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How to Deal With Mansplaining at Work

Head up! The term mansplaining is relatively new, but the concept is an old one. If you’re not familiar, the term refers to when someone (most often a man, thus mansplain) explains something to someone (typically a female) in a condescending or patronizing way. If you’re a woman, then chances are this happens to you on a weekly if not daily basis. However, figuring out what to do about it can be a bit challenging. About 10 years ago, I worked as a barista part time as an excuse to get out of the house and to satisfy my coffee addiction. I was a pretty successful writer already at the time, but I loved the human interaction on a regular basis (working from home can get lonely!). One day, a regular customer came in and started to explain a new web app to me. He had gotten an important detail wrong, and when I politely corrected him explained to me in a condescending way that I was wrong because he had read an article in PC Magazine about it and pleasantly suggested I should “See if my...

What Do Companies Mean by Culture?

  Anthropology in Practice Supportive. Curious. Unafraid. These are some of the words that advertising agencies use to describe their company culture. But do any of these words actually connect them with what culture actually is? This article is part of the Workplace Anthropology series. Perusing the top ten of Ad Age’s 2017 agency list, there is one common theme in how advertising agencies describe their company culture: collaborative. There are plenty of supporting words that carefully surround “collaborative,” such as passion, insightful, supportive, entrepreneurial, borderless, and unafraid, but you would be correct in arguing that these descriptors are more relevant to the people these companies hope (will) work for them, rather than being indicative of a culture itself. Culture statements, which tend to reside on About Us and Career pages online, sit comfortably under the recruitment banner. In our current pursuit of work/life balance, a company’s cultur...

TRUMP CAN'T STOP THE GLOBALIZATION OF WORK—THE INTERNET WILL SEE TO THAT

GETTY IMAGES DONALD TRUMP IS promising to make America great again by keeping others out. That approach is already undermining the smidgen of tentative good will he had enjoyed from the tech industry. As a strategy for keeping jobs in the US, it’s also fatally flawed. Turns out that in a world connected by the internet, isolationism is just a glitch in the network that the system—in this case, the global economy—routes around. In the days since Trump signed his executive order limiting immigration from certain countries, tech employees who work in the US but were stuck outside the country have stayed in touch via email, videoconferencing, social media, and chat programs like Slack. In 2017, most of the day-to-day work that high-tech employees do takes place entirely on computers. Whether that computer is on Google’s campus in Mountain View or an airport in Tehran is largely irrelevant. RELATED STORIES Doctors and Patients Reel After Trump’s Immigration Ban Trump’s Ban Isn’t ...

Iran missile work not violating UN bans: Russia’s Churkin

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin (Photo by AFP) A senior Russian diplomat has expressed surprise at an outcry provoked by the new US administration over Iranian missile work, saying Tehran’s missile tests are not violating any UN bans, legally speaking. “This outcry about Iran’s ballistic missile launches. I was surprised to hear even American experts speaking on CNN and calling it a violation of bans by the UN Security Council,” said Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin in an interview with RT published Tuesday. He was referring to Resolution 2231 adopted by the Security Council in July 2015 to underpin the landmark nuclear deal inked days earlier between Tehran and the P5+1 group of states, namely Russia, China, France, Britain, the US plus Germany. The document terminated the provisions of previous UN resolutions, calling on Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering ...