- Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.
But also:
- As more women enter the upper echelons of organizations, people become more accustomed to women’s contributing and leading. Professor Burris and his colleagues studied a credit union where women made up 74 percent of supervisors and 84 percent of front-line employees. Sure enough, when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard than men.
In my male-dominated workplace, I witnessed a woman just about break down when she tried to explain her frustrations on this subject: "When a man's assertive and headstrong, he's a leader. When a woman does the same, she's a bitch." What's unfortunate is that I found this insightful only a couple of short years ago. She's not wrong, and it made me respect the women I work with even more. Now I wonder about other little subtleties innate to every single "professional" interaction that I have the pleasure of experiencing as a white male.
Vox has some commentary on this that I enjoyed: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/12/7531775/sandberg-women-interrupt-work
Yeeeeup. Hit the nail on the head right here. A lot of people don't mean to be sexist or racist but their actions or words still are. It doesn't mean you're a bad person or 100% all the time sexist/racist/whatever. It means you're human, you're subject to unconscious biases, and you don't always know when you are expressing them. Last night my mom tried to tell me that she didn't see Hispanic people as "non-white;" essentially, they "didn't count" as a minority to her. Dat racist. It's well-intentioned but it's still wrong - it's like telling a woman "Don't worry, I don't think of you as a woman, I'm not sexist because I treat all women like my bros." Well, dude, I am a woman. I want to be treated equally, but that doesn't mean I'm a man. I found it especially amusing because like, there are two sections for race you usually have to check on forms: there's the one with 8+ descriptions, and then there's the one with two: "Hispanic/Latino" and "White/Non-Hispanic." We all slip up sometimes. What is important to me is that when we slip up, it gets pointed out - by ourselves or others - and then we recognize the moment, learn from it, and hopefully don't repeat that mistake. It's when instead we feel attacked and defend our statements as "not sexist" or "not racist" that a problem occurs - when we condone our behavior because we are embarrassed or feel cornered and our reaction is to jump to the defense. If a biased statement isn't attacked and examined, it will be repeated and propagated.These interrupters aren't actively trying to crush women's ideas, but they're still doing it.