Sick to the back teeth of useless men using weaponised incompetence at work. Is it just me?!

[OscillateItsTitsALot]

Sorry but I’m so annoyed I can’t sleep thinking about how utterly infuriating I find the men in my workplace.
I work in a small organisation of 14 people, in a management role.
2 of the staff are men.
100% of the men in the organisation are absolutely useless in basic tasks and I’m getting really sick of it. Some of the women treat them like they’re particularly stupid toddlers as well.
Recent examples include:

• the men messaging women more senior than them for email addresses they could get themselves if they just spent a few seconds looking in the online address book
• On a recent work away day, one of the men asked me if I could give him directions to the restaurant we were all meeting at. I told him it will be available on Google Maps.
• Occupying the vast majority of time of our shared executive assistant because they can’t do things like organise their own travel or book hotels (the EA role is focussed around setting up meetings and finance work, we are all expected to make our own travel arrangements and to only use her if it’s a complex requirement). One of the men apparently needs the PA to put a reminder in his calendar for when he has to set off from his house to the train station, because he forgets otherwise
• A female colleague created a special word document recently because one of the men kept forgetting the work he’d been asked to do. She updates it for him. She’s more senior than him, and I’m quite annoyed she’s gone to these lengths rather than just telling him to start making lists himself
• One of the men asking if he can have no meetings before 10am because the school run tires him out. He has 1 child.
• They both take an eternity to respond to a simple Teams message. The incompetence they can get away with is something I feel women would be going through a disciplinary for.
• They’re always tired, or having to go out and run errands for their families or taking an hour to do the school run so can’t be available for meetings between 3 and 4. I feel when women do this, it’s seen as almost a sackable offence and at the very least a sign of incompetence. But when men do it they’re tired little heroes.

I have raised with other managers that we need to have better expectations and not set a standard whereby women are doing the work of men displaying weaponised incompetence. However it was met with what I can only describe as bemusement and “Well you know what they’re like, they need a bit of hand holding sometimes”. These are men in their late 30’s and 40’s FFS.

There are only 3 women who pander to the men but they’re quite protective of the men, and are quite Senior so what they say goes.

Does this happen in other workplaces? I’m sick of picking up the slack for them, for the constant mistakes and moaning about being tired from being dads. I am looking at other opportunities, I can’t work much longer in a workplace that treats women so appallingly

It's only a gender issue if you believe it's exclusive to one sex as opposed to just an anecdote where the culprits happen to be male.

Plenty of women play 'the helpless woman' card when they want men to rush to their aid. Some are very good at it. There are certainly more women that can't work the lawnmower than men that can't work the washing machine.

Except studies have repeatedly shown that women don't actually collaborate as well as men and don't like working for other women. In fact, men were found to be less likely to have an issue with a female boss than women were. Women were also less likely to help another woman if she was senior to them but were less reluctant to help men (which the OP corroborates).

I'm off to bed now but I'll happily dig out the thread with all the links tomorrow. One was by a female Harvard academic and had 500,000 respondents so it was pretty solid research. Ironically, the thread turned into a massive bunfight with loads of women furiously arguing over whether women get on with each other. 🤣

They aren’t berated for doing the school run, they are berated for taking a clear hour to do pick up, and in particular for needing an hours down time to recover from the drop off?? In what world is that normal for anyone?

I have never worked anywhere like this, my male boss does quite a bit for his kids and there is less than zero slacking at work because of it. He’s great :)

There's actually a current thread where a poster is furious her boss won't give her TOIL for four hours of overtime she worked. Turns out boss was letting her spend an hour on the school run every day and then have a half hour lunchbreak too. She thought she should get more time off than her workmates and still not have to do any overtime.

So what your daugther has proved is that its not just men.

But there has to be man to blame somewhere

We have one senior male who spends more time attempting to delegate bits of his job to random women than it would take for him to actually do it. A few pander to him like a toddler but most don’t.
A few years ago in a different job, my team moved into a temporary office building which had no cleaning service. Probably an even split of men and women. The women organised a few quid to buy loo roll and hand soap and bin bags etc for our loo. The men did not do that; they just moaned that there wasn’t any in theirs. For weeks. The incompetence astounded me.

Tbf I wouldn't be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for company supplies. I can understand a few days but what kind of employer leaves you for weeks without basic sanitation facilities? It's against the law.

I would also be infuriated by all your points except this one:
A female colleague created a special word document recently because one of the men kept forgetting the work he’d been asked to do. She updates it for him. She’s more senior than him, and I’m quite annoyed she’s gone to these lengths rather than just telling him to start making lists himself

Which sounds a lot like a manager providing evidence they had taken reasonable steps/made reasonable adjustments to correct an employee's poor work performance for "HR purposes". That could be optimism on my part though.

That's true. I created task lists for a man I managed who was struggling to get things done.
It didn't work, so we ended up getting rid of him.
I think that's just part of a manager's job, male or female.

Not where I work, thank goodness but that would drive me nuts

Is that you Friedrich Merz?

(for those of you who don't know, the Chancellor of Germany thinks all part-timers are lazy and unproductive and need to get (back) to full time work. You get a free pass if you have children or elderly parents).

If the pp's daughter cleared the cups away she'd be bowing to gender(sex) norms.

However the better response would be - hey guys, don't forget your cups.

But it's the police we're talking about, so...in that case if you can't beat them join them.

Wouldn't that also be a gander (sex) norm of a woman chasing after men to clean up?

After 30+ years in the workplace I’d say the proportion of incompetents is broadly similar amongst the sexes in my large organisation. But. The incompetent men are much more likely to seek and therefore gain promotion.