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Breaking Gender Cliques at Work?
An anonymous reader asks: "No-one likes finding themselves being the 'odd one out' of a clique, and gender barriers make them harder to break. The question is simple: what can a girl in IT do when she finds herself on the outside of those cliques of boy coworkers? Or inversely, what should groups of boys at work be doing to be more welcoming for that lone girl in the IT office?"
Ugh, there's no need to focus on "gender issues". There are all kinds of "cliques" in this world and they aren't necessarily gender-based. (PS: why "boys" and "girl", is this kindergarden? How about "men" and "women").
Maybe you're just new, or you're smarter than them, or you're a different race, or you speak with an accent, or you have different skills, or maybe, you're just shy. Conversely, they might be scared of you! Sometimes guys in IT just have pretty bad social skills.
The first thing to keep in mind is that YOU are responsible for everything that happens to you. I know, this is kind of a foreign concept in our society, but bear with me here. If you want to be friends with your co-workers, you can. If you don't like your co-workers and you want a different job, you can make that happen too. If you want to change the culture in your office, become the CEO, or anything else, you are capable of it. Once you have this kind of confidence, making friends is easy. No need to blame something outside yourself ("gender clique") when you're perfectly capable of achieving whatever you desire.
I know that's a "big" answer to a "small" question, but there was a point in my life when I had a revelation along those lines and these kinds of "problems" just stopped happening to me.
For a specific answer, the best way to make friends with someone (or a group) is to to treat them like they are your friends and have been for a long time. Pretty easy!
So, let's assume these folks are your best friends. What do you do when you see them, say, together at lunch? You join them. You sit down and act as if it's totally appropriate to sit down and say hello, and you've been doing it for years. You have genuine interest in what they say, and you're eager to learn from them and appreciate whatever differences they have from you. You don't care what gender they are, and if they're cold or unreceptive, it's because you need to be a little more patient or try a little harder.
If for some reason they won't accept you as part of their social group, then that's fine too. You can just do your job the best you can, or better yet, leave and get a better job.
Think of some ideas along these lines, ways you can connect with your co-workers. Write them down, and then tomorrow, put them into action.
As for them, well, if they want advice they can Ask Slashdot themselves. You are the one asking the question.
I would suggest getting a lawyer because you should be able to have several sexual harrassment suits on your hands, you won't need to work there much longer.
This is exactly why I refuse to have anything to do with any of my female coworkers. It is *far* too easy to get slapped with a sexual harassment complaint these days. I've never been hit with one myself (and I think my refuse-to-deal-with-them policy is why I've been safe), but I've seen coworkers hit and fired for it. Simple stuff, like asking if your female coworker would like to go to lunch has been enough to get coworkers written up at companies I've worked for. No guy would hesitate to ask another guy what his lunch plans were, but ask a female and you're heading for trouble.
Is this extreme? Yes, it is. But I like having income. So I simple refuse to have anything to do with female coworkers that isn't directly job related. No friendliness, no joking around, no post-work activities, no weekend/holiday party invitations. Seriously, this is how guys feel comfortable keeping their jobs because the sexual harassment system is completely screwed up.
So to the women asking how they can "fit in", the answer is that you can't. Some group of ultra-feminists with get-em-fired happy lawyers have ruined it for the rest of you. In an office full of men, we're scared to death of you, because even a wrong look can take away our ability to support our families. So please, for everyone's sake, just leave us alone.
The lawyer thing is actually a pretty serious detriment to male-female interactions at work.
Most IT houses these days have pretty strict sexual harassment rules. Even small computer centers have "Harassment Awareness" training of some kind. The idea that sexual harassment == being sued and/or fired is hammered in to IT workers to the extreme.
Worse, there are no end of horror stories about an innocent comment or action being construted as harassment by overzealous HR departments. How many times have we all heard the old saw about an unscrupulous woman pressing sexual harassment charges? It's mostly urban legend and closet sexism, but the idea is still there.
The net effect is that even very well-adjusted male IT personell are wary of offending a woman, should it result in loss of employment. They'll avoid conversations with women at work, not out of sexism, but out of a sense of personal safety.
The unfortuneate not-so-well-adjusted IT guys are TERRIFIED. The guys who had trouble talking to females in highschool and college suddenly find themselves under threat of legal action when they enter the workplace, as well as ordinary crushing rejection.
If a woman wants to interact with these guys, she's going to have to make the first move.
No, a woman shouldn't have to prove anything upon entering the workplace. Unfortuneately, the climate that's been created by an oversensitivity to sexual harassment means that a woman has a lot to prove. Sad, but true.
She's got to prove that she won't sue someone for a social mistake.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If you're a woman in an all guy enviroment, just be the first one to tell an off-color joke. That usually breaks the tension enough that it's pretty easy from there on out.
My biggest complaint with my female co-workers has been a total unwillingness to put in any overtime, work on any extra projects, etc. The usual excuse always has something to do with their kids - picking them up, taking them to practice, etc. Seriously, is it going to kill your husband if he has to be the one to take Suzie to band practice one night out of how many months? Since they don't really carry their share, they are seen as second string contributors by most of my male colleagues. I have to admit that in many ways I seem them in the same light.
Then when they get passed over for promotions, plum assignments, etc. they get bitter and resentful. Since I've always been willing to do what needs doing to get the job done, I get a lot of respect from my male counterparts and superiors. If something's broken, I'm staying until it's fixed. I work pretty hard to make sure that nothing's going to be broken, but hey, stuff happens. Patches don't always perform as expected. Maybe the router needs to be rebooted. It doesn't really matter what the problem is, but if it's genuinely mission critical, I'm not going home until it's back on line.
Because of this, I'm a frequent recipient of bonuses, very positive performance appraisals, interesting projects, etc. I've had to deal with some female colleagues who were unhappy because they got passed over and I didn't. They would have liked to be able to file a complaint with HR that they were being discriminated against because of gender, but since so many of the things they wanted went to me, they could not. I actually got into a shouting match with one of them because I got an assignement she wanted. She made some accusations about favoritism and had no idea that her turning into a pumpkin promptly at 3pm, no matter what else was happening, was costing her. She thought that it was because I went outside and smoked with all the guys. That had very little to do with it. I got invited to go out and smoke with the guys precisely because I was "one of the team" and not "one of the candya$$&$". I tried to explain to her that if she'd just stick around or work an overtime assignment once in a while, it would go a long way toward smoothing things over for her, but she didn't want to hear it.
Instead of her own bad behvior, she made a bunch of accusations that ended up with her getting fired. She complained that I was getting favorable treatment when she was just a competent (which she wasn't - she made a lot of high profile mistakes including knocking out our external connection), doing the same work (which she wasn't - system operator vs. network administrator), and doing just as good a job (which she wasn't - HR said that the performance reviews were "no comparision"). After a few interviews with our co-workers, HR decided that she was the one with the problem and asked me if I'd like to file a complaint about her creating a hostile work environment (the whole incident where she cornered me in the women's bathroom and screamed at me - so loudly and so long that several other employees came into the restroom to find out what was going on). After consulting with my boss, I decided that it was probably best that I file the complaint. You cannot imagine how surprised she was when she was the one that got fired. Sadly, it only got worse from there because I started getting threatening phone calls from her husband. I called the police, filed a complaint, and they got arrested.
Frankly, a lot of the women I work with really make me angry because they give the rest of us a bad name. They want all the gravy, but they don't want to pay the dues to get it.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
I have a wonderful and, thus far, apparently foolproof system: I'm from another culture.
Them: "We think you interacted inappropriately with that female."
Me: "In my culture, that's entirely appropriate. Is this a race thing? Are you singling out my very respectful 'English' behavior as inappropriate in your American workplace?"
Them: "Oh, shit. We could get sued for that, couldn't we? Pretend we said nothing."
It's much like patent law. Companies patent stupid crap they don't really need to patent simply so that when the next company sues them, they have something they could counter sue over and they know they'll both agree to back off in exchange for shared patents.
As I am of a different race, so long as I'm basically polite, cases where fear-of-getting-sued prompts people to freak out over my being male and talking to females can be just as quickly quashed by their equally over inflated fear of an English employee suing over cultural insensitivity and racism.
99% of sexual harassment stupidity isn't motivated by actual lawsuits so much as fear of lawsuits. If I genuinely commit sexual harassment, I expect to get disciplined for it. On the other hand, if people want to freak out about possibilities, I'll give them other possibilities that are just as scary to push them back the other way.