Download Otter for your meeting notes

Episode 16--Experience Episode: Harassment in Male-Dominated Work: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Episode 16--Experience Episode: Harassment in Male-Dominated Work

Meredith Holley40min

Meredith Holley

00:00

Meredith, welcome to empowered communication. I am Meredith Holley, a workplace conflict mediator, Communication Coach and attorney. This podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to substitute for legal advice or work therapy. Laws are different in every state in the United States, especially when it comes to employment law, and in every country, they're also different. If you have concerns about your workplace experience, we encourage you to seek counseling, seek therapy, seek any modality that might help you, and to get legal advice from an attorney in your area. This episode starts a series of interviews with past clients and experts. I'm excited to be joined in this episode by a wonderful past client who's decided to tell her story but be anonymous. This episode includes references to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and it also includes swears. So listen responsibly, and now on to the episode. So today we are with one of my wonderful, amazing, brilliant, perfect past clients, and she has offered to tell kind of her story, why she does the work that she does, what has motivated her to stay in it, kind of transitions that she made in coaching. And so she's going to be anonymous today because we may talk about some of her current work experiences. We'll see welcome. Do you want to sort of introduce yourself, say what kind of work you do and and then even I do love for people to share their cultural background and upbringing and how that influenced where you are today.

Speaker 1

01:41

Okay, yeah, I'm currently a merchant mariner. I'm a mate. I just passed my third mate exam with the Coast Guard, which is super exciting. I used to work on research vessels, and now I've switched to commercial and I've been working on tugboats in Alaska. My cultural background is that I'm a white woman. I'm a cis, straight woman. I grew up without a ton of money, but now I'm more financially stable. Yeah.

Meredith Holley

02:12

So what do you love about the work that you do?

Speaker 1

02:14

I like that. It's really varied. You have all kinds of different skills. I like being on the water. I don't have to work at an office. I get to do mechanical stuff, which I like, I like. I get to problem solve and fix things and drive the boat and cargo loading plans and work together and in a team with my crew. I

Meredith Holley

02:38

like all that stuff. That's awesome. So about how often do you work with other women? Just in your regular work, West

Speaker 1

02:45

Alaska doesn't have a lot of women, mainly it's guys. It is always nice to work with women, because I we have kind of hard to explain. I like working with other women, because you feel like, oh, there's someone here with my same kind of shared work experience. Like women are a lot more likely to kind of understand workplace sexual harassment, yeah. And so it's kind of like, if there's sexist comments, there's someone there who are not always, but there's at least someone there who is kind of is capable of understanding your experience when sexist comments are made. So that's kind of nice. Do you think you

Meredith Holley

03:35

work less often or more often with people who are non binary or trans in your work? Do you have a sense of that? That's pretty rare. I have. When I worked for the University, I worked with a trans Mariner and a trans scientist, but in this fleet, I haven't worked with people who have identified that way. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I think what you're saying is really common for people that when you have the opportunity to work with even one person who's like you, there is that even assumption of a shared experience, even if the other person really doesn't understand what's going on for you, there's just that sense of almost security of they might understand. Whereas if you work with only people who are not all like you, you almost have to assume, why even bring up a conversation about something that you're uncomfortable about because they just won't understand. Does that sound like kind of experience that you've had or no, yeah.

Speaker 1

04:33

I mean, if there's another woman, there's kind of like, the possibility of like, Yeah, I'm not completely alone here. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for someone else, they're like you, it feels a little bit safer,

Meredith Holley

04:49

yeah. So we started working together when you were you were in your old, more research focused work, um, can you sort of share. A little bit about what brought you to to us working together, and what was going on with you. Yeah,

Speaker 1

05:06

I was not having a great work experience, and I felt that there was, I think I was one of two women in a group of, like, maybe 12 or 14 people, and I felt like I wasn't being treated fairly on the basis of gender and the stuff there was a lot more subtle. Like, in these more highly educated environments, you don't necessarily get, like, over at least sexist comments, but you'll get more subtle behaviors. Like, basically, there's a different standard of behavior for men than there is for women. So if a man's, like, pushy and wants a project or does a task, that's acceptable, but if you engage in the exact same behavior, then it's viewed negatively if you're a woman. So it's like that, among other things. I remember

Meredith Holley

06:02

some of the things people had said was sort of telling stories about women speaking up and them being a bitch or like but the one that always stands out to me is the password that you had to type in to get into the system. Will you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, they they had a

Speaker 1

06:21

password on a system. It's changed now, because I kind of commented on it, but it was men wanted was the password. It's from Ernest Shackleton. There was a job ad that's actually not it's an apocryphal job ad. It's not even historically accurate, where they put out a job ad for people to go on the endurance expedition, which is a famous kind of Expedition where they got trapped in Antarctica and had to, like, spend a year getting back to civilization. But the passage was something like, men wanted for dangerous journey, little chance of success. And it goes on. It's kind of like this kind of in oceanography, some circles kind of idolize this kind of idea that men going forth and exploring stuff

Meredith Holley

07:10

is the ideal, right? The ideal? Yeah, it shows that you're a man almost, right? It's a macho,

Speaker 1

07:19

manly field, and thing to do is to go out and do oceanography and study the ocean, and it has this roots in this, like Western exploration kind of history.

Meredith Holley

07:31

And so a lot of people, I think, say, and I was raised this way. I was raised to say by men wanted we just mean people. Because man just means humans, and it encompasses everybody, but really, in real life, it can have just the impact of saying, not women, not non binary people, not trans people, like we want cis, straight men on these trips

Speaker 1

07:53

well, and in that endurance expedition, there were women that applied and were told you can't come because you are a woman, right, right?

Meredith Holley

08:02

And so it was interesting when you came to me because you were very frustrated, I remember about the unfairness in the environment. You were being given worse tasks than men who were less capable than you, or had less training or certifications than you. And then also there was this background of more violent, more like, invasive experiences that you had in other places. You remember kind of what I'm talking about. Are you comfortable a little bit sharing about that?

Speaker 1

08:30

Yeah, So previous to that job, I had had, like, sexual assault experiences at other workplaces, not in that particular group, but another group within the same organization, and I went to try to get help from the Dean of the University, and she was literally like, I've been her ass. So what? Just keep your head down and do your job, right? So I kind of already felt very unsafe at that organization because of her response, yeah, and I

Meredith Holley

09:01

appreciate you sharing about that, because I think one of the important things about that is sometimes, when people are reporting harassment at work, they will report things like the password that says men wanted like I'm being treated differently, because when I raise my voice, it's I'm called a bitch and called shrill, but men are not. But a lot of times there is a background like that of having been having had some kind of physically violent experience, and then being told that it's not a valid experience. And so it really discourages people from reporting seriously unsafe things, and then the the things that seem kind of smaller are really part of the whole structure that makes the workplace unsafe. Yeah,

Speaker 1

09:47

absolutely. Like, when I went to the dean, I didn't say like I was assaulted. What I said was, there's a problem with sexual harassment on this particular boat. Yeah. And. Right? So it's kind of like, as a leader, you could listen to that and say, Well, you didn't actually say the sexual assault. Or you could say, like, huh, if someone's trying to talk to me, they may only be sharing the tip of the iceberg, and there could be, like, far more severe issues going on, and that's kind of like, why so now, like, I'm kind of taking on more of a leadership role, and it's like, if someone comes to me and they're like, someone made this comment that made me feel uncomfortable, I'm gonna just kind of assume that there could be a lot more going on than just this little thing. Because when I went to that Dean, you know, I had spent years being devalued and dismissed as a woman in that field. And so what I said was an attempt to see, like, is this a safe person? Am I going to have a my job impacted if I make this report, you know, so you kind of like, where it's time. I was kind of like, oh, what's the right term, giving like a preview, yeah, it was just a test. The right term, it was like, a test, yeah, she failed it. It was horrifically, yeah, yeah. So then it was kind of like, oh, I kind of feel unsafe moving forward with what actually happened here, yeah. And then later I, I did report it later, and then it was kind of like past statute of limitations at the time of investigation. At the time, it was a year and it was past the year, yeah. But then later, another woman reported him, and then that person that assaulted me got fired, but they didn't say he was fired. They just kind of did it quietly, yeah, which was weird, but it was it took some, another woman being impacted for me to, like, say something about it, like I didn't value myself enough to report that situation at the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But when I saw like, other this man is gonna keep doing the same thing to other women, it was like, Oh, I have to do something.

Meredith Holley

12:06

Yeah. I think that that's really common also. And I also think when we have those really vulnerable, violent experiences, it really is each person's individual choice, what they're willing to do, especially when it comes to creating safety for other people, because ultimately, it is the predator, the abusers, responsibility for the behavior. It's not our responsibility to manage their behavior, right, right?

Speaker 1

12:36

And healing can be different. Getting healing can be different from getting justice. That's a really good point. Yeah, sometimes those can be two different things.

Meredith Holley

12:46

I think a lot of times they're two different things because I think they're two different feelings, like I always think Justice is sort of the feeling we have of looking back at our past self and saying, I'm proud of you. You went through something really hard, you did everything that you could, you made all the decisions that you could make at the time, and you're a superhero like to me, that feels that sort of creates that feeling of justice and then healing has another quality that's more like I love and care for myself I process through difficult things. It has, it has a quieter, maybe, quality to it. What do you think about the difference between the two? Yeah.

Speaker 1

13:23

I mean, I guess, like, it can be really hard for women to get justice through, like the established processes for getting justice, and it's not always successful, and that whole process is can be very traumatizing in of itself. Yeah. So I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't make a judgment against somebody who chose not to

Meredith Holley

13:45

go through to go through that process. I always say to people, the legal system was built to protect white men's property, and it does such a good job at that, and it doesn't do other things very well. And so if we wait to feel justice until a judge or a jury agrees with us, we're sort of putting so much power into the hands of a system that wasn't created necessarily for that purpose. I think. Yeah, exactly, yeah, totally. So what do you think ultimately motivated you to do something about your later workplace situation, and kind of us working together, like, start that process, and then ultimately, we negotiated a settlement around the experiences that you had in the later situation. Yeah,

Speaker 1

14:37

it's been a couple years after Yeah. Like, if there was a specific and I don't think I started out working with you, I don't think I was planning to, like, write, you know, a complaint letter, yeah, initially, I think I was just kind of, like, having these. Big feelings of like, this is sexist, and like, I don't like it, and what can I do? Kind of a thing, I think that's where I ended up fighting.

Meredith Holley

15:10

Think another thing that happened at the time, and I'm not sure we even talked about it initially then, was that you were seeing men promoted above you, and I think there was sort of a career impact that you were trying to figure out if you could prevent,

Speaker 1

15:23

yeah, so I felt like I wasn't being paid as much, yeah, as the guys with less experience. And then I had applied for someone left to go work somewhere else, and I applied for that job, and then I was not hired. Yeah, that's what I was thinking for

Meredith Holley

15:39

that job. Yeah, yeah. So we worked together, and then you ended up doing a master's program and, like, tell people kind of about your research that you ended up doing. I think it's super interesting. Yeah, I

Speaker 1

15:52

got started hearing in the university system, sometimes administrators, even women, will be like, there's no harassment that happens in academia. And I was like, Well, I know that there is, so one of the things that I wanted to do was just gather some data. Be like, All right, well, this is something we can gather data about. So I designed a whole Master's project to study rates of sexual harassment and kind of some of the policies around sexual harassment prevention on research vessels. What were the results of the research that you did? There's sexual harassment in academia, yeah, and there's been a number of studies on this. So I don't know why these, some of these administrators, seem to believe that there isn't any but what I did was specifically on research vessels, so that's what made my project a little bit different. Yeah,

Meredith Holley

16:45

was there anything that stood out to you about the results or that was interesting? Well,

Speaker 1

16:50

I mean, I think what happens with incidents of sexual harassment is that there's a lot of lack of transparency around it, so it makes a different cult for people, and for obvious reasons, you want to maintain people's privacy, like the privacy of victims in particular, but then what happens is, like, there's, there's no organizational learning you can do from these incidents. So one of the things that was important to me was to kind of give people a space to just, like, write what they wanted in an anonymous way to just kind of be like, Yeah, this is what my experience was, and I was able to include some of that in the project, like we did a lot of quantitative data, but I tried to include as many just qualitative experiences as I could that I was able to anonymize just so people in general and managers could be like, well, this is the anatomy of sexual harassment. This is, yeah, what happens. Because, like, how many incidences of sexual harassment do most people actually get to, like, read firsthand, right? Right? It's just like, kind of, you know, made private by

Meredith Holley

18:00

HR department, right? And pretty much covered up by HR departments. So if people don't know what quantitative and qualitative data is, will you explain that a little bit

Speaker 1

18:11

quantitative data would be like this many people took our survey and this many people reported that they had experienced sexual harassment. So it's just statistics, like percentages, and we asked a lot of questions to do quantitative analysis, and then the qualitative data would just be, like, more free form. I had a question at the end. It was like, Is there anything else you would like to tell us with regards to sexual harassment on research vessels? And that was where people could just write whatever they wanted, that

Meredith Holley

18:42

makes sense. A lot of women leave fields of work of all kinds, but particularly fields where they don't see other women a lot because of harassment. A lot of non binary trans folks have similar same experience. They don't see each other very much. They experience harassment and feel isolated, and they leave. What do you think were the major transitions that you made that let you stay in the field and continue in your career? Yeah,

Speaker 1

19:10

well, when I first started working with you, I kind of felt like, Oh, I'm doing something wrong. There's something wrong with me. But now I'm a lot more likely to be like, Oh no, these people are messed up. It's like, I internalize it a lot less than I used to, because I think I used to try, want to try to effort myself out of patriarchy, show at work, and that's just not that effective. Because you can't buy yourself, effort, yourself out of experiencing, you know, sexism, that's the result of centuries of patriarchy, well,

Meredith Holley

19:49

in other people's thinking and other people's behavior, right? I feel like that reminds me of some things I think, that we talked about. Like, one of the things I think you would do is you would try to explain to the people. In your workplace, why what they were doing was unreasonable, or like, get into conversations with them about it, and then it would turn into them criticizing you. And I think I was just thinking of it that I think that's one of the ways that we sometimes effort, not that it's bad to explain to people the dynamics of behaviors, but sometimes we already know that they're not open to it, and so we're better off treating ourselves well, putting ourselves in a good environment, rewarding ourselves, making things safe for ourselves, and trying to get them to change when they don't want to. Yeah,

Speaker 1

20:33

I mean, it's it's actually possible to create boundaries for yourself, rather than like, convincing other people to be different, it's

Meredith Holley

20:42

very hard to help other people be different. I think sometimes we can, and also we have to ask like, is it the best use of our energy, right? I remember at my old workplace, I had a jar of chocolate, and I made my bosses say something nice to me before they could have candy, and so I kind of trained them to be nicer to me that way.

Unknown Speaker

21:03

Really funny giving them a treat,

Meredith Holley

21:05

and they were it worked. But also, like, sometimes I might not want to buy candy on the weekend, like, not our responsibility. What else do you remember from, from sort of because I remember sitting with you and having you be very down, like very kind of defeated feeling and almost kind of hopeless feeling. And now, when I talk to you, you're like, oh my gosh, this wild thing happened, and let me tell you about it, and also I'm gonna do this about it, you know, like you just have a very different energy about you now than you did then. Yeah.

Speaker 1

21:36

I mean, I started working on boats in 2009 and I just, I put up with so much male bullshit, sexist comments, and then, and like, I give people like, 10 chances, like, they didn't realize what they said, or they're an old guy and they don't get it, you know, I'd make all these excuses for them. And now it's like, I don't want to, like, I don't want to do the emotional gymnastics to allow them to keep harassing me. Yeah,

Meredith Holley

22:03

yeah. You want to give some examples of the kind of sexist comments that you get now and how you respond to them. They were great, yeah.

Speaker 1

22:13

So I'm in a really male dominated field. It's maritime, so there's also a lot of crude language. Is typical. I also sometimes use key language, but sometimes people will be like, well, he's a pussy, or he's a little bitch, and I'll just be like, Well, what's wrong with pussies? And they just like, don't know how to respond, and they'll just kind of look at me blankly, or they'll be like, nothing, I love pussies.

Meredith Holley

22:46

Like, I'm not gay, I'm more homophobic than I am sexist.

Speaker 1

22:51

Yeah, you're kind of like, okay, decide, decide, are you more homophobic or more sexist? And it, I mean, I think it's funny, and it makes them really uncomfortable, which I also think is funny. But then, you know, if they're smart, they get the idea like, oh, I guess she doesn't want to hear that. And then if they continue to like, talk like that, it does it does that kind of language does kind of bother me. So if they continue to talk like that, then I'll like, escalate it to HR or whatever, but like, I try to just, like, disrupt the thought pattern in these, like, you know, lower level ways. And then at best, they're like, oh, maybe she just doesn't want to hear that kind of language, and at worst, they'll just report them. Yeah. I think either way, the like, the emotional burden is more off of me.

Meredith Holley

23:50

Yeah. And what you do, what you're talking about, is a strategy that I think is really effective, of letting yourself ask a question in response to something you're offended to about because, like, my brain if, if somebody says something in front of me that's offensive, a lot of times, my brain will be like, they didn't really say that. Did that really happen? I shouldn't be mad about that, like, I have all these blocks, but if I ask a question in in return, it lets them clarify if they said something, if I did miss here. So I think that that's a really good strategy. Oh, what's wrong with that? Oh, did you really say this? Would you say, like, those can be and then it puts it back on the person, like you said. I think that's a really good strategy. Yeah, yeah. I've heard

Speaker 1

24:36

other women say that too, where sometimes someone will make an offhand sexist comment, and they may or may not realize it, but if you're like, what does that mean? Just, like, totally neutral, yeah. What's that mean? They'll either, like, catch themselves and they'll be like, Oh, that's not what I meant. Or word of conversation with them. Them,

Meredith Holley

25:00

yeah, or double it, double down. And then you're like, Wow, big red flag on this person. I need it. And

Speaker 1

25:05

then you write it down, and you see if it's like, if they don't back off, and you're like, Oh, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry. It's like, if they do the opposite, then it's like, Okay, write it down. This person's

Meredith Holley

25:15

an unsafe person. I also think like, and we kind of talked a little bit about, like, being our places of privilege and what we do. Because I think, like for me, what I found is people are a lot more likely to say racist comments in front of me than they are to say sexist comments. And so it's also a strategy of building towards like, Ally ship or accomplish ship, like, like being really somebody who, who is a safe person, to people when you have privilege to start saying, Oh, wait, was that racist? Oh, what'd you say? Oh, what's wrong with that? What does that mean? Like, those questions, because it can build your brain towards being willing to make stronger statements to create safety for other people. I think,

Speaker 1

26:09

yeah, I've for sure notice that people will say racist things in front of me, as if I want to hear racist things because I might and

Meredith Holley

26:15

don't. Right

Speaker 1

26:16

in those like, sometimes people say stuff, you know, like, what in your mind? You're like, did they just do that? And you're just like, stunned, yeah, you know. And in those situations, I've tried to get better about saying and I don't even have to process the whole statement. I'll just say, like, That's fucked up. Like, I don't have to be like, Well, you said this, and that's a bad stereotype, and that's why the I don't need a whole logic line, yeah, I can just say that's fucked up, right? And it doesn't take a huge amount of like, right, effort when you've been stunned to say that's fucked

Meredith Holley

26:57

up. I think for me, the questions like asking helps me overcome any barrier I have, but then ultimately the response can be, ew. That's a terrible thing to say, That's fucked up. Like, ew, what? No, yeah, we don't do that here, and

Speaker 1

27:12

because I have this academic background, I think I might go to is like a three to five page essay on why that seems bad, but it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like can be like, or that's fucked up, yeah? And that's all you really need to say to challenge fucked up statements, yeah,

Meredith Holley

27:33

yeah. And I mean to show that you are a safe person for other people, to show yourself that you are a safe person for yourself, and to create a safer environment around you. I think that those are really great strategies.

Speaker 1

27:48

So now I just like document what they said, and I won't necessarily. I'm not gonna go straight to HR for like, a minor thing, but I continue to document it, and when I get to the point where I'm done, then I just send all those comments onto HR, and I'm like, I'm tired of this. Yeah,

Meredith Holley

28:05

yeah. It sounds like you just mostly don't take it on yourself anymore, like you do what you need viewed

Speaker 1

28:14

as my responsibility, like it's and even at my company, they've done sexual harassment training, and in our training, it's like, they want us to just report things to them and not solve it on my own. And it's like, Yeah, I'm okay. I don't want to have to solve it on my own. That makes sense. That makes sense. They're not necessarily perfect at it, but it also kind of puts the burden off of me to solve everything like by myself, even if they don't necessarily act in a way that I agree with, it's kind of like it's not my responsibility to manage everybody's behavior. There's a department for

Meredith Holley

28:53

that. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So I think another fear that people have is that if they say something, if they do something, it'll impact their career, or they'll be stigmatized, or won't be able to get other jobs. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1

29:09

I mean, it's always a possibility. It's illegal, of course, but like, you know they can, the only thing that it being illegal does for you is that if they fire you could get an attorney and potentially Sue. That's the only benefit of, you know, report of illegal retaliation. But I just, fortunately, I'm in a job right now where there's, like, a ton of opportunities, like people are desperate to hire mariners. I also just kind of set up my life in a way that financially, I have savings, and if I need to leave a job or hire a lawyer, I have an emergency fund. Yeah, and I know that's not like a fuzzy, happy answer, but I think it's just the reality of having a job as a woman. It where, yeah, it's kind of like having bad money, the old concept of having bad money, but instead of a bad date, it's your job, I

Meredith Holley

30:07

mean, and I think also with you, you weren't forced out of your original job, and you have been able to find increasingly higher paying jobs while you continue to enforce your environment, the safety around you? Is that fair? Well, they

Speaker 1

30:26

did. They so what they did was they unassigned me from my job, which is a super weird way of getting rid of someone, but I did get three months of pay, plus the settlement, but then I just I was already doing a master's degree part time. So it was really kind of funny, because it was like, You do realize I'm not gonna go anywhere, right? I'm just gonna stay at the same university and finish my master's degree with the settlement I got, yeah, so I would still see my bosses around the university. Okay, you know what you did? Yeah, and they'd get really uncomfortable, and then they'd leave. And I was like, Okay, be uncomfortable. It's not my problem.

Meredith Holley

31:08

Yeah, I guess that's what I was remembering. I remembered you being still there at the university, so you left the position. We kind of negotiated you leaving the position, but then you stayed as a student, and then having that background though, like you openly did your major thesis on gender discrimination, and you still have been able to, like it, move forward in your career, be hired. Yeah.

Speaker 1

31:35

So yeah, after that, I well. I while I was towards the end of my master's degree, I started doing contract work with another research vessel, and then the pay, you know, the pay and the vessels really isn't great, and I wanted to upgrade my officer license. I also didn't get along that much with the officers there. I didn't think they were particularly competent at their jobs, and they were immature to the point where they had no business being in charge of other people. So I ended up going commercial and make twice as much money as I did working for universities, which has allowed me to make enough money to upgrade my license, which I would have been really a huge financial strain working for universities. Yeah, so I've kind of just like, continue to, I don't want to say fail into higher and higher paying jobs, but like, transition into higher and higher paying jobs. I

Meredith Holley

32:29

mean, I would almost say, refuse to tolerate incompetence into higher paying jobs. Yeah, I

Speaker 1

32:35

refuse to tolerate incompetence into higher and higher paying jobs.

Meredith Holley

32:40

I mean, I know when I was leaving my old workplace, a lot of people said, like, you can't even leave a job, or else, as a lawyer, your career is going to be impacted. People are going to think badly of you have to stay for 20 years in the same job, and then that's how people will know that you're good at your work. And my experience of it is I both reported and initiated investigations about sexual harassment in my old workplace, and I wrote a book about it, and have a business about it, and it has been successful for me. And I think that people internalize like you were talking about, internalize the blame of the other person's conduct, internalized responsibility to manage other people's behavior and internalize this idea that if I talk about my experience or hold people to higher standards, I will be the one that's forced out. And I think while that can happen, I don't think it necessarily has to happen, and I think a lot of that is about how we are strategic around what we do and the plans that we make for ourselves and and trying new things, I guess, is another component. What else do you think?

Speaker 1

33:49

Yeah, I think one thing that happened at that previous job was that once I made a report of sexual harassment, they dredged up mistakes from like three years previous to try to justify why they didn't want me working there, even though, like men had made similar or worse mistakes, right? So I think maybe people rightly, sort of intuitively, think that that might happen, yeah, but it's it's also kind of like, if someone's treating you that way, do you want to stay at that job for the rest of your life? Like I didn't like now it's so funny in the maritime industry, like the bar is so much lower than academia. So it's like people in this industry really value what I'm capable of, and mostly like, they don't really care what gender I am. They just care, like, Can I show up on time to work, not drunk, and that's super easy for me to do. And then, like, I also have a lot of experience at sea and a lot of education, so doing things like analyzing operating manual. Was like, super easy for me. So in this industry, people really appreciate those skills. So it's kind of like, I I think I was holding on way too long at a job where people just didn't value me anyway. Yeah? So it's kind of like, yeah, maybe they will try to discredit your record. Maybe they will say bad things about you, but like so anyone

Meredith Holley

35:24

who would trust them is somebody who's also probably not going to be your person anyway. And I think that's a really good point. I I like to talk about accountability as math, and anytime we ask somebody else to be accountable and say, Hey, you took these actions, you got these results. That's kind of just the math equation of what's happened. They also, they come back to us and ask us to be 10 times more accountable. They're like, Well, seven years ago, you took an action too. You did something and that had an impact too. And I think if we have a healthy relationship with accountability, and we're like, Yeah, I did do that. So what that's not relevant. I now ask you to also acknowledge what you did and the results that you got, the harm that you created from what you did. Then we can, I think, move forward with it in a better way, but if we feel a lot of guilt and shame and blame and perfectionism around our own behavior, it's a lot harder to ask other people to be accountable to

Speaker 1

36:28

Yeah, and it's kind of funny, one of the things I've learned in the maritime industry is like, like, there's so many people who are just not that good at their jobs, but like, they don't care. Yeah, they really don't care. Like, they're there, they're making the big bucks, they're not that good. They don't care. Yeah, and so, like, I am holding myself to this, like, or I have been my whole life, holding myself to this, like, perfectionist standard, and it's caused me to, like, accept abuse from people because I'm not meeting this ridiculously high standard, because

Meredith Holley

37:05

you're like unless I never make a mistake, ever that they can never bring anything up about me, then I won't talk about what they're doing that's actually causing real harm, when really, if we can have that loving relationship with ourself and say, I I too, take actions, and they get results, and I might even cause harm sometimes, like you and I have had conversations about being white women and impacts that we have that we don't even realize on black women who we know and love. I think like if we are willing to have that compassionate relationship with ourselves, it's much easier to also say to other people, stop doing what you're doing because it's causing harm.

Speaker 1

37:45

Yeah, absolutely. What

Meredith Holley

37:48

else do you think someone should know if they're thinking about reporting or if they're in a workplace environment that's kind of unfair or scary? Yeah?

Speaker 1

37:57

I mean, I think part of why I've stayed in these bad situations also was like, because I needed everyone to like me and like, I couldn't leave a place unless everyone was like, liked me and thought I was great. But it was like, that's not the right metric to be using. And whether you stay at a job or not like or whether you report sexual harassment or not, it's just, it's like some people are just ignorant sexists. It has nothing to do with you. Yeah, I guess, and

Meredith Holley

38:29

them liking you, like needing them to like you, or needing other people to like you more than them even, can be a real trap that can like you said, make us tolerate abuse. That's a really point. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story and for pushing through everything. And you even shared your story twice because we had a recording snafu, so we're here again, and so I so appreciate it. Oh, yeah, no problem at all. Meredith, if you know someone who might be in a toxic work environment, encourage them to take the quiz, how toxic is your work environment at Aris resolution.com/health quiz. Often when we wonder whether our work environment is healthy, it can feel like we're in a confusing maze. We're not sure whether we're in danger or whether what we're experiencing is normal. This quiz has the major components we've seen indicate whether an environment is healthy or toxic, and the results are confidential. They're only for you. Our team doesn't even get a copy of the results. This can get you started in considering whether you might want to make a change. Again, the quiz is called, how toxic is your work environment? And it's at Iris resolution.com/health quiz, E, R, i, s resolution.com/health, quiz. The Empower communication podcast is produced by same team media music by Sarai Johnson. I.

00:0000:00