This is fairly obvious, but I can offer an anecdote.
I am a man, for context. Recently I had to edit some personnel photos for my company.
Some group had been brought in to take headshots of all of the major players, a lot of whom are women, and they did a terrible job. Found out after the fact that the group that was brought in was brought in nepotistically and did not have any proven skill worthy the amount of money that the company paid them for their services.
Since it was my job to edit the photos, I was complaining about the quality of the photos, how the wrong lenses had been chosen that caused their faces to be distorted, how the makeup was done inexpertly, and how the photos were a significant downgrade of the photos that were currently there in most cases. I have a little bit of experience in this because my ex-girlfriend was a model and I attended and helped and actually photographed her on multiple occasions for clothing distributors and for makeup brands, like I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. Just a little bit.
A co-worker of mine got really upset that I was talking about the appearance of my female co-workers.
There was no opportunity for me to explain to her that I am not talking about my coworkers. I’m talking about the photographs of my coworkers. She directly ordered me to “not talk about the appearance of my female coworkers”.
And now it’s really hard for me to think positive thoughts about her because she immediately went to one of the worst possible explanations for what I was doing rather than asking or even talking to me about it.
I know well enough to know that if you’re talking about your co-workers and one of your co-workers comes in and says, don’t talk about your co-workers, to not talk about your co-workers. She’s clearly indicated that she is offended. Fine.
But I was talking to one of the co-workers who had their headshot, and we were discussing her headshot, and the quality of it, and what they had done right, and what they had done wrong, when that person came in and told me to shut up. She interjected herself into a conversation she was not a part of, and indicated that she was offended that this conversation was happening and implied that I was being sexist for having it.
Like, we were having a good and productive conversation because it had already been decided that another group was going to be brought in for additional headshots because the quality of these headshots was not up to snuff.
But now I’m all bent out of shape, and personally butthurt, and she feels like, you know, she struck a mighty blow for the feminist cause, and it’s all bullshit, and it just- I’m- I’m struggling to find a way to stop sitting in my feelings over it.
Before all of this, I really liked her as a person. Now I don’t want to be in the same room with her because she can judge me like that.
This sucks. Your coworker misjudged a situation and seems to be unfairly misjudging you because of it. I can understand why that would create tension and discomfort.
Can you try to talk to her about it? Approach her and ask if you can have a few minutes of her time. Then try to explain that you didn’t mean any offense because you were talking about the low quality of the photography, not about the people in it and it didn’t occur that someone might take it to be about the people. After her reaction it clicked that it could look/sound that way, but that was genuinely not the intent or your thought process at all.
Heck, you could also take a good selfie and a bad selfie (or internet examples of this) and show her those as an example to highlight that the same subject in different settings can look starkly different, and that was what you were commenting on, not the subjects themselves. Hopefully that would clear it up.
This approach would take some humility to concede some to her perception of you doing something wrong because doing so might soften her up enough to actually listen to you, but I want to clarify that I don’t think you did anything wrong (and FWIW, I’m a woman).
Do you need to do this? No. But it’s clearly eating at you, and this is a way that might put it to bed. And if she doubles down and gets worse, then you know you really should put distance in how you interact with this person.
Like the other commenter said, it might be worth mentioning to your manager first though, especially if you have a good relationship there. Doing so covers several bases:
- If she was spiteful enough to report you for what she perceived to be happening, you have the real version out there.
- Your manager may have a recommendation on how to approach her better than what I said since they actually know each other.
- Your manager may recommend not reaching out, for whatever reason. One possibility, maybe this coworker is known to stir the pot and this could be another example. Sometimes there are performance things spoken about only at the manager level.
I wish you luck and peace in moving on from this. It’s stressful to be accused of something you haven’t done because of a misunderstanding (I’ve been there).
Those are good advices and I will take them into consideration. I know I’ll get over it eventually, But at the same time I also know that one, she’s higher in the corporate hierarchy than I am, and two, if you were a boss and you heard a man trying to complain about being unfairly judged over a passive allegation of sexist creepiness versus a highly ranked and respected woman who made the allegation. It’s in your best financial interests to believe the woman and dismiss the complaints of the man.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that 99 times out of 100, it’s actually the man being a creep. It sucks to be in that 1% category this one time.
You were doing your job. If that happened to me, I’d go to my supervisor and say that another employee ordered me not to do my job. You were put in charge of getting the headshots sorted out, and another employee told you not to talk about the headshots. You can’t do your job if you’re not allowed to talk about it. Boss needs to do something to fix that.
You had the chance to clarify when it happened and failed to execute. Stop crying, move on and defend yourself next time.
You are not a victim.
