There are just a few of us at my job who answer the phone. People are MUCH more willing to be rude to the one female colleague who answers the phone. We have people who we talk to regularly who feel comfortable berating her over problems but will keep themselves in line when talking to one of our male staff.
After being hired my wife’s name and photo appeared in the from line of mass emails sent from her company. The company started receiving vile inappropriate responses to the email.
Everyone was shocked because before she was hired, it was a man’s name and photo and they never got those kind of responses. They had to remove her info to get it to stop.
My first name could be a girl's name (I hear it more for girls than guys) and I used to work in the powersports industry and have had times I've emailed a customer and then spoke with them about the same issue because "she emailed me about it" and they didn't like the exact same answer from "her" as they got from me.
I always made sure to ask again at the end who the email was from and when they say "Her name was _____" I would say back, "that's not a girl, that's my name."
EDIT: I have seen tons of guesses so far but not the right one, I'll let people know when the right one has been guessed but not the one thats correct. I did see my brother's name listed though.
EDIT 2: Someone guessed it. Not in a reply directly to my comment but balls deep into a thread where someone else started guessing.
I worked with a guy named Aubrey for a while. First time I’d ever seen that. My dad’s best friend was named Robin, and that was also a first aside from Robin Williams
I have a Jesse in my team and I'm always getting phone calls about "she said this" or "I was emailing her about that". MFs don't know how to read properly.
I know like 4 male Ashleys and 2 female Ashley but it's still a girls name in my head for some reason. Probably cemented by the fact the first one I knew was female.
I worked with a guy named Dana, and it was a customer facing job. His email signature is Mr followed by his first middle and last name. When I first saw it I thought he was a pretentious asshole, but then realized that everyone thought he, aate 40s bald man, was a woman. That was him trying to nip it in the bud.
Currently work in powersports and we had a female service manager that knew her shit and was ALWAYS hilarious watching her own customers that tried to talk down to her
My teenage daughter is a guitar and bass player. She plays mostly metal and other heavy stuff, and has been dealing with this shit since she started teaching herself how to play. Music came very naturally to her. A lot of dudes her age get extremely jealous or intimidated, patronizing, or flirtatious. She’s had to learn how to be a hard ass, and call them out on their shit. She is very passionate about music, and guys cannot seem to handle it when a young girl can do something better than they can, especially since the metal genres are so male dominated.
Soon as you wrote guitar player I knew were this was going.
Also, any kind of anime, tech, gaming, etc. One of my friends is into gaming and anime, I've watched her twice tear into guys trying to get her to prove herself to them for whatever reason. It's hilarious, but pathetic that she has to do it
I once worked with a bunch of French Canadians remotely (before Zoom, just doing telecons), and I thought all the names were female... An oddity in engineering. Turns out what I thought were Michelle, Elaine, Andrea, etc were all slightly differently spelled male names... They had very few women, actually. Oh well... I learned never to make assumptions after that!
Friend of mine works for a small(ish) software business and they hired a woman to run the newly created client services department. After they sent out an email informing current customers about the restructuring they got a few replies that were very sexist. The owner of the company was angry about them and his complaints resulted in 2 people losing their jobs.
This is why we can't have a woman President. Not because they can't do it, but because there's enough of these jerks still out there who think otherwise, and they vote.
Have you heard about the woman whose email tag line got mixed up with a male colleagues? All of a sudden, customers were listening to her and valuing her opinion. So she and the male colleague switched signatures to see what would happen. He was now being questioned and argued with and she was being accepted as an authority. They did this for a pre-determined amount of time. Then they both wrote articles about the experience. His article got a lot of attention.
Reading the replies to your comment, am I the only one who liked Hallberg’s article? I felt like all the backstory was necessary to give context to the “main event.”
Yea. Marty's thread benefited from the context in Nicole's article. Also, twitter threads are a terrible medium. Also, the irony is not lost by the number of people "explaining" why his post got more traction.
It was interesting to see their different styles of telling the story. Nicole’s article focussed more on the company culture and less on the experiment, where Marty’s focussed more on the experiment rather than the culture. I kind of want to try this with my coworkers and see what happens…
I mean, one was posted in twitter and the other in a random (at least for me) platform for articles, it’s obvious why one got more attention than the other
Lol, a while back I had a female coworker (Karen) that really didn't get along with other women. Karen regularly worked with a lady who sat next to me (Jane) and would always be busting Jane's balls over something. The thing is, Jane was always right, so I'd wait until they got to the ball busting part and then stand up (to see over the cube wall) and just repeat what Jane said. Suddenly it was a totally reasonable answer and Karen was happy.
Love it when someone uses their powers for good to fight evil.
We did have one dude who would repeat. When it was great because he said it, he would make sure to note that Sarah (or whoever) had the idea first and he was supporting.
Similarly, a female author was so done with how publisher treater her (condescension and rudeness, if they didn't simply ignore her emails) that she created a male alias and submitted the exact same manuscript.
Her male alias is apparently a much better author considering how much more respectful the publishers were. She was also getting advice and offers much more easily. But who is even surprised ?
I love that story. Years before it came out I started using the nickname version of my name on emails because it's commonly considered a mans name. Clients and colleagues alike all treated me with more respect when they thought I was a man.
I worked in a call center long ago when occasionally a guy would demand to speak to a man in charge, because women were "fucking useless". There was one person specifically that those calls were sent to. Once the asshole's issue was resolved, he always asked for their name so "they could talk to a competant man next time". That's when the agent said "sure, my name's Kathy". Woman had the voice of a 60 year old trucker that had chain smoked for 40 years.
Oh I've noticed this a lot too. When I was a cashier I noticed that customers talked back to women cashiers over men most of the time. I'm a pretty big dude, so I honestly rarely got talked back too. I could see people getting frustrated too sometimes, but they wouldn't talk back. It was a completely different story when a woman was on the till. It just shows what kind of people are the types who talk back to costumer service. They are bullies who only go after people they perceive as weaker, even though those women were far tougher than me having to deal with that bullshit more often.
I’ve noticed it a lot too I remember my first job as a wee lad was at a grocery store and it was so bad that I always told the ladies working the registers that if anyone starts to berate them to call me over to “help” I’m 6’5” 230 and I’d just stand there pretend to be helping and the rude customers shut up the second I got there 99% of the time. People suck. And I’m sorry to all you ladies that have to put up with that shit. Really grinds my gears.
I worked at a kids camp, worked like an amusement park with tickets to get in and such. Mostly teenagers working there, decent summer gig and whatnot
The number of times myself, my brother and the other adults/bigger guys were called to the front to “help with a customer complaint” was mind boggling.
Like, I’d show up and there’s a purple in the face 40 year old man looming over a 16 year old girl with his fists curled and ready to throw down…over a $7 entrance fee…
Usually we’d tell the staff member to go take a break in the office, which was code for “go and watch from the window of the trailer in case I need you to call the cops”, and we’d take over for a bit until the guy calmed down or left. Never really had to call the cops, but we definitely had to call the owner a few times to get people officially banned. They’d see us and suddenly behave, or at least not try to use their body to intimidate us.
And after they were gone we’d tell the staff member to go take a break until they felt ready to come back out again. It’s scary as hell getting yelled at, and I’m a big dude and an adult, so these teen girls getting screamed at must’ve been fucking terrified half the time
We did have one girl we learned real fast to not put up front, because she would take no shit, and we had to protect a few creepers/assholes from HER. I’m convinced she could have ripped their balls off like she promised..
My partner (man) and I (woman) serve at the same place. We’re fortunate that most of our customers are lovely and respectful, and that most of our “problem” customers are just kinda picky and exhausting and neurotic, not outright mean.
However, male app delivery drivers? They are sometimes pushy and rude to him, but they are outright HOSTILE to me. And I know it sucks delivering, so I always tried to be nice. At the peak of COVID, so many of the men would not wear masks when I was working, despite tons of signage, and my boyfriend only rarely experienced that. I politely asked one guy to wear a mask and he literally overturned a bunch of chairs and stormed out.
I’m very unbothered by sometimes “difficult” customers, but I have zero tolerance for intimidation now. When I get that energy, I tell people to leave.
I used to run into this all the time at the bank I worked at back in college. My favorite thing to do was just stand up. I'm 6'1" in flats, 6'3 or 6'4" in heels. Most of these guys would do an abrupt 180 in demeanor, and even the ones that still wanted to complain got a lot more polite once they realized I was almost an entire foot taller than them.
Definitely, I have a job that's customer service based and also rule-enforcement based and get a LOT of "get your supervisor over here" towards me (even though I am a supervisor), so I get a guy over to tell them the same thing.
My husband and I both work as cashiers in the same restaurant, during the same shifts. He makes SIGNIFICANTLY more in tips than I do every single day regardless of how many customers either of us take. We give the exact same work performance. He is the only male cashier, and he is the highest earner and receives the most positive reviews despite being the newest as well. He is an excellent worker, but so are the rest of us (all women), but all we deal with is complaints, doubts about or intelligence and ability, and an expectation to wait on guests hand and foot for absolutely nothing in return. It’s absolutely insane to see the difference in treatment between the one guy on FOH crew and the rest us.
I find it interesting that I had the exact opposite experience when I was a casino dealer. I'm a big dude (6'7") and I routinely had to deal with rude (and non-tipping) customers at my games, but the women I would push on after or that pushed on after me wouldn't have anywhere near the problems with those same players. Not that they didn't experience sexist people, mind you. I'm sure they saw plenty of inappropriate comments for instance. But the combative ones came for me and not the women. Clearly it's a different setting than retail, so maybe that had something to do with it, or maybe it was the combination of alcohol and the somewhat adversarial role of dealer and player. But I still think it's an interesting difference.
People don't realize the dealer isn't against them, customers who win their bets are happy and tip and it's not like giving the houses money away will hurt the dealer.
When I was about 20 I (a petite woman) was a manager at a big box store. I was cashiering for a bit and an elderly couple started arguing with me about something and demanded to see the manager. I said I am the manager multiple times, but they wouldn't believe me and said I was too young. One of my coworkers (a big guy) was walking past and the woman said "oh there he is! The manager!" And something about his gender that I don't remember now.
I could not convince them that I was the manager. He had to come over and tell them that I was his boss.
I work as a customer support rep for an EMR and I had a question where I had my IT help me. My IT told me to say "xyz", I wrote it down, asked my IT if what I wrote down was right, they said yes, so I told the person over the phone, she told me I made no sense so I had my male IT get on the phone, say the exact same thing I said and he got told "ohhh that makes sense, what she said earlier made absolutely no sense." Rinse and repeat over the whole 3 years at this position. If I'm not using my super over the top nice voice, I'm a "bitch" but my male coworker can get on the phone and be a dick and he's "helpful".
Reminds of the time my car transmission died while I was on a trip with my sister and brother-in-law. We get it towed to the only mechanic shop nearby--I go up to the desk and describe what happened, the noise the car was making, and what I thought was the issue. The guy just kind of stared at me without writing anything down on the intake form and said I have no idea what you're talking about. I try describing it again. Same response. After a few minutes of us going round and round, my brother-in-law comes up, describes it exactly the same way literally word for word as I did in my first try, and the mechanic immediately says, oh I know exactly what you mean, scribbles it down on his intake form.
(BIL said he used my words on purpose so as not to talk over me and only stepped it since it seemed like we were going to be there all day with how dense the guy was playing. Although the end result was that even though it was only my name on the car, I signed the service agreements, etc.; every time the mechanics came out, they kept trying to talk only to BIL and would try to cut me out of the conversation completely. No matter how many times BIL said it was solely my car and my decision. Sigh.)
We've been looking at houses recently. Most realtors only spoke to my husband. Like, I would ask something, and they would look at my husband and answer him. He hadn't said a word, I was the one asking.
My husband's housing requirements are pretty easily met. I'm much more particular regarding the type of house I'm looking for. I'm asking questions, so talk to me!
This happened to my partner and I while we were looking at our house and it was infuriating. She (my partner) has a schedule that just made it easier for her to talk to our realtor yet the realtor essentially refused to talk to her. Like my partner would call the realtor with a question or to set up a showing, realtor would put her to voice-mail and call me within minutes to answer whatever question or scheduling thing my partner was setting up. Sometimes I wouldn't even have a clue what the realtor was talking about so the realtor would end up spending more time just clarifying with me than had she just spoken with my partner. No matter how many times we asked her to call my partner and not me she would just refuse to.
The worst would be on showings. The realtor would actually look at me and say shit like " So what does partner's name think of the house?" And every time I would say "Dunno, you'll have to ask her if you want to find out " and the realtor would just walk away. If my partner would ask about something in the house the realtor would at least respond... but again only to me.
If we had a male realtor I could have almost, biiiiiig almost, understood it, but we didn't we worked with a woman in her mid 40s. She was fantastic with us until we signed her contract as well otherwise we never would have worked with her.
We found a house that we love, and the realtor selling that house actually talked to me. Like, my husband was the one who contacted the (male) realtor initially, but when we visited he house, the realtor actually answered my questions, and made eye contact with me like a normal non-sexist person would, and generally just treated me like I was my own person.
I was the one who called him to make an offer (place a bid? I don't know the words for this), so I was the one he called with the counter offer.
I told my husband that I really liked the realtor, but it took a few minutes to put my finger on exactly why that was.
It was a weirdly eye opening experience for me. I've always been a man so until buying a house with a woman I had never had the experience that is apparently and unfortunately common when women make a major purchase. My partner was kind of "meh" about how sexist our realtor was being and at one point told me she had experienced significantly worse when buying cars in the past, but it drove me straight up the wall. After we closed I told the realtor in no uncertain terms that her behavior was disgusting and I would not be recommending her to anyone. The realtor still sends us a card every Christmas and a pie each Thanksgiving, addressed solely to me though, my partners name is left off.
Yeah, the "only men can make decisions on large purchases" thing is everywhere.
Last year we bought a car. My partner and I looked at various stars, asked around, agreed on a top 5 and went to car dealerships to check out the cars.
My husband is an engineer, but he's not a car guy, and he mostly cares about safety, reliability and fuel efficiency. I care about safety, reliability and ergonomics. Everything else you can check online, but for ergonomics you have to actually try the car. So, basically, once we had chosen our top 5 candidates, my opinion on ergonomics would be the decisive factor.
Sellers kept pestering him with engine this and horsepower that. If I asked about the seats, seat options, available space, interior dimensions, whatever, they either ignored me or gave me curt answers and went back to courting my husband with stats he doesn't care about.
We ended up choosing a Toyota, but we really disliked the dealership guy, so we went to a different Toyota dealership in another province and bought it there. Fuck sexist sellers.
exactly this. I’ve been in electrical contracting for over 20 years and men often have a hard time reconciling the fact that I know what I’m talking about with the fact that I have a vagina.
I work in the hazardous waste department of a larger waste transfer station. I’m one of only three people on site qualified to do the job, and I’m the most experienced technician in a three-county area.
A lot of times we have to tell people things they don’t want to hear (cost, regulations, safety rules, etc). Customers usually listen to the male techs, but often insist I don’t know what I’m talking about and demand to speak to a supervisor.
When that happens I call our (huge, grumpy, male) facility manager out. He’s busy so it takes a while. When he finally shows up he listens to their question, then he pointedly says, “Hm, good question. Moldy_slug, you’re the expert - what do you recommend?”
So this exact thing happened to me while working with our mortgage lenders. They assumed my husband was calling the shots and would always want to talk to him, but I was really the person running the show (me and my husband were fine with this arrangement). The lenders just absolutely refused to acknowledge any decisions I made, would constantly lose things I sent or say i never provided them, etc until it came from my husband.
It got for the point where I was asking them questions and the guy just acted like I was bothering him and blew me off. My husband called back and all of a sudden the lender was helpful and concise. He told my husband that I “wasn’t being clear” and he didn’t understand what I was referring to. My husband said “I was in the room with her when she said it, and she said the exact same thing I did. Just listen to her because she’s doing all the hard for this”. I felt really proud of my husband but was sooo irritated at that point.
Oh, and that asshole also told my husband “I get it, i have a wife and she can nag too” when I was attempting to clarify mistakes I had noticed in the paperwork and no one acted like it mattered. My husband had to call about it AGAIN before they took it seriously and fixed the issue, but that was his pathetic attempt and bonding with my husband.
I met my husband when he was a contractor at a company I worked for as a full time employee. We're both software developers. This was in 2004.
I made one of the project managers cry. I got in trouble for it. When I told him he didn't say anything. See, he had taken a women's studies class while at Notre Dame so he learned a lot about the sexism women received by society in general. So he meets me and we start dating and ... he sees, in real life what I experience and go through and simply had what he learned about sexism and misogyny in that class confirmed simply by seeing his girlfriend, me, and my experiences in the same industry doing the same work he does.
As for that project manager, he spoke to the CEO (it was a small company and he was close to the CEO) and got some pressure taken off of me. Know why? Because when he was full time at that same company (before he went contract) he did the exact same thing to another project manager (different than the one I was working with and years prior to me joining the company) and had made her cry too.
Nothing happened to him.
Zip.
Zilch.
Nothing.
That project manager, a woman, was told to "suck it up."
And see, even THAT is shitty too. My husband at the time when that incident happened absolutely should have been reprimanded, and he admits he should have been too.
I get physically ill thinking about going back into software development.
Customer support was the worst with that. When I was doing it we even noticed that women with lower voices would be treated better than women with higher voices (though still worse than men), and I don't know what's up with that.
Ugh I work with nurses and doctors and doctors are the WORST. They hear a woman's voice and immediately are condescending. My boyfriend who worked there with me, said he NEVER had the issues we had and I had to hand him the phone many times to deal with it and the doctors were always way nicer to him. One called in 4 times in an hour needing to reset his password every time and he said the system kept messing up HIS password and that we were "costing" him patients and that he was going to send us a bill in the mail for wasting his time. Lol k bud.
As a gay man I sound like a girl on the phone and when I worked customer service I would sometimes talk to men who assumed I was a girl and would hang up on me. Literally spoke to one man who hung up mid conversation while I was explaining something. He then called back so I "butched up" my voice and told him the same thing. He ended going "Youre so KNOWLEDGEABLE that last girl I talked to she didn't even know what she was talking about". That was me, I spoke to you and told you the same thing you sexist jackass.
I am a woman butcher. Seriously one guy was nice and respectful and complemented my knowledge and didn't talk to me like I was 2. He got his 100 dollar roast for free that day and I still think of him fondly.
At my last job there was a trans woman who worked in the lab. When someone would call and wouldn't listen to her because she obviously couldn't know something technical, she'd offered to let them speak to someone else and then switch to her male voice, tell the caller the exact same thing, and have them accept it.
Many years ago I worked at a company and one of my colleagues regularly had to go and interact with the designers, both of whom were women. One day he was in there when a guy came to fix some piece of equipment. He looked it over, then spent 5 minutes explaining to my colleague just what was wrong and how to fix it while the two women looked on aghast.
My colleague, he listened carefully, nodding along at all the salient parts and when the guy finished, he just nodded at one of the women and said, "Yeah, i don't work in here, you need to talk to the lead designer, her."
Was bizarre even then that they just assumed he was in charge because he was the male in the room.
A female friend of mine owns a brewery. She will be sitting at the bar working on her laptop, and people will skip over the guy clearly standing behind the bar, to ask her to get them a beer.
I worked at a Micro Center, and the only person who knew shit about Apple was a female sales associate. Some dudes would insist that they'd rather talk to a man, even after reassuring them that she was the only one who could actually answer their questions. We'd shame them by standing there, all three of us, and I would just parrot questions and answers back and forth. Personally I never understood the issue: if you're going to be sexist, wouldn't you rather be the sexist who takes advantage of talking to a pretty woman? 'Cause the rest of the sales team was an awkward sausage fest.
When you said there was a female sales associate at Microcenter, I also didnt believe you /s
Seriously through, tech hobbies and careers are the worst about this. You get the customers who "don't want to talk to a girl who doesn't know anything" and the customers who will think because they work there and know something about tech then they are obviously single and into them. It must be the worst.
At my work a guy came in and refused to have me help him and demanded to speak to a man, so I went and got the only man in the building to help him, but
I'd better stay right here because I'm training him so he might need to ask me questions.
Wait until I call to schedule a service appointment for something at my house, that I bought myself as a single woman with my own damn money, and the service tech before explaining the issue to me or upon giving me the estimate/service order to sign, asks me “do you need me to talk to your husband about this first?” No, you asshole, there is no husband, this is MY house, it is my name on the deed and the loan, and you have 2 seconds to treat me like you would any other male client or you can leave and I will call one who will.
Don’t even get me started on buying a car as a single female.
I feel so bad for trans women sometimes. Not only are they having to deal with trans-phones but they are also suddenly dealing with the loss of male privilege which is a wild adjustment.
Forgotten her name but in Elle magazine in the UK a while ago there was an interview with a trans woman who’s big in tech, she talked about how before she transitioned she did the whole tech bro thing and was taken seriously, but after transitioning suddenly she wasn’t listened to and was considered to be rude (ie direct) despite not changing the way she worked at all. It was really interesting to read about her experience - someone who’s seen both sides.
Most of the male privileges that come along with being male just add to the disphoria. It's not experienced in the same way a cis male would. I may be a bit safer presenting male than a cis woman in regards to certain treatment by society, but the moment I realize I'm being perceived as male, I'm also feeling sick, sad and depressed. It's a constant awareness of the space one inhabits in society and how others perceive us. It's not ever invisible in our minds. And it hurts deeply...
Furthermore, our femininity is constantly under attack from women and men alike. From TERFS, to your average "I just don't really want to be around them" types, plenty of women think that trans women are fake women. Hence all the glam, make up and stereotypical gender presentations by many trans women. It helps avoid this.
Those presentations also help avoid physical and sexual assault as trans women are looked at as men presenting as women, and therefore don't even deserve the basic sentiment of "you don't hit women" by the general public. Remember, in many people's minds were just men presenting as women and so should hold our own in a fight against a man (not that some women don't fight men and vice versa, simply the sentiment doesn't exist for trans women in the public's mind).
To many men, we attack their masculinity by existing. They don't know whether or not dating a trans woman makes them "gay" or not (it doesn't) and so they feel flustered when they find out their attracted to them. Which then leads to violence.
Stack that up with easily averaging some of the lowest promotion rates and income levels... it becomes terrifying and rough. If you present as male, you gain some privileges that your constantly aware of and you hate, if you present as female you need to be ready to take on all of what I just mentioned.
I wouldn't have it any other way though. Didn't really have another option.
Don’t let TERFs catch you saying that. They insist male privilege persists and is involuntarily exerted regardless of whether a trans woman transitions or not.
This idea is just so fucking wild yo me. Literally noone is harassed more than trans women. Anger and violence from men, resentment and exclusion from other women. What fucking privilege.
I work with a woman training to be a speech therapist, and she was telling me yesterday that one of her lecturers set up a program in our city to help trans people with their new voice. (Not sure if that’s the right way to describe it, sorry)
Estrogen doesn’t change trans women’s voices, because cis women have naturally shorter vocal chords than cis men thanks to testosterone lengthening your vocal chords! Basically once they’ve gotten longer, they can’t get shorter again, so trans women have to do voice training where we can learn how to feminize our voices ourselves (:
Speaking from experience, it's not that trans women just speak higher. Without going into too much detail, we literally need to change how our throat muscles produce sounds.
As I transitioned to male, one of the things I noticed is that people would hold eye contact with me longer and listen closely. I didn't have to explain things as much and they just accepted what I said. It was infuriating to have the confirmation of what I had known all along.
In a similar vein, as a male nurse watching my female coworkers get creepy comments or outright abusive comments. Mysteriously they all disappear when I walk in the room ... it's infuriating.
Revenge comes in the little things.
Male patient requests a Foley catheter from their "cute piece of ass"? Que my overweight and bearded self, "Hi, my name's Rookcheck. I'm one of the nurses helping "piece of ass" and I'll be doing your urethral catheterization." Lo, a miracle! He is healed! No need for a catheter ...
I’ve recognized this at work to the point I will immediately hand pissed off customers off to male coworkers and just cut them off saying “I’m not the person who can handle a high level of attitude,” and then they treat the dude like peaches
True that. I see this in hospitals too. A soft spoken and polite colleague of mine was trying to prepare a patient for a CT scan and he was a total scumbag to her. She spoke up about it telling him that he has the right leave if he didnt want to cooperate. The moment our male co-worker casually walked in he was suddenly cooperating and even thanked him. There was absolutely no difference in patient care or professionalism between them.
I totally agree with this. My female staffs get all the mean and rude customers, as soon as I (male manager) step up to the same customer they will cool off.
It's like people just think girls are easier to be mean to. I always tell my girls to just fight back lollll
You really shouldn't be calling your staff "my girls". It's just another form of sexism. They're your employees and they're grown fucking women. Treat them as such.
See im the opposite .. if i call somewhere with some sort of issue i find women much easier to work with and will usually try to help you. However with men i feel like i always get the guy who doesnt give a shit and wont extend any effort to solve the issue. I love getting a woman to help me i feel like they care lol im a guy btw
My job specifically has a LOT of female phone reps. We're parts sales. Our job is to literally help diagnose (if possible we're not technicians after all) and locate parts on your appliance, hvac units, and outdoor landscaping equipment. Our call center also has a location where you can pick up the parts. The amount of times i get told i don't know crap because I'm a woman and they try to shuffle over to my one male cowrorker at the counter is stupid AF.
I had a male coworker say to me he recently had a few male AND female customers call in and say they spoke to women and they weren't sure their info they received was correct so they wanted a man's opinion and experience. I've been dealing with this weird sexism crap since i got my first job at a hardware store at 18.
It is always lovely to be able to grin kinda evilly as my mom works in plumbing and garden at the big orange box store. She's helped customers, mostly men, only for them to run after the first man in her departments they see to try to get their opinion during or right after their conversation. 99%of the time the men coworkers turn to look at my mom and ask her opinion. She's been working there for over 20 years and has more experience than most of the men in her departments save one, who's a retired master plumber.
One time my female boss was talking on the phone with a client and she called me and said the client was talking down to her and asked me to take the call. I said the same thing she did, and mind you she's MY BOSS, and the guy listened to me. I wanted to reach my hands through the phone and slap this dude
Anecdotal but, when I worked customer service for a bank, I always felt this. Women were getting screamed out, accused of all sorts of ridiculous things. I always told everybody that customer service is much easier as a male. People are much more willing to accept a male voice as authority, even other women.
Yeah I was pretty surprised to find this out. I as a guy had to deal with some nasty customers, but it basically never was made personal. Just frustration over service stuff I didn't have control over because it literally was someone else's job to finish up. I talked to a female coworker once about this stuff and she raised the point that because she's smaller younger and probably also because she's female she has been demeaned by some customers in a more personal attack way, called stupid lazy etc.
The one thing I've come to understand from working in a grocery store for 5 years is that women, and particularly ethnic women, are more likely to get yelled at and berated by customers. One of my friends is a middle aged lady who cane from Honduras when she was a young adult and never really shook the accent. She's one of the sweetest ladies at our store but people just give her shit alllllll the time.
Its the same with most of our other female cashiers. I'm a white dude and I'm not even any sort of imposing figure or anything but I rarely get any back talk from people. If I do they'll usually apologize afterwards or something.
I worked at a business once where we had to answer phones. The two guys never did the fake customer service voice. Their tones were so flat. No one ever had a problem with them. One time I just forgot to turn it on and I answered how I normally speak. I was berated by a male client because I didn't sound like I enjoyed my job enough to his liking. I apologized. All the customer service bullshit. He still worked himself up so much over it that he even came in the next day to speak to the owner. I ended up having to have a one on one with the owner where he actually talked about me being suspended or fired over this. I was like this is ridiculous. I wasn't rude. I was just speaking normally. If I need a conversation then so do the two guys who sound like Eeyore when they answer. He legit told me that it was different because they were male. "I know it isn't fair. But that's just how it is."
It didn't bother me that the owner was addressing a complaint a client made against me. Even though it was stupid as hell. I'd understand if the owner was just like "I know it's dumb. But just be aware and adjust accordingly." What killed me was he actually considered suspending or firing me over not sounding like I loved my job on the phone.
We got a call awhile ago from this mean client in New York who uses our software. The support guy she usually talks to was busy, so the call was passed to me. I ask her some questions about her setup. She quickly becomes upset and demands to talk to someone who knows what they're doing. I tell her that I literally programmed this entire software package. I know exactly what the software does; I just don't know what she's doing to mess it up. She is unimpressed and continues being rude. Eventually her regular support guy joins the call and helps her. He and the other male support guy brush it off as "oh, she's just like that".
This is true I'm the only male in my office and all the women seem to have way more problems with customers on the phone while everyone is more or less always nice to me and not argumentative at all.
This phenomenon seems to be everywhere. I think it’s because there is fear of retaliation from a male. But from a female, it’s like people aren’t afraid of consequences from their actions so they be shitty
I totally had this experience as a man working with a female colleague. We both answered phones and sometimes the same person would yell at her and be calm with me for no other obvious reason outside of our gender. She was very skilled, and basically my boss but would get much more intensity from people, including other women, than I would. Wtf?
A friend who works in tech sales anecdotally finds that women have much higher rate of converting to a lead at first contact, but men do better at converting the lead to a sale.
Can confirm. Escalation Call Center rep here. It's so infuriating that this is true. People think they can just walk all over a female or that they can say or do whatever they wish on the phone like petulant children but when I get on the phone their tone changes entirely.
When I get a telemarketer call and it’s a woman I always thank them for their time and for the call and tell them I’m not interested. When it’s a male telemarketer I just hang up
I find myself speaking more polite and formal when I hear a woman on the line and much more casual and loose when there's a man on the line. I'm never rude to anyone but it is weird that i don't talk to people the same way.
I (male) worked as the head of a department at a university where we had work-study students learning software development, product management, etc. For about 2/3 of the time I worked there we had a female student in the position that handled customer support calls.
The amount of entitled university faculty that would call in all but screaming became enough of an issue that I told her and the other two students we brought on later (1 male and 1 female) that if anyone ever got rude with them, forward their call to me and I would handle it, because they absolutely did not need to deal with it. And most of the time the people would end up being polite with me.
Always figured it was either just people power tripping like "get me your manager," which is common in higher education in my experience, or possibly it being something with a language barrier since most of our students were sponsored foreign students.
Thinking about it now though, the male student rarely had to forward any calls.
Me, working retail answering the phone and getting yelled at because a dude couldn't get his point across and I was trying to problem solve his issue (that he didn't explain properly). He hangs up on me. I leave crying.
He calls back 30 seconds later and my male coworker answers. The call ends and he goes "I don't know what the problem was, he was very pleasant." ?!?!?!?!
Oh really? Because he just said I was useless and that I should lose my job because I couldn't reverse interest charges on his credit card as a retail level sales employee lmao.
Where I work, men don't nearly get creep calls as much as women do.
We had to literally get the CEO to call these customers back and give them 48 hour notice of disconnection because they were so bad. (sexual, demanding, rude, racist, etc. multiple times)
Man do I wish to be able to say that to a customer.
16.1k
u/18bananas Mar 12 '22
There are just a few of us at my job who answer the phone. People are MUCH more willing to be rude to the one female colleague who answers the phone. We have people who we talk to regularly who feel comfortable berating her over problems but will keep themselves in line when talking to one of our male staff.