Oh to have the confidence of an average male

[Errors]

This is one of my favourite sayings now. Did I get it right? I think I read it for the first time on here.

Anyway, what is it about getting slightly older (40s) and all of a sudden SEEING this everywhere?

I went on a date the other day with a guy who still
lives at home with his Dad and siblings (he is my age) which normally wouldn’t be off putting in of itself (it was circumstantial) but he was so unbelievably full of himself. Kept talking about women in the office throwing themselves at him, text me after to say I was too ‘cold’ and not flirty enough and so he decided to ‘match my vibe’ and almost made out like I was really missing out on someone great by not wanting to see him again.

Tell me some of your hilarious stories about men acting this way please.
Why the hell do most decidedly average (and below average) men think they’re god’s gift?

This is so so true. And everyone has to pretend they’re amazing or their fragile ego smashes.

To whoever said women just need to become more like men, adopt the same traits, be more ambitious: to hell with you!

I am a woman in a male dominated field. You have NO idea how many times I have had to ASK for promotions and pay rises when my set of responsibilities increased and grew a new sector in this company. The answer is: every single time. Not once have I been promoted 'as a surprise'.

At the same time, my male bosses hire male employees with little experience into quite senior positions. I witness how they plan to promote them in the next cycle and I just wonder to myself ON WHAT FUCKING GROUNDS. I know because I am the one working with them closely. They are just below average, no drive or initiative, but seem to somehow be thought of. I actually wondered if he should be managed out as he doesn't respond to feedback, takes very long breaks and is sometimes not contactable. I on the other hand have brought in shitloads of money for the company and nobody needed to hold my hand for it. I literally did it on my own. I wonder to this day why I have had to ask in this company THREE times to be paid more and moved up a grade. I get paid well now so that I couldn't actually switch companies, but I just resent men now.

People who say this have no idea how a woman is perceived if she behaves more like a man. As a woman, you can't win. Because you are just going to be seen as aggressive, difficult, crazy and what not.

@Thepeopleversuswork very true! Just before Christmas I was in a meeting and one of the senior men said he would need to leave early as he was going to watch his daughter's school nativity play. And we were all treated to a two minute homily from him about work/life balance and making time for family priorities.

Me and the two other women in the room were eyeballing each other incredulously, as literally 30 minutes before going into that meeting, we'd heard moaning that his PA had asked for an early finish the following day, so she could go and watch her son's nativity play. Apparently it was "fucking inconvenient" and he was fed up with her "lack of ability to prioritise the job over her kids".

That's infuriating.

DH and I see something similar. We have similar jobs, earn to within £100 of each other a month, equally pull our weight with the kids. I get the judgement for working FT, he's an absolute hero of a man because he can look after his own children who even appear to like him. Infuriating.

I read a good quote the other day:

While you are waiting to be noticed, there's a man out there asking for what you want.

I think autocorrect changed your Ada to Eva (sorry)

@Demodog

^ very true! Just before Christmas I was in a meeting and one of the senior men said he would need to leave early as he was going to watch his daughter's school nativity play. And we were all treated to a two minute homily from him about work/life balance and making time for family priorities.^

Don't get me started on this its my absolute pet hate.

I spent ten years as a single mother having to fight tooth and nail to be allowed incredibly reasonable adjustments such as being allowed to leave work 30 minutes early to pick my daughter up from childcare (and working long into the evening to make up for it) or occasionally working from home (this was pre COVID when it was less accepted). Most of my male colleagues were then in their early 30s and going out and getting pissed most nights of the week and chasing women, coming in late and visibly hungover while I would be at home working after my DD was in bed. And still I'd get snarky comments about being a "part timer". One of them had the nerve to raise in his annual review that the other male staff were resentful of the "concessions" made to me and commented that having children was a "lifestyle choice". They all knew my marriage had broken down due to domestic abuse as well so I had very little choice in the matter.

Fast forward now and these same colleagues now have small kids and make a big song and dance about "family time": demanding that they never be called after 5pm and doing performative five a side football tournaments that take a whole morning while everyone else has to pick up the slack.

Now work life balance is fashionable they're all over it. Fuck off with that.

💯

Although I think there is one exception to the male confidence.

'Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre female Marketing Manager’

They are a breed unto themselves.

This this this. And it’s EVERY INDUSTRY I have worked in bar non, and that includes entertainment, health and government ( with government being the worst).
Its God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white male.

👏👏👏

It was right on the presentation, I swear 😆

Typing and temper don't mix!

The problem is even I, as a woman, am much more forgiving of a ‘horrible’ male boss, who I’ll just quietly roll my eyes at, than I am of a similar female one (who I will hate with a passion). The book sounds like an interesting (and hopefully enlightening) read.

@BunnyLake

The problem is even I, as a woman, am much more forgiving of a ‘horrible’ male boss, who I’ll just quietly roll my eyes at, than I am of a similar female one (who I will hate with a passion).

I struggle with this too. My big bosses are mainly women. They are tough and hard-driving. They've had to be. Mostly their toughness falls into the "tough but fair" category but like all bosses they are sometimes unreasonable.

My instinctive reaction sometimes is to think "what a cow" if one of them does something I consider unreasonable. When I know perfectly well if it was a man I would just be silently sucking it up.

@growlum

This is so so true. And everyone has to pretend they’re amazing or their fragile ego smashes.

I worked for many years with a male colleague who was good but not as good as he thought he was (if you know what I mean). He is ten years younger than me and he's smart but his ego is huge. We and a bunch of four or five other colleagues had worked together for many years and were a friendship group. When he finally got his "big" promotion he started overnight asking the rest of us to fetch and carry and do errands for him.

I think it fair up to a point if you become a boss to distance yourself a bit from more junior colleagues. You have to put a bit of clear blue water aside in order to be able to establish authority. But he would ask his (female) colleagues and friends to go and get his lunch for him, book him hair appointments, collect his shoes from the menders and all this sort of nonsense. To my astonishment, most of them would shrug and tease him about being a hard taskmaster but would do it.

I just didn't do it: I wasn't his secretary or EA and I wasn't going to be told to get lunch by someone who had been an equal colleague for several years. I have too much work to do. He got really shitty with me and eventually complained to our bigger boss that I was trying to "undermine" him because I wasn't basically behaving as his servant.

That was a real eye-opener for me. No woman in the history of the world would suddenly expect people who have formerly been equal colleagues to go and buy their sandwiches.

I'm now approaching retirement and my biggest regret is not being much more appropriately assertive and ambitious when I was younger. I was the first in my family to go to university and into the kind of job usually only available to graduates and that seemed like reward enough. I assumed, as I saw less competent men promoted above me, that I didn't have what it takes. Thank goodness women are wising up and learning to ask for what they deserve. I was once refused a promotion that should have been mine without question by a male boss who promoted a man over me on the basis that he had a wife and children to support and I was didn't. That was 1997 and my boss said it to my face but wouldn't put it into writing, otherwise I'd have taken the company to an employment tribunal.

@Rubydoobydoobydoo yes, im glad women ask more often. But even then, asking is often not enough. As a woman you still have to prove yourself more before getting this or that job, whereas a man can be half arsed in his current role and will be trusted to learn his next role post promotion.

It infuriates me that the pressure is always on women to be this or that. Women aren't the main issue here. It would be like saying that sexism and mysogyny are self inflicted. It's BS. Women are up against the impossible.

You aren't telling a black person to be more of this or that to bring about equality themselves.

I am an independent consultant and I work with another female independent consultant on a lot of projects. Our work is mostly with financial services and fintech firms, with a strong showing in other types of professional services and the odd scattering of more traditional tech firms.

We probably should abbreviate our regular cry of, 'Please save me from mediocre white men" to PSMFMWM.

There are lots of issues with men in the workplace, many highlighted on this thread. But I think this specific one is a specific sub-sector of men who are, at best, average at their job but think they're incredible. In Fintech especially this can be interesting in our world becuase, truthfully, our clients aren't always top tier firms so they have even more mediocre men in their midst. The types who will pontificate about theme x or y to us... when we've been working on those issues for years and is the specific reason we've been brought in.

I think we see it a lot because we are there to support communications. So a lot of our work is around helping these firms to create a message and accompanying content but, in theory, the core messages should be developed by the business and then we fine tune and expand and make it usable. But so often, we get such generic answers to our questions that we feel like we are the ones creating the business strategy. It's incredibly frustrating.

We also quite often get mediocre men giving us irrelevant feedback which then has to be politely rejected. This one is always tricky because as consultants we don't want the internal team to look like idiots, but we are ultimately reporting to the CMO, COO and CEO so we have to get input from lower down but we have to produce work that meets a much higher standard.

It's also fascinating when we then work with top tier firms because it happens so much less (but still happens).

@Thepeopleversuswork I was in a meeting years ago, when I was one of two women there - the other was our MD. I was junior but not the most junior in the room. It was a big meeting so there was a catering assistant tasked with getting the teas and coffees sorted.

One swinging dick exec strolled in and asked for a coffee and told the catering assistant no to bother as Demodog would get it. I politely told him that there was a catering assistant sorting drinks today. He replied that it was a shame I was making such a fuss about getting a senior manager a coffee.

At this point our MD spoke up and asked dickhead exec why he thought it was more appropriate to ask me to get him a drink, instead of the catering assistant. At which point there was an awkward silence. She didn't let it go, and got a muttered load of crap about not having realised that the catering assistant was actually the catering assistant (despite him wearing a literal uniform!).

Two lessons that day. Firstly that sexist arseholes will find every way possible to try and put you in the place they think you belong, and reinforce their view of your purpose and abilities. Secondly it was an absolute eye opener hearing the men speak about her afterwards, blaming her for being a bitch and a ball breaker. And I got some pushback for having shown him up and made it awkward and I should have just got him the coffee to "show respect". Absolutely dismal.

The Accidental Sexist is a good read. Sums up everyday sexism in the workplace that still occurs.

The Spark Company have a sale on just now, just saying 😆

I am constantly amazed at my work at the response to mistakes made by men rather than women. One bloke managed to arrange transport for around 250 people to the training venue but completely forgot to arrange transport back. This was one of several complete cock ups that he'd made most of which ended up being sorted by women. The bosses just laughed about it and he was promoted shortly after.

I'm not sure that this is just about 'confidence'. Most men are deluded.

They have a tendency to overestimate their ability in most tasks. They also typically overestimate how attractive they are, compared to how others rate them. Even scientific studies have shown this.

You see it regularly in online dating. Unattractive, middle aged man with mediocre job, seeks attractive female 10 years younger.

It doesn't always work out well for them. Men will often piss away their 20s and 30s, not wanting to settle down, and then are shocked when they reach 45 and find that 30 year old women aren't eager to settle down and have their babies.

I've also known a couple who have left their wives in their 40s, thinking that they can get somebody better (younger), only to discover that they can't.

That's the quote - I use it a lot too

@Demodog

Two lessons that day. Firstly that sexist arseholes will find every way possible to try and put you in the place they think you belong, and reinforce their view of your purpose and abilities. Secondly it was an absolute eye opener hearing the men speak about her afterwards, blaming her for being a bitch and a ball breaker. And I got some pushback for having shown him up and made it awkward and I should have just got him the coffee to "show respect". Absolutely dismal.

Absolutely. I'm always reminded of that phrase about "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression". This particular guy interpreted my reluctance to make myself behave like an inferior as a personal sleight to him or a deliberate demonstration of lack of respect. He thought I was deliberately refusing to "service" him not because I didn't want to or didn't have time but out of spite and unkindness.

The flip side of these huge egos is that they are usually incredibly brittle and take great umbrage when people show a bit of backbone, even in the most innocuous ways.

I was once refused a promotion that should have been mine without question by a male boss who promoted a man over me on the basis that he had a wife and children to support and I didn't.

A female colleague of mine discovered that a male colleague doing exactly the same job as her, but with less experience and less years of service, was being paid significantly more. When she queried this with her boss she was told she didn't need to earn as much because she wasn't a breadwinner.

When a male colleague from another department decided to leave for a better job, the same boss congratulated him on getting a proper job because his current job wasn't a one for a breadwinner. I pulled him up on that and he snarled at me. Horrid little man.