A little background. I’ve held my current job for five years, and am in my mid-30s. Since then, the number of people staffed in my department has dwindled, and currently, with the only other male still out recovering from surgery, I’m the only guy there right now. The man who hired me has since retired, and was replaced by a woman, and I’m the one with least senority at this place.
Not that I care. It only recently occurred to me I was the only one currently in the department with a Y chromosome. I get along fine with all my co-workers, for the most part. That’s what made what happened at the end of this workweek an eye-opener.
There’s this one microorganism that came in from a local hospital that, despite hailing from a genus I have a lot of experience with, has been resisting my efforts to identify it at the species level. Didn’t help that there were evidently TWO separate species on the slant shipped to us, and it’s been a pain separating them. Worse, the hospital has been calling regularly, and did so again yesterday. I had to essentially drop all the other work I was doing, and couldn’t get back to it for a couple of hours, all the while getting agitated, feeling they were unfairly busting my chops over this one organism. I got REALLY grouchy and frustrated. I’ll admit I felt as if the senior technologist was insinuating I was slacking off and ignoring this case, when I had done everything I could with this troublemaker so far.
The next day, my supervisor called me into her office, and what she had to say REALLY opened my eyes. She said the other two women I work with got a little fearful after my self-control slipped. Again, I’ve been working with those two for five years, and we’ve always gotten along. And I certainly don’t see myself as scary, being barely 5’10” and just over 150 pounds. Yet two women who’ve known me for half a decade got nervous after my composure slipped due to frustration at work.
So if anxiety can set in there, it only begged the question of what women go through every day, whether around men who are strangers or those they know closely. Yeah, I’m aware of all the statistics about those who violently assault women are typically those they know. But something like this really drives the anxiety they feel home.