Ladies,
If you had a choice would you work at a place where;
- Its almost all men and your the only female?
- It’s a workforce thats fairly mixed.
- Its a all or nearly all women’s workplace.
Mixed. Mostly men, and they tend to treat me as incompetent. Mostly women, and I’m exhausted from the intriguing and social maneuvering.
If I had to pick single gendered, I’d pick men. With time, I can win them over, or I can manipulate their protective feelings to my advantage, if I must (although I hate doing that). With women, there’s always another round of, “Did you hear…?” :eek:
(Gross generalizations are gross.)
That pretty much summed up my thoughts on the matter.
I find that men & women are more or less equally bad in their most annoying forms: the gossip & the braggart.
Both of which I want to avoid like the plague.
Fortunately the social annoyances & the hard workers sort themselves into their own groups & I stick with the hard workers.
I just want to do my job & socialize off the clock.
If I had a choice, my first one would be to work in an institution whose values I believed in, doing work that spoke to my competencies yet was also challenging, that made a contribution to the workplace and the world at large.
Gender of people at the office would be totally secondary to the substance and impact of the work.
I’ve been nursing so long, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to work with men.
Notice how you attempted to manipulate emotions and make yourself look more noble to avoid addressing the hypothetical and actually answering the question that was asked.
That’s why women are exhausting.
- I don’t give a flying fuck.
- Mixed, but…
There are many workplaces that, on the surface, are “mixed”, yet they’re very much segregated (for sexist and perhaps non-sexist reasons).
For example, looking at it from the surface, I work in a mixed place. Except that the people with whom I immediately work with and interact with are all men. I have no direct women coworkers. None. I can pass days without talking more than a couple of greetings with other women staff members.
I also want to make a comment on WhyNot’s first response. I imagine the same would be if the genders are reversed. It is not that the men would be any less gossipy or “Did you hear…?”-type… It is that they won’t be that way in front of a woman. They’ll mostly keep it to themselves and wait until the woman is not around to gossip between them. I know because my coworkers do that. Since I don’t care, I don’t mind when they go behind closed doors to do their manly gossiping. Unless I want to get to my food, then they should open that door and let me get my lunch.
Similarly, sometimes women, if there is only one guy around, will wait until the guy is out to start the “Did you hear…?” gossip.
So it is not necessarily that they’re different, but they won’t show that side of the personality to the other gender/will keep the “other” out of it.
Mixed. I’m a woman who gets along better with men, but I don’t like to be the standout either.
While I can appreciate your values, truth is getting along with coworkers and fitting in is just as important as ones job skills.
Um, is that a whoosh? 
Or was the level of hostility I read in that answer intentional? Kind of exhausting to think about.
Seriously, I don’t care about the gender of my co-workers - I’ve had good and bad experiences with both genders. I’m not trying to manipulate anyone’s emotions - it’s just that for me, gender isn’t really all that important.
Excellent point. Since I generally tune such stuff out (and will probably never rise very far in the ranks of my profession because of that, but that’s okay with me) I prefer it happen where I don’t have to hear it or engage in it.
It’s really for the best that I work mostly independently. I see my coworkers once a week. That’s enough.
And what’s between people’s legs has very little to do with that.
Sure, getting along with colleagues is important. I just haven’t noticed that their gender matters. I like most of the people I work with these days, whether male or female. Those few who annoy me are both male and female, and I don’t honestly see that their gender is relevant.
Apologies if I’m missing something here and coming across as hostile. Not my intent at all; I was just answering the question.
2, 1, 3 (mixed, men, women) in order of preference.
In 11 years in the Navy and 26 years as an engineer for the DoD, I worked in majority male offices and it suited me just fine. I didn’t like having to prove that my plumbing had nothing to do with my professional competence, but overall, men were easier to work with. And in general, they were easier to just talk with - most of the women would go on and on about fashion and shoes and celeb gossip and I had zero interest in that. Apart from sports, the guys seemed to have more interesting conversation. Again - this was my experience in my workplaces, not a broad sweeping pronouncement.
Even among acquaintances, I find men to be more engaging company.
I tune some of the stuff the guys say out, but other times it is good to know for me or it explains/confirm something I noticed earlier (in ways that impact what I do and how I interact with some people around here). And I know that they gossip more when I’m not around. Otherwise they wouldn’t lock the doors when they’re chatting.
But I did want to make the point that when women say working with other women leads to “Did you hear…?” and to lots of gossiping, that does not mean that it doesn’t happen with men.
Gossiping is human, and all do it. It’s just a single woman in a sea of men is more likely to be excluded from the manly gossip than she would be if they were all women, as they would include her or think she would like to be included in the gossip circle. Either one will have their advantages or disadvantages.
Woman here, usually if there’s someone I hate at work it’s a straight guy and I prefer the company of other women generally. If I could choose I’d only want to work with women and gay men. Luckily in my field of work (service) that’s often the case.
Yes, politics in a female-dominated environment can be exhausting, but I’m ace at opting out. I establish myself as non-competitive, unwilling to talk trash, and generally helpful and pleasant early on, and become a neutral party and occaisional mediator who watches all the drama from a dignified distance.
Whichever one paid best.
I’ve worked with women and with men - and get along just fine with both, mostly. I can’t imagine that it would ever be something I would get a choice in anyway, unless I changed careers.
I would prefer to work with mostly men. I like women okay, but they always seem to have some kind of psychological game going on that I just have no interest in participating in (and even if you don’t participate, they still seem to find a way to make your life miserable). Men just do their work and let me do my work and we get along just fine.
Talking about mixed workplaces that aren’t as mixed as you’d think, my husband’s most recent job was at a construction management company. It has many women and men at the company, but the women do the low-paying jobs (with small stock options* to go along with their small salaries), and the men are the bosses making the big money (with the incredibly huge stock options). The things he told me about how the women were treated at this company, in Canada, in the modern day, astonished me. I don’t think they had a stated policy of treating women like second-class workers, but that was the result.
*The company is employee-owned, and the stock options are a huge perk, that allows people who purchase stock options to make from 30-65% returns in dividends. The male higher-ups make hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year in dividends. The female employees do not.