Letter from the career change trenches:
Sexism is not cute.
An undisclosed while back, I went through an excessively extensive interview process. I recently returned to the corporate job market and learned some interesting things about myself and what I will not tolerate.
Yeah, it was like that.
Red flag #1: Too Many Interviews
I did eight (8) interviews for this job, including a last-minute portfolio review right before a facilitation demo. This does not include daily conversations, sometimes multiple, with the headhunters and hiring manager. I was working with a headhunter who worked for an agency that worked for the hiring company. My first client interview was with the hiring manager, a woman (this will become important later).
Despite being in some sexist fields (performing arts, academia), I haven’t faced much sexism in the workplace. Some sexual harassment when I was younger (and not so young), a bit of paternalism in the academy, but mostly minor. I seem to be slightly intimidating in a helpful kind of way; my students don’t mess with me, and they are pleasantly surprised when I turn out to be a soft touch. Also, I am the only woman I know who never got her pregnant belly felt by a stranger. So I think of it as a kind of superpower; I am a kind, creative, intelligent person, and I also seem to project a “do not fuck with” vibe.
I’d had several interviews with other companies before interviewing with the organization. None of them had sexist overtones, other than one informational interview that was a bit patronizing and weird.
I blew through my first three interviews, all with women. One with the headhunter, one with the hiring manager, and one with the Chief of Staff to the CEO/Founder. That one was to determine if I had a strong enough personality not to be cowed by an eccentric executive, and I was deemed to have such a personality. Win!
Red Flag #2: Weird interviews with vague, patronizing feedback
Then shit got terminally weird. As soon as I started interviewing with men at the company, I got strange, inconsistent, and frankly sexist feedback from my substitute recruiter, who was also male. I wasn’t qualified. I was too confident. I wasn’t “teachable.” (My four careers and five degrees beg to differ, my dudes.) I didn’t “read the room.” I talked too much. For those needing translation, I was essentially so confident that I made the men interviewing me feel insecure, threatened, or emasculated. Take your pick. “Reading the room” is code for “not paying enough attention to me during the interview where I ask you lots of questions, and you answer them.” It is a sexist dog whistle.
Then I did my facilitation demo, which was deemed “masterful” by the participants. But wait, I was still hearing from the male headhunter that I had a “strong personality” that somehow caused “friction” but was also in possession of a “really great personality.” My dude, I did not ask for your assessment of my personality. Like my height, it is unlikely to change and is not up for discussion.
Red Flag #3: Super different reactions between male and female interviewers
I talked directly to the hiring manager the following week to try and clear up what sounded like a lot of contradictory messages. I was cleared for the final two rounds of interviews. The first was with a woman; we got along like a house on fire. I love collaboration, thinking outside the box, and thorny problems. Also corgis. She had a corgi, a sharp mind, and was super interesting and cool. I’m still bummed I didn’t get to work with her.
Keep in mind I was doing 2–4 interviews a week and constantly fielding calls from the recruiting firm while teaching five classes and doing all the other stuff I had to do daily. I was stressed out because I couldn’t decide if my trepidation about this job was because I was out of practice and looking at a major career change or because it was toxic AF. Take a wild guess which it was.
I did my last interview a few days later with two men who were in upper management. (I was a candidate for a senior management role that had been somewhat customized to my skills as the hiring VP wanted me on board ASAP). This interview shared a trait that all my interviews with the men in the organization had: while in full possession of my resume, website, cover letter, CV, and notes from the other interviews, they asked me questions they knew I couldn’t answer directly (because I’ve been in academia for 12 years, not in corporations doing product launches). So I would come up with something as analogous as possible while emphasizing that I was mid-career change. It’s not complicated. If you want to hire me, you have to be prepared for me to need a little time to acclimate and learn some new skills while you get to take full advantage of my experience, subject area expertise, knowledge, and abilities.
Most of the interviews had the same set of behavioral questions. “When have you screwed something up, and how did you fix it?” “How have you resolved tensions between different stakeholders?” I used the same answers across interviews unless a different question was asked but got vastly different reactions. Huh.
The interviews with women felt more like discussions or even collaborations. They could help me translate my subject matter expertise and skills into ways I could help the organization; I could problem-solve and develop novel ideas to help them with their pain points. The interviews with the men had none of this byplay. This is not to say that every interview I’ve had with a man since I started job hunting has been bad — quite the opposite. I’ve had some great conversations. But this place had a very different vibe.
An hour after my final interview, my recruiter called and said I’d been turned down. Because I was “too cocky” and “didn’t read the room.” The hiring manager wanted me to know that I would have been awesome in the job, but she had to go with the consensus, and it seems like (since I interviewed with equal numbers of men and women) the men’s opinions held more weight.
Some Final Thoughts
The company is largely male and white, and in choosing to nuke my candidacy, they sent a very clear message to the women who wanted me to join them:
You are less important, and if you show too much confidence in your own abilities, we will make you pay. Getting what you need to do your job well is less important than fanning our egos.
Sexism is not cute. It is also not subtle. There was little need to read between the lines; the women welcomed my knowledge and skills, and the men did not. In my multiple careers, I’ve gotten on well with men — sometimes better than women. But when you are dealing with an organization so insular that they can’t even spot their own obvious biases, there is not much to be done.
I knew going in that this organization had been having issues with creating a culture that welcomed diversity; I did not know that my female middle-aged over-educated white ass would be a controversial diversity hire. I have never been so happy not to get a job offer — and this job paid 4x what I currently make.
Things I have learned:
- If the people interviewing you seem combative, they probably are.
- If it looks like sexism, it’s sexism.
- Don’t work for a company whose owner calls himself “Machiavellian.”
- Listen to your therapist, career coach, and best friend when they say “RUN.”
- Trust your instincts, even when the money looks really, really good.
- If you care about diversity and inclusion, don’t interview at a company that doesn’t have any. “Changing it from the inside” is not a thing if there is nothing to build on. I was not going to get them to start recruiting from HBCUs instead of Harvard, no matter how good I was at my job.
- Glassdoor doesn’t lie.
- Sexism isn’t cute.
