You are a cool expert, I opine.

–fake bot-person in my spam comments filter

I couldn’t agree more!

Well, so I asked for a subscription for Christmas. The complimentary copy I picked up at the Detroit Free Press Marathon expo was thin and boring, but I hoped they were maybe just having an off month. But 3 or 4 months after my mom ordered the gift subscription for me, I finally received my first issue, and I fear that instead my first impression was just plain wrong. There are 5 cover blurbs, and 3 of them are:

• Run Your Way to Lasting Weight Loss! (this is of course the first and largest item)
• 16 Flirty & Fun Running Skirts and Dresses
• Build a Strong Core (whatever the content of the actual piece, including this type of thing on the cover is lady code for “get a flat sexy tummy!” in my experience)

Hmm.

Inside we find the following:

1) A roundup of races that “entertain you on and off the course,” including the SkirtChaser 5k. The copy says “Women runners tease their male competitors in athletic skirts as they get a friendly three-minute head start.” Post-race entertainment includes a “sexy DriLex fashion show.” I have heard of this race series before, and EWWWWW. How about I run a “race” where I deliberately position myself so men can ogle my ass, then reinforce imagery of a group of guys chasing down women in “tantalizing” clothing. Granted the existence of this creepy event is not the magazine’s fault.

2) A whole article entitled “Secrets to Healthy Hair” (???)

3) The promised weight-loss article, which features a hypothyroid woman who lost 130 lbs. from a starting weight (during pregnancy, though) of 260. Her endocrinologist “advised her that because her metabolism was so sluggish, she would need to double what other people do to lose weight.” As a result, she started walking for 2 HOURS every morning PLUS 1 hour every night, and now runs 8-10 miles per day with strength training 3 times a week. Her meal plan is listed as “oatmeal with ground flaxseed, walnuts, and blueberries” for breakfast, “turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onion and mustard on sprouted whole-grain bread” for lunch, yogurt for a snack, “lean protein like chicken or fish, vegetables, and a salad” for dinner, and a “special indulgence” of ICED COFFEE. People, iced coffee does not contain any calories.

My rough calculations put this daily menu at about 1150 calories (and that’s assuming she eats regular yogurt and full-fat salad dressing, which I doubt). Now, I realize we all eat different amounts, and the diet of many readers here may resemble this description. I don’t judge individual food choices. But once you publish something like this in a magazine article, it becomes less of a personal choice and more of a “recommendation,” and I hope we can agree that this level of intake is not, on average, reasonable or adequate for many sedentary people, let alone someone this active. Mainly this irritates me because it seems that her endo may be a candidate for First, Do No Harm–I have no idea what they tried in terms of medication, but telling someone they will just have to suck it up and do twice as much as everyone else, case closed, is never a good sign as far as I am concerned. The folks here do not, by and large, care for endos, and although I am sure there are many great ones out there, this is another data point on the negative side of the ledger AFAIC.

4) An article with some yummy-looking recipes, but with an intro that states “Women runners seem to have a natural aversion to the C word [carbs]. For many of us, consuming the usual carbs (think pasta and potatoes) seems like a bad idea when trying to lose weight and eat better.” Leaving aside that the article is written by a man, so what’s with the chummy “just us girls” tone, why are “we” assumed to be trying to lose weight at all times? Aren’t we mainly just trying to become better runners? I can get as much of this crap as I want from Good Housekeeping or Cosmo, so I fail to see why I should pay for a running magazine that feels similar in content.

To be fair, there is some good stuff in there too, including a sprint triathlon training plan for beginners, an article on vegetarianism that does not promote weight loss, a list of top trail running destinations that includes Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (woo hoo!), and a heart-rate-based training plan that I actually want to study further… it looks similar to the low-heart-rate plans I am aware of, but with some additional interesting information. But on the whole I was disappointed. I’ll keep reading the new issues as they come in, of course, but I can’t in good conscience renew my subscription if there is going to be this much weight-loss dreck.

The size and somewhat amateurish feel of the magazine tells me that it may not be doing that well anyway, so perhaps I will not have to make that choice. If my beloved Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion can go under (they filled out my subscription with Martha Stewart Living, which I have no specific issue (ha!) with, but it’s no MEHC) then I guess I won’t shed as much of a tear for Women’s Running should it suffer the same fate.

On that note, time to head out for a run! I have a race in 3 weeks that I am not as prepared for as I’d like to be.

Of course, this is what happens when we have 24-hour news and people have to think of stuff to say to fill the time. Eventually they are going to say something stupid and usually it’s something that reflects their true colors.

On the other hand, there’s the unhealthy nature of obesity and the politically correct aspect of saying, ‘You should be happy with who you are,’ she said.

Note that on the air, she said all of these words, not just the ones in quotes. I love when people invoke political correctness. And since when is it “politically correct” to let obese people (who, and I feel like I will probably repeat this about 80 more times in this post, are NOT ACTUALLY REPRESENTED in mainstream high fashion anyway) off the hook for being themselves anyway?

She was being interviewed because she wrote a fairly condescending article on this subject. Here are some of my thoughts.

1) In my opinion, the article is kind of badly written. No point that is made seems to follow logically from the previous point.

2)

It would be a welcome relief if the majority of those designers who put their wares on the runway in the coming months took a stand and refused to use models whose ribs are plainly visible and whose countenance cries ‘ill-health.’ What is the point of creeping out consumers, after all?

Screw you, lady, you have no idea if those models are healthy, nor is it any of your business, and how exactly does ridiculing any group of women for their bodies help? Or, since I’m a paranoid type, are you just trying to dishonestly present what you think might be the ungracious viewpoint of jealous fatties?

3)

How big is big enough? And when does plus size, in a profoundly overweight population, become just as distressingly unhealthy an image as emaciation?

I am PRETTY SURE we are NOT CLOSE to having to worry about this with regard to runway models.

4)

The star of the issue is arguably the model Crystal Renn, who captures the same air of detached, unattainable glamour as any size 0, perhaps even more so because Renn is classically pretty rather than startlingly odd.

Renn is indeed “classically pretty,” and therefore not exactly a representation of “average”… but which models are supposed to be “startlingly odd”? All other plus-size models or all standard-size models? What the heck are you talking about? (Amusingly, though I like it–reminds me of fairies and spring–Renn’s look is indeed a little on the “odd” side in the photo that accompanies the article.)

5)

Just how big does a model have to be before folks are satisfied that she represents some ever-shifting vision of what a ‘real’ woman looks like? Must she be precisely 5-feet-4 and a size 14, which is the fashion industry’s accepted stats for the average woman? And if she is, will that transform the fantasy photographs in fashion magazines into the equivalent of catalogues? After all, a large part of our fascination with Hollywood is because it’s populated with absurdly stunning men and women…

Yawn. Nobody has ever argued that every model should be exactly “average.” And if the goal is promoting general good health in the population (which of course it is not, which is why all of these arguments seem pointless if you think about them for half a second), body type should not be something to “aspire” to. (Note, I realize physique competitors aspire to a certain body shape, and that is fine, but although they are probably indeed very healthy, fine-tuning their bodies to meet stringent shape and size requirements does not by and large make them more so.)

Health, on the other hand, may be something to aspire to if you want to. But the idea that the noble fashion industry carries the torch for promoting good health is just… I have no idea what to say to this ridiculous self-righteous notion. Also note the “aspirational” argument that constantly gets trotted out (to be fair, it is not exactly her fault because EVERYONE who is on the defensive about thin models says this and doesn’t seem to consider that it is kind of disturbing. “Yes, we admit that some models are starving themselves to achieve this look, and that’s bad! But the look itself is harmless because women know it’s supposed to be ASPIRATIONAL, not real!” Without regard to the implication of why a look they know average women would have to starve themselves to achieve should be “aspired” to).

6)

And the lesson to designers is that all sorts of women can make their clothes look good. Attitude often counts more than body size. Although, there are certainly times when no matter how good you think you look, reality tells another story. See: Mariah Carey at the Golden Globes.

Don’t get above yourself, ladies! You might think you look good but that just means you need to be taken down a peg until you hate yourself again. See the next point: I guess part of an “inclusive” definition of beauty is tearing down other women. Good to know nothing ever really changes.

7)

Somewhere between emaciation and obesity lies good health. And somewhere between those extremes there is also a definition of beauty that is inclusive, sound and honest.

Yes, it is clear that you love all women and just want to be inclusive. Or that you spend very little time considering me as an obese person (I imagine that very few of our inconveniently large butts cross Givhan’s line of sight in the average work day), but think of me as more of a public health crisis than a human being, if I did happen to cross your mind. It’s so hard to tell.

Look, “good health” may encompass both “emaciation” and “obesity”–you don’t know by looking. Also, I cannot stress enough that “obesity” is basically never seen on ANY runway at this point in time, and on the one or two occasions when it has been, it has been a novelty where the entire point of the show is the model’s obesity. It’s not like we’re seeing those “unhealthy” size 24s (or even 16s) step out on the average runway without comment on a regular basis. Givhan is getting freaked out about something that will probably never happen in my lifetime, and acting as if it is happening now.

The take-home I am hearing is that it freaks her out that the UNHEALTHY FATTIES (again, like anyone in the fashion industry gives a rip about health anyway… if the ideal were 300 lbs. they would be force-feeding people to get it) might be taking over the runway, which would obviously be a CATASTROPHE. Don’t worry, though, Robin… I think you are safe for the time being.

Anyway, I was having trouble recently with a font that wouldn’t embed properly in a pdf file that I had made from the PowerPoint slide containing my poster design. The substitute system font came out looking OK on the print considering that this is, after all, a community band poster, and by no means a professional one, in the first place (and I had at least used WordArt, which I guess I need to stop mocking–I didn’t know it was as customizable as it is–to do the text that was the focal point, so that saved me from having the entire thing end up irredeemably weird-looking), but it would have been a lot nicer to have the original. I was a little bummed because one of our members does the reproduction for free, so I can’t really ask him to print another set… I’ve never had this embedding problem before, so it didn’t occur to me to ask him for a proof.

Still, I also email the file to the membership in case they want to make their own, and the poster goes out as an electronic announcement to our email list, so I wanted to at least rectify the problem before I did that. It seemed like the only way to be truly sure it would come out right would be to convert the text block in question to an image.

Now, I would love to learn how to create a good-looking image of text in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but have been totally inept at this so far (almost certainly my own fault, but I just can’t figure it out despite copious googling and checking the help files). First I tried using the software’s text tool and saving the image as a transparent background gif. I eventually did get it through my head that this is not a format for print, so I tried again with a tif and other file types, using various settings. I have probably saved text “pictures” 50 times trying to get something that looks decent. But each time I import it into Word or PowerPoint, it looks like crap on a cracker, especially compared to the existing text box. The letters are blurry, pixellated, or otherwise unacceptable, no matter what options or anti-aliasing I select. I have also had this problem to some degree when trying to create simple images for use on items in the band’s Cafepress store. The images look basically good in the end, but I have to be careful to make them very large and scrutinize the results to avoid a lack of crispness.

So, back to what I know–Office–as much as I’m sure that makes most of you want to cry. I tried WordArt again but the line spacing was constrained and wrong and, for some reason, pasting the WordArt object as a picture/drawing object and ungrouping it so I could manipulate the spacing (a suggestion I found) made the “i” character look weird. However, this gave me the idea that I could possibly also just select and Paste Special the original text box as an enhanced metafile. Voilà! The text I wanted, looking just as sharp and crisp as it did before, but in image form so hopefully I won’t run into any more embedding problems. This seems so simple, but it would never have occurred to me had I not seen the WordArt tip.

Anyway, I just wanted to share because sometimes these “101″ types of suggestions are difficult to find by googling… either they are not widely applicable, or most people already know about them, so you tend to get higher-level results that are difficult to put into practice if you are a beginner. I mean, I’m sure this isn’t even considered good practice (not that anything else I do would be either), but at least it solved my problem. Hope it helps someone else!

So anyway, I get her emails and am generally a big believer in the system. She is kind of cheesy and occasionally throws a bit of a petulant fit when people disagree with her, but who’s perfect? Certainly not me. That’s why I like her.

One of the offshoots of her philosophy that I don’t so much enjoy is the concept of “body clutter.” She tries to loosely apply her strategies for decluttering to weight loss, and predictably, it doesn’t seem to quite work out. For one thing, she herself is still fat, which is certainly fine by me and none of my business, but it’s interesting since I have no doubt she has tried to lose weight using her own system.

Note that I haven’t read the book and the description sounds like weight loss is de-emphasized, so I’m sure this is not the worst diet ever invented or anything… I just feel like the whole “fix your emotional problems and get skinny” thing has kind of been done to death, and surprise, we are not all skinny. Anyway, the email list is not terribly diet-y but there is an overall attitude (to be fair, this hardly originated with FlyLady) that getting your weight “under control” is part of getting your life under control.

There is also an emphasis on cooking at home to save money and improve your health–and there’s nothing wrong with that unless it becomes a moral imperative. The tips and recipes provided are probably helpful to a lot of readers. Unfortunately, in a recent email from FlyLady’s food expert, Leanne Ely, it did become a moral imperative, in a way that really pushed my buttons. Ely put together a “top ten list” along the lines of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules (unfortunately I can’t link to it because it was posted to FlyLady’s email list and login-required message board, not to Ely’s blog), and number 10 read as follows:

10)To afford to eat food worthy of consuming, eat only quality, real food and eat less of it.

Who does she think she is? “Eat only quality, real food and eat less of it.” So basically, in the real world, if you are poor, this means you’ll be taking the same food budget and using it to buy more expensive food (usually read: fruits and vegetables), necessarily in smaller quantities than you were buying before of other foods. This could result in a huge loss of available food energy. Possibly enough of a loss that you will no longer be able to afford enough calories to live on. It is not necessarily the overall concept of changing the choices you make that bothers me–perhaps if you are lucky enough to not be all that poor, you can make some substitutions and still be able to afford adequate nourishment. (After all, leaving aside non-trivial issues of the time it takes to prepare such things and whether you can find them in your local store, say, dried beans or canned vegetables–which she also nixes in one of her other “rules” due to sodium, but screw that–can actually be affordable compared to prepared foods. In fact that makes the “rule” kind of bewildering because it seems to imply that “high quality” food is always going to be more expensive. Kind of leads you to wonder what she means by “high quality,” but anyway.) No, as screwed up as some of the other assumptions implicit in this rule are, it is the apparent belief that less is always better when it comes to food intake that is causing me to experience a  simultaneous sort of white-hot rage and terrible hopelessness.

I think this reaction is mostly because deep down I know how common this view of fat people is–that somehow, because we have larger bodies, we can subsist on air and a few broccoli florets and that will actually be good for us, whereas a thin person gets a pass to consume, you know, an actual reasonable quantity and variety of food, as needed to live and thrive. (I wish I could find it now, but I remember someone in the fatosphere being told by a doctor to buy a head of broccoli and make it last all week as the entirety of her dinners.) Ely seems to make it even worse by extending this “less is better” belief to all people, probably because “everybody knows” that Americans are pretty much all too fat, right? This “rule” implies–intentionally or not–that it is a universal moral good for all people to constantly strive to eat less and less and less.

Anyway. Wrong. Fat people need adequate quantities of nourishing food–note: 1000 calories is not usually an adequate quantity, and you need protein and fat too–in exactly the same way that thin people do. To think otherwise is to deny that fat people are… well… actually people; and, in this case, to dismiss the difficulties of poor people and those who can’t afford “high quality” food as something they could overcome if they just tried a little harder. There is way too much of this crap out there as it is.

Thumbs down, Leanne. Keep the cooking tips coming, but lose the self-satisfied judgment next time.

(Incidentally, in rule #6, she also states “They are the enemy” with reference to regular and diet sodas. Dramatic much?? I tire of the scapegoating of soda. Sure, it’s bad for you. I am just finding it harder and harder to care.)

When it comes to disaster relief, I have started to believe over time that swift and immediate action is necessary to save the most possible lives following a disaster… but the rebuilding and redevelopment work, which may take years and be less successful at drawing donations than the initial disaster, is at least as important and may also save countless lives. This is not necessarily a cut-and-dried issue. However, in Haiti, hopefully that longer-term effort will include engineering and construction assistance to provide clean, reliable water sources and rebuild safer structures. For that reason, I have chosen to compile some information about Engineers Without Borders–USA.

In Part 1 of this post, I described how I had difficulty finding independent evaluations of EWB-USA. I know we all value concrete, objective information on charities that we choose to donate our money to. However, I believe in the concept and hope this post will encourage individuals to research the organization further for themselves and see if this is a cause they are interested in supporting.

EWB-USA was established in 2002 and is part of an international network of engineering charities, Engineers Without Borders–International. According to the mission of the U.S. chapter, its work “supports community-driven development programs worldwide through the design and implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while fostering responsible leadership.” Each of the group’s chapters makes a 5-year commitment to perform work in a partnering community and to train local people to sustain and maintain the projects that are completed.

Many of EWB-USA’s chapters appear to be university-affiliated, and accordingly, the group also has a leadership development and education focus.

Current projects being planned or undertaken by the group in Haiti include the following:

• Virginia Tech chapter: currently planning means of improving and ultimately reconstructing an outpatient clinic at St. Therese
• South Central Florida Professionals chapter: performing a study to provide water supply and treatment to a mountainous area in southern Haiti
• San Francisco Professionals chapter: designing a clinic in the community of Bayonnais, Haiti to meet U.S. structural and seismic codes and to include a standalone power source and onsite sewage treatment (this article includes an interview with a University of Wisconsin student who was with a group working on this project at the time of the earthquake)

The full list of ongoing EWB-USA projects in Haiti is here. Each project, as well as the main page, contains a link to donate to the specific project, to a specific chapter, or to the organization as a whole, though I am unsure whether the group guarantees that your donation will go to your designated project. And though, again, I have little information on how efficient this group is considered to be and how successful its projects typically are, it appears to remain active in Haiti and elsewhere.

Other infrastructure-related charities I am aware of are Water for People, charity: water, Architects Without Borders, and, of course, the U.S. Peace Corps. Does anyone know of others or have feedback on the ones discussed here? Please share in comments if so. Thanks!

ETA: I just learned about Architecture for Humanity as well, via Alanna Shaikh.

On the other hand, development charities might be a good focus for my own contribution to the carnival since I am an environmental engineer. In my two most recent jobs, we did giving campaigns for Water for People, and I am interested in the work of Engineers Without Borders–USA and Architects Without Borders, which are perhaps somewhat lesser-known. I’ll follow up this post with the information I could find on Engineers Without Borders.

As I tried to look further into these charities, though—and this is really the topic of this first post—it soon became clear that all was not cut-and-dried in the world of evaluating charity performance. My starting point was charitywatch.org, a project of the American Institute for Philanthropy. I recently heard the Institute’s president, David Borochoff, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. He described the AIP’s criteria for evaluating charities, based primarily on dollars spent to raise $100 as calculated after an in-depth process of reviewing charities’ financial statements. In other words, the claim “95% of our funds raised go directly to programs” would not be taken at face value but recalculated based on the AIP’s evaluation of how funds had been allocated.

As an example, an emailer to the show stated that she had selected Food for the Poor for her Haiti donation dollars because the organization represents that 97% of its funds go to programs. Borochoff responded that in fact, by AIP’s analysis, only 55% of Food for the Poor’s cash budget goes to programs, earning it a “C” grade. This seemed great to me—charitywatch.org was doing the work of delving into charities’ financial statements and coming up with a more accurate representation of organizational efficiency.

But I started to get a little more confused when I was trying to find information on Engineers Without Borders for this post. See, I love the idea of EWB, but it has often seemed rather sparsely realized to me. There are not a ton of chapters, and much of the organization seems to be driven by student activity, which can be great but can also mean that well-meaning kids started a chapter 10 years ago but by now it is inactive. In other words, this was just the type of nonprofit that I would love to have some help evaluating, or finding alternatives for if EWB itself was not highly regarded. I checked the sites I knew of (charitywatch.org, Charity Navigator) and found no entry for the group. I then googled it (unfortunately finding no independent evaluation, so in my next post I will simply offer some of its history and activities for folks to evaluate on their own), and that is where I started to find various links challenging the use of fundraising “efficiency” in general as a measure of a charity’s effectiveness or integrity.

This was not something I had considered previously, but the arguments made—that groups that do things the most cheaply aren’t necessarily the best in the same way that the cheapest car doesn’t necessarily represent the best value, or that a somewhat high salary for a charity CEO can be justified depending on the organization—also made sense to me. After all, I have long been suspicious of bidding processes that place a premium on the lowest bid; I have seen large, experienced firms lose out to start-ups that have little experience in the project area and that are highly unlikely to be able to complete the scope at the bid price, to say nothing of doing a good job. If they are really the best candidate, fine, but the lowest bid is not always the best bid.

But I still don’t think I am seeing the whole picture. Some of the charity evaluation organizations that are critical of traditional efficiency ratings (e.g. GiveWell) have rated only a few charities to date, and I don’t necessarily understand all of their reasoning. For example, they commend Doctors Without Borders—USA for its honesty about a program that ended up failing, but then give it 1 star out of 3 overall without really explaining why. And they and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy highly recommend a group called Partners in Health for Haiti disaster response in particular because they say the group has a strong history in Haiti and is well plugged-in to local communities. But invariably, folks in comments to blog posts on these topics also make a similarly compelling case for other groups and then commenters argue back and forth about whether they are legit (e.g. here, here, and here). The recommendations are fragmented, and it is hard to see a consensus except for the big disaster relief players that we have all heard of.

My issue with taking recommendations that are not or are only partially based on data, even from experienced aid workers, is that of possible bias. I’m sure every charity thinks it does great work, when the reality could vary from “great” to “needs improvement.” Maybe the GiveWell rep has a good relationship with the Partners in Health rep and that contributes to their respect for the group. (And hey, maybe that is justified.) Perhaps not surprisingly, I am much more comfortable with numbers and data than text describing why a particular charity is best suited for a particular disaster response. Otherwise it seems like the kind of thing where—especially on the Internet—there could be a million right answers and a million wrong answers, and very little way of getting at the “truth.”

It also seems that there is a disinclination (see comments) among those who share this school of thought to trust large American or international organizations when it seems to me that, though not perfect, they often are at least effective at mobilizing large numbers of volunteers and supplies quickly. I think I am suffering from a bit of information overload here.

I have the following questions that I hope will spark some discussion in comments.

• Is there any reason why I should believe subjective assessments of charities, even if they come from experienced aid workers or from foundations like GiveWell? After all, everyone has a different agenda, goals, and set of biases and beliefs.
• Is there any objective measure (e.g. numerical formula) of a charity that is at all a reliable evaluation of its fitness for receiving your donor dollars, in your opinion?
• This question may have been hashed out to the point of futility, but what is your opinion of the American Red Cross as a charity, and would you personally be comfortable directing your donation to it? (Incidentally, here is an article that was helpful to me in distinguishing between the different Red Crosses.)
• Here’s the part where you do my work for me : Which engineering/architecture/development charities would you recommend, if any, and why?

Here’s what I wrote this year. I’ll be sure to update again in 2011 when they say something like “our suits fit every single woman in the world la la la we can’t hear you, fat ladies.”

I sent the below message about 10 months ago taking issue with an email I received from T9 titled “Swimwear in all shapes & sizes.” Today I received another swimwear preview email from T9 headed “Swimwear for every body.”

Your response last March stated that you can’t carry the range of sizes you would like due to logistical constraints, and I understand and sympathize with that. It is your advertising language that I have an issue with. If your marketing department somehow only knows women who wear sizes 6-14, then perhaps it seems harmless or unimportant to state that this size range encompasses “every body.” But what you are actually doing is negating the existence of a large percentage of active women who would love to buy from your catalog but can’t. Whether these women are too fat to wear your suits or too thin–or whether, for example, they are too tall, too short, in need of a suit that will accommodate a mastectomy prosthesis, or shaped such that your suits just “don’t work” for whatever reason–they exist and are proof that nobody, and in particular not a catalog focused on a relatively narrow portion of the misses’ size range, offers suits for “every body.”

As I said, I appreciate that it may be impossible to expand your range of merchandise. So next time, how about making claims about something like the supportiveness of your suits, their utility for active pursuits, or their durability. It’s a small change, but one that would demonstrate respect to many customers and potential customers.

Through mulling over these issues and a conversation with my therapist this week where we discussed my work issues, I came to one realization that seemed pertinent–it feels like I started losing confidence in my abilities when the relationship between myself and those I answered to changed. One commenter to the Punk Rock HR post stated that he had hired a woman who lacked confidence but did OK until, as he stated:

The doubts came back in her mind because the “customer” she supported changed from a nurturing kind “father” to a dishonest “dick”.

I can kind of see where this employee was coming from. Up until my first true “grown-up” job, I had mostly personal relationships and relationships with authority figures where the contract went: be polite and helpful, do your work, and people will be happy and satisfied. This (more or less) applied to my teachers and professors, supervisors at my summer jobs during college, and my bosses and clients through most of my first “real” engineering job out of school.

Not that most of this doesn’t still apply at work. Do your job, don’t make trouble for others, and you are still ahead of a sadly large number of other employees out there. But eventually, in my first job, I was asked to do some site assessments in which I would have to ask convenience store managers for access to the property but was not supposed to reveal who my client was or why the work was being done. Except the project manager didn’t tell me that in advance–it was just assumed that I would be discreet. So I followed my usual model–figure out how people are feeling, figure out a way to make them feel better–and really for the first major time, it wasn’t right. I told an angry and suspicious store manager who the client was (a convenience store chain) and why they had ordered the site assessments (they were going to buy the convenience stores I was visiting) in an effort to, basically, make him less mad at me.

This turned out not to be a major problem in the end, but my PM sat me down and coached me on not revealing that kind of information. As I look back now, what he was in effect asking me to do was to get myself in the door, but then just LET people be hostile, upset, irritated, or scared, and not try to fix it! This goes completely against the grain of my personality, and it’s no wonder that I still found myself overexplaining, talking myself into a corner, saying the wrong things, and wondering why I couldn’t do this right.

In my next job I found myself having similar difficulties, but the stakes were higher–I worked for a larger firm now, and was involved in several collaborative projects where different pieces of the pie went to different local firms. Because of this, there was something of a tendency for the company representatives to “work together” at the same time as attempting to make the other players look bad in front of the ultimate client… after all, we were all going to have to bid against each other on the next project. There were also the usual office politics, a testy administrative assistant whom I couldn’t seem to appease no matter what I did, and other interactions that were confusing and difficult for me. Still, to some extent, I kept interacting with people by attempting to put them at ease and make them happy, when the best strategy would have been to present data and information without a lot of explanation or rationalization, and certainly without apologizing, which unfortunately I did copiously.

(I’m oversimplifying, and there is no question that I made PLENTY of other mistakes as well, mostly in the area of being disorganized and a procrastinator. It also probably didn’t help that typically, all the other people in a given meeting were male engineers with 15+ years experience, and I was usually the only woman and certainly the only one in my twenties.)

In any case, not surprisingly, this continued not to work very well–and eventually I ended up quitting my most recent job in my field because over the years I had become so overwhelmed by my belief in my own incompetence (technical and otherwise) that on some level I was afraid to attempt or do anything.

But I now realize that at least one piece of that puzzle is that not every communication in the corporate world is intended by all parties to result in mutual happiness or satisfaction. Sometimes someone is just plain trying to make you look bad, take pressure off themselves, or is taking out their personal frustrations on you. Sometimes someone is getting pressure from elsewhere (or maybe they are just used to a more adversarial, challenging style of interaction where confidence is highly valued and where you try to get one up on others… this seems common in engineering in my experience), and that is why they, for example, come at you out of the blue demanding an immediate answer to a question that really requires an “I’ll get back to you later.” But at the time, I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking that time because then I would hang up the phone with the other person still unhappy, and that was an unacceptable outcome for me.

Another commenter to Laurie’s post made a common argument, that women seem to be their “own worst enemy” when it comes to engaging in mutual self-flagellation where career issues are concerned. Personally I think this probably comes from social conditioning and not something biologically innate to women, or whatever. It seems to be advantageous in some way for us to beat ourselves up rather than displaying confidence, and I think the advantage has something to do with it being detrimental to appear overconfident and therefore threatening to men in social situations. The commenter also noted that even nowadays, many girls don’t think they “can do math,” which in my mind is closely related to the “own worst enemy” concept. I’m sure no school in 2010 actually teaches girls that they can’t do math and science, but although things are much better than they used to be, it is true that girls still lack confidence in these areas, or find it easier to get by if they hide their confidence.

This is also not limited to “math”–for me it’s more hands-on, physical labor with a technical component, along the lines of woodworking or car repair. I was putting up a blind over the summer at my grandparents’ house with a screw at one of those sort of odd, frustrating angles, and my dad (whom I love dearly) took the screwdriver out of my hand and did it himself. I’m 33 years old. I’m sure that in no way did he mean “you can’t do this, stop wasting my time”… the thought (though it was probably not explicit) was probably more like “my little girl is struggling with something, I will help her and fix it.”

I will also admit that unfortunately, I am guilty of just hanging back and letting my husband do projects around the house if he grabs the tools before I can. Because this translates to my work to some extent (I have encountered random needs like quickly getting a finicky boat to start, assembling and disassembling equipment, lifting heavy items like manhole covers, climbing fences, etc.–not to mention design projects where it is beneficial to have some hands-on experience with things like plumbing components, and not just the theory you learn in school), I have been trying to grab the tools myself and just do things around the house my share of the time, even if it frustrates my husband to watch me do it because he thinks he could do it better.

The upshot for me is that if men or similarly confident women jump in to do these things to save me trouble and frustration, and I let them, then I am positioning myself lower on the totem pole and I never get comfortable with that kind of work. So then I continue to be and look uncomfortable doing it, and that nice coworker may continue to jump in to do it for me… possibly because he was raised both to be comfortable working with his hands, and to have an action bias, rather than to avoid “just doing” things because he is afraid of doing them wrong (which is more my tendency). The end result is that I contribute to the unspoken belief that women are “just bad” at this type of work, which in my experience continues to hang around under the surface. Everybody typically means well in these situations, but the result could certainly be detrimental both to women’s self-sufficiency and our careers.

Thanks again to Laurie for posting my question (as you can see, the responses really got me thinking), and for her fantastic blog.