A man learnt the hard way what it’s really like to be a woman in the workforce when he accidentally used one of his female co-worker’s email signatures at work.
Martin R. Schneider worked for a small employment services firm with a woman called Nicole Pieri. He was her superior at the time, and his manager kept complaining that she was taking to long with the clients.
He couldn’t really get to the bottom of why until one day.
He took to Twitter to tell the story:
He couldn’t figure out what was wrong, until he looked at his email signature.
He was so intrigued by this whole situation that he decided to conduct an experiment for two weeks with Nicole: he would sign all his emails as ‘Nicole’ and she would sign them as ‘Martin’.
The result?
Though Martin spoke to his boss about this, he didn’t really believe him.
The thing he was really shocked about is that Nicole just viewed this as a normal part of her job, even though she knew she was being discriminated against as a woman (a reality that many women will know very well).
While Martin was praised for sharing his story, he did get some criticism, like the fact that it took him experiencing it to realise it was going on.
In a Medium post, Nicole pondered why her boss refused to believe this was happening.
“But I will always wonder. What did my boss have to gain by refusing to believe that sexism exists? Even when the evidence is screaming at him, even when his employee who makes him an awful lot of money is telling him, even when THE BOY on staff is telling him??
I never did figure it out. Instead, I quit and started my own business writing blog posts and web copy as a freelancer. In an office of one, I can finally put my walls down.”
Ladies, we still have a long way to go!
