Wait, what? I’m autistic and have not had this happen since approximately high school, but I’m an engineer and don’t work with many women. What situations are you encountering this with?
Sorry that’s happening to you. This has never happened to me and I’ve been lucky enough to never hear about anything like it before. I’m not sure how common it is but glad it’s not at all my experience.
it is very saddening. Sorry for your experience, some of us still live with internalized misogyny. I understand how hard is navigate the world as a neurodivergent. I figured that I’d rather break them into categories to see what to expect. Normally there are two types of women, acting hostile: one is just a girl boss, trying to dominate over other ladies and another is complete pick-me hating succeeding, smart girls. I would keep the maximum mental distance with the second type.
Weird, no, this has never happened to me. The women I’ve worked with have generally been the most supportive and I’ve always had the best experiences when I’ve worked on all female teams.
That sounds awful. TBH, though, I’ve only seen this happen on soap operas (and I have a bunch of male and female autistic friends – all of whom have had a lot of sucky workplace encounters). Is it maybe specific to the industry you are in?
Hopefully it is only bad advice and doesn’t extend to sabotage. I once worked for a local TV station and my supervisor would pretend like I didn’t submit things on time or even at all, to her boss, despite company email time stamps showing the delivery. Of course she took credit for my work as well. She would give me bad expired makeup that made me break out, and a tool for curling my hair that burned me, despite knowing I have some movement and joint problems and wouldn’t be able to use what she gave me easily.
Edited to add I am sorry that happened to you and hopefully you find a place that values you!!! I left my profession, and the workforce entirely, because my experiences were too upsetting. I’m too sensitive for that shit, after decade+ it broke me.
Edited again to add I didn’t work at that TV station for a decade, only 1 year, but I have many examples of women sabotaging me in the media industry, and very very few instances of them being supportive. Other more damaging examples include asking me if I slept with my sources. It could also be an age thing. Seems younger women have worked on their internalized misogyny.
Ugh yeah. I had that happen with a woman I’m still not even sure why. Sabotaged me on a call with an important client by saying she would show up and then didn’t (she was key to the call) after telling me to schedule it and she’d be there. Answering questions by linking me to invalid pages saying the answer was there when it wasn’t. Etc etc.
But she was just a nasty person and did that to multiple people, including men.
I’m not saying this doesn’t happens, because I’m sure it does, and I’m sorry it happened to you. After all, women being pitted against each other is part of how misogyny operates. That’s pretty sad, honestly.
But, it’s also important to not feed into the stereotype that all women are catty, jealous harpies. I’d say that the vast majority of times, women are much more supportive and kind than men, especially in the workplace.
Hasn’t been my experience at all. I’ve definitely had tensions with women as much as men but I’ve actually found that women are more willing to work out disagreements.
One thing I will note though is that in your twenties, older folks in the offices, especially women, may tend to treat you like their daughter and be very protective of you, and a big part of being in your thirties is adjusting to the fact that the people who would have been parental or protective of you are now just treating you like a peer.
I have seen a number of both men and women who have trouble navigating this stage, and expect to still be babied a bit, and feel like they are being bullied when really they are just not being mothered anymore.
i work with 98% women (education field) and no, this has not been my experience at all. it’s mostly the other 2% who have treated me poorly. there’s actually a ton of solidarity and support between the women there, even when our ideas about teaching clash
i’m not sure how old you are OP, but when i was a teenager i had a mindset sorta like yours. looking back on it, i was actually the problem. i didn’t make much of an effort to reach out to other women or treat them well, so i thought they didn’t like me when they reacted appropriately
I once had a coworker tell me with a straight face that I could wash my leather tennis shoes in the washing machine. She insisted, in fact. I cleaned them up real well by hand – they were almost new – and showed them off to her the following Monday. “Wow, you were right! The washer did a great job!” Shut her right up, and no one in that department pulled any crap like that again.
They disliked me (bc autistic.) The feeling was mutual.
She was awful and was also racist (eventually they early retired her after too many complaints). I’m sure there are others.
I’ve been at my company for 22 years now though and by far, more women were supportive than not.
(Also! Just to add, the mean woman had no children. But my next boss had no children and she was amazing! And then my boss after that had children and she was amazing, too. I know some people try to say it makes a difference but anecdotally for me, it does not.)
I’ve had women give me bad advice, but it always ended up being what they THOUGHT was good advice. It just took me a while to realize we had very different values and ideas, and what they would do in their life is not what I would do in mine. Now I hardly ever ask those people for advice because frankly I wouldn’t want their life. lol
Not advice but saying things to make you doubt yourself or others is a pretty common thing too. I knew someone like this but she wasn’t smart enough to be convincing lol
This sounds like more of a cruel individual or workplace, than a common issue with women. I hope you’re able to change jobs, because that sounds so stressful, not being able to trust the women around you.
I’m sorry you’re experiencing that. I’m so glad I ended being around a lot of supportive women in my career. Also autistic so it means a lot to me because I was preparing myself for what you were talking about because that’s all I experienced during school years.
Why are people here like “well this never happend to me” and insisting that OP misunderstood? Well maybe that reaction is the reason no one has talked about this with you.
Women tend to show aggression in veeery subtle ways. It’s either not noticeable at all (to influence someone negatively) or only really noticable to the person they’re targeting. Doesn’t help that these kinds tend to go for women who are already struggling socially in some way.
It literally makes you doubt your own sanity and when you tell other women about it, it feels pointless. They always want to suggest that it wasn’t meant that way and that “she’s not like this with me”. No shit, because she isn’t targeting you.
Holy cow the comments. OP, you are correct. I live in the Southern US, more rural areas, & it is EXTREMELY common here. Specifically because we are taught to be outwardly nice despite our internal feelings. This leads to women esp being evil v subtly & catty & sneaky way more often than other areas. Women are extremely common in healthcare here as well so I do agree with you ab the mean girl to nurse pipeline.
Not sorry commenters. We are not responsible for 2nd guessing our own observations & intuition for someone else. You can clock a nasty person behind a smile too, if you actually pay attention.
As an autistic woman it is very common for other women to be catty/rude in the workplace. It took me a while to realize it too. I personally suggest becoming an entrepreneur if you can 😅
ITT: Too many women willfully ignorant or genuinely ignorant that some women are simply targeted by other types of women their entire life, blissfully unaware because it didn’t happen to them. Snore.
when i was in high school, i volunteered at the local mall and modeled different outfits from different stores, all for community service.
there was this girl i went to high school with, and she ALWAYS tried to convince me to go for the most HORRIFIC outfits (because sometimes we could select our own, so long as they were from specific stores).
she would say “oh Clo, this would look fantastic on you” when it’s the ugliest top or skirt in the whole mall. or she’d say “i think your hair would look so much better this way” when it’s a style that is completely unflattering for my face shape or hair type.
as an autistic person i could never tell if it was from a genuine place or not. but given the circumstances, and the items she presented to me, i think it was all with malice. thankfully, i haven’t encountered any behavior like that in my adult life; i guess the women i surround myself with are secure and mature. i’m ashamed to hear that you’re experiencing this from grown ass adults. 🙁
Wow at these comments, condolences op, I’m glad some haven’t been similarly affected but dismayed they’re seeking to undermine you and your feelings/experience.
I’ve seen it both ways outside of the south and outside of rural regions too.
It must suck extra having to discern subtle social cues for authenticity rather than bust being able to accept things at face value too.
We really don’t need all that extra work/stress when just trying to earn a paycheck and get support anywhere.
I think a lot of people are understandably reacting to what feels like a negative generalization about women. There are good coworkers and bad coworkers of both male and female varieties. Your bad experiences happened to be with women this far.
If you changed it to “jealous black people giving you bad advice to undermine you is so common in the workplace” It’s suddenly noticeable how bad that sounds, right? And saying, “well that’s my lived experience with black people!” hardly makes it better. It seems like there is an undue focus on gender being a factor here.
My cousin did this to me. I had just moved across the country to where she lived and I was 18, alone with no friends just wanting to fit in. I had really pretty long thick hair and she kept telling me that everyone was going to assume I’m a hoodrat because only hoodrats have long hair. I ended up cutting my hair and when I got home she laughed in my face and told me she was only telling me thay because she was jealous.
When I was around 26, I worked in a real estate office with an older woman. I didnt really have a mom and she took me under her wing. I really trusted her, so I was devastated when I learned she had been advising me to pick up more work so she could make my boss look bad and on top of that, had been bad mouthing me to the owner.
When I was around 30, I became a manager in a corporate office, on a team of 33 managers, 30 of them being women. They piled on me in meetings and constantly excluded me from decision making, except for my assigned mentor, she really seemed to help me navigate it all. That was until I found out she told all my direct reports I was going to fire them in order to poach all my top performers. See, I ended up meeting her roommate through a mutual friend at work, and quickly realized she had been talking shit about the friend to me, and talking shit about me to the friend. Come to find out she was jealous of me losing weight and was also telling everyone I was on drugs and not doing it “the natural way”. I busted my ass at the gym that year because I was recently divorced and needed an outlet, meanwhile come to find out she was doing all kinds of crazy injections and other things to try and lose weight.
I could go on, but hopefully that’s enough to let you know these other people insinuating that this stuff doesnt happen are probably the ones doing it, because it happens all the time.
For women who’ve said they haven’t experienced this, I need to know if you’re considered conventionally attractive. Quickly. Because that will have a lot to do with whether or not this has happened to you.
It’s never happened to me because I’m fat (and also have a weird personality) so other women don’t see me as a threat.
This asshole girl once told me I was so “brave” to wear black mascara as a blonde girl with blonde lashes. She did it in front of guys who didn’t agree with her so her pick-Mesha ways blew up in her face. It was funny.
There’s one woman did that to me, when I was doing my intern, for only few weeks time. She wasn’t even responsible for teaching me, but gave me some non constructive advices. I have no idea why she does that. Anyway I won’t see her again.
I am suspicious that it doesn’t happen. I think that any time someone accuses a woman of being jealous and giving bad advice to sabotage a relationship, what’s really happening is that one of the women is in the “live bombing” stage of a relationship with an abusive man, and the other one can see the red flags when the first is still dazzled.
It’s possible that there are some toxic women who subscribe to a patriarchy-generated zero-sum competition for “queen bitch” in office politics, but I don’t personally have experience with this ever happening, so I can’t give experiential advice about it.
I’ve had this happen a few times, unfortunately. It’s best to be careful when working at a new place or dealing with a new employee. You just never know what someone’s motivations are until you’ve spent some time with them.
I’ve even had people who i thought were my friends do this to me.
This one time this girl told me to dye my hair a reddish bronze color… and I knew then she hated me because that would so clash with skin and hair tone. I support women but some really are devious snakes.
Comments
I feel lucky because I’ve only ever seen that kind of thing on tv. What kind of advice?
Or incredibly vague advice. Or they gatekeep the right answer to keep you confused or in the dark
Wait, what? I’m autistic and have not had this happen since approximately high school, but I’m an engineer and don’t work with many women. What situations are you encountering this with?
That hasn’t been my experience at all. I was mentored by women in the workplace, and they were the ones who most often had my back.
Sorry that’s happening to you. This has never happened to me and I’ve been lucky enough to never hear about anything like it before. I’m not sure how common it is but glad it’s not at all my experience.
I encountered that daily in the sales industry but it’s been rare in the time I’ve spent in a variety of locations in healthcare admin.
it is very saddening. Sorry for your experience, some of us still live with internalized misogyny. I understand how hard is navigate the world as a neurodivergent. I figured that I’d rather break them into categories to see what to expect. Normally there are two types of women, acting hostile: one is just a girl boss, trying to dominate over other ladies and another is complete pick-me hating succeeding, smart girls. I would keep the maximum mental distance with the second type.
Weird, no, this has never happened to me. The women I’ve worked with have generally been the most supportive and I’ve always had the best experiences when I’ve worked on all female teams.
Is it common? I’ve worked with 95% women for a couple of decades and haven’t really seen it.
Edit: I apologize for coming off as condescending, knee-jerked at the generalizations in the OP and in responses.
Can you give examples?
Concrete examples??
That sounds awful. TBH, though, I’ve only seen this happen on soap operas (and I have a bunch of male and female autistic friends – all of whom have had a lot of sucky workplace encounters). Is it maybe specific to the industry you are in?
Hopefully it is only bad advice and doesn’t extend to sabotage. I once worked for a local TV station and my supervisor would pretend like I didn’t submit things on time or even at all, to her boss, despite company email time stamps showing the delivery. Of course she took credit for my work as well. She would give me bad expired makeup that made me break out, and a tool for curling my hair that burned me, despite knowing I have some movement and joint problems and wouldn’t be able to use what she gave me easily.
Edited to add I am sorry that happened to you and hopefully you find a place that values you!!! I left my profession, and the workforce entirely, because my experiences were too upsetting. I’m too sensitive for that shit, after decade+ it broke me.
Edited again to add I didn’t work at that TV station for a decade, only 1 year, but I have many examples of women sabotaging me in the media industry, and very very few instances of them being supportive. Other more damaging examples include asking me if I slept with my sources. It could also be an age thing. Seems younger women have worked on their internalized misogyny.
Ugh yeah. I had that happen with a woman I’m still not even sure why. Sabotaged me on a call with an important client by saying she would show up and then didn’t (she was key to the call) after telling me to schedule it and she’d be there. Answering questions by linking me to invalid pages saying the answer was there when it wasn’t. Etc etc.
But she was just a nasty person and did that to multiple people, including men.
I’m not saying this doesn’t happens, because I’m sure it does, and I’m sorry it happened to you. After all, women being pitted against each other is part of how misogyny operates. That’s pretty sad, honestly.
But, it’s also important to not feed into the stereotype that all women are catty, jealous harpies. I’d say that the vast majority of times, women are much more supportive and kind than men, especially in the workplace.
Hasn’t been my experience at all. I’ve definitely had tensions with women as much as men but I’ve actually found that women are more willing to work out disagreements.
One thing I will note though is that in your twenties, older folks in the offices, especially women, may tend to treat you like their daughter and be very protective of you, and a big part of being in your thirties is adjusting to the fact that the people who would have been parental or protective of you are now just treating you like a peer.
I have seen a number of both men and women who have trouble navigating this stage, and expect to still be babied a bit, and feel like they are being bullied when really they are just not being mothered anymore.
How do you know they’re jealous?
How do you know they’re trying to undermine you?
How do you know it’s malice and not ignorance?
i work with 98% women (education field) and no, this has not been my experience at all. it’s mostly the other 2% who have treated me poorly. there’s actually a ton of solidarity and support between the women there, even when our ideas about teaching clash
i’m not sure how old you are OP, but when i was a teenager i had a mindset sorta like yours. looking back on it, i was actually the problem. i didn’t make much of an effort to reach out to other women or treat them well, so i thought they didn’t like me when they reacted appropriately
I once had a coworker tell me with a straight face that I could wash my leather tennis shoes in the washing machine. She insisted, in fact. I cleaned them up real well by hand – they were almost new – and showed them off to her the following Monday. “Wow, you were right! The washer did a great job!” Shut her right up, and no one in that department pulled any crap like that again.
They disliked me (bc autistic.) The feeling was mutual.
Actually its not common perhaps you are misinterpreting it
I’ve only seen it with one woman.
She was awful and was also racist (eventually they early retired her after too many complaints). I’m sure there are others.
I’ve been at my company for 22 years now though and by far, more women were supportive than not.
(Also! Just to add, the mean woman had no children. But my next boss had no children and she was amazing! And then my boss after that had children and she was amazing, too. I know some people try to say it makes a difference but anecdotally for me, it does not.)
I’ve had women give me bad advice, but it always ended up being what they THOUGHT was good advice. It just took me a while to realize we had very different values and ideas, and what they would do in their life is not what I would do in mine. Now I hardly ever ask those people for advice because frankly I wouldn’t want their life. lol
Not advice but saying things to make you doubt yourself or others is a pretty common thing too. I knew someone like this but she wasn’t smart enough to be convincing lol
This sounds like more of a cruel individual or workplace, than a common issue with women. I hope you’re able to change jobs, because that sounds so stressful, not being able to trust the women around you.
I’m sorry you’re experiencing that. I’m so glad I ended being around a lot of supportive women in my career. Also autistic so it means a lot to me because I was preparing myself for what you were talking about because that’s all I experienced during school years.
Why are people here like “well this never happend to me” and insisting that OP misunderstood? Well maybe that reaction is the reason no one has talked about this with you.
Women tend to show aggression in veeery subtle ways. It’s either not noticeable at all (to influence someone negatively) or only really noticable to the person they’re targeting. Doesn’t help that these kinds tend to go for women who are already struggling socially in some way.
It literally makes you doubt your own sanity and when you tell other women about it, it feels pointless. They always want to suggest that it wasn’t meant that way and that “she’s not like this with me”. No shit, because she isn’t targeting you.
Holy cow the comments. OP, you are correct. I live in the Southern US, more rural areas, & it is EXTREMELY common here. Specifically because we are taught to be outwardly nice despite our internal feelings. This leads to women esp being evil v subtly & catty & sneaky way more often than other areas. Women are extremely common in healthcare here as well so I do agree with you ab the mean girl to nurse pipeline.
Not sorry commenters. We are not responsible for 2nd guessing our own observations & intuition for someone else. You can clock a nasty person behind a smile too, if you actually pay attention.
As an autistic woman it is very common for other women to be catty/rude in the workplace. It took me a while to realize it too. I personally suggest becoming an entrepreneur if you can 😅
No advice, just solidarity 🫂
ITT: Too many women willfully ignorant or genuinely ignorant that some women are simply targeted by other types of women their entire life, blissfully unaware because it didn’t happen to them. Snore.
You might experience more supportive atmosphere if you post in a sub like r/Autisminwomen
In my experience, the women who think all women are out to get them are usually wrong and incredibly self-centered.
Never in my life.
OP, do you ever have paranoid thoughts about the people in your life, like they are secretly trying to ruin you?
Coworkers are not friends.
You might be friendly.
But they are not your friends.
Yeah also add being “territorial” over friends so weird.
when i was in high school, i volunteered at the local mall and modeled different outfits from different stores, all for community service.
there was this girl i went to high school with, and she ALWAYS tried to convince me to go for the most HORRIFIC outfits (because sometimes we could select our own, so long as they were from specific stores).
she would say “oh Clo, this would look fantastic on you” when it’s the ugliest top or skirt in the whole mall. or she’d say “i think your hair would look so much better this way” when it’s a style that is completely unflattering for my face shape or hair type.
as an autistic person i could never tell if it was from a genuine place or not. but given the circumstances, and the items she presented to me, i think it was all with malice. thankfully, i haven’t encountered any behavior like that in my adult life; i guess the women i surround myself with are secure and mature. i’m ashamed to hear that you’re experiencing this from grown ass adults. 🙁
Wow at these comments, condolences op, I’m glad some haven’t been similarly affected but dismayed they’re seeking to undermine you and your feelings/experience.
I’ve seen it both ways outside of the south and outside of rural regions too.
It must suck extra having to discern subtle social cues for authenticity rather than bust being able to accept things at face value too.
We really don’t need all that extra work/stress when just trying to earn a paycheck and get support anywhere.
It’s really hard for me to see until it’s too late.
I think a lot of people are understandably reacting to what feels like a negative generalization about women. There are good coworkers and bad coworkers of both male and female varieties. Your bad experiences happened to be with women this far.
If you changed it to “jealous black people giving you bad advice to undermine you is so common in the workplace” It’s suddenly noticeable how bad that sounds, right? And saying, “well that’s my lived experience with black people!” hardly makes it better. It seems like there is an undue focus on gender being a factor here.
My cousin did this to me. I had just moved across the country to where she lived and I was 18, alone with no friends just wanting to fit in. I had really pretty long thick hair and she kept telling me that everyone was going to assume I’m a hoodrat because only hoodrats have long hair. I ended up cutting my hair and when I got home she laughed in my face and told me she was only telling me thay because she was jealous.
When I was around 26, I worked in a real estate office with an older woman. I didnt really have a mom and she took me under her wing. I really trusted her, so I was devastated when I learned she had been advising me to pick up more work so she could make my boss look bad and on top of that, had been bad mouthing me to the owner.
When I was around 30, I became a manager in a corporate office, on a team of 33 managers, 30 of them being women. They piled on me in meetings and constantly excluded me from decision making, except for my assigned mentor, she really seemed to help me navigate it all. That was until I found out she told all my direct reports I was going to fire them in order to poach all my top performers. See, I ended up meeting her roommate through a mutual friend at work, and quickly realized she had been talking shit about the friend to me, and talking shit about me to the friend. Come to find out she was jealous of me losing weight and was also telling everyone I was on drugs and not doing it “the natural way”. I busted my ass at the gym that year because I was recently divorced and needed an outlet, meanwhile come to find out she was doing all kinds of crazy injections and other things to try and lose weight.
I could go on, but hopefully that’s enough to let you know these other people insinuating that this stuff doesnt happen are probably the ones doing it, because it happens all the time.
Im autistic and poc. I have experienced alot wrong advice, bad advice, and sometimes, no advice. It’s not great when women are also gatekeepers.
For women who’ve said they haven’t experienced this, I need to know if you’re considered conventionally attractive. Quickly. Because that will have a lot to do with whether or not this has happened to you.
It’s never happened to me because I’m fat (and also have a weird personality) so other women don’t see me as a threat.
This asshole girl once told me I was so “brave” to wear black mascara as a blonde girl with blonde lashes. She did it in front of guys who didn’t agree with her so her pick-Mesha ways blew up in her face. It was funny.
Complimentary in 99% of all hair salons, I swear to God😆.
Op cam you report this? Its awful
There’s one woman did that to me, when I was doing my intern, for only few weeks time. She wasn’t even responsible for teaching me, but gave me some non constructive advices. I have no idea why she does that. Anyway I won’t see her again.
I am suspicious that it doesn’t happen. I think that any time someone accuses a woman of being jealous and giving bad advice to sabotage a relationship, what’s really happening is that one of the women is in the “live bombing” stage of a relationship with an abusive man, and the other one can see the red flags when the first is still dazzled.
It’s possible that there are some toxic women who subscribe to a patriarchy-generated zero-sum competition for “queen bitch” in office politics, but I don’t personally have experience with this ever happening, so I can’t give experiential advice about it.
I’ve had this happen a few times, unfortunately. It’s best to be careful when working at a new place or dealing with a new employee. You just never know what someone’s motivations are until you’ve spent some time with them.
I’ve even had people who i thought were my friends do this to me.
This one time this girl told me to dye my hair a reddish bronze color… and I knew then she hated me because that would so clash with skin and hair tone. I support women but some really are devious snakes.