"I'm sorry, Mikhail, if I could? Didn't mean to cut you off there."

October 15, 2015 4:06 AM

...or, how a woman would have to ask Gorbachev to tear down this wall.
posted by nightrecordings (37 comments total)

See also the Miss Triggs Question (1988).
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:40 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

For the record, Mrs. Thatcher famously toid Mr. Gorbachev in a face-to-face meeting in Moscow, "Britain did not want German unification”

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”
posted by three blind mice at 4:44 AM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]

Don't bring actual women into this thread about theoretical women.
posted by Bugbread at 5:03 AM on October 15, 2015 [15 favorites]

Sure, some men talk like this, but they're usually not called a bitch, or bossy, or hostile, or difficult, if they are more direct.

Or, ugh, my least favorite response to a directly stated negative opinion: "Geez, sorry mom." Fuck you.
posted by muddgirl at 5:09 AM on October 15, 2015 [36 favorites]

...and your weird Oedipus complex.
posted by muddgirl at 5:10 AM on October 15, 2015 [10 favorites]

I know you're busy. But if I could bother you for just a minute, you might want to read it.

Also-now try being an "older" woman. Strike two.
posted by NorthernLite at 5:14 AM on October 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

FTA: "You start with your thought, then you figure out how to say it as though you were offering a groveling apology for an unspecified error."

I think the article is wrong, in that it's not a "man vs woman" thing at all...

Sure, some men talk like this, but they're usually not called a bitch, or bossy, or hostile, or difficult, if they are more direct.

Mary Beard: "...women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard..."
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:19 AM on October 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

I've been in a lot of business meetings and I've seen both men and women who use this sort of language. The difference is that the men who do it often get privately pulled aside by someone who wants them to do well and told to speak more confidently in meetings. Whereas the women who don't do it get invisibly labelled difficult and hard to work with.
posted by 256 at 5:22 AM on October 15, 2015 [30 favorites]

I read the comments. Why? Why did I read the comments.
posted by Justinian at 5:31 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is actually the reason I would vote for Hillary Clinton. I think just watching how the dynamic of conversation and relationships change would be interesting. I mean, she's at least as qualified as any other candidate (much more than some) but this is one key difference that I know will have an impact.

Would she use this sort of language and style and suffer those consequences or would she be more "mannish" and suffer that blowback?

Which style would bring her greater benefits?

Would her male advisers adopt different language styles? The questions are endless.

*Also, and I know this is horrible, but just once I would like her pull the P card and say something like "Maybe it's just because I'm having my period, but I'm the president of the United States of American and I don't think I have to sit here and listen to this shit." Oh, I think it would be beautiful and what would they say in response? The mind fairly boggles...
posted by BeReasonable at 5:32 AM on October 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

It's been my experience that office people of either gender mostly talk in bizarro-world corporatespeak anyway.
posted by jonmc at 5:57 AM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Inculcated timidity, which is probably the most prominent aspect of female gender socialization, has nothing to do with the fact that some men talk in meetings like this and everything to do with the fact that, save for legitimately progressive workplaces, all women have to. Which is why the title of the article is "the way a woman would have to say them" and not "the way only women and no men at all could ever say them."

Like how my whole working life, I've been told to be more confident, to be louder, to speak up more and more often because my insight and expertise are valuable and worth sharing. So here's what happens every time I do that: I get ignored completely. I get listened to for a beat and then everyone just starts talking over me because talking over women is easy and expected. A man hears my idea, repeats what I said, and gets credit for it. My idea is immediately shot down and, moments later, reintroduced by a man to immediate acceptance. And that old chestnut, the sarcastically-delivered "thanks, mom!" "whoa, sorry, mom!" or "ha, you sound like my wife!" which is what comes out when a man thinks you're acting too big for your britches and wants to bring you down a peg -- out of the office and into the home, where women belong.
posted by divined by radio at 6:04 AM on October 15, 2015 [40 favorites]

I'd laugh at this but it hits too close to home.

On the Hillary Clinton front, I'll just leave this here, in case y'all haven't seen it yet:
14 Perfect Situations For Hillary Clinton's Badass No

I wish I had a meeting to go to today, just so I could do it myself.
Boss: "Hey, Tuesday, Why don't you write up the notes you've been taking and send them out to everyone so they can avoid doing their own notes?"
Me: "Hahahaha. No."
posted by tuesdayschild at 6:10 AM on October 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

I have mentioned this before on MF, but once at a full time professional job at an explicitly progressive institution, my one year job review included “people are afraid to ask you for things because you intimidate them” (note: I always happily did anything anyone asked) and “[X Important Man in Leadership Position] would like you to look up from your work and smile when he visits this part of the building.”
posted by a fiendish thingy at 6:23 AM on October 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Alexandra Petri, as usual, nails it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:24 AM on October 15, 2015

Would she use this sort of language and style and suffer those consequences or would she be more "mannish" and suffer that blowback?

It worked for Thatcher, and it seems to be working for Merkel.

If I were Hillary, I'd go for sharp, competent, and confident, which, by most accounts, is her actual persona, and seems to have worked well for the women in power before her.
posted by schmod at 6:37 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am so happy to see this discussion but I am so sad that we are still having to have it in 2015. I have so many stories and after almost three decades of having to deal with exactly the kind of shit being described here, I can tell you that it begins to undermine your sense of competence.
posted by bluesky43 at 6:57 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I started a new job and started working with a woman who is my superior in a lot of significant ways: more experience, more skill, more authority in the company, etc...she's also a very intense personality and is sometimes hard to work with. Nothing serious, but sometimes I wasn't getting the collaboration or help I needed, and I hadn't figured out how to communicate with her at that point. I mentioned the challenges in a casual conversation at a family dinner and the VERY FIRST question my father-in-law asked was "is she married?"

"Err...what does that have to do with anything?"

"I bet she's a spinster. That why she's such a bitch"

"...I never said that. I just said it was a challenge and I was still figuring out how to work with her"

"Yeah I bet she's not married"

And that was the end of the conversation. Folks hold on to a lot of gross notions for a long damn time.
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:03 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I feel like I need to make an ask mefi about how to address this: I was volunteering in my 7 year old daughter's classroom, and she prefaced an answer to the teacher's question with "this is probably stupid, but..."

WHERE THE FUCK DID SHE LEARN THAT?!?!

Certainly not from me. Oy. Apparently she's soaking in this sort of environment in fucking elementary school.
posted by gaspode at 7:04 AM on October 15, 2015 [26 favorites]

This is the most awesome thing ever.

One of the best things anyone ever did for me was the very successful mid-career professional woman who pulled my very young 20-something self aside after a board meeting and snapped "We're not paying you to feel; we're paying you to think."
posted by DarlingBri at 7:15 AM on October 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

“I spoke my mind and gave my opinion in a clear and no-[BS] way; no aggression, just blunt. The man I was working with (actually, he was working for me) said, ‘Whoa! We’re all on the same team here!’ As if I was yelling at him.

A sort of perfect expression of befuddlement by a person who thinks he's the running back and has just been offsides tackled by the person he has cast as the team's cheerleader?

(I put at least two girl things in that sentence, the "sort of" and the "?" and I wasn't even trying.)

(I also called him a person, not a man, just to be gentler and not bluntly pasting on a gendered lable.)
posted by puddledork at 8:49 AM on October 15, 2015

You're lucky you got such strong advice from career backers, DarlingBri. You're one of the few.

It's just so frustrating and tiring having to think and act this way all the time. I get so tired of massaging men's egos, especially when it's my job to correct them and make sure they're presenting themselves in a way that keeps them from looking stupid (which is a big part of my job description). It's not enough to say, "this is a mistake, and this is really bad, and you really should rethink this." Everything has to be couched in gentling phrases, "I think perhaps this might be a better approach," or "have you considered this angle?" Yes, I know there are times when this more diplomatic phrasing is called for, but it shouldn't be necessary all the time.

As for speaking directly in meetings, this is the standard that is enforced. Women even do it to each other, and that just makes me want to scream (or punch somebody, but as I'm a professional lady, I never resort to that option).

One of the most frustrating and infuriating times was when a company came in to pitch its SEO service and product. Now I had done my research before hand, and I pretty much knew what to expect of the company and let's just say I was far from impressed. But it was one of those meetings where I didn't really have any power and I was just there as back-up/moral support for my male boss (who really didn't want to be there in the first place, in part because his forte wasn't in understanding this type of technology). So I was determined to say as little as possible and just go along for the ride.

The team that came in, one woman and two men, made its pitch and for about 20 minutes or half-an-hour, I didn't say a word. I sat there patiently and quietly and listed attentively. Then when it finally got into the essence of how the service worked (instead of just the 'we're a wonderful company, with Very Important Big Clients!) I finally figured it was safe to ask a question. So I asked directly, "you say we can sort viewers into these categories, how can we do that? What are the determining factors?" Can we establish our own parameters for these particular labels?"

Well you should have seen the look on the female presenter's face. Of course the woman was in charge of marketing and presentations, and the two guys were the "technical experts." You'd have thought I asked her to sacrifice herself to the local volcano god. She danced around, providing lots of hand-wavy non-answers. (Essentially the company was offering a black box algorithm with no customization or ability to peer under the hood. To make it worse, it was designed to support completely different types of businesses than ours.)

So the whole meeting continued this way. I tried to ask questions that clarified how the technology would work, what factors they took into account, and how we could integrate it with our systems, and she just kept waving me off and tried speaking to my boss. Okay, I'll admit that I started asking much harder technical questions as the pitch went along, but that's because I was tired of getting dismissed with "well you don't understand."

When the sales pitch broke up and we were saying our good-byes in the hallway, the marketing woman came up to me and my boss and told me directly to my face, "I don't think you were very open or nice. You were hostile and didn't keep an open mind." And of course I was absolutely shocked and flabbergasted and was too stunned to say anything. And then she batted her eyelashes and tried flirting with my boss.

Personally I could never have expected that response. What happened to "the customer is always right"? What happened to trying to win over clients? Apparently all that goes out the window when a woman decides to ask questions. I guess I should have been, "well, gee gosh-golly, but I'm just a silly girl, and I so don't understand your wondrous Internet machine. Could you explain it to me with paper dolls and crayons?"

I swear I just can't win. And I'm tired of playing a losing game.
posted by sardonyx at 9:01 AM on October 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

These all felt very familiar to me from my years in the corporate wasteland (the tech corporate wasteland, so ostensibly a rather progressive wasteland) but it also reminded me of the flip side of qualifying everything I had to say which was the longer I took to make my point, the more likely I would be interrupted in the middle and never get to say anything at all.
posted by telegraph at 9:04 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, and I know this is horrible, but just once I would like her pull the P card and say something like "Maybe it's just because I'm having my period, but I'm the president of the United States of American and I don't think I have to sit here and listen to this shit."

As she's 67 years old, I assume she's post-menopausal. I've heard this sort of wish expressed about Merkel, though, too, who's 61. Which is making me wonder why everyone seems so worried about PMS in female world leaders, given that they're normally very post-PMSing by the time they're leading the world. Another misconception due to general ignorance of women's anatomy, I guess?
posted by jaguar at 9:50 AM on October 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

Seems like what it basically comes down to is that lots of men are, at some deep level, afraid of women. Or at very least of being laughed at by them.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:55 AM on October 15, 2015

I feel like I need to make an ask mefi about how to address this: I was volunteering in my 7 year old daughter's classroom, and she prefaced an answer to the teacher's question with "this is probably stupid, but..."

I wish I had any advice for you, but I'm glad you're trying to do something about it. I hope it's okay to link to myself, but this really hit a nerve with a tumblr comment I made a long while ago about my mom. Because this is how she's talked for as long as I've been aware enough to notice it and it's something that breaks my heart, and there has to be a way to mitigate this so that it doesn't become something that is a permanent habit and deeply internalized. (and I would love to see that AskMe)
posted by nogoodverybad at 10:36 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh right, Thatcher didn't use language like this. A clear example that women can absolutely skip this language and still be considered likable and easy to get along with!
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:44 AM on October 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Which is making me wonder why everyone seems so worried about PMS in female world leaders,

I do find it objectionable that when a man punches a hole in the wall, flies into a rage, orders an airstrike out of nowhere, fires a guy in the middle of an all-staff meeting, swipes the cluttered surface of his desk so that it flies across the room-- why those things are never chalked up to hormones, but so much of women's emotional decisions are attributed to chemicals.

If a guy gets into a bar fight because someone insults the team he roots for, that couldn't possibly be based on hormones? I'm not saying every rage anyone ever flies into is due to hormones, but it seems specious to blame hormones when speaking of women but not ever of men, even taking into consideration that testosterone is commonly perceived as 'the aggressive hormone'.

Rages are sometimes valid (and even when they're hormonally charged they might still be valid) but to suggest half the species is governed more by chemicals and the other half by righteous fury seems conveniently dismissive of women's rages and overly indulgent of men's.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:06 AM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh right, Thatcher didn't use language like this. A clear example that women can absolutely skip this language and still be considered likable and easy to get along with!

Except that Thatcher got called things like Attila the Hen and The Iron Lady and probably many other pejoratives.
posted by wabbittwax at 11:06 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think the friendly Thatcher comment was intended as sarcasm.
posted by jaguar at 11:18 AM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

uh, yea. Sorry, didn't realise that anyone might think I was serious there!
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:09 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the friendly Thatcher comment was intended as sarcasm.

uh, yea. Sorry, didn't realise that anyone might think I was serious there!

You know, this interaction just perfectly demonstrated the point for me. I would have just said bluntly "That was obviously sarcasm", with no cushioning "I think" or apologies afterwards.
posted by Conspire at 12:29 PM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

The baboon heirarchy, booya, corporate house of bluff cards, thing that is meetings, comes sharply down to two dimensions, when people who are women just tell it like it is, with no regard for invisible, but meaningful human social pyramids. So the unsuspecting cards of tier four, hoping for mothering or visual sexual stimulation, are angered and confused when the endorphins invoked call for data evaluation. Hence abrasive, out of line, pushy, off task, disrespectful of corporate culture, criticisms, for people who happen to be women. The truly abrasive woman is usually making the naked Emperor, put on real business dress.
posted by Oyéah at 12:57 PM on October 15, 2015

the marketing woman came up to me and my boss and told me directly to my face, "I don't think you were very open or nice. You were hostile and didn't keep an open mind."

Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to make this sort of comment to a potential customer? Turning "I am terrible at my marketing job" around and making it your fault is incredible bullshit. If this technique (and the flirting!) somehow worked to sell this company's services, I'm not sure I want to know about it. Last scrap of faith in humanity gone, et cetera.
posted by asperity at 2:20 PM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I can thankfully report that it didn't, at least not for the division of the company I was with at the time. Mainly, I believe, because the product was so ridiculously over-priced, and my boss was too cheap to spend that kind of money. The really sad part is that another division ended up doing a trial with them, and knowing the people (men) on that side of the wall, I would be willing to bet that a) nobody was asking the attractive marketing girl any tough questions and that b) she was flirting her darndest during that pitch meeting.

Yeah, I weep for the fate of humanity too.
posted by sardonyx at 4:18 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know, this interaction just perfectly demonstrated the point for me. I would have just said bluntly "That was obviously sarcasm", with no cushioning "I think"

Ha! I thought I was being overly blunt and felt slightly bad about it for a while.

A perfect demonstration indeed.
posted by jaguar at 4:55 PM on October 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I did a talk last night for the computing society at UCC on "Why Technology Sucks for Women" (because holy shitballs does it suck miles of dong) and while it always makes me nervous that things did not go well when there are no questions from the room, a large group of students came outside afterwards to tell me they had found it really valuable. (Which was so nice of them!)

So we stood around talking afterwards and I recapped this article for them. Two of them told me about having made perfectly reasonable requests of their male housemates and being given boxes of tampons the next day (because they were clearly cranky bitches on the rag, geddit?) So I told them about jam rags, which I had learned about from Jane the Brown just that morning.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:48 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]