Help! A male colleague thinks it’s scary

Dear OOO,

I am a middle-aged woman manager in a medium-sized company. “Ben,” a male colleague I’m pretty close to, “Steve,” a male colleague I’m not close to, told Beni that he was scared of me. Steve and I don’t work in the same department, but we meet quite often together, and now I’m very conscious about her. I’m a nice person, not abusive, I swear, but I like to be fair, do I think Steve interprets it as scary? Ben thinks it’s just because I’m a woman, but I don’t know how to act about that guy right now — help!

–Martine

This is definitely definitely happening because you are a woman. I don’t need any additional information about your workplace or your personality to know that Steve is definitely saying that he is afraid of you or that he is afraid of people because he is uncomfortable with working women.

I know because I’ve been told four times I’m scared, and every time the accuser has been a man. (In 75 percent of those cases, like yours, the man was too scared to tell me so I filtered the message through another man.) I know because I asked a bunch of other women — women know how to be nice people! – Whether a man has accused them of being intimidating at work, and everyone has said yes. I know this because I have worked with many men who treat themselves as feminists but treat men and women differently in the office differently, and because I have worked with many women who have consciously or unconsciously changed their behavior over time. I don’t know your Steve, but I do know Steve.

I know, too, because academic research proves that. 2015 one examination published in Identity and Social Psychology Bulletin they found that “men with higher roles in men (relative to women) feel more threatened (in roles more than men) and as a result tend to behave more assertively towards these women.” As part of the experiment, the men were ordered to decide how to distribute a $ 10,000 bonus and a fictitious manager. When a female manager was said to be “ambitious,” men saved much more than half the money for themselves. “Men are perceived to be more deserving and appropriate leaders than women,” one of the authors of the study found said Cut at the time. “The ambitious agency is also in line with the gender role of men. Therefore, men seeking power do not dismantle or question the traditional gender hierarchy. ”

I realize that the problem is Steve and that you don’t fix things with the validation of an internet consulting columnist. However, it allows us to tackle the right problem: you work with a man who is uncomfortable with women at work. (He said another way: You’re not scary.) The problem is, there’s no easy way to work with men (jeje / crying). Whatever you do, please don’t try to modulate your behavior around Steve; Changing who you are rarely works, and it’s not right to ask. In the meantime, dealing with someone you already think is “scary” won’t be too good either. You will feel self-awareness around him for a while, but try to be as normal, kind, and correct as possible — this is the problem you have to deal with, not yours.

Let’s talk about Ben, though. There are some colleagues very close that they tell each other everything, and if my closest colleague had told me that a guy had scared me, I would have felt disappointed. But using the word “pretty” makes me think that maybe you and Benena aren’t that close, in which case he absolutely didn’t have to tell you. That’s not the message anyone would want except a very close friend! It’s too late to get that toothpaste back into the tube, but it’s Ben who really has the duty here. If Steve hadn’t put himself in his place at the moment, Ben would have to step back and say something. For starters, he can tell Stever that there’s nothing scary about you, you’re really wonderful at working with him and he should try to get to know you better.

For cookies on male allies, Ben should gently propose (or not gently!) That he is a bit sexist because he says what it means to scare a woman. Again, the truth is that there is no easy way to work with men. But there is a hard way: the Bens of the world are demanding to rise.

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