Let me amend my statement: you haven’t lost perspective and rational judgement; you are a complete idiot.
Not only do you only have three female co-workers on which you base your conclusions, but you also admit that one of those three is a “cool” person with whom you have a “good working (read: professional) relationship.”
Are you a woman? Perhaps you don’t mind it because you are one of the ones playing silly games (manipulate your male manager?)
Yes, I am a woman, but I don’t play games. We only manipulate the managers who deserve it. Any manager that has sex with one of their employees and then fires her when she starts paying more attention to another employee deserves to be manipulated.
Well, manipulating managers IS playing games, whether you like to think so or not. Any employee/manager combination who have sex with each other and think everything is going to be hunky-dory afterwards are idiots.
To the OP, I personally haven’t had any problems working with women. In fact, as I work in a male dominated industry I find that there are plenty of petty, backstabbing, rumour mungering men around as well.
I’ve worked with a lot of backstabbing, gossipy women, but you know if you try to ignore it usually… eventually… you can stay out of it.
In general I find men more easy going and straightforward, easier to work with, BUT, when men are bad they can be utterly awful in a way that women can’t, especially if you’re female. The most emotionally manipulative, cruel, and abusive coworker I ever had was a male. No woman ever showed me pictures she painted of other women hanging naked and dismembered from meat hooks, or sexually explicit drawings, or made me listen to all the intimate failtures of her marriage, or went out of her way to make my life miserable when I showed no interest in sleeping with her. Over that, I would take gossipy female work politics any day. I’ve also had some really sexist male bosses that went out of their way to make all their employees, especially female ones, feel like shit and remind them how worthless and stupid they are… never had a female boss that was worse than “bitchy.”
I think most coworkers suck in general. You throw a bunch of people who probably don’t have much in common together, and make them spend 40 hours a week in the same place for 50 weeks a year… you’re gonna have problems and personality clashes.
Count me in as one of those people who fucking hates office politics. I choose to be an honest, frank person, and I’m learning that rather than being the norm, this is the exception.
My mother taught me to be assertive, so mostly I can put up a shield against that bullshit. I refuse to participate in it, and when people start trying to manipulate me I pull out right away.
I think that women are more likely to do this than men because we are trained to take things personally, so when we have a problem, we take it to the personal realm and use gossip and backstabbing. There is another way to deal with problems at work, but no one is taught what it is. If you refuse to take things personally, then you are immunized from all that stuff.
Honestly, I don’t understand why it is so hard for people to have integrity, be honest, admit to mistakes, and learn from them. It doesn’t cost anything, and in the long run you are a better person for it. It’s very rewarding.
I’m a man. I work in a field (DoD engineering) where men outnumber women pretty heavily, so my sample set may be small.
My experience is that women are no more likely to be difficult than men. However, I find myself able to deal with assholes more readily when they’re men.
If a guy yells at me and calls me names, I will likely call him even worse names and suggest that if he has a problem with it, that we settle it in the parking lot.
When a woman does this, though, I’m generally sunk. (I’m talking, here, about abruptly escalating a reasoned disagreement into the screaming of obscenities).
Whether this is a shortcoming of mine, resulting from being raised in a time and place where men didn’t treat women the same, or a sneaky tactic used by women who note this about me, is up for debate.
There are assholes on both sides, but count me in as one who hates to work with a lot of women.
Backstabbing, gossip, pettiness, oh yes. My faith in human nature is severely shaken after having to deal with too many of these types. They seem nice to your face, but it’s gossip, gossip, petty gossip behind your back.
I used to think it was because they were unhappy with their own lives (and I definitely think that’s a big part of it), but people who apparently have something going for them (in my estimation) do it too.
Men and women are both assholes, but I’ve found that the women I have problems with are the ones who bitch at you about still being single and not having kids. “Oh,you poor little thing,” they sigh. If you tell them you don’t want kids, they smugly go on, “Oh, but that’ll change.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it’ll change on the plane to Paris because that’s where I’m going. Bye!”
The women who most seem to have problems with other women are the ones who obeyed, I don’t know, traditional values and resent it, I guess. That’s just been my experience. I’m not married, don’t intend to be, own my own house, and so forth. They’re the ones who believe in the Rules—i.e., that men are stupid and subject to manipulation–and I’ve also noticed that they’re the kind who will do some really scary stuff like file false complaints. I witnessed a dispute at a long-ago job, and the woman asked me to testify for her—she’d charged some guy with sexual harassment. It was totally made up, but she felt I’d go along with her because I hated the guy she was accusing of it, and she knew I was a feminist. But I can only hate somebody for what they actually do, and while the guy was an asshole, he just hadn’t done what she’d claimed he’d done.
Men can get just as passive aggressive though. I had two male supervisors recenty, and one of them would ask you how you were and take note if you were getting ill, stuff like that. The other guy would ignore everything but gushing wounds—if you were female, that is. If you were female and complained about something, he’d dismiss you as a whiner. With the guys he was all pro-active and so forth. If you were a woman, the guy just wouldn’t listen.
This is part of the reason I don’t like working with women. My boss is male, and aside from his bizarre affinity for CtAC, he is easily swayed by a shaking boobie. It means the people who get recognition aren’t the ones who do a good job, the work piles up on the people who won’t flirt with him (or god forbid, fuck him like one of my coworkers), and I’m probably on thin ice because he already fired the other female who didn’t flirt for what she wanted.
I’ve found the opposite. The ones who have the easiest time getting you completely ostracized, your reputation destroyed, and generally making your life a living hell are the gossipy, backstabbing, nosy, passive-aggressive women. Especially if they are pretty and willing to stick some of it in the boss’s face so he’ll pay attention to whatever their rantings about you are.
There’s one where I work right now who makes absolutely sure no female ever gets promoted to a position higher than hers. She’ll trash anyone she has to in order to accomplish it.
Well if you responded to her the way you would to a man, you’d be in HR either being fired or sent to sensitivity classes for your hostility toward women.
I’ve found that mind games and back stabbing are par for the course in corporations, irrespective of private individual plumbing.
kimera: The only reason I prefer a male manager is because they are much easier to manipulate.
catsix: This is part of the reason I don’t like working with women. My boss is male, and aside from his bizarre affinity for CtAC, he is easily swayed by a shaking boobie.
I can see why you wouldn’t like this situation, but I’m puzzled as to why you seem to imply that the problem is only with the women. Isn’t it the male manager’s professional responsibility not to allow himself to be “easily swayed by a shaking boobie”?
I can well believe that many women are difficult to work with (though I personally haven’t had a significant number of manipulative/bitchy/backstabbing female co-workers, or seen in my own experience a lot of the problems described here); but I wonder if some of the guys aren’t being let off too easily.
I’m dealing with one of those right now - in addition to her frequently trying to make me look bad in front of my boss (constant barrage of petty bullshit like “She didn’t order the supplies I asked for,” and yet I can produce my numerous requests for the item numbers and/or specifics of the supplies she wants that have gone unanswered), she’s constantly in my face with “Well, it must be nice to…” (FITB - my Beetle, my trip to London last summer, seeing ‘grown-up’ movies, whatever), and somehow she sees it as me putting something over on the universe by not having kids - “Well, I’d drive a Beetle, too, if I didn’t have to have a mini-van for the kids,” that kind of thing. She acts like I’ve somehow screwed her over.
My tactic is just to smile sweetly and reply that in fact, it IS very nice. My SIL pulls this same BS on us, but I have yet to understand why they take this so personally. SIL would set us up - “Have you seen any good movies lately? Must be nice not to have to sit through ‘Polar Express’ 12 times…” What’s the point? My brother doesn’t do it, my male co-workers with kids don’t do it.
Katriona: * What’s the point? My brother doesn’t do it, my male co-workers with kids don’t do it.*
As a childless female myself, I agree with you that it’s very annoying to get sort of subtly zinged all the time by people who seem to resent you for not (currently) having to put up with the burdens of parenthood.
But I would note one glaringly obvious potential reason why women might be more likely to react this way than men: namely, women generally carry much more of the day-to-day burden of childcare than men do.
Don’t know if that happens to be true for your brother’s or coworker’s family, but I could definitely understand why women in general would act more resentful about this than men.
Meh, I’ve never had this experience with women in the workplace, and both of my last two jobs were places with majority of females around.
I’m glad someone started a thread about this. Working with women is no problem for me. Working for women? Oy! I’ve had four female bosses in my career and each and every one of them was an absolute bitch. It seemed like they felt the need to take on the worst characteristics of every male boss they ever had.
I am a total professional in the workplace and only ask the same of supervisors and subordinates, but for some reason that wasn’t enough for these vipers. Harassment, pettiness and persecution were the order of the day in each and every case. They acted like men were the enemy instead of colleagues.
I know that sometimes it’s tough for women to make it to senior positions, but there is no reason to be complete assholes once there.
He’s an idiot for being manipulated, and I also have a serious problem with those who are doing the manipulating. If it’s his professional responsibility not to be distracted by T&A, it’s their professional responsibility also to not shove T&A in someone’s face to try to get what they want.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with disliking someone who’s manipulative.
catsix: If it’s his professional responsibility not to be distracted by T&A, it’s their professional responsibility also to not shove T&A in someone’s face to try to get what they want.
That, I can totally agree with. Both sexes should be more professional about treating colleagues as workers and people, not as what we quaintly used to call “sex objects”.
The only person who has made me lose my temper in my whole adult life was a woman with whom I had the distinctly unpleasant experience of working. She had (has) an ego the size of Everest, and in every other respect is a total hack at her profession. She talked down to me and rode me and made my job miserable until it came to a head one day. And then she tried to get me fired for it. It didn’t work, though. A few months later, she quit, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
Lest you think it was just me, when she made a power play to get a better position, in charge of her former departmental co-workers, they all quit, en masse, rather than work for her.
I’ve known some nasty men, but not like this woman. Good riddance!