3 ms·
The thing is that communication style is not a mere decoration: it's an important skill for an engineer. And that's bad news for women if they really do speak
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
The thing is that communication style is not a mere decoration: it's an important skill for an engineer.
And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if you are first confindent.
Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.
But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.
- zepto 10y agoWhy do you assume tre difference has anything to do with 'timidity'?
- adrianratnapala 10y agoThe original story talks about women being more easily discouraged than men -- this is in line with other new stories I have seen in the same genre. If all that is true, then one might suspect that men talk more confidently while women talk more diffidently. In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes, they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.