Being nice

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I'm a strong believer in sportsmanship, too.

I hate the way ballplayers taunt other players these days.

I am not competitive at all. I avoid it as the associated behaviour is far too combative. Who wins doesn't matter to me. In grade school we had spelling bees and I would deliberately misspell words so as to be out of the game.

Way to take one thing way out of context and try and cast me in the worst possible light; I think there's a word for that...

How is that out of context?

Im not feeling very nice today, Ive started to really dislike my boss.

Sometimes I can be competitive if the occasion calls for it, like if Im playing a team sport, but like androbot I will usually avoid it because of the associated behaviour.
I sometimes wonder if silly (insignificant) competitive behaviour comes from having too much time to fill or just an idle mind.

When I did pizza delivery, almost 20 years ago, at 4 out of the 5 places I worked at everyone mostly got along okay. It was only at the last place I worked, it was the guys who would go tattling to the manager about me stealing their runs. This is the same manager who let most of them come to work and drive drunk or stoned, and if they were too slow on the draw, it was their damn fault for being intoxicated.

The other 4 places wouldn't have tolerated the things that went on at the 5th one, the environment was totally different there, standards were lower overall and it resulted in a lot of sniping and back biting, illegal behavior, bad driving skills, poor work ethics, and poor cleanliness and of course lower food quality. Management sets the tone, not gender.

You snipped one chunk out of a sentence and implied that I was saying women don't handle meritocracy well, even going so far as to mock my own assurance that I wasn't trying to make any broad statement, when all I was doing was relating an observation from my own experience of different genders responding to the same work. Dishonest is the first word that comes to mind, but not the last.

You didn't imply women don't handle meritocracy well; you said it. That's your experience, so fair enough. I, however, am at liberty to challenge this. Women and men are equally capable of understanding the logistics of reward for production. Anyone who went through grade skill is familiar with this concept. That's not to say there aren't people who are unmotivated by this system (such as myself,) but that is not to do with gender.

Also, in rereading your original post, I noticed that you said that women take things personally while men don't. But if men punch each other over disputes, aren't they taking things personally?

Lol, I think my management style for this thread is laissez faire, and ^^voila... being nice or snippy is an individual way of being .

I related my experience with specific women in a specific industry, you're the one who's trying to twist my words around to score some sort of points, which is odd behavior coming from someone who keeps claiming not to be competitive.



You didn't "challenge" anything, you mangled my post to try and make me look sexist, while you made snarky remarks about it.



Notice that no one has said anything about anyone being unable to understand reward structures; you're knocking down straw men.



What the women I worked with in delivery shops had a hard time with was the legitimate competition with their coworkers that was an integral part of the job, they took things personally that everyone else shrugged off as normal parts of the work. When I talk about punches being thrown, I'm not talking about someone being upset because they thought they were being singled out, I'm talking about discipline being enforced on someone who was trying to cheat his coworkers.

It's hard to understand if you haven't done that job, there is some etiquette and informal rules that normally prevents things from getting that far, but sometimes someone doesn't learn or take the hints or thinks they can get away with it, in which case his coworkers take care of the problem. Usually, a cheating driver, called a snake, gets frozen out by his coworkers deliberately setting him up with the worst runs or otherwise colluding against him, it's when the snake makes an issue of that that things might get physical, or he gets an unusual number of flats on the job, etc.

So if a woman breaks an informal rule, the men will beat her up and slash her tires? But it's not personal? And this somehow proves women don't like meritocracies? Perhaps they just don't like having their physical safety threatened.

I try to be nice because I don't like bitchiness. Apparently I'm not very successful though because I'm accidentally rude sometimes due to tactless bluntness and there are definitely people who consider me a b***h.

I don't want to be like that. I try to be nice but I don't always see ahead of time how sometimes what I say might be hurtful. Sometimes I don't see even hours or days later why something I said was hurtful. I hate arguing and conflict, I hate insults and even teasing if it looks more like mean teasing or bullying to me. It makes me cringe inside and sometimes outside.

I don't know why some people seem to read the most insult possible into other poeple's comments, looking for offense where none was intended. I also don't get why the same behavior in women that is labelled "bitchy" in women is just labelled assertive or good leadership or confidence in men. To me, men who act like that are often just dicks.

I agree in part, management does make a big difference, but I still feel that gender plays a role in how people respond to the work environment. I had good luck if we had a driving manager, or at least a former driver who had been promoted to manager, because they could usually function as a pretty good referee for squabbles over orders, being able to look at the tickets and know what should go with what for good runs. Non-driving managers with no experience as drivers were more of a problem, either telling the drivers to settle it among themselves, or trying to get hands on and assigning runs that made no sense and forced everyone to get stuck in traffic for no good reason. Even the former drivers though tended to stay out of things unless it became a problem, so dispatching was usually up to the drivers to work out, and that generally functioned well enough. I never really had much of a problem with drunk or stoned drivers; not that it didn't happen, just that everyone pretty much felt that if they wanted to kneecap their own earning potential, that was on them, and no one was going to care if they whined about getting shut out. Cooks always did their own thing, the rule of thumb was that if it didn't effect their job performance, it was their business, to the point that one shop I worked at in Denver allowed their cooks to have brown paper sacks at their station, so long as they didn't abuse the privilege.

The thing I'm talking about, women drivers taking the job too personally, I saw at multiple shops in multiple cities in multiple states, to the point where it was the exceptions who stood out among my many coworkers of that era. Honestly, it was a little different than I would have expected, usually when you see women in male dominated industries they tend to double down on the macho shtick (e.g. lady cops), or be quiet and intense, which is what I see a lot now that I'm a chef and not a delivery driver, so I'm more curious than anything as to why that particular business brought out that particular reaction. I really think it has something to do with the way women compete with other women vs the way guys compete with each other, and something about that work environment tripped it in a weird way.

Actually, I've never heard of any of that happening to a woman in that business or even being threatened with it, if anything men in the business tend to be protective of their female coworkers. It's pure honor culture stuff, you handle your own business, you don't let people steal from you, you're prepared to do violence to any man who insults you; you know, all the great parts of being male.

I'd point out that I never argued that women don't like meritocracies, but somehow I doubt it would matter to you.

I'm not trying to score points. I'm disagreeing with you.


How is that mangling? I don't know if you are sexist or not. And it's not relevant to the question of women's response to meritocratic work environments.


I don't think it's so much a matter of "understanding" but rather "responding to." If women aren't judged by merit, then what the heck are they judged by? In the job you mention it sounds like pushiness was what was rewarded.


Both are examples of personal interaction. It is your language which is different. "Upset" vs "discipline enforced..." The one example is from the perspective of the person being ostracized, the second is from the perspective of the enforcer. You may have thought the women who were "upset" because they were "singled out" had no legitimate grievance, but how would you know? It sounds like the method of interaction was different based on gender in this environment ... ostracism vs thumping. But the goal of behaviour modification is the same.


I'm not sure this behaviour is intrinsic to maleness.

Any man who slashes a woman's tires should be arrested.

Same with a woman slashing a man's tires.