I’m a man myself, but I’m a foreigner where I live and work, so I sometimes get the impression that my intelligence is a bit underestimated by employers and coworkers. I’m a sous chef, so in a management position, and I often get this feeling like the chef de cuisine, the owner, and sometimes some of the cooks aren’t listening to me. Like I’ll have to reiterate my point two or even three times at a meeting before I get a relevant answer, or I’ll send a memo out and the changes I’ve instated aren’t being adopted after the fact, or someone I’m talking to might vacantly say “yes” as if they’re occupied with something else.
Yesterday I asked the chef a question about a recipe that only he could answer and he said I could google it. I’d already googled it just to be sure, wouldn’t you know. The day before, the owner told a cook, who then told me, that we all together were planning to put all delivery receipts in a neat little box and adopt a system to check they’re correct, but I’d already done it alone a week earlier, and told them all about it, with photos and everything. I feel like I’m going mad.
I hear that this is a (more) common experience for women, so I wonder if any of you have any tips or tricks or whatever to make yourself heard, or to at least cope with not being heard, or even just a bit of commiseration is fine. Cheers!
This is a common, everyday experience for women in all our relationships including our personal ones. Not much you can do about it except keep repeating yourself until someone hears or just shut down on the subject and walk away. It’s always infuriating but after a while the shutting down numbs you out so it doesn’t feel like it cuts as deep even though it really does. Tell yourself it’s a them problem, you tried your best but they don’t care to listen, and go on with your day.
I hear it a lot, yes. It brings a tear to my eye to think about it. Sorry to read it.
Not that I’m excited that anyone has to deal with this, but I have to point out how this is an ongoing issue women deal with, but we’re always written off as nagging (at home) or a bitch (at work).
But we can only get a conversation going if it’s a man bringing the issue up.
A few years ago, a couple of people did an experiment at work*. 2 people, one male one female, were regularly having very different experiences with clients at work. Every step of projects the woman was working on was met with difficulties from the client. They didn’t believe her recommendations, wanted a second opinion, talked down to her, etc. The man saw none of this.
They were both very qualified for the work and both routinely interfaced with clients via email.
For a week or two, they swapped email signatures and immediately clients were approving (and even praising) the woman’s work. Suddenly everything the man brought to the client was questioned.
Salt in the wound is that it’s the man’s temporary experience that gets more coverage than the the woman’s every day reality.
Even talking about the phenomenon needs to be from a man’s perspective to get clicks/sell ad space/ get people to care
*Edit I wrote this comment from memory of the article. After rereading, the experiment wasn’t on purpose, it was only after the man accidentally had his email signature set up to look like the woman’s. Just wanted to add this before anyone comes here with the intent to derail the conversation because i misrepresented that part of the story.
I remember reading about that! Likewise, our other sous chef is a woman, also foreign, and I’m often reminding people that she knows what she’s doing. Obviously I spoke to her about this whole thing before posting here, and she sort of had a stoical attitude about it.
Not a woman, but just wanted to put some food for thought out there…. how’s your accent? Heavy accents tend to get ignored because they are not heard/understood.
Well, I’m using my second language at work, and people are always telling me I speak it well when they find out it’s my second language. I could entertain the possibility that there’s a language barrier but I’m positive people aren’t engaging with my point rather than not comprehending what I’m saying. For example, I asked if we paid a supplier a monthly fee to use them, so the boss said yes, €150 per month, so I followed up by saying buying this cheaper ingredient from them wasn’t actually saving us money overall, and I had to explain my point three times, until it turned out we don’t pay a monthly fee at all.
Edit: For what it’s worth, my accent in English is very broad. One of the reasons I speak this other language so well is that I have to use it because people often don’t understand my English.
Be confident and Get to the point first, don’t build up with a lot of talking, hook them first to catch their ears and spit it out.
Example:
“We can save time and reduce mistakes if we keep the papers together in a box so we can find them and check them”
Vs
“What I’m thinking is we get a box, it doesn’t have to be a big box, any size really and what we can do is like, put the papers in it, and we can all put the papers in it and that way, if we need to when we want to find them, we can look through and check to make sure that it’s there and everything is right, that way we won’t have as many errors and we won’t have customers yelling at us that we forgot things”
Unfortunately, people have short attention span, they are busy multi tasking and don’t have time for a long story.
At least that seems to help me. Sometimes you have to be dramatic or funny too.
Also, some people are just jerks and don’t have enough respect for others
I don’t think that’s the problem most of the time but I’ll keep your advice in mind, especially next time I send a memo. I have made them a bit long in the past and just apologised at the bottom for the length.
Cope with not being heard? Drink.
Otherwise, just try to put everything in writing. However, it’s more of a “cover your ass” solution than being heard in any meaningful way.
But if you find the secret, please share! Working women everywhere need to know.
Ha. You’ll be the first to know.
