To Be or Not To Be…Silent
Women often tend to stay quiet when faced with a situation where they want to speak up. Why is that? When I’ve been in those situations myself, I often question whether I’m overreacting, and whether it’s better to stay quiet and maintain the peace. When I have decided to speak up I’ve always questioned how I’ll come across, whether I’ll be seen as the angry, emotional woman, or whether my feelings about the situation are valid and speaking up is the right thing to do. This constant second guessing is exhausting. I even gaslight myself.
To give you an idea of how women tend to second guess themselves, here are a few examples of my own experiences.
A few years ago a teammate attempted to take control of the team through manipulation. He informed the rest of us that he had authority from our boss to prioritize our work for us and we had to follow his mandate and work on things he felt were important. Being knee deep in my own work, I went to our boss to make my case, only to find out that this person hadn’t been given this authority and that I could continue to work on my own tasks. Off I went back to my desk to work away, but I wondered: Was I being a tattle tale? Should I have just kept quiet and done the work?
Another time an old colleague completely took credit for all of my hard work, leaving me confused and upset. When I asked him privately why he did this, he claimed we did the work together, which was not true. Soon after our conversation, he rectified the situation by sending out a note to the team. After this I was able to move past it, doubt and guilt also creeped in. Did I do the right thing by speaking up? Did he think I’m being too sensitive by asking him why he would do that?
More recently, a co-worker totally overstepped my boundaries by projecting his own needs onto me without thinking how his actions would affect me. Although an acknowledgement and an apology followed after I had a conversation with him (inspiring my article The power of a well intentioned apology), I still felt guilty for even being upset. Was I just making a big fuss? Should I have kept quiet?
The cases above are just a few examples of when I felt like I was treated in questionable ways, spoken up, had my initial gut feelings validated, but still felt guilty for even speaking up in the first place. But why? To dig a little deeper into the why, I did some reflecting into reasons why I’ve shied away from speaking up, and followed up with a bit of research as well. I came away with three main reasons.
Conditioning
Staying silent is what we have been taught to do by our cultures and by society in general.
The article “Good Girls Are Quiet’: How Society Tells Our Daughters To Self-Silence” dives into this topic very well. According to the author, Yolanda Zhang, “Whether influenced by culture — they are Chinese — or age, they have placed a premium on behaviours that are submissive: being quiet, being seen but not heard and being a good listener. My daughter is internalizing these values. There is of, course, nothing wrong with being a good listener, but when those behaviours are overemphasized to the exclusion of others, it has a silencing effect. It takes away some of my daughter’s voice and tells her that, in order to be a “good girl,” she needs to be quiet.”
Growing up in an Iranian household, I can attest to the same lessons, not just by my parents, but also by my extended family, by my teachers in school and by society in general. We were always being warned to not make noise, told to play quietly, and if we didn’t, there would be some sort of punishment. Growing up, I learned that being quiet is a virtue, and something to strive for because adults will accept you more if you’re quiet. In fact, as an adult I still carry those learned behaviours with me, not because they serve me but because they are so ingrained in me, I have trouble unlearning them.
Fear
Another reason women tend to stay silent is fear. Fear of being shamed. Fear of punishment. Fear of violence. We don’t have to go too far back in history to find laws that were specifically written to shame and silence women. As Jane Brox explains in this excerpt from her book SILENCE A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives, “One set of laws applied almost entirely to women, and was aimed specifically at muting their voices: Women could be harshly punished and humiliated simply for talking too much or too publicly or in a tone of voice that seemed grating or nagging. They were labeled scolds or gossips and, unlike the crimes of theft, assault, or murder, no concrete measure defined their transgression. English law defined a scold as “a troublesome angry woman who, by her brawling and wrangling among her neighbours, doth break the public peace, and beget, cherish and increase public discord.” Furthermore, she explains “If ever a woman spoke too much or acted out of turn or disobeyed, a husband might send for the jailer to bring the scold’s bridle, which was then chained to the hook at the hearth and clamped around his wife’s head.”
Fear of speaking out can also be seen in a different light where women have a fear of hurting another person’s feelings by speaking out, so they choose to keep their grievances to themselves. Ultimately though, in the long run, they end up hurting themselves as their own feelings are now overlooked and the problem is never brought to light and resolved.
Inability
Sometimes women do try to speak up, but are unable to do so. How many times have you been in a situation where you constantly get interrupted or spoken over, or worse, not even given a chance to speak? I certainly have, more often than I would like to admit. I remember one specific meeting where I was surrounded by about ten of my male colleagues and after half an hour of trying to get a word in, I gave up and just watched them as they constantly talked over and interrupted each other. If nothing else, it was even a little amusing to watch.
According to the article ‘How often are women interrupted by men? Here’s what the research says’, actual studies have been done on this phenomena and the results are not surprising. “a separate study from George Washington University found that men interrupted 33 percent more often when they spoke with women than when they spoke with other men. According to the researchers, over the course of a three-minute conversation, men interrupted women 2.1 times. In contrast, during conversations of the same duration, men interrupted other men only 1.8 times — and women on average interrupted men only once.”
If you would like to read more about this, I also highly recommend the article “Speaking While Female” by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.
So where do we go from here? What can we each individually do to change the collective behaviour? We can commit to speaking up even if it’s hard or scary. We can also encourage and support our colleagues if they’re the ones who are faced with difficult conversations. If you are in a leadership position, be on the lookout for these situations and be proactive about dealing with them. As a leader, if I see this happening, I make a point of having private conversations my directs around what happened, what the effects were, and how to resolve it and move past it. The more we bring these situations to light, the more we normalize these conversations, and the less often women will shy away from speaking up.
The fact is change is already happening. I’ve seen first hand over the last decade in the tech industry. More women are entering the technology sector, working hard, being promoted and becoming leaders. New leaders are trained to be more sensitive, to listen without judgement and without shutting the speaker down. The old paradigm of the alpha clueless boss is slowly melting away and organizations are realizing the power of having female representatives in leadership roles.
Are we there yet? Absolutely not. We’re still in the early stages and it will take a collective effort by all of us to get there. The question is: How will you commit to un-silencing women around you in 2021 and beyond?
