I am most definitely not a man, nor would anyone who has actually met me in person ever confuse me for one, however I still have an answer for this.
For many years, I was living a sort of double life. While I was Heather in “the real world,” my online personality at work was a dude named “Allan.”
Allan was born out of the necessity that comes for all bootstrapping companies – the need to do more with less. In this case, we needed to minimize the amount of time spent on each individual technical support case, so we could hire fewer people.
I discovered that when Heather sent out technical support answers, the touch-to-close ratio (how many answers each customer support ticket would take) averaged around 6. That was way too high, and unsustainable. I had to do something.
I evaluated why this was happening – it seemed that I was spending a lot of time attempting to convince people to follow the steps that I was sending them, which was wasting their time, and mine.
So, in comes Allan. “He’d” suggest the same steps, and the “convincer” loop never happened. The touch-to-close ratio went down to 2.
That’s right – Heather “s was 3 times higher for exactly the same initial steps. I didn’t change the wording at all. I only changed the gender of the person sending the information.
Was I offended by this? Not at all. It was good, useful information. Not only did it save the company a ton of money over the years, I started learning a lot about implicit and explicit bias because of it.
And what I learned is that – and there is much more than simply my anecdotal research to back this up – people just believe information more readily coming from a man than a woman. Across the board. In almost every culture you can point to.
If that’s not male privilege – I don’t know what is.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/Whats-your-most-memorable-male-privilege-moment
Originally Posted On: 2016-09-20