Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

It’s Time to Talk About Male Mediocrity at Work

2 min read

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Highlights

Other, lesser minds should have been sweating the small stuff. (View Highlight)

the demographic I happen to belong to: straight, white, male (View Highlight)

years, I started to realize that those particular “people skills” weren’t working for me the way they used to (View Highlight)

performing competence. It’s kind of easy, actually. You don’t talk a lot in meetings, and when you do you ask questions of the people who made assertions, or repeat and praise good points others made (View Highlight)

Lise Vesterlund, who along with three coauthors wrote The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work (View Highlight)

strategic incompetence” (sometimes called “skilled incompetence” or “weaponized incompetence”). Strategic incompetence is the colleague who claims to be terrible at math, so that you handle all the spreadsheets (View Highlight)

it’s a reluctance to do the lower-value jobs that Vesterlund and coauthors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, and Laurie Weingart call “non-promotable. (View Highlight)

In a series of experiments, Vesterlund and her coauthors found that women are 44% more likely than men to be asked by male managers to perform non-promotable tasks such as taking meeting notes, and 50% more likely to say yes (View Highlight)

This is an impossible standard, so the obvious strategy is to fake it, and to avoid any situation where your inadequacy will be visible (View Highlight)

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