I’ve had good and bad experiences with mostly-male and mostly-female groups. I think it has less to do with the actual gender of the group, and more to do with: (a) the manner and extent to which group members are invested in performing their gender, (b1) whether the group embraces deviation from that performance, or (b2) whether one’s own performance of gender is similar enough to the group’s.
I’ve often described myself as “not very good at being a woman.” My weirdness and difficulty with hidden meanings has gotten me shunned by fellow women and usually bullied out of all-female groups, particularly when I was young. But as I discovered a few years ago after adopting a more active lifestyle, I get along fantastically with most women who play sports.
All-male groups were usually not much better. I still had to keep LARPing a persona, it’s just that the “cool girl” persona came easier to me. The main advantage was that mostly-male groups didn’t tend to say one thing while meaning the opposite. (For example, “stay as long as you like” actually means “you should probably go home now” and that is absolutely nonsensical to me.) But all-male groups never accepted me either, so the best case scenario meant being tolerated instead of shunned.
When it comes to work environments, it’s only been women who played the game of psychologically tormenting me until I have a breakdown and quit (although one of those was a woman boss in a mostly-male small office). So mostly-male groups have been somewhat better because I usually don’t have to waste as much brainspace on LARPing the correct persona. I still tended to be treated more as a tagalong or novelty, though, and gender isn’t a guarantee of future behavior (for example, one of my current coworkers is a man who politicks like a woman).
I chose what happened to be a predominantly female class in my chosen job course in high school and social interactions definitely rolled off the tongue better.
I’m a 6’5 reasonably muscular male running two offices entirely staffed by women, except for two gay guys. There’s no masculine competition, which is nice, and communication is much more personal. Due to my strict rule of not considering any of my coworkers potential partners, I make sure I’m as supportive as possible without being threatening to any of the girls or their respective partners. It’s very interesting seeing how patients act towards me vs the other workers. They seem to treat me as an authority figure, and take what I say at face value, even if I’m just confirming what one of the women already told them. The girls have to convince patients they’re professional and not jerking them around, where I can just state something and they’ll believe me. I’m viewed as a scientist, and the women are viewed as salesmen or interns.
I mentioned my stature earlier, because it’s led to me being the office protector. I will defuse situations, defend my workers, and even fire patients if they offend anyone else in the office. If a rep for a company talks down to any of the women, or only wants to speak to me, I won’t do business with them.
Ive hired men before, but they never last. They either make the girls uncomfortable, try to start relationships, or try to butt heads with me as if they hold authority over anyone else. It’s very easy to see how someone with less feministic views could easily take advantage of the situation I’m in.
Edit: they’re always fucking cold though. 73 degrees is not fucking cold Donna. I’m wearing a suit. Put on a sweater.
Anecdotal but according to my SO who went from all female workplace to all male one the biggest difference is going from constant drama to no drama at all.
I think this all depends on the people, not the gender … I’ve worked in several construction all male work crews and trust me, there is a lot of drama there too.
Not construction, but I’ve worked in restaurants where almost everyone was men, and others where all the servers were all women (most of the line staff were men, but the servers didn’t really interact with them much)
At least in that environment, drama transcended gender.
Although your situation is really terrible and I wish you are able to land a better workspace environment with a reasonable pay, I believe you missed the point of the entire OP’s question.
I’ve had plenty of good and bad coworkers of both genders, so I don’t care much about the ratio as long as everyone does roughly their fair share of the workload.
As far as bonus points go, other guys are generally more into the same hobbies as me, so there’s more “bro talk” about that stuff. The girls seem to provide a wider range of topics and I learn about things I wouldn’t with just other guys. I have pretty diverse interests though, so having a mix of good guys and girls to talk with is the best scenario for me.
About the only perk to working with majority males is then I’m not always the first one the boss asks to lug around heavy crap.
I seem to feel for some of the girls in all girl teams though. They can be way harsher to each other than I’ve seen all male teams work. I would not be able to continue in some of the situations I’ve seen them put each other through…
In my experience, predominantly male environments are fairly disdainful of anything non-technical and include a lot of unexamined biased views toward women. Workplaces with more women, or a balance of both, don’t have the same issue, in my experience.
I’ve worked predominantly in two fields - engineering and environmental policy. I find the culture of engineering to be pretty toxic - too many conservative men. Environmental policy suffers from too much being demanded of workers, I think mostly because of the expectation that you’re motivated by your passion, rather than being paid for your time. I don’t know if that is directly tied to the gender balance in the workplace, but certainly women historically and presently are not compensated fairly for their work.
It’s a shame that I’m better at doing engineering, because I vastly prefer to not work in a place where I can hear my boss listen to Hannity every day through the wall.
“Unexamined bias” was exactly the phrase I was going to use. Homogenous working environments tend to ignore blindspots and assume that their team experience is universal.
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