60% of male managers now say they're uncomfortable mentoring women
uk.finance.yahoo.com
uk.finance.yahoo.com
I hired a female contractor engineer (in the UK contractors are paid daily, supposed to be easy to hire/fire), my manager is also female. 2 weeks after the engineer started, I knew she wouldn't be able to stay in the team because her work was not good (she was spending a lot of time chatting around, and not producing good quality code). Everybody complains to me that my engineer is not performing well, but my manager makes me keep her. A month later my manager asks for a meeting with me, and says that my contractor has been complaining about micro-management, and that it can be seen as bullying or harassment. Because of that I leave for 2 weeks, and it takes another month to get rid of the contractor.
Learnings: I actually handled the situation very well, but I suffered a lot from the way my manager handled the situation. I have myself managed, hired and fired dozens of people in my career. Yet as soon as it was a girl, the rules of the game completely changed, and it didn't matter who was right or wrong. No matter how much I want to be inclusive and how much I want to give equal rights to everybody, other people (and even females) don't see it that way, and still want to make a distinction between sexes.
But considering the nature of using dimunitive forms with regards to women, I would just call her a woman unless we are in very casual company.
I'm male, I've been accused of sexual abuse, and it was thrown out because it became exceedingly clear that it never happened. That was extremely unpleasant to go through, and I'd rather never go through it again.
However, it hasn't had an ongoing effect on my relationships with women, just the one woman. I'm still more than happy to work with my coworkers regardless of their sex, and I'm more than happy to guide anyone who happens to fall under my leadership.
Anybody accused is first judged by the audience. A certain amount of guilt is assumed. That you let yourself into a potentially compromising situation, or you sought out the situation.
And I imagine the higher you are up a managerial chain, the higher the stakes are when you get accused.
There is a human cost, even if "nothing comes of it".
I imagine many of these managers are terrified of the ordeal, of lawyers, they don't know if the company will support them until a judgement is made or kick them to the curb. Of the effect it may have on their family, where they might already have strained relationships with their spouses.
They don't want to potentially risk it, because the power dynamics at play are not in their favour from the outset. The system is biased to find fault, rather than first determine if there was fault.
At the same time, we can't cut the authority of the system in any way - the people it protects, who genuinely need protection, often are already in a power imbalance of their own.
The fears are justified to an extent, but the simple truth it comes down to is... You're a manager. It is your responsibility to be responsible for those under you. If you can't be, then perhaps a management position is not appropriate for you. Perhaps you need to learn to thrive in a different role. Harsh, certainly, but as the environment stands, ignoring those under your care will only help to promote an environment where women are once again second-class citizens.
A lot of people aren't squeaky clean paragons of virtue in everything they do in combination with being secure and confident in their position in the corporate hierarchy. So your suggestion seems to be boiling down to 'figure it out'. What is your fallback if the required behaviors are complicated or hard to figure out? Men-women relationships are fundamentally asymmetrical and unbalanced, and it is the case that most people are poor communicators.
There is an underlying theme to these conversations that everyone should have a basic expectation that they can come to work and enjoy a safe, respectful work environment. That applies to managers just as much as subordinates - if companies are going to act on accusations then they need very clear policy on how much evidence is needed to put a manager's career at risk.
Unless the state of the field is very clear, it isn't reasonable to tell the managers that their role is to put themselves at risk professionally and work it out as they go. The conversation needs to be more detailed about what, exactly, the managers are expected to do outside the formal frameworks and what level of evidence is needed for them to get into trouble.
Absolutely. It's why I tried to humanise the difficulty of the manager's position. Management is hard enough, without being hyper aware of a culture where actions of all kinds can be easily misconstrued. Hell, getting someone a coffee in the morning can be considered dangerous.
> So your suggestion seems to be boiling down to 'figure it out'.
I'm afraid I can't offer a suggestion for someone trying to figure things out.
All I can say is, if it becomes clear to you that you can't figure out, if you can't find the right balance and those fears are stopping you from doing part of your job, specifically leading women...
... Then maybe you shouldn't be, at least until you do work things out. If you're becoming a problem, and can't find any other solution, then it's probably best for everyone, including yourself, that you aren't in that situation anymore.
Don't take the stress, and don't hurt your colleagues.
I'm not a manager, but I eat lunch/dinner one on one with men far more than I eat lunch/dinner with women, and it's because I try not to be a creep. I try to manage bias and I try to be aware of when I might be doing something for a coworker just because she's female and pretty, and unfortunately that means that when it is actually genuinely appropriate to grab dinner together and talk about our work I second-guess myself. When it does happen, it's usually a more senior coworker taking the initiative first.
No idea how to stop doing it other than time and experience. If you've got tips, throw them out there.
Also: do you offer to mentor the "not pretty" females? That statement alone in your post shows a remarkable immaturity in you about women in the workplace.
The problem here is non-formal social opportunities that aren't meetings and don't take the place of meetings. If there's solid work-related content to discuss then of course you can meet with someone and discuss it, but that's not the same as grabbing dinner with someone when you're both working late and chattering about career-related stuff.
> Also: do you offer to mentor the "not pretty" females? That statement alone in your post shows a remarkable immaturity in you about women in the workplace.
Of course I do, I mentor anyone who asks to be mentored. Formal work relationships like mentoring aren't a problem because they're explicitly endorsed by the company and usually facilitated by a manager or initiated by the mentee. I worry that I'm being too condescending as a mentor because of implicit bias, or overcompensating in the direction of not giving enough help, but that's a different problem.
"Am I doing this because she's pretty?" is relevant to the conversation about this article because creepy behavior by men who are attracted to women seems to be a core complaint of professional women and a part of the #MeToo movement, and men are asked to be aware of their own biases and motivations and actions to try to fix this.
This is not female-vs-male problem. You will get the same kind of trouble when you smoke with colleagues while there is a non-smoker in the team, or when team member has kids and cannot stay late with you, or when there is a remote coworker, or just some people on the team enjoy watching football and some not.
Yes, you do need to think when and how you discuss work related stuff. And your friendly relations with someone on the team affect team dynamic.
Generalizing it to "working with women is harder" is plain wrong.
Nevertheless, I do have a certain empathy for the people who talk about their fears here. I have mine too. Again there is this small difference: while you fear that a certain accusation(which happens how often?) can ruin your carrier, I have a fear that your fear can ruin my carrier with >60% chance. Without possibility for me to get accused explicitly, leaving me no chance to defend myself.
While I'm taking a moment to feel your fears, can I ask you to do the same for mine?
Once upon a time, I would have tried to help distressed children. These days I walk straight past them. Let the next female do the consoling.
As a result, it would be smart of most men in these positions to either not mentor at all or always have someone else in the room. I wouldn't be surprised if companies started having everything recorded at some point.
The real problem is that false accusers won't face many repercussions compared to the accused. Some men accused are even found to have done nothing and it doesn't matter. People still believe they did something.
More and more I’m seeing managers have their 1:1s in public areas, such as cafeterias or outdoor seating.
I have changed my behavior around women subordinates. It sucks, but that’s the reality. At this point I’m as concerned with the appearance of impropriety as I am false accusations. I know who I am and I trust myself. Everyone else? Not so much anymore.
The reactions I'm seeing are... not helpful for the most part.
One reaction is that this is a horrible thing because it is unfair. I agree that it is an unfortunate part of our current reality. So is the possibility of being forced into uncomfortable situations, or more generally, being sexually harassed when you're a blameless woman in the workplace. I don't see a way of resolving that unfairness without any negative impact on blameless men.
We can certainly try to work together in good faith to minimize negative impact while creating positive change. But wailing and moaning about the balance of power tipping slightly away from us (I'm a white male) is not acting in good faith. It's just plain entitlement.
The #metoo movement's direct impact puts me at more risk than before. And I've taken advantage of my cultural immunity more than once in my life. I'm not proud of some things in my past, and I'm not free from the possibility of doing more things in the future. I have problematic biases and attitudes. But I'd rather live in, and have my kids grow up in, the sort of world that #metoo is leading us towards than the world that (I hope) we're leaving behind.
Besides, some of this abject fear over being accused of the things that we've actually done would be lessened if the patriarchal walls of silence and secrecy were torn down so we could all see what is actually happening in the world, rather than the whitewashed appearance of perfect honor and respect that we all pretend is real. I don't think my personal lapses would be judged too harshly if compared against reality. But they look pretty bad if compared to all the guys professing purity and innocence -- because we as a society have somehow fooled ourselves into believing them.
60% of male managers are nervous about mentoring women. What percentage of working women are nervous about what their male coworkers might do one at any point in the future?
And fuck that, what percentage have already experienced worse than what a male manager might realistically experience from a complaint about his behavior in a 1-1? And don't bother pulling out the "but what if absolutely nothing happened but the woman accused him unfairly and he lost his job and wife and kids and had to live under a bridge until he killed himself??!" unless you have some solid evidence that this happens more often than women get raped by acquaintances.
Or if you don't like that comparison, maybe look at the number of women who lose jobs or careers or get blacklisted as a result of someone else harassing them.
If the percentage of women that experienced problems were actually really low, and if rape basically didn't happen in the work place, how would that change the way we should have this discussion?
It sounds like you're saying women raped by acquaintances and women having problems in the work place are related. I've always interpreted it as they are acquaintances through friend groups, not necessarily through work. I guess it'd be interesting to see a study of what percentage the acquaintances are known through work explicitly, then maybe that could shed some light on where the tensions come from.
It would be more useful to not use the extreme scenarios when working through this stuff. They're really bad, but rare, and so not all that relevant.
Maybe some specific examples would help. Somebody came in to ask for advice about whether they should be more aggressive in some work situation. I thought about it and remember some advice that a colleague had applied effectively. The advice was widely praised. I said the same advice word-by-word, but after saying it, realized that this advice only works when said by a woman to another woman (the advice itself was something about being empowered as a woman). It sounded a bit awkward / patronizing when coming from me. This person then later complained to another person that I gave a sexist suggestion. Nothing happened of it, but it was really uncomfortable and had they spread it on social media in a bad light, that would have hurt my reputation.
In another case, a subordinate and I were already at slightly adversarial terms (a bit of loss in trust, but nothing too serious at that time). I could tell they were attentively looking to find what I was saying to be erroneous. I had to be particularly careful in those meetings, and had to constantly respond to accusations like "why did you agree with [male]'s idea when I had proposed the same idea a month ago and you rejected it" (when it was obviously a more complex situation and the context for the proposed idea were different). But had I been a bit more casual in our meetings, I am pretty sure she would have found something to complain about loudly.
Basically, "don't be a creep" is not enough and oversimplifies things. You can not be a creep, yet still get into a bad situation if someone else interprets you as a creep, especially in a situation where the relationship is not a strong trusted one. You often have to meet and advise people who don't know your intentions, and an awkward mis-step can be problematic. That's just the unfortunate reality.
The problem is the extreme power imbalance, where any woman you interact with can snap her fingers and destroy your life/career.
Let me put it this way: It's incredibly rare that a bear attacks a human. But pretty much everyone will still avoid a bear if they can. This has nothing to do with "don't piss off the bear and you'll be fine" and everything to do with "if that bear does decide to attack you, you are completely defenseless".
When it comes to that, it seems to be that the statistics show that real sexual harassment happens more often then the scenario you are describing. How would you handle this, so it is reduced or eliminated?
This was the original power imbalance, and it can't be forgotten.
Generally a pendulum swings many time before finding equilibrium, I think we're just in that process right now.
Don't mistake my comment as calling woman liars or defending sexual misconduct on men's part. I'm simply analyzing the rational for men not wanting to be alone with women in the work place.
What would be the motivation of a woman to falsify accusations of someone mentoring her? How often does this actually happen? Wouldn't accusing someone also jeopardize her career prospect? Etc.
I fully understand the response of men not wanting to be alone with women in the workplace, but I can't agree that it's rationale, reasonable and justified. We're all human, and unreasonable feelings of fears and worries is something we all suffer from. That said, the current feelings seem mostly irrational to me, and appear to be put forward by fear mongers.
I am very much in agreement that all are innocent until proven guilty, that the public opinion shouldn't be used as a court of law, and that due process must be followed and respected. That said, I'm still happily mentoring women, and respectfully engaging them at work, and I won't let myself fall prey to these irrational fears.
Sorry, can you actually name a human being who had his "life/career" destroyed by a metaphorical snap of the finger? I mean, good grief, you have to dig like crazy to even find evidence of a false accusation.
I mean, sure, it happens, in the same sense that sure, you might get hit by a truck. Where does this outrageous paranoia come from? The horrifying thing is that you aren't alone -- half this topic is men posting about how terrible shrews are lurking in the bushes about to steal their careers. And... there are no shrews to be seen.
A simple misunderstanding of a truly collegial touch, an off the cuff remark, a glance, a gesture - all completely normal otherwise and often spontaneous - and you can find yourself on the defensive.
And given social media and the virality of outrage (see Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, or go Google Johnny Depp and Amber Heard for an example of how he said she said testimony is reported as "Big if true") it's clear that the paranoia stems from the disproportionate reputational damage in the court of public opinion, not the accusation itself.
Which is accurately reflected in the headline as "discomfort" - having to highly self-regulate your words and actions is, by definition, uncomfortable.
Not that it can't and shouldn't be done. But to follow your analogy of getting hit by a truck then mentoring women is like playing a never-ending round of Frogger.
So yeah, the game is endless. You'll never escape the possibility of jumping in front of the truck and getting squashed flat.
Don't jump in front of the truck.
I'm now very careful with my interactions with women at work. No 1:1 meetings, all conversation must be strictly work related, no walking the same direction, avoid eye contact as much as possible, etc. It's a total minefield and you need to minimize how much you walk through it, especially if you have a great job.
That kind of generalization is exactly what can torpedo your career. Try putting those thoughts about the fairer sex in a memo or blog post and see what response you get.
But then I live in Asia, things might be different than in America/Europe.
Fun fact: The word for 'woman' in my country is derived from '婦' - 女 (“woman”) + 帚 (“broom”), so even calling them that way is kinda male chauvinist already.
nine times more likely to be hesitant to travel with a junior woman for work than a junior man, and six times more likely to be hesitant to have a work dinner with a junior woman than a junior man.
This is, unfortunately, a rational response to the current climate.
Yup, it's still rational in that respect too; this sucks and the way to fix it seems to be at the organizational level. Make it not one on one meetings, and make it "public" record (transparent), and make the support systems for reporting abuse in either direction act on that public record.
Yes! It is rational to have a fear response to the prospect of being held accountable. Because we have not had a culture of accountability, many men are not confident in their ability NOT to behave in a harmful manner, even if they do not intend to harm. That feeling of discomfort is from finally having to think about these things. I hope more men embrace that discomfort instead of resent it.
Just an accusation can result in huge legal bills, a loss of reputation and other consequences. https://veterinarybusinessadvisors.com/guilty-until-proven-i...
Here’s an example of how delicate this stuff can be: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-colleague-threaten...
If you are a manager or executive, it’s a real risk that you’ll get dragged through the mud by a false accusation. In a world we’re he-said she-said is biased towards “believing women,” it would be prudent to avoid close professional relationships with women. Literally decades later it can come back to bite you. Remember that while the man may “hire and promote fairly,” not all people necessarily act honestly and “fairly” can be very subjective. Just an accusation can torpedo a career.
Acting like “it’s bullshit” is to ignore the litigious society in which we operate.
Now, I don't know the statistics, I think we need some to know if we're being absurd and irrationally afraid or not.
Similarly, we also need to remember the flip side, many of these interactions used too and still are real risks to women as they can get harassed and abused as well. Again, statistics might help.
Either statistic is hard to find though, because ground truth is difficult and most cases don't necessarily get recorded or even mentioned.
Hopefully, we slowly figure all this out and how to balance it all.
> "The thing is, it's not enough," she says. "It's really important to not harass anyone, but that's pretty basic. We also need to not be ignored."
There's no need to walk back any part of MeToo to solve this problem, just to keep pushing forward.
Yes, you don't have to do these, but some people just like buddyhood kind of binding more than others.
But what you suggested was that people change their behavior regarding other coworking relationships that are otherwise working fine for both parties.
If both parties are totally comfortable with whatever dinner plans that they have with each other, then who are you to go in and tell them not to?
You suggested that men change their mentorship behavior that is otherwise working fine with their male mentees.
I may be missing your point. If you mean that two men shouldn't have to stop meeting at a bar when they're both comfortable with it, simply because there's a woman on the team who wouldn't be comfortable in the same situation, well... let's say your team has a habit of meeting at a Brazilian steakhouse to make important decisions. Then you hire Dave's brother Jerry, who is a strict ethical vegetarian. Don't you think it might be a decent idea to pick a different restaurant? Jerry swears he's willing to come along to the steakhouse and bring his own food, though you notice he looks pretty queasy and never touches his food the whole time you're there.
Or maybe you think it's fine if he quit if he's so uncomfortable, your team just isn't right for women oops I mean vegetarians and they'd be better off working somewhere else.
If you are the kind of person who does not have to social skills and awareness to navigate these kinds of normal social interactions, with other normal humans beings, then fine, silo yourself off, metaphorically with extremely impersonally relationships with others in which you act 100% "professionally" all the time with the people who you spend half of your waking life with.
But the rest of us are able to handle such situations easily.
This goes for technical skills and moral ones too. You feel bad until you're better.
Are you referring to 60% of male managers, or women they mentor?
That said, why should someone more senior train someone to take a job they themselves should be getting?
When an incompetent woman gets promoted, it's because she's a woman.
All kinds of idiots get promoted above their capacities. Women aren't special in that regard.