Woman Reprimanded For Being 'Rude & Disrespectful' After Copying Her Male Colleague's 'Direct & Professional' Email Style
Huh. It's almost like all those double-standards we've heard about are real.
Peopleimages.com | YuriArcurs | Canva Pro Say one word about the double standards applied to women and other minorities in the workplace and some dude will inevitably roll his eyes and explain why it's not real. But one woman on Reddit shared an absurd experience at work that is basically an object lesson in how very real these double standards are.
The woman was reprimanded for being 'rude and disrespectful' after she started writing emails in her male colleagues' direct style.
We've all heard it a million times: When a man is assertive he's confident and trustworthy. When a woman is assertive she's a word we cannot type here without hurting the algorithm's feelings, but it rhymes with "witch" and starts with the letter b. This maxim has been repeated so often it's become a cliché, but most clichés become clichés for a reason.
These perceptions often manifest in the way women (and others with "minority" identities) write their emails — with lots of exclamation points and smiley emojis to indicate a bright, happy tone, along with verbiage that subtly, if not explicitly, undermines or apologizes for whatever is being said ("no worries if not!").
I'm speaking from experience here, lest there be any naysayers reading this. Since stereotypes and judgments applied to women are sometimes also applied to gay men, I have spent much of my career doing these things too.
In her Reddit post, this late-20s corporate professional explained that she has always written emails in this manner. However, since she's now "pretty established" in her career and company, she has grown tired of her "very 'hi! How are you? :))))'" email style. She realized it "doesn't reflect [her] professionalism" and worried it affected how others viewed her.
So she decided to change it and adopt her male colleagues' more direct style. The blowback she received was telling, in the most eye-rolling way possible.
She copied a male colleague's email style verbatim as a test and was then reprimanded for being 'disrespectful.'
She wrote that her male colleagues "mail/message with no emojis, exclamation marks or fluff," which results in messages that "aren't rude but aren't overly nice and apologetic." The backlash was almost immediate.
"Turns out, while everyone respects their 'direct tone' and 'professional approach,' I am 'rude and disrespectful' for emailing the exact same way."
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She was so irritated by the pushback that decided to do a kind of test, copying an entire email from a male coworker that included generic wording that applied to her situation too. When her manager saw it, he reprimanded her for being rude.
When she showed her manager the emails side by side, he was instantly "embarrassed" when he realized they were verbatim the same email. "We're supposed to be a company that cares about sexism," she wrote. Oops.
Countless women responded to the Reddit post with similar experiences.
"I've had this happen when literally I copy/pasted my manager's old email and just changed/added the relevant information," one commenter wrote. "My manager didn't like it. So, I showed him the email (his) that I made into my template."
One woman with a unisex name shared an even more revealing spin on this experience. After years of only ever emailing a client in a direct, "no fluff" tone, she finally had a phone call with him. "[He] was surprised I'm a woman. He treated me differently after finding out," she wrote. "Took longer to respond, blew me off, didn't take me seriously, etc."
This isn't just opinion. A 2017 study that looked at one large corporation found pretty conclusively that even when all other factors were equal — from their credentials to investing time in traditional "boys club" networking opportunities — women were still held back at the company solely because of bias-based negative perceptions about their actions and working style.
If there were an easy fix for this situation someone would have become a billionaire by now, but refusing to play the game is of course a huge step forward, and that's exactly what this Redditor has decided to do. "I refuse to be overly polite just because I'm a woman," she wrote.
In the immortal words of pop icon Madonna: "I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a [b-word], okay." Spoken like a person who'd never deign to put an exclamation point in her email.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.