I’m a man myself, but I’m a foreigner where I live and work, so I sometimes get the impression that my intelligence is a bit underestimated by employers and coworkers. I’m a sous chef, so in a management position, and I often get this feeling like the chef de cuisine, the owner, and sometimes some of the cooks aren’t listening to me. Like I’ll have to reiterate my point two or even three times at a meeting before I get a relevant answer, or I’ll send a memo out and the changes I’ve instated aren’t being adopted after the fact, or someone I’m talking to might vacantly say “yes” as if they’re occupied with something else.
Yesterday I asked the chef a question about a recipe that only he could answer and he said I could google it. I’d already googled it just to be sure, wouldn’t you know. The day before, the owner told a cook, who then told me, that we all together were planning to put all delivery receipts in a neat little box and adopt a system to check they’re correct, but I’d already done it alone a week earlier, and told them all about it, with photos and everything. I feel like I’m going mad.
I hear that this is a (more) common experience for women, so I wonder if any of you have any tips or tricks or whatever to make yourself heard, or to at least cope with not being heard, or even just a bit of commiseration is fine. Cheers!
I hear it a lot, yes. It brings a tear to my eye to think about it. Sorry to read it.
Not that I’m excited that anyone has to deal with this, but I have to point out how this is an ongoing issue women deal with, but we’re always written off as nagging (at home) or a removed (at work).
But we can only get a conversation going if it’s a man bringing the issue up.
A few years ago, a couple of people did an experiment at work*. 2 people, one male one female, were regularly having very different experiences with clients at work. Every step of projects the woman was working on was met with difficulties from the client. They didn’t believe her recommendations, wanted a second opinion, talked down to her, etc. The man saw none of this.
They were both very qualified for the work and both routinely interfaced with clients via email.
For a week or two, they swapped email signatures and immediately clients were approving (and even praising) the woman’s work. Suddenly everything the man brought to the client was questioned.
Salt in the wound is that it’s the man’s temporary experience that gets more coverage than the the woman’s every day reality.
Even talking about the phenomenon needs to be from a man’s perspective to get clicks/sell ad space/ get people to care
*Edit I wrote this comment from memory of the article. After rereading, the experiment wasn’t on purpose, it was only after the man accidentally had his email signature set up to look like the woman’s. Just wanted to add this before anyone comes here with the intent to derail the conversation because i misrepresented that part of the story.
I remember reading about that! Likewise, our other sous chef is a woman, also foreign, and I’m often reminding people that she knows what she’s doing. Obviously I spoke to her about this whole thing before posting here, and she sort of had a stoical attitude about it.