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Maybe it's the way you tell them. With engineers, a little explicitness goes a long way, and will generally be accepted - unless you're being patronising and te
by greenrd 9y ago
Maybe it's the way you tell them. With engineers, a little explicitness goes a long way, and will generally be accepted - unless you're being patronising and telling them something they already know. So try saying "I'm not saying this to gain any sympathy or anything like that, but I had a similar experience, which was... and what it taught me / how it made me stronger was..." I mean that's kind of a stilted template, but you get the general idea.
Now, this might lead to a bunfight about whether those situations were similar, in your colleagues' opinions - but then at least you'd have brought out into the open where your colleagues weren't thinking along the same lines as you - which might not always be what you expected!
- DoreenMichele 9y agoWell, to be fair, I never really stopped doing it. But I do handle things differently. I still don't think that makes it fair to assume the woman in the article wasn't doing something similar. We don't have her side of the story. We have someone else's version of events. Also: A man telling a woman that her observations about her own experiences aren't valid and she just must be doing it wrong has a not nice name because it is not nice behavior. Which may be apropos of nothing if you happen to be female and just failed to say that. Either way, I wasn't asking for advice, I was giving testimony, so your comment is guilty of treating me like a victim when I wasn't playing the victim card at all, just testifying from firsthand experience.
- greenrd 9y agoIf you read my comment carefully, I didn't say you "must" be doing it wrong. I said "maybe". Statistically, men are more likely to react to tales of woe by trying to solve the actual problem, whereas women are likely to react by (first) offering sympathy, so I was just being a typical man, not doing anything wrong.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]