: Male pattern emotional illiteracy
Or MPEI for short. This is a new term I have been trying to make catch on with my friends slash colleagues. It describes so many of the situations we keep finding ourselves in.
As much context as I can provide without giving my literal address away: We work in a very male- and boomer-dominated field. But our immediate team does a special thing that skews younger and female. So we often find ourselves in the awkward role of having to work with another team nominally to provide our team's special thing, but in practice to compensate for the fact that the team has succumbed to MPEI and their relationship with the client is falling apart.
What I'm saying is, we work with a bunch of sexist old dudes, and have seen Mad Men levels (have not actually seen the show lol) of casual sexism/racism in our work. Very common scenes are dudes making weird sex jokes, completely ignoring my colleague's point until I repeat it for her, looking at me while my colleague speaks, etc.
This has put me in the uncomfortable position of being the "man whisperer" because I have just enough self-awareness to recognize that sometimes women have good ideas (shocker) but also can "speak bro" and sell their ideas to the unreceptive crowd.
I won't pretend my job is as hard as the women's, but it is challenging in a few non-obvious ways, most notably that everyday seems to provide further evidence for a conclusion that I have been trying to resist for my whole life: that men are congenitally emotionally illiterate, that they can never learn to listen, that they were born bad at this and their best bet is to meet a good woman who will have pity on them and protect them from their emotional deficits. I've done a lot of work (i.e. therapy: very expensive) to try to escape this trap. I would like to think others can, too, but then, here are my boomer colleagues, the contrary evidence staring me in the face.
Second challenge of my position is that I essentially function as a crutch that removes the need for these boomer dudes to actually learn to communicate with women. Instead they can just keep boomering, and I serve as the translation layer in between. This also means that I tend to get automatic credit for ideas that actually came from the women I work with. I try to magnify and amplify but like, I can't solve all of sexism myself.