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by dunno7456
656 days ago
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> For example, my very existence as a moderately young, moderately successful computer scientist threatens some men’s sense of identity, thus making them uncomfortable and/or lash out. I'm not a woman, but I faced this soooo many times in my career that now I believe that it's just insecure men feeling threatened by other people's knowledge or capabilities. Usually these people are hiding something and they are not as smart as perceived. Having someone in the room that can potentially unmask that makes them insecure. You have to address the behavior the first time it occurs by establishing boundaries otherwise it keeps happening more and more. And that is a leadership/management failure to address these behaviors. In all occasions the insecure men were so loud and obnoxious that management prefers not to deal with it and take the easy route by firing the target of the abuse, reinforcing the behavior more and more. |
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Funny you mention this. The worst career experience I ever had was with a woman who was insecure about herself. She routinely gave me a hard time and butted heads with me on issues where I was actually right many times. By the way, she got promoted to be my manager (something that one more senior guy expected from the first time he met her years before). I wasn't the only one who couldn't stand her. Arrogance is not a uniquely or even predominantly masculine trait in this industry. It's a relatively common thing among programmers, especially young ones.
And if you're gonna blame the upper management for my experience, I've just gotta say that you are naive. They are the ones who put that woman in place and were biased in her favor. Nothing I could have said about her obnoxious behavior would have made a bit of difference. More likely than not, I would have been targetted for even more frustrating BS.
And if you're gonna accuse me of not liking women somehow, my current manager is a woman and she's one of the better ones I've had. I'm talking about the assumption that all toxic personalities are owned by men, and that women are inherently disadvantaged. They are not as a whole. In this industry, there is more variance among members of each gender than there is between genders. Men and women want different things out of life generally. But if you look at similar types of people, their gender hardly matters.