit of a tradition for me and my classfellows to talk about how the new baby barristers are not as driven as we were. Which is bullshit. They are and moreover we had our own ways of slacking off and avoiding undesired work.
The “angry young women” that you worry about will i) either mature or ii) quietly fall by the wayside as they manage to annoy everyone else or iii) your company will fail since its a horrible place to work.
My take on it—
Many men, when working with an attractive woman, will spend an inordinate amount of time looking for signs that she “likes” him. A smile, a few minutes of pleasant conversation, a shared joke are not taken at face value.
Some guys view it as a permission slip to hit on you constantly and accuse you of “leading them on” when you turn them down. Other guys internalize it and build up a relationship in their heads, then get emotionally crushed when they figure out that you don’t want to marry them and have their children just because you smiled at them at the coffee machine and asked them about their weekend.
After this happens a bunch of times, many women make a conscious effort to make sure no guy ever picks up anything that could be interpreted as a signal, ever……and this basically entails walking around all day looking like you’re three seconds away from hitting someone in the face.
How young are you talking? I’m a 30 year old dude and I’m really not seeing what you’re saying at places I’ve worked. I don’t think at least the younger millennials are really all that different - it’s just the same gossip, off-color jokes, going out for drinks and bitching that everyone else does.
Let’s see.
My very first job after college……the guy that hired me tried to start a sexual relationship with me. His boss tried the same thing, too.
Next job, when I was being introduced around, my new employer said “Hi, this is Ann. You’re very lucky we had a job opening because I would’ve fired you to hire her.” Cute joke, he told it to everyone. He hit on me,too. He hit on everyone. I watched the women he slept with get raises and promotions I didn’t. A friend of mine called him on it and was told. “What do you expect? They went out with me. You didn’t.”
I’ve had executives I worked with make obscene phone calls to me in the middle of the night. I’ve worked with men that had porn displayed in their workplace — not scantily clad women, large sized pictures of fully naked women with their legs spread.
I’ve not gotten jobs because I was a woman - I know that because it was the stated reason I didn’t get hired — the interviewer was somewhat apologetic, blaming it on the guys that wouldn’t accept working with me.
My work history is really varied, I’ve worked on construction sites, in blue collar shops, backstage in theatre, in white collar sales jobs…but always as an extremely attractive woman. It sounds immodest , but it made a huge difference - everyone reacts differently to the beautiful woman -men and women both.
I’ll be honest, it had it advantages- lots of them- but it also had its disadvantages. You can’t disappear into the background or be just another face in the crowd, everyone notices you and everyone remembers you.
I’ve have lots of mixed feelings on some of the stories I hear, my experience has taught me that resilience is important and you have to pick your battles. When I was younger, I was sometimes insensitive towards other women…. “honey, you call that harassment? Let me tell you a story….” and I admit that attitude sometimes slips in when I hear a woman complain that a male coworker touched her arm or something.
It was conversation with a colleague, another attractive woman that had the same job I once had in another large city, that turned my attitudes and made me realize how much I had internalized the harassment.
She told me about how her boss ( in a company with three employees) had made a pass at her, the kind of pass my old bosses had all made a few times, the stuff I shrugged off all the time.
She was telling me about the terror that grasped her every morning upon waking,knowing she’d have to go to work and see him, how hard it was for her to pretend it didn’t happen, how scared she was that it would happen again.
And I got it. By then I was working for myself and I had a steady base of long term clients I liked, so I wasn’t dealing with nearly as much bullshit. But there is always the feeling that you can’t let your guard down.
Probably the worst thing that happened later in my career was a male colleague, someone I had been professional friends with for twenty years, sharing countless lunches and dinners, socializing with his family, made a pass at me. It was quick, a question asked and answered in under 3 seconds without words - an inappropriate touch and glance, followed by me frowning and shaking my head - and it was over. But it killed what had been a valuable friendship. Because after twenty freaking years I let my guard down for a few seconds.
When I was speaking about being a manager, I was talking about employees not prisoners.
I saw this happen from the other side. When an attractive woman started working, there was a common pattern. There would be an initial period in which many male employees would be super friendly to her. But within a few weeks, when they realized she was not going to go out with them (or jump into bed with them) that attitude would do a 180. These same men would begin condemning her and telling everyone how unfriendly and stuck up she was.
I’ll point out what should be obvious; this was nothing the new employee was doing. The only thing she would be doing was being present in the workplace. The problem was coming from the male employees who couldn’t deal with that in a professional manner.
My mom worked in banking, as an executive, from the 80s through to late 2010s, and she’s got some fucking horror stories. Two that stand out, the “funny” one first. She’s at a board meeting with a rep from back east. She’s the only woman in the room. The rep has a “reputation.” At the end of the meeting, the rep wraps up the topic, then takes his hotel key out of his pocket and throws it to my mom - all the way across the boardroom, in front of all of her peers. She catches them, and then - in the boardroom, in front of all of his peers - throws them back.
The bad one? Every day, she’d have to assign one of her tellers as a look out - shed stand by the window, and let everyone know if a particular executive was about to walk into the branch. If he showed up, my mom would send all the pretty young tellers on lunch break, and get the male tellers and older women up front. If she didn’t, he’d zero in on one and harass her until she was in tears. That guy eventually died in prison, after he was convicted of drowning an underaged prostitute in a hot tub.
The thing that amazes me more than anything else in life is that Lorena Bobbit was mostly a one-off.
So to speak.
There’s also another type of dynamic which has not been mentioned in this thread.
Attractive women gets hired. Quickly identifies the key (male) influential people in the company/division, and acts slightly flirtateously with these men, while having a regular business-like relationship with all other employees of either gender. As a result, she gets on the inside track with key important people, and this is resented by other employees of both genders but especially women.
Admittedly it can sometimes be a bit difficult to sort out the exact extent to which this is her initiative or the men’s, but it’s sometimes not that hard either.
I am a supervisor in a juvenile detention center. There are several factors that perhaps make it an atypical experience.
If you have uniforms of some sort, it eliminates the “Cute skirt” issue because everyone dresses much the same. Where I work, we all have official-issue polo shirts, but in a wide choice of colors. I can say I like a female (or male) officer’s shirt without it being weird, because they know I’m wondering if that color is available in my size. I have a rainbow of work shirts in my closet. (I’m wearing bright purple today!)
Although I generally don’t avoid women at work, there are some conversations I stay away from. Before we had the above-mentioned official-issue shirts, we had a few times when a younger female officer was working around teenage males and was drawing too much attention due to clothing choices. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I would assume it was not deliberate, but a matter of them wearing things that may have been okay at college, but not okay at work. If I felt awkward about discussing it, I usually would ask one of the female supervisors to address it. They would have the discussions about maybe wearing a bra or not wearing a shirt that was rather transparent.
There have been male officers that do inappropriate things, too. We fired a guy for groping a female resident, and reported him to the sheriff’s department and family services. We fired another guy for harassing a gay resident. Several female detention officers complained about a probation officer who was stopping by unnecessarily, making flirty/sexual comments, and being very obvious with his ogling. We talked about it with his boss, and we haven’t seen him any more.
We have always tried to be pretty much a zero-tolerance workplace for sexual harassment. With the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) having been passed by congress several years ago, every prison, jail, and detention center should be paying more attention to sexual harassment and sexual assault issues.
No disrespect to your mother, but damn, this sounds a much more interesting story….
In all fairness, it’s been my experience on multiple occasions that sometimes my female coworkers actually did want actually hook up with me.
I know plenty of guys who hooked up with, even married coworkers. They don’t act in the way you described. They usually keep things on the DL because they don’t want the whole office to know they are dating Mary from Accounting. I’ve worked with plenty of the sort of douchey guys you describe as well. They don’t act like that because they think it gets them laid (that’s what prostitutes or their mistress is for). They act like that because it’s how they project power.
I suppose maybe there is an old-school way of thinking that men don’t hang out with women socially unless they are…you know…fucking? You know - like you grow up playing (gender segregated) sports like football or baseball, mostly hanging out with your friends from the team. Then you go off to college and mostly hang out with your male roommates or fraternity brothers. Then maybe you go off to the military or your male-dominated job back in the day surrounded by men. So the only time you would socialize with a woman is when you asked one out on a date. So I imagine if you are of that generation, having a woman show up to the office must turn you into Ron Burgundy.
FWIW, I’ve hooked up with clients before (one who later became a coworker while we were still hooking up). It was sort of on the DL, because he was one of a handful of high dollar clients, my clients were in competition with each other, and we did a lot negotiated pricing. So it was a perceived a conflict of interest.
OTOH, we were together all the time, we openly traveled together, same flights and hotels - concealing only that we were sharing a room. I just told people that he wasn’t good with the internet and had asked me to make the bookings for him.
And I suspect the pass that my friend of 20 years (who was another of these high value clients) made was not unrelated to this relationship. Which comes down to a certain reputational risk on my part - to some men you are either someone who puts out or someone who doesn’t.
I wasn’t so much shocked that he made the pass as I was at the transactional nature of it and the fact that it hadn’t happened sooner. I’d brought him to my apartment alone for one reason or another a half dozen times or so over the years, and I’d been at his house alone during the day as many times. We once pretended to be married so he could help me buy a car. We were really good friends, and it came down to him looking for what he saw as a perk that he thought someone else was getting.
I guess I never understood why women find it so surprising or off-putting that someone who they’ve grown to become friends with might be interested in them romantically (or at least sexually). 20 years is kind of a long time though. Like he was just really into older women and just biding his time?
Good on your mum. It’s absolutely shocking anyone ever thought that (what the guy did) was acceptable behaviour, even back in the 1980s.
Noticing is one thing. Commenting is another. You can’t control one, but you can the other.
I feel like “nice haircut” or whatever is always going to be fine.
This is absolutely true, but I think that not wanting to appear to encourage sexual advances is only part of it. I think there are a lot of gendered expectations of women that go beyond the sexual. The sexual is more interesting (because, hey, sex is interesting), and because most men seem to understand that sexual harassment is wrong, it’s easier to talk about, but it’s really just one facet of all the ways gendered expectations are a problem in the workplace.
For example, even in a female-dominated profession (teaching), there’s still quite a few dudes who expect all women to do this thing. I don’t have a name for it. It’s like flirting, but it’s not sexual. It’s listening to his stories, laughing at his jokes, engaging in a sort of teasing, setting things up so he can have the chance to look smart, basically making sure in conversation that he gets the chance to be the star. It’s usually older guys. And if you can’t do this (and I am bad at it), you can’t get anything done with them. Women just have to behave in this really strongly gendered way to even be visible. Does anyone know what I am talking about?
There’s also the well-documented fact that women get talked over more than men, and criticized more if they do the same, or try to take the conversation back. Women have a narrower needle to thread between “confident” and “bitchy”. Women get saddled with things like taking care off office morale (recognizing marriages and babies and deaths; identifying people who need support or help; event planning) and men benefit from this but often deny they do and are opening scornful of the women who do it. Even things like note-taking at meetings fall disproportionately on women. I used to have a co-worker that I would go to conferences and present with. Great guy. People would come up and talk to him and ignore me, like I was invisible, all the time. I had to train him to defer the questions that were more in my sphere to me, because at first he didn’t even see it.
I don’t know. I wish men would realize that the only issue isn’t being accused of sexual impropriety. Women have a lot of reasons to be angry in the workplace even if they aren’t young, attractive women. And it may be some of those things that are making the under-30s so grim (if that’s indeed true).