The thing with prejudice is nobody will ever admit to being prejudiced. All you can do is piece it together. Sometimes your working hypothesis is that it's just noise, other times it's prejudice.
I brought in a woman to work on a project once, and it was awful.
Despite her doing objectively better work than what was available before, my partners decided everything she did needed criticism. Never anything substantial, just pretend criticism meant to look like they knew what they were talking about. And one of them wanted veto on all the work, despite knowing very little about it.
They questioned whether she'd have been on the project if she didn't know me, which is pretty out there given she did this for a living for some very well known firms.
Then they called her something offensive in front of her, and when I called them out on it, they pretended it was a joke intended to make her feel like part of the team.
Can you ever conclude what people's true motivations are? Not really. Could someone genuinely have felt that some person's work was substandard, they didn't get the job legitimately, and could they screw up some office banter? Sure.
It took me a long time to think this through, but in the end it misogyny seemed to be the only answer. We'd worked with plenty of incompetents before without saying much, and hired plenty of people (all guys) through the friends network. We'd never had anyone get bullied like that in the office, though.
Story got a whole lot worse later, but that's for another time.
I brought in a woman to work on a project once, and it was awful.
Despite her doing objectively better work than what was available before, my partners decided everything she did needed criticism. Never anything substantial, just pretend criticism meant to look like they knew what they were talking about. And one of them wanted veto on all the work, despite knowing very little about it.
They questioned whether she'd have been on the project if she didn't know me, which is pretty out there given she did this for a living for some very well known firms.
Then they called her something offensive in front of her, and when I called them out on it, they pretended it was a joke intended to make her feel like part of the team.
Can you ever conclude what people's true motivations are? Not really. Could someone genuinely have felt that some person's work was substandard, they didn't get the job legitimately, and could they screw up some office banter? Sure.
It took me a long time to think this through, but in the end it misogyny seemed to be the only answer. We'd worked with plenty of incompetents before without saying much, and hired plenty of people (all guys) through the friends network. We'd never had anyone get bullied like that in the office, though.
Story got a whole lot worse later, but that's for another time.