“Excuse Me, I’m Speaking” – 4 Ways to Deal with Manterruptions at Work
If you think that we live in a post-feminist society, then you can’t have watched last week’s Vice Presidential debate. Vice President Pence interrupted VP hopeful Kamala Harris somewhere between 10 and 16 times. For comparison, she interrupted him five times. If politics isn’t your thing, perhaps you caught the viral Tik Tik video of a 22 year old STEM student at the University of Iowa, Claire McDonnel, trying to get a word in edgeways while being constantly interrupted and spoken over by her male classmates. I doubt there’s a woman on the planet who can’t relate.
By now, there is a ton of well-researched data indicating that men interrupt more than women, and although they do it to their male colleagues too, they interrupt women far more often. Nearly every woman I know has encountered this phenomenon at work, often time and time again. But rather than sit seething for the rest of that meeting, only to experience the same thing next time, here are four things you can do right away to make sure your voice is heard without any unwanted input from your male colleagues…