But the question IS a dichotomy - either there is racism or there is no racism. You don’t expect anyone to be happy with being labeled “slightly racist”. For that person, either he was racist or he was not. I find your surprise over this silly.
My husband works for a construction management company that is very good in a lot of ways, but the blatant sexism that he tells me about just about takes my breath away.
ETA: And they keep getting voted one of the best companies to work for in Canada and the US. I guess the people making that decision don’t differentiate between men working for them and women working for them.
I also see a lot of people who can’t find a way to believe that someone else’s life experience is different than theirs. “I have never seen or experienced that, so you haven’t either.”
And why do you steadfastly refuse to actually explain what was said?
I think it’s normal human defensiveness that leads people to suspect or deny someone else’s perceptions that bias occurred- usually. We don’t want it to have happened, so we try to act like it didn’t.
Other times, I think it’s a ham-handed attempt to make someone feel better about the experience. So, suppose my female coworker says “I noticed he reacted differently to the men interviewing him than the women”- and I like her, and I don’t want her to feel that way. So I say “Naah, I think it was the questions Steve was asking as opposed to what Susan asked”. Then she says, “Oh, so you’re telling me it didn’t happen?!” - I’ve come from a place of good intentions but now I’m actually aggravating things, and I don’t know how to approach or repair the situation. Can I say to her, “look, all I mean is, the perception was subjective. You may not have seen it at all,” without her thinking that I’m dismissing her? Probably not.
That’s when I personally would remove myself from the conversation. What’s weird to me is that your coworker dug in. I know you said you weren’t “worked up”, but did you get upset with him, or maybe argue the point emphatically, when he initially said he had not observed the same things as you?
If not, I don’t think it’s normal behavior to continue to initiate conversations to try to get you to say that sexism is dead. That’s probably why people want more details- so they can figure out what is different about what happened, or what you did, to make this situation weird.
I did not get worked up about the interview. I was asked for my impression, I gave it, there was a conversation and that was that. At least that was my impression and seems to be the impression of all but this one co-worker.
I did not get emphatic with him over what I saw. I did point out that he said he doesn’t observe those sorts of things and the last time he tried to revisit it, reiterated the three different versions of events that he has given. He seemed annoyed at that but did not deny that he gave varying accounts.
I did get quite annoyed after about the third time of him coming into my cubical specifically to argue that sexism is not an issue. But that annoyance has not led to heated words. One of his more annoying gambits is to trivialize an incident of bias by comparing it to situations not caused by bias. Such as comparing being asked explicitly to fill in for the receptionist because I was a woman to management being asked to fill in for striking workers.
There are two knids of “varying accounts.”
If his first account was silent on some issue, he then became aware of your interpretation, and revised his account to specifically counter some key element, that’s not a particular problem. Example of the first account:
Candidate A was pleasant, friendly, and seemed knowledgable about basic technical issues. He was asked to describe the process of obtaining a DHCP address and did so correctly, although he could not identify the specific UDP ports used by the process before an IP address is assigned.
Then he becomes aware of your version, and modifies his to read:
Candidate A was pleasant, friendly, and seemed knowledgable about basic technical issues. He was asked to describe the process of obtaining a DHCP address and did so correctly, although he could not identify the specific UDP ports used by the process before an IP address is assigned. At no time did the candidate speak disparigingly of female engineers or exhibit bias of any kind directed at Ms. Lee, my co-interviewer.
It’s true those are two versions, but one does not contradict the other.
Yeah, that strikes me as an attempt at smoke and mirrors. In this case he positively said he does not and did not take notice the kind of thing I mentioned. Then he said positively he had observed just the opposite of what I observed. When I pointed out that he had made two contradictory statements, he admitted that he had made both and they were not consistent. When asked why, he shrugged expansively.
While your evasion about the dispositive issue in this thread certainly lends credence to the proposition that you have some expertise in smoke and mirrors, I disagree with your assignment of the concept here.
lee, why can’t you simply be happy having your own opinion? Why do you have to turn it into this big thing about how you think people are often dismissive of observations of bias? People just have different opinions about things, and that’s OK.
PMSL.
Seeing as you attacked everyone for asking for information by accusing them of sexism, I perfectly well understand why you are not believed on your accusation. Apparently, you use that type accusation as an insult. I would be disinclined to believe you, as well.
Especially if you did like you did here, and won’t specifically tell what the sexist accusation was. Most likely, you insulted someone needlessly, and that person is upset with you. The sexism thing has nothing to do with it.
Please enumerate those whom I have called sexist.
You called me sexist in post #72.
Piffle.
Post #72:
I suspect that this thread is not going to go anywhere, at this point.
Lee is asking a question regarding the general need for some people to aggressively deny various prejudices in spite of any evidence. Her co-worker’s persistence in repeatedly bringing up objections to her single observation for multiple days confirms, in her mind, that such behavior certainly occurs. (And I would tend to agree that there are people who are rudely obsessive on such topics whose behavior is similar to that which she describes.)
Lee’s opponents, however, have a legitimate point in that even if her co-worker is demonstrating boorish, obsessive-compulsive behavior, that is not actually an indication that his views regarding the incident are in error. Without knowing the exact comments and context of Lee’s observations, it is not really possible for any other poster to know whether her co-worker is defensive because he refuses to recognize the prejudice expressed or whether he accurately recognized that her observations were in error and simply lacks the social skills to quit harping on a dead topic.
Since I doubt that either side, here, is going to move from their current positions, I suspect that this thread is pretty futile.
That said, Blake, you are really stretching it to make the claim you have regarding anyone accusing you of sexism. Let’s not jump through a lot of convoluted logic to take umbrage at personal comments that have not actually been posted.
But you see, i did experience an accusation of sexism in post 72.
Among my observations was a use of non- gender-neutral terms as directed at me. I think those bear mentioning.
Why is Tom that you, upon hearing me mention facing your bias, must deny, trivialize, or one-up it to prove that no bias was experienced, or that somehow the bias was well deserved. Why do you do this?
Your irony needs work.
Oh, you think I *worked *at that. 