Nitpicking; It’s good for your career?
Why I will Never Condemn People Who Choose to Work in the Adult Industry(4)
I started my analyst job, my longest role, in the Spring of 2021 during COVID. I had just moved everything I owned from the East Coast to the West Coast, and all my belongings were in a car while I started the job working out of a hotel. I was genuinely the happiest I’d ever been in my life, but that changed.
There was some writing on the wall indicating a negative work environment. The former ordering team all but left about two years into the job. One woman after another. Five in total on a team that had been seven. I saw Asian, Black, and mixed-race people leaving at rates disproportionate to the number of minorities within the company. One of my fellow analysts, an East Indian woman (who left a year before I did), shared an article about how women are underrepresented in educational leadership. At the virtual school where we worked, most leadership positions were held by men. A woman of East Asian descent was briefly hired to be Associate Director for Operations. She left within two months. Coworkers gossiped, and people badmouthed their own spouses. One woman in particular went on about how she was an empath while speaking about her husband as if he were incompetent, and talking behind the back of a woman she was friends with on her team.
In my third year with the company, a woman we’ll call Bertilda joined as the ordering manager. I reported to the Director of Operations, Abraham, but was the assigned analyst for the ordering department. Issues arose when it was time to roll over reports for the new year. Bertilda carelessly messed up an existing report, and I had to rebuild it. Then there was the start of the undermining. A new, male analyst joined an adjacent analyst team six months after Bertilda joined. She sent an email about updating a report I owned the maintenance for, and referred to the work as “fairly complex” for me, so she wanted to work with the new guy. At no point did she discuss with me what she wanted to update. I mentioned my concern about the undermining and the careless handling of the report I had to rebuild with Abraham. He said he didn’t think Bertilda’s decisions were malicious.
I found out in the Fall of 2024 that I would be under Bertilda. I immediately started making moves to find a new job because of the bias and carelessness in handling data that I had already seen from Bertilda. But then I stopped looking.
My fatal, “benefit of the doubt”, optimism kicked in. And that is where I’ve always been 100% wrong.
It was like pulling teeth to get into the ordering department meetings with the rest of the team. Bertilda asked if I was sure I wanted to join. The previous team automatically included me despite my reporting to Abraham back then. When I finally joined these meetings, eyes would travel up and down my body. Bertilda’s body language was jittery. I was referred to more than once as an “honorary member,” even though I was directly listed next to Bertilda on the organization chart.
I was not invited to take pictures with this new team, whereas the old team welcomed me. In fact, Bertilda asked two former members of the ordering department who were next to my cubicle to join a holiday photo, and bypassed me. Only one member of the ordering team (who later switched departments) said, “What about so and so?”
When I did end up joining the holiday photo, Bertilda glanced over to me as if I shouldn’t be there. That photo ended up being the only photo they didn’t include on the ordering team department wall of photos.
Other exclusions included one of the ordering team members deliberately coming to me and telling me that she and the others went to lunch, but “they’d invite me next time”. I would have never known, so there was no point in saying that other than to let me know I’m being excluded. Whenever birthdays came around, they always brought someone else’s card for me to sign, but when my birthday rolled around, there was no card from them. I only got a card from the COO and my former boss.
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As far as my analyst work under Bertilda went, she never took the time to review my reports. She would come back weeks later, asking basic questions despite having flagged the reports as finished. My job became harder for all the wrong reasons. When one of my annual reports came up, Bertilda took my report, renamed it, and messed up the pivot tables I had created. No analyst or other manager had ever done this. I also found errors on a weekly report she took over, with overlapping data disrupting the report columns. I fixed her mistakes, yet Bertilda still undermined me. She would defer me to male analysts, never the other female analysts. Then there was Trello. When Abraham was my boss, he always communicated which Trello cards I was responsible for and gave context. Bertilda would put my name on a Trello card without informing me. I only knew a system enhancement was in the works once the programming team was in the QA testing phase.
When my annual review time came, Bertilda took to tone policing that was almost as bad as the situation I dealt with as a project coordinator. I was told I was professional, but she claimed my communication was “too direct and strong”. This was an immediate double bind. I told Bertilda about a time when the financial manager at the same job told me I was “too diplomatic and political” when I first started, because I told him “everything was going well” in response to being asked how things were going. Bertilda found this anecdote funny and laughed.
Bertilda started to contradict herself with her claim. She said that HR insisted managers give a note for improvement, which implied that it was a trivial suggestion on her part, but then she claimed that others had given this feedback (no one but her had ever said anything to me about a “too direct” tone). In fact, in my last annual review, Abraham just told me how great my work was and to “keep it up”. In this instance, Bertilda created a negative work environment because either she’s lying, or Abraham spent over three years smiling in my face and lying to me. Either way, the distress set in. When I asked her for examples of the “too strong” communication, she didn’t have any. I asked to meet about this claim. When we finally met, she did a complete 180. I was snapped at and told the meeting “wasn’t my time” and that her claims “weren’t up for debate”. All in a meeting, she set the time for, she sent the invite for, and she agreed to meet about both verbally and in writing. The irony of being tone policed by a woman who thinks it’s appropriate to snap at her employees.
Bertilda came up with two examples and admitted that none of the receiving parties complained about the communications. I had another coworker review these just so that I knew I wasn’t crazy, and he didn’t see the issue:
Bertilda confessed to me that she went back through months’ worth of chats and couldn’t find any tone issues. She even said she could “see how her claim could be seen as nitpicking”. This was mind-blowing because initially, she said this feedback was supposed to help me in my career. There is no good managerial advice that claims nitpicking employees is a helpful form of feedback. A quick Google search about a nitpicking boss yields overwhelmingly negative associations. I want to point out in the email that Bertilda said I was an “excellent employee”. Similar to the HR Director I dealt with as a project coordinator, she acknowledged my good work reputation while treating me poorly. With people like this, it’s all about control. Even the edits she suggested I make during the eventual in-person meeting sounded like she wanted me to grovel in my emails.
I told Bertilda that this was a talking point often aimed at women. She virtue-signaled about how women should support each other and made a self-insert telling me how the COO once snapped at her. I wasn’t surprised, considering how she often talked over people, but her lack of self-awareness was laughable given how she snapped at me. This same woman, before I left, scoffed at an idea I had for a new system-built report. Abraham thought it was a good idea and escalated it to IT. I left just as the project was getting started. Still, it was a woman dismissing my idea while a man pushed it forward. Even in my last week, a friendly acquaintance I spent time with outside of work said she cared about me as a person, but didn’t want to hear why I was leaving. Yet a male analyst asked why I was leaving, offered to sit down and listen to my experiences over lunch, and gave me his contact info so that he could be my reference.
Minority women in my position might have called this entire experience racism with the treatment I got. The women who made comments about my body were White, Asian, and mixed-race (A&W). The undermining and tone policing came from Bertilda, a White woman.
It could be a combination, but women of all races have been in the practice of reducing me to my appearance, making comments on my body, and trying to police or silence me. It’s prejudice and bias based on perceived attractiveness; I’ll get into that in the future.
For my part, I wrote three reference letters for other women while I was an analyst. I supported women, despite them not supporting me. And I will continue to do that and check myself for signs of internalized misogyny because the only way sexism disappears is if we all address it.
As of now, I have obtained the right to sue from my state’s Civil Rights Department. They wouldn’t take the case themselves, and as with my project coordinator job, the legal representative was useless and sighed throughout my intake meeting for the sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination. The irony of reporting corruption to a corrupt entity. As it goes, when you’re ruled by criminals….
Thank you for reading. This is the fourth publication in the series, “Why I will Never Condemn People Who Choose to Work in the Adult Industry”.
