As a woman, you can’t just go to work and go home 🙄.

[joseline]

i recently got my graphic design job months ago and I really like the job so far.

i have been working for 8 months.

but a week ago, I got called out by my manager who is also a woman because I don’t interact with other coworkers other then good morning or have a good evening. I only talk to them about the work at hand but I never have small talks, I never have lunch with them. I do my job and go home.

my boss called me out because, a woman coworker recently came out after being on leave. I don’t know why and I do not care. It’s not my business. When she came back I didn’t welcome her cheerfully. I said good morning to her like everyone else. And it’s not like this coworker has no work friends, I basically got called out because I am not kissing her ass.

i am not the only one who have gone through those petty dramas over nothing.

my women cousins told me stories of other women at various jobs they worked at starting ridiculous conflicts because they just did their job and went home and didn’t wanna be buddy buddy with their women coworkers.

I am starting to think that there is a ridiculous unspoken rule of being a girl’s girl and you’ll a social outcast when you refuse to be in a clique.

I understand there are cases of women getting harassed by men at work but in my personal experience whenever I’ve had any sort of beef with coworkers, it’s always been other women. The men always left me alone.

are me and my cousins the only ones who experienced those phenomenons ?

I guess I do ask people about what I know they are interested in (to a degree football and Love Island I just can’t manage any conversation on). I will chat about pets, babies, hobbies, books, films, TV, travel but largely by asking rather than telling much about myself.

I have found that people like to talk about their own stuff usually and you can very easily get away with not saying much at all about your own life if you don’t want to. It’s basic politeness to express some interest in people you see regularly I think.

I am not against people making some small effort to be friendly in the office but I do object to any gendered expectations about this. I feel it should apply equally to men and women if it’s a social norm that is desirable.

I knew I’d read this before!

Why do posters do this?!

I’m intrigued. OP, can you explain?

If there exists so-called quantitative studies they are likely to be methodologically hopeless and shot through with obvious confounding factors. Anthropological studies would be interesting in themselves, but, again, unlikely to reveal true cause versus effect for productivity. Having worked in a female-dominated industry I will remain entirely sceptical about such studies. Even if I got to actually read them.

It sounds like the common denominator is the OP.

I don't understand the mentality I often see on mumsnet that you shouldn't ever make friends with people you work with or that you have to cap the number of friends you have.

I assume that these people still live in the town that they grew up in and still have family and school friends nearby, and have never upped roots to work elsewhere in a new city where they don't know anyone.

I wouldn't complain about an unsociable coworker though, or try and engage them in conversation if they had made it clear that they didn't want to engage socially because they think sociable people are needy

There are loads of studies. Dismiss them without even reading them if you want... that says more about you than it says about the studies themselves.

The problem is the narrowness of the conversational parameters, or at any rate it was for me when I was office-based (happily wfh now). If you were a woman it was babies and diets with the odd detour to the weather and what people were having for lunch, if you were a man it was football with the occasional side order of misogyny. Doesn't sound like much has changed in the ten years I've been wfh.

I agree with you that most teams need a degree of camaraderie to function well, it's just a shame the norms around that are so one-size-fits-all and, for some, plain stultifying.

I remember my first job - I was fairly terrified by these women who were quite a few years older and all knew each other. I was a little mouse who showed up, did my job but didn’t talk unless someone spoke to me. I heard after I’d left (I only stayed a couple months) that they all thought I was cold and unfriendly - they were surprisingly unempathetic in fact.
But it’s not part of the job description to be friendly, but being a ‘team player’ may be what they mean; fitting in to that particular office culture. People like working with people they like. I do think this applies to men too, but in a different way. I’ve seen guys kinda ostracised because they don’t like football or take part in the office ‘banter’.

Speaking as a fellow childfree woman, you got off lightly there. Whenever a baby was brought into one of my previous workplaces I would be repeatedly adjured to 'have a little hold' and on the one or two occasions I couldn't think of a polite way to decline, everyone stood around looking mawkishly at me and announcing I'd 'be getting broody'. Nope, nope, nope. 🙄

I mean, would anyone ever do that to a man?

It sounds like you were unlucky.
Could you not steer the conversation in a different direction?

I’m the exact same, OP. I like to do my own thing which isn’t ok with some people and it’s given me a lot of grief at work in the past. I work for myself now and have never been happier.

I did try sometimes, with varying degrees of success. People would sometimes look baffled I was diverging from the script, so to speak. I guess people get used to the comfortable topics and find it easiest to stick to those.

No never - and I would sometimes quite like to have been asked!

It’s got nothing to do with you being a woman and everything to do with you being rude.

Also, massive levels of internalised misogyny.

They would never do that to a man.

As a child free woman I found myself being left out of a lot of conversations and even if I tried to join in by talking about children I am close to (godchildren etc) they would treat it as not the same as having your own. Really frustrating. And boring. It was as though they had no interest in anything or anyone else.

I am not sure it is internalised misogyny for op to point out that in her specific workplace the women didn’t have her back and gave her grief for being different. That kind of behaviour is a nuanced consequence of a patriarchal system.

Do what? Start a thread and disappear? They're probably getting on with life and don't live on Mumsnet. Probably saw all the replies and what resembled a pile-on, so hasn't returned?

Lots of reasons.

I think getting to know colleagues below the surface level is very helpful in understanding how to work with others as productively as possible. Social interactions offer rich pickings to understand how the people you're meant to get along with a large part of your week, achieving things together, tick.
It's useful to know that Jane is worried about her mums alzheimers, that Dave is a listener rather than a talker, that humour is a good way to engage with Tom, and so on.
People who keep engagement to the basics are missing out on some valuable intelligence and bonding that oils the wheels significantly. Which is of course a personal choice and matters less in some fields than others.
However, generally for the career minded, being seen as interested in others and capable of social skills, tends to raise your profile and value over those that aren't. People can say this is unfair on introverts, but jobs are not about being fair, they're about an exchange of money for skills an employer wants to purchase, and an employer is as entitled to require a modicum of social skills in their workforce, as they are any other.
Obviously there's a balance and in some teams the expectations are very high, the huggers, the present buyers, the regular out of work socialisers. But it doesn't have to be that or silence. There's a mid point thats very useful.

In what way is OP showing internalised misogyny?

Well said @5128gap

This is so very true.

Basically, if you aren't a team player or aren't prepared to be a team player don't get a job that involves being part of a team. You can be quiet and introverted (I notice that lots of posters are misusing the term on this thread) yet still be a team player.

No - start 2 threads on the same topic.

I see this happen for the purposes of traffic. You either get some responses or none at all. That means (to my untrained eye) that I'm seeing there is a poster asking for input in one thread and getting nothing more than a bump, or, a thread chocked full of responses they then need to read through with a few here and they're assuming they started a thread and then ran off.

Damned if you do....

37 pages of posts on the other thread with approx 20 replies from the OP, 7 pages (so far) on this. Hardly a shortage of traffic.

Yep. I've had the same experience, although no doubt someone's going to come along and accuse us of misogyny for claiming a lot of women do this.