🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Feb 4

Recently, I was thinking about why men¹ talk over women, and I think it's less a gender thing, and more of a...

"men¹ are taught to talk over anyone who doesn't talk more assertively than they do"

In my roles as an executive at several tech companies, the one negative feedback I got on almost every review was that I wasn't assertive enough in meetings with other execs. One male CEO even told me "you need to interrupt more, talk more—even if you don't know the answer. Otherwise they'll think you don't have anything to say". Which, honestly, churned my stomach.

The feedback was clear, if I wanted to succeed I needed to talk like the guys¹ in the boardroom—the same ones¹ who'd interrupt to ask a question I was already in the middle of explaining, who'd repeat a suggestion I'd just made—only louder, who'd make some cute comment that would derail my presentation, who'd explain my position back to me as though they'd just thought of it.

I needed to do that...and I needed to do it louder.

Otherwise men¹ weren't going to listen to me.

¹ not all men

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@alice
In my experience, many men actually expect women to just listen to them/validate them and it's different from just talking over other men.

For many men this just seems to be how they think you "talk to women".
No intentional malice, just having it normalised so much, that it would take active effort to question it and realise what is happening.
Since pushback is rare, it's easier to just find another woman to talk to and avoid women who don't play along.

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Feb 4 at 9:47pmWeb
Show threadhauchFeb 4

@alice
You can probably find a lot of accounts, that have a suspiciously high rate of how many female to male presenting accounts they talk to(and probably get blocked by).

They know on some level, that they couldn't talk to other men in this way, because the conversation is one-sided, only taking their needs into account.

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