Much has been made recently of an editorial by Jennifer Lawrence and an article by Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post that claim that women are forced into different speech patterns during business meetings. I find this interesting, because Hollywood and the Washington Post are not well-known as bastions of conservatism. Granted, Hollywood is in the business of serving up human flesh for our entertainment and oggling, so I suspect much of their liberal pontifications are mere cover-fire. But I do really have to marvel at what the business meetings at the Washington Post must be like. Really?!
I’ve never experienced a meeting where women had to hem and haw and cower in order to be taken seriously. (I’m evidently not alone, either.) And I’ve lived most of my professional life in supposed patriarchal cess-pools like Idaho and Utah. From my experience, if anyone is discounted or not taken seriously it’s an individual personality thing, not a gender thing. In the majority of departments and workgroups I’ve been in, those who are naturally inclined to be assertive and speak out tend to dominate the discussion, male and female.
In the first place I worked we had a female QA lead who could (and frequently would) put the alpha male developers in their place. She didn’t have to tread carefully, and to my knowledge no one thought she was overly aggressive. She was passionate about her job, and we respected that. And, more often than not, she was right. I worked for her for a while, and I enjoyed it. And as a rule, she only got passionate and aggressive when necessary to counter the passionate aggression of the other strong personalities in the group.
You know who was the mealy-mouthed weakling in that group? Me. I’ve never been very good at handling conflict, even when I’m only an observer and not the target. I tend toward the passive-aggressive, and I struggle continually with whether or not it’s my place to speak up. Clearly I was missing something in my “Male Privilege Package”. I’m getting better, but I suspect if you were to hand an anonymized transcript of team meetings in which I’m a part to Ms. Petri she’d tag me as the female in the group, and the majority of the women in the group as male.
So yes, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a bold stand and tell Ms. Lawrence and Ms. Petri that my anecdotal experience is just as valid as theirs and wonder aloud at the institutionalized biases in their liberal organizations that favor hiring mealy-mouthed women. I’ve never worked at one of those. My experience is that there are strong-willed men and there are strong-willed women. And there are reserved men and women. And there are “class clown” men and women. And there are wise, silent men and women who speak little in meetings, but tend to end all debate when they do. And there are overbearing men and women.
It’s not a gender thing. It’s a personality thing. There is no “female” personality any more than there is a “male” personality. Everyone handles things their own way, for better or for worse. If certain organizations aren’t able to grasp that concept, or if certain organizations tend to collect certain types of people, that’s a problem of those organizations and are not necessarily indicative of the entire scope of society. Otherwise I would find it immensely amusing and ironic that the “enlightened” east coast/west coast are the bastions of sexism, while out here in backward, fly-over country we’re actually practicing what the coasts only preach.