I’m ok, you’re not ok.

I was informed today that I was a misogynist. According to Dictionary.com, a misogynist is “a person who hates, dislikes, mistrusts, or mistreats women.” One of the parts of my job requires me to evaluate the performance of a group of people on a set of tasks. Then I select the best performers for inclusion on a high visibility project. There is a set of objective and subjective criteria that I use to make my decision. I also get the inputs of some of my co-workers to help make sure my decisions are as unbiased as possible. Well, one of the individuals that tried out for the team was not selected for a position. Once she found out, she felt it was necessary to write a two-page essay to my boss to explain how I discriminated against her because she was a woman. I clearly excluded her because she didn’t get the job.  There’s no chance she didn’t get the job because she was the one of the poorest performing people that tried out. The criteria must be biased toward men because she did nothing wrong and performed flawlessly. Therefore, the system and the face of that system must hate women. This is a classic case of I’m ok, you’re not ok. Everyone and everything else besides her is wrong and out to get her. Instead of taking a minute to think about what happened and look at it from a different perspective, declare discrimination and assign blame. This situation does make me wonder what happened in her life that made her this way. It also makes me wonder if she behaves this way in other areas of her life. 

So what did I learn from this situation? The first thing is my boss has my back. He looked at what she had to say and allowed me to give my side. Ultimately, he sided with me and squashed the accusation. The second thing is not something I learned but just reaffirmed what I already knew; CYA. Never for one minute let your guard down when people are competing for something. It doesn’t matter what your profession is, if competition is involved there are people that would cut your throat and step over your bleeding body to get ahead.