Men's strategic incompetence - AIBU to say it's not just at home?

[Triffid1]

So often on threads I see women who are frustrated at their DPs because they can't do the simplest things at home (I am, obviously, 100% in their camp and agree it's ridiculous) but there's often comments about how it's especially irritating because all these men are supposedly competent at work.

Except, in my experience, soooooo many men are equally strategically incompetent at work and it has zero negative impact on them. AIBU to say this issue is far wider than just not being able to "remember" DC lunchboxes?

I can think of 100 examples without even trying:

The men who could never ever organise their own travel arrangements. So somehow always got someone else to do it. Ditto booking restaurants, arranging meetings etc.

The boss who refused to learn the basics of computer work so that all the junior (women only, natch) who worked for him had to spend time helping him constantly to set up a printer/ print out an email etc.

No man in the history of my working career (25+ years) has organised the leaving/ birthday/wedding/maternity card/gift. Not even the junior ones.

I currently employ freelancers. It is ALWAYS the men who need me to hand hold, "Can you please tell me what the deadline is [because I can't be bothered to click on the link you provided that has all the details]" or "Oh, I don't always see my emails so can you send me a text message if you need something".

At work, skipping all this just allows them more time to network and dazzle with their "brilliance" or to have an easier time of it. Why on earth would they be any different at home?

If it's not her job, and you were unhappy with his behaviour, why didn't you pull him up on it if she wasn't comfortable doing so?

This was 20 odd years ago but you know what's astonishing? I did. So did other (female) colleagues. And we told the junior not to do it. BUT.... he just shrugged it off and/or said she didn't mind or whatever. And she would just repeat it, while obviously feeling uncomfortable and unwilling to rock thereat. And it's not like we could go and "tittle tattle" to the senior (male) bosses. If I was that person today, I might be more likely to raise it up the food chain, but it certainly wasn't an option then.

Once I became a boss, absolutely, I didn't put up with this behaviour from male reports. And you won't be shocked to hear that the contractors I have worked with the longest and/or give the most work to are all women because I just quietly drop the contractors/freelancers who piss me off.

Doesn't change the fact that I hear about it consistently, particularly within client organisations. Or that even at my last (employed in an actual corporate) job where I was relatively senior, I certainly couldn't push back on the more senior men who behaved badly. Or that there's only so much I could do if I saw the behaviour in other teams.

Oh absolutely - I’m an academic and male strategic incompetence is rife here. The fastest way to not be asked to do boring admin/service/committee work is to do it so badly that you can’t be trusted with being asked to do it again.

And it’s definitely not to do with seniority - we have senior women all over the shop doggedly carrying on being capable and competent in some chairing/administrative/practical task or role. Yet so many senior men who have made it a career feature that they can’t somehow do anything organisational because they’re so disorganised. “Don’t give X task to Stephen/Bob/David or it won’t get done properly” is the constant refrain - invariably Bob made a name for himself in about 1985 spectacularly messing up a committee or task, and never answers an email, so has never been asked again.

You see the young men strategising to do this too - loudly proclaiming they are far too busy and can’t keep on top of boring tasks, just to send the message!

@Pedalpushers

In my experience, anyone in the workplace who has achieved a certain level of seniority does this to an extent whether male or female. I always wonder how people end up in such senior roles when they can't perform basic tasks, but then you realise that getting other people to do their basic tasks IS their role. I say if you can't beat em, join em.

I think this is true and its basically built into the structure of many industries, but there's definitely a sex twist to it which benefits men.

There's a particular Catch 22 in my industry whereby the junior staff basically spend 80% of their time on admin -- organising meetings and writing agendas etc. Their competence at this is what gets them noticed and promoted but ironically the more senior they get the more they are discouraged from doing this because it takes away from the "strategic" work they are meant to do.

Inevitably, the male staff are quicker at learning to delegate and get the admin stuff off their to do list by farming it out to female juniors. I've noticed that some of the mid-level female people really struggle with the transition to stop doing all the admin for the senior people because it feels like their job, while the blokes tend to walk away from it without a backward glance.

The thing is the female staff who are not so hot on the admin side definitely get judged more harshly at the start of their careers, while male staff who are a bit disorganised but "brilliant" at the more freewheeling stuff get cut more slack. Which creates a real paradox for female junior people wanting to be promoted. They can't win: if they're rubbish at admin they are seen as flaky, if they're too good at it they are not seen as management material.

So I do partly agree with the OP. It is a seniority thing but its definitely easier for men to wash their hands of this dull admin stuff than it is for women.

@foxgoosefinch great, practical examples that have nothing to do with seniority necessarily. And relates to research re how women in academia often have less research/published work because they land up taking on the teaching/admin/other stuff.

@Lolalasagna

I was going to say exactly what *@Pedalpushers* said - I work with someone really senior who somehow manages to make it your fault if she hasn't read your email (you sent it at the wrong time, you didn't call her to tell you you'd sent it, you should know how busy she was and that she wouldn't have read it, didn't you know she has eleventy million emails a day and you need to make sure yours is at the top of her mailbox, why didn't you mark it URGENT (I did)).

I don't think it's a male thing, my experience is it's usually a 'don't you know how important I am' thing - there is only one man in our team and he is generally the most proactive at organising team events, remembers birthdays, makes sure people get a leaving present etc

Unfortunately I have worked with women like this too who somehow make it your fault that they missed your email

The men seem to do sort of blustering incompetence (ie not being able to use the printer)

Not my experiences at all. I find working with men much easier. They get in with tasks. I find women at work spend much too much time whinging and gossiping and always finding things to moan about.

I agree. Men can be fucking useless and then still reap rewards.

Personally I don't mind a bit of man hating. Men as a class DESPISE women. Misogyny is everywhere.

@vivainsomnia

Not my experiences at all. I find working with men much easier. They get in with tasks. I find women at work spend much too much time whinging and gossiping and always finding things to moan about.

I'm always a bit bemused when I read this. In my gaff the men are just as bitchy if not more so than the women.

Sorry @ZeroFuchsGiven and @araiwa you're right.

I didn't explain that well, my issue was that it kept happening after PAs were cut for cost reasons and the role became a shared team admin support. But a few of the guys (& only guys) couldn't seem to fathom how they could exists without someone calling them, booking everything and printing off pages and pages of emails.

YANBU!

I am not in a City or other big firm and variously the men here
Don't know how to host a Zoom
Can't print-preview and print docs
Can't book their own appointments
Can't set up a meeting in Outlook on their own
Can't organise lunch for meetings
Can't do their own expenses
etc
etc
GRAAAHHHH

There's a good looking man at my running club who runs his own business (so you'd assume is reasonably competent) but he's absolutely useless with social arrangements. Always late and needs reminding of dates and times and meeting places.

Women seem to find it adorable and fall over themselves to help him out

I didn't many years as a PA before my current role

Half of what people are describing here was just my job that I got paid to do. I was not expecting my employer to book his own travel and accommodation because then I wouldn't have a job

IME the work equivalent of domestic strategic incompetence just gets you fired

@daimbarsatemydogsbone the research on office housework gender bias is pretty hefty:

University of Cambridge

https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/insight/2021/office-glamour-and-office-housework/

Journey of business and Psychology:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Seulki-Jang-2/publication/342257944OfficeeHouseworkBurnouttandPromotionnDoesGenderrMatter/links/5ef79f1b458515505078a8e3/Office-Housework-Burnout-and-Promotion-Does-Gender-Matter.pdf

University of California:

hbr.org/amp/2018/04/women-of-color-get-asked-to-do-more-office-housework-heres-how-they-can-say-no

The bias is a double whammy - women do more but don't get promoted for it (because they're expected to do it due to gender bias). When men do it everyone thinks they're amazing and it strongly predicts promotion likelihood.

Increasingly I see women standing back from the office wife work, wise to it now. But it's rarely a man that steps into the void.

That complaint makes no sense. If women are stepping back from the job then why on earth should a man "step into the void" as you put it? Either it's worth doing - by someone, regardless of gender - or it's not? If women are entitled to decline to do it then so are men.

Maybe I've been lucky but I've not come across a particular problem with men being "strategically incompetent". Maybe it's that the men I work with are generally well-educated and are of the opinion that incompetence in any area of their professional life doesn't reflect well on them.

When working in a different company it was mainly women who played the "incompetence card" to get out of the shitty jobs they were being paid to do. That was when I started out working though, most of them were early-20s at most.

@EishetChayil

I agree. Men can be fucking useless and then still reap rewards.

Personally I don't mind a bit of man hating. Men as a class DESPISE women. Misogyny is everywhere.

Yeah, great plan, let's all hate each other.

Are the senior men behaving badly - or are they just better at delegating? I don't mean the ones who ask a younger woman to make the tea but getting someone more knowledgeable of either sex to format your documents doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

I think this:
I work with someone really senior who somehow manages to make it your fault if she hasn't read your email
and similar examples on this thread is different to what I'm actually speaking about.

A wanker-boss can as easily be a woman as a man. And of course, I think I've seen some suggestions that proportionately, women can be worse (I remember some research or similar suggesting that because women know that at best, one or two can make it to the top, there's an additional, sub-conscious, effort to discredit other women because you know you are competing with them in a different way).

But the zoom example is a great one. It's the sort of day to day thing that is no different really to being able to dial a phone number or whatever, that so many (not all) men, at all levels, just don't do or do badly so that everyone then subsequently works around them.

Ditto, I'm not talking about the person who can't do travel arrangements if there is a PA to do that for him/her. But, for example, when I started out working in a fairly small firm, there was 1 assistant. Her job was 80% to look after the co-MDs and to do team related activities. The rest of us were expected to sort our own travel/expenses etc.

OR a different version of the same is the man who does have a PA to do his travel arrangements but who forgets the print out she gave him and is incapable of pulling up the details on his email (which she also sent him) or his diary (which she put in for him) ....

That complaint makes no sense. If women are stepping back from the job then why on earth should a man "step into the void" as you put it? Either it's worth doing - by someone, regardless of gender - or it's not? If women are entitled to decline to do it then so are men.

Aah, but women are often penalised for declining. Accused of being "difficult", "aggressive", "not a team player" etc etc etc. Certainly seen that 100 times. Or the subtle abuse and effort to set women up against each other, "ooh, you can't ask Bling to do that, she's a feminist" as A.N Other Woman steps up instead, with gritted teeth.

@JuergenSchwarzwald

Are the senior men behaving badly - or are they just better at delegating? I don't mean the ones who ask a younger woman to make the tea but getting someone more knowledgeable of either sex to format your documents doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

I typed stuff to make money throughout university. But no, it is NOT a good use of my time to do someone else's document formatting if that is not my job. Ever. These are basic skills in today's office place.

Ugh yeah my boss is super strategically incompetent. He kept asking that I emailed documents to him, which were saved on our network and I had told him where they were saved multiple times. When he asks I just send him the links to the network. He can’t be bothered to log onto it so he asks someone else for the document or just doesn’t do the work and says he can’t find what he needs! I think he’s being performance managed… 🤞

It is my experience, with the caveat that younger men do seem to be more capable of organising a piss up at a brewery and that sort of thing than older men.
I think it is mentioned in ‘Invisible Women’ ( I haven’t read every response here).
It’s also true that it is often women that want to perpetuate irritating stuff like buying birthday cards and organising secret Santa.
Some of the problems may be to do with a lack of support staff, which makes less sense the bigger the pay differential.

There is definitely also a class of boss male and female who demands a forensic degree of organisation from the juniors but who is not prepared to do the same.

I've known bosses who are desperately chaotic about email and will ask you to resend an email you sent them an hour prior, but who will ball you out for not being able to find one they sent you months ago.

@QueBarbaridad on 'irritating stuff like birthday cards' I actually wonder the opposite - I suspect the value of this sort of thing will be recognised more and more. In a zoom meeting, hybrid world where it's harder to get and keep good staff, leaders are much more interested in the things that drive strong culture and employee engagement. I think little gestures like birthday cards can cumulatively make a big difference. Obviously not instead of good basics like salary, purpose, recognition, support and promotion opportunities but as the difference between somewhere people are happy with vs really go all out for, I think it's important.

I once stumbled upon a strategy for dealing with this. Whilst working for an alternative organisation, a visiting Trustee strolled in and told me do some printing/admin for him. I, all welcoming, logged him in on a spare computer, showed him where the printer & paper was and left him to it. I wasn't trying to make a point especially, it just seemed the most efficient, respectful, empowering solution. I heard later that he thought I had the most graceful and charming way of saying Fuck Off that he'd ever come across! I think guilelessness and spontaneity was key though ...

but women are often penalised for declining

Maybe they are.

It's not been my experience.

My first 'proper job' was as software support in an IBM dealership. In the first month or two, the person who covered for the receptionist's lunch break was off, I'll and likely to be off for some time.

The first lunch time, the MD actually sat at the desk. The next day, he asked me (the only female, non secretary in the building) to do so. I was perfectly happy to help out.

Next day, he asked me was I ok to do it again, pointing out that he had done a turn, too. I said I was happy to do so again, when everyone else apart from the two of us had taken their turn.

Oddly enough, the next day we had a new person providing cover for all the missing persons role.

I don't know what the answer is for everyone. Doing my fair share of grunt work and then being too busy with more important stuff has worked well for me.