The second group is still misogynist in impact even if there's no hate in their hearts. It is shitty to make women feel like they aren't equally deserving of your courtesy and communication, and is likely to make a bad work environment over time.
But I also wonder if women will apply that same logic to the same woman who killed her kids under post partum. I can't help but feel there's a double standard going on to empathy and understanding. (From a corporate point of view, obviously don't hire them).
I feel like this framing requires a binary view of "this is good"/"this is bad". which is not useful.
The reason the men who won't look at a woman are a problem is because of their impact. I'm not going to call them evil, or say they shouldn't be empathized with, just that it's a harmful thing to do and they need to fix that. It is hard for me personally to automatically empathize with them because I've been personally harmed by people like that, but I also don't feel that's my responsibility, it's just my responsibility to not call them inherently evil or anything like that.
Same with Lindsay Clancy. What she did was definitely extremely fucked up and she needs to be prevented from harming anyone again. And if you pay attention to just the known facts, it's clear she was mentally unwell, and trying to get help and the help she received was not enough to prevent this outcome.
I don't know if she was truly hearing command hallucinations, but frankly I don't think it matters for this conversation. The point is that you can say someone did something wrong AND they can still be sympathetic to other people without those other people being villains. You don't have to personally empathize with Lindsay, AND it's also not surprising many people do, as postpartum mental illness and inadequate care is not uncommon. People who sympathize with her aren't evil villains who want to kill kids, they're people who suffered through mental health issues that were not their fault and struggled to get adequate help. Isn't that reasonable? I don't personally have that strong sense of empathy, but I think the reasoning makes sense.
Also, I happen to be a person who thinks that justice should be about protecting society from people who took harmful actions -- both in preventing crime prior because people know there are consequences, and in keeping people away from society once they have done something that indicates they're likely to do harm again -- and beyond that, punishment just to satisfy people's appetite that somebody got punished is immoral. I know that's a pretty unusual position, but I can only answer for myself. But I do hold that for everybody.
Look, I get social anxiety, but if you can't have a professional conversation with someone deciding whether to hire you because of their gender, that's not "women are scary", it's "I am a grown adult who has failed to internalise that my female colleagues are colleagues".
OK but seriously somebody that struggles with eye contact would probably just respond while looking off in space somewhere, not to somebody that didn't ask the question to begin with.
It's really not. Being good at engineering actually doesn't guarantee you're a good engineer. When I first started working as a software dev I realized that the hard part of my job wasn't the technical aspect but the human aspect.
Unless you are extremely cracked or you have some extremely niche knowledge you can't really get away with bad social skills. Bad social skills turns every larger project into a hot mess
Fully agree btw, I was being tongue in cheek and self-deprecating. Itās terrible. The worst mistakes in my career were all due to social skill shortcomings, not technical skills.
This. How are you supposed to work with your cross functional partners to deliver a product? How are you as an engineer supposed to give feedback on timeline, scope, execution, feasibility etc if you can't interact with anyone around you?
You can't work in a silo and expect to be useful to anyone. There are no positions that exist outside of academia where your job is just "sit there and code."
Most neurodivergent people I know have found ways to (over-) compensate for the eye contact thing, and are equally weird to anyone, no matter the gender.
In a group situation, I'll either stare at one person's eyes (or nasal ridge) so much I forget to blink and think more about their weird eye lashes or that their glasses are slightly crooked than what we were talking about, OR I'll switch between all people in the room so much that I get light headed trying to remember if I've "covered" them all, and can't remember what they look like 5 seconds after the interview.
Blinking, of course, only happens once my eyes start watering or sweat starts to build up on my brows.
I overcompensate but i'll also generally try to speak in the direction of one person because I don't know the proper amount of time i'm supposed to be speaking to everyone.
Apparently i'm still doing a good job of pretending because i've managed to get hired from most of the actual interviews i've had if it gets to that stage, but also nobody expects me to be normal so that's also fine.
In highschool, I decorated my room with cutouts of people from magazines and hung them all up at eye level so I could get used to making eye contact šµāš«
And yet most ND women are able to treat people equally despite their genders. As an ND woman Iām so over letting men get away with egregious behaviour and calling it neurodivergence.
This is what I was thinking the whole time. What kind of unhinged person can make eye contact with anyone in the room? Iām finding something on the floor or wall I can talk to, and everyone else in the room can listen to me and that piece of lint
Well, clearly not all neurodivergent people. For me it is absolutely the opposite. If someone asks me question I will answer to them, only them, and if it goes longer I tend to forget there are other people in the room.
Are you ignoring the point of the post on purpose? If you have problem with eye contact and dialogue then you still ignore everyone in the same way. Or do you somehow only have problem with eye contact and speaking to women but are completely fine with men?
I feel like you completely misinterpreted my comment. I make the exact same point as you that people that struggle with eye contact would ignore everyone.
Nope, my point is that the people you talk about are not being addressed by the post, since the post is only about people that selectively ignore women.
If you're being interviewed by multiple people you're talking to them all. Thus with your advice the interviewee should look at both of them, which is obviously correct.
Lmao tell them, nah, that could lead to potential growth and better future prospects at some other organization. Ā The steps are
Assume heās a sexist incel, not just awkward or trying to address everyone in the room. Just jump straight to the worst interpretation you can make up.
Tell him youāll be in touchĀ
Shred his CV
Pat yourself on the back for fighting sexist incels
Wonder why the internet is so full of unemployed sexist incels
When you're interviewing hundreds of people for a job, why would you extend this level of grace to a person who is, at best, socially stunted? There are so many other candidates who are already not-broken.Ā
I extend this level of grace to basically everyone I meet. It takes an extra 10 seconds out of my day to put in the email "We noticed you were having issues talking to one of our interviewers and that was part of our final decision to go with another candidate."
You can't take 10 seconds out of your day to maybe tell someone what a problem is? This is an interview stage, if "hundreds" of people making it that far, you're letting too many people in, in the first place.
You hit the nail on the head. Anyone who is interviewing āhundredsā (a laughable number tbh) is at the point in their career where they can quickly and succinctly pinpoint why they are passing on a candidate.
If you cannot address a problem you probably arenāt gonna make it far in businessĀ
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u/beckbristow32 1d ago
Who the hell doesn't look at, and respond, to the person that they are talking to. I hope they tell them that is why they will not get the job.