Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Styles of Asking for Help, by Gender

At work, I am often asked to fix stuff.  I'm the sysadmin so it comes with the territory.  However, the other women of the office (who are overwhelming administrative staff rather than engineers, because women in tech aren't much of a thing in the U.S.) when they ask for help often preface it with either how stupid they are and they are probably asking dumb questions, or how smart I am.  The men of the office have much less of a tendency to do this.  One or two of our male interns who are still in college, will but the full time engineers will seldom if ever tell me they are stupid.  Even if they are telling me that there is no internet coming out of the internet hole in the wall (true story).

What, if anything, can I do about this, besides being always prepared with motivational speeches for women telling me they are stupid?

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