AIBU for parents to know what roughly what job I do?

[myjob]

I probably am being unreasonable, but hear me out. Just having a brat really.

I work in the city of London in a finance role, supporting fund managers. My mum has asked what I do and I have told her many times what my role is and how it supports the wider business. She just doesn't understand it and when I try to explain, she says "it's all so complicated!" And won't even try to listen. She is in her 60's and was a SAHM her whole life. My brother works in digital media sales and it's the same with him. She thinks he works with computers and I'm a secretary. She doesn't seem to understand that I'm not in a typing pool.

It's a stressful, serious job. I have tried to explain, she doesn't seem to understand that women can have important roles in an office environment.

Do your parents understand your job if it's not something like teacher or nurse? Maybe IABU! I give up with trying to explain it now!

This is interesting to me because I have a close family member who is a software programmer. And I have never got my head around why or how he spends so much time in contact with companies who have already bought the software he has designed. Surely once his company has sold it to their company the relationship is at any end, I would think, but apparently not.

There's always things that don't work exactly as customers would like, or additional functionality wanted after the initial release. Good communication with customers is often essential for improvements

Your dad seems to have done a great job of destroying your self esteem. If you’ve achieved financial success, you must have achieved success in your work, and that isn’t nothing.

Agreed.

People just aren’t interested in other people’s jobs

If you don’t want her to think you are a PA, don’t describe it as supporting people - say you are an analyst or whatever

I think you just have to accept she will never get it, especially if she has never been in work and may stuck in a certain way of thinking about women at work.

My grandfather never really understood, for example, redundancy from white collar jobs and thought that any sort of losing an office job was really terrible and hard to recover from, when in fact its perfectly common these days, so he worried loads when it happened to DH and then to me.

My husband works in IT (although he tells me it’s ‘systems’).

We now agree that his job is ‘tapping and staring’ - at a screen.

I get people not generally being interested in other people's jobs (though actually, unless someone is a complete bore, I do actually find it interesting to know what other people do, but each to their own).

What I really don't get is that people are still uninterested when it's about their own dc or other close family members. Surely that's different, isn't it? Wouldn't you make at least a little bit of effort?

This is my mum all over.

She’ll be super proud to tell everyone how she got invited to a do at the local millionaire’s house the other day, but ask her what her daughter does to earn more money than any man in the family and she’s 🤷‍♀️

My parents never ask me about work. They know I work, they have never really cared about the inner details of any aspect of my life. I used to try to tell them when I progressed, got promoted etc, but the disinterest was so obvious, I just stopped. I can't even remember the last time my mum asked me how I am lol. Every conversation she starts with me is about her latest drama/trauma/imagined illness. I smiler, nod, and humour her.

I love my parents, but they are very self obsessed and have zero awareness for anyone else. This has been the case since my childhood. Took me a long time to realise this and accept it and be at peace with it.

Yes, there’s definitely a difference between a job and a career. I have worked in some quite interesting roles in the past, but now work in gyms teaching fitness classes. I’m really passionate about it but I don’t really talk to family and friends about it much because what is there to say besides ‘I’ve done about 700 squats this week’ 😂 Just not very interesting. But also of course a job that is easy to understand so people don’t need to ask questions about it.

Overall, I don’t find that work comes up very much in conversation with friends and family. I have some friends in low level jobs like me and some in very complex, high level jobs in IT, finance, law and so on. But none of them really talk about their jobs when we meet up. (Aside from obviously celebrating promotions or new jobs).

Reading threads like this make me more grateful for my own parents than ever. They have always been interested and supportive in relation to my career - they know what I do now, and how I got here, and they're proud of everything I have achieved. I hope that I will always take a similar interest in dd's career as it unfolds...it would feel like my mum and dad didn't even know me properly if they didn't understand something as important as what I do all day and why.

Honestly, not really, I have an ok self esteem (in the professional area, that is). It also has not been like that before - it is just in the recent times, and I think it has been triggered by the recent changes (living with parents now, and them depending on me). I think it is just easier for him to pretend that I am a silly girl who has her head in the clouds and who is secretly living off state support and blind luck, rather than acknowledge and accept the reality.

They mostly understand my current job but they didn't understand my last job at all and my sister used to tell people that I did a job that could very easily get me arrested. I'm glad they understand this job but I did keep the description very top line

I have asked, more than once. None of the sentences seemed to mean anything. I managed to grasp that he sometimes calls the company's clients up and chats to them, without doing anything so crass as talking to them directly about their contract with the company. But that this isn't a major part of what fills his time. It was the only part I understood.

I am very passionate about my job and my research. My job in particular is something I feel I have a vocation to rather than just what happens to pay the bills. But most of my family still don't know what I actually do all day, although I'm fairly sure they could tell people a rough approximation of my job title. I honestly feel that this is normal and not a slight or lack of engagement.

I'm a lawyer in a large financial institution, previously having worked for the regulator. I have given up explaining this to my parents. Who cares.

That still doesn’t make it ok for him to talk to you like that.

My grandma was a bit like this. When I started working after university she was always asking me whether the girls at work were friendly. I actually worked in a very male dominated environment but I’m sure she thought I was a secretary or something similar.
Then when we bought our house she was so impressed but always saying to me “oh DH does treat you well doesn’t he”. Well actually I earn about £20k more than DH, put down more deposit than he did and did 90% of the legwork in buying and renovating the house.
I gave up trying to put her straight in the end, she was just of a different generation although I know how much it grates!

We will have to agree to disagree on that point, as I think that, if people are genuinely engaged and interested, they will make the effort to understand.

It sounds like you feel a bit dismissive towards your relatives marketing job...like you don't think it's actually a real job with real value, perhaps unlike your own role which you describe as a vocation. I wonder if that contributes to your lack of understanding as you just don't consider it to be that important? A bit of a non-job maybe?

I sort of understand this. I too work in a role which I regard as a vocation, and it's important to me to make a difference. Most of my relatives are similar. But even if a job seemed quite pointless to me, I think I would still make an effort to understand it if it was important to them. I struggle to understand how you can have it explained and just not get what they do...unless their explanations are just really bad, that is!! Presumably they understand what they're trying to achieve and why it matters, so how come they can't articulate this in a way that makes sense to you, I wonder?

This thread has become increasingly depressing! So many awful views out there:

A woman WFH is dossing about; a man WFH is working
Women don’t earn as much as men, let alone (gasp) more
A married woman is financially supported by her husband. It isn’t possible for her to earn the same or more as him
A woman in a good job must be a diversity hire
Whatever she does, and however senior she is, she’s probably a secretary or some kind of assistant
Parents / in-laws talk down their daughter’s/DIL’s career but not their son’s/ SIL’s

After all these years, women are not seen as anything like equal in the workplace - so much so that when we do a senior, professional, highly qualified and/or well paid job, people convince themselves that we can’t be doing that, we must be a secretary.

They not only have these views, they say it to our faces.

Actually... that was surprisingly liberating to hear. Thank you.

Totally agree, it's awful to see all of these views being shared by parents and grandparents etc. I always grew up believing that these people were supposed to be our biggest cheerleaders.

What's most depressing is how many posters seem totally resigned to it, like it doesn't even really matter.

I am starting to feel very lucky for having a family that does stuff that I have perhaps taken too much for granted in the past.

Why does it matter? She has no understanding of that work type or environment. Why does it matter to you so much?

It doesn't sound like it's just a case of her not knowing, it's that she is belittling your job, and that would really bug me too. I think I'd struggle to be polite in replying to be honest. I wouldn't care so much about her not knowing, it's like she's deliberately getting it wrong and that's not nice.

I am head of a department for a large multinational company, in a b2b type of professional services for executives.
My parents think I work in customer service. I gave up explaining both my role and my company's business a loooooong time ago.
Oh, and I also work from home, which obviously means I am not REALLY working.

I'll admit that in the beginning I did put marketing into a mental category of 'office jobs in the private sector' which are all a bit samey to me, and for which my working assumption was that they were the kind of things people did interchangeably rather than because they had a real enthusiasm for that particular field. But over the years it has become clear that my relative really does see himself as someone in marketing as a whole distinct career, and has put a lot of effort (and money) in his spare time into training. So I do now appreciate that marketing is really his career and not just one job among many. I still don't get what it is he does though, even when he's WFH and doing it right next to me. I honestly don't think I know enough about what it is to make a judgment call on whether it's a career I would value or consider worthwhile, I just don't get what it is.