I’m a man myself, but I’m a foreigner where I live and work, so I sometimes get the impression that my intelligence is a bit underestimated by employers and coworkers. I’m a sous chef, so in a management position, and I often get this feeling like the chef de cuisine, the owner, and sometimes some of the cooks aren’t listening to me. Like I’ll have to reiterate my point two or even three times at a meeting before I get a relevant answer, or I’ll send a memo out and the changes I’ve instated aren’t being adopted after the fact, or someone I’m talking to might vacantly say “yes” as if they’re occupied with something else.
Yesterday I asked the chef a question about a recipe that only he could answer and he said I could google it. I’d already googled it just to be sure, wouldn’t you know. The day before, the owner told a cook, who then told me, that we all together were planning to put all delivery receipts in a neat little box and adopt a system to check they’re correct, but I’d already done it alone a week earlier, and told them all about it, with photos and everything. I feel like I’m going mad.
I hear that this is a (more) common experience for women, so I wonder if any of you have any tips or tricks or whatever to make yourself heard, or to at least cope with not being heard, or even just a bit of commiseration is fine. Cheers!
Not a woman, but just wanted to put some food for thought out there…. how’s your accent? Heavy accents tend to get ignored because they are not heard/understood.
Well, I’m using my second language at work, and people are always telling me I speak it well when they find out it’s my second language. I could entertain the possibility that there’s a language barrier but I’m positive people aren’t engaging with my point rather than not comprehending what I’m saying. For example, I asked if we paid a supplier a monthly fee to use them, so the boss said yes, €150 per month, so I followed up by saying buying this cheaper ingredient from them wasn’t actually saving us money overall, and I had to explain my point three times, until it turned out we don’t pay a monthly fee at all.
Edit: For what it’s worth, my accent in English is very broad. One of the reasons I speak this other language so well is that I have to use it because people often don’t understand my English.