(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

We are ready to get going on Gaslighting & Gender in the Workplace. Hooray! Such enthusiasm. Okay, so once again, I'm Holly - you all already know who I am, because I just told you, but I want to tell you a little bit more about kind of who I am and where I've been, because you don't end up doing a talk about Gaslighting & Gender in the Workplace due to academic curiosity, or because you think it'll win you friends or something like that, right?

I'm doing this talk, because I think it really matters to all of you in the room, I hope. I think it really matters to the women I serve at WIMDI and also… it's a thing that's happened to me tons in my career and so I know it's a problem, because I watch it happen to people all the time. And really everything that I do with WIMDI and leadership coaching, is about helping women have better careers, longer careers, more sustainable careers and helping them build up their leadership skills.

Retention of Women in STEM

The way that I like to frame this, some of you may have seen this before, is with the world's most upsetting graph. I braced you for it - let's take a look: here is the world's most upsetting graph.

Gaslighting on ‘Roids

Now, if we really want to up the ante on this and make the gaslighting even more pernicious, there's a couple of key ways that we can do that. The first ingredient that we'd want to add, if we wanted to make gaslighting extra terrible, is a power imbalance. Anytime there's a power imbalance where one person is more powerful than the other, it gives them an advantage to make their gaslighting a little more sticky, to make the other person question whether or not they don't fully understand the way the world works.

I'll give you a couple of examples of how that looks: A common one that many people will have experience with is an adult/child relationship, so basically, with our parents. You see this a lot in, for example, homes with addiction, where children will sort of suspect that maybe there is too much drinking going on and everybody says, "No, what drinking? Everything's fine and normal." So, because of the power dynamic, because children are so dependent on adults to help them understand the world, but also, for all of their basic needs, it makes it much more likely that the kid reaches for that. "Oh, maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand," explanation.

Another commonplace one we'll see is, especially at work, is between bosses and subordinates, because we depend on our bosses again, just sort of like when we were kids, we depend on them for promotions, for how much we make, for feedback about our own performance – especially - that's a big one. Their interpretation of the world carries a lot of weight for us, and that puts that extra hand on the scale for, "Oh, maybe they get it, and I totally don't."

You also see it, even if there's no explicit power – like there is in boss and subordinate relationships – you also see it even just with senior and junior, where somebody is providing technical mentorship or something like that, because they're perceived as having more experience and understanding the industry or the technical issue better. That gives them a very similar edge to what you'd get from your boss, even if they don't actually control your paycheck. And surprisingly, you'll even see it between therapists and patients.

Now, you wouldn't expect to see this in some ways, because I mean, heck, aren't therapists supposed to explicitly not emotionally abuse their clients, right? Of course, the answer is yes, but what can happen, especially if you are a patient that's working with mental health issues with a therapist, is that because you're working on your mental health and you're relying on your therapist to help you interpret the world and understand how you relate to it, it's very easy, if the therapist is not careful to slip into a dynamic where they're making the calls and they have that elevated position of dictating how the world should be perceived, so it's not uncommon to see it there, unfortunately, as well.

Okay, so power dynamics are key to increasing the effectiveness or the likelihood of gaslighting becoming, really, a difficult thing. And the second ingredient is what I like to call the outsider effect. The outsider effect really happens anytime you've got people who have uncommon viewpoints or different lived experiences. This is really anybody who's in a marginalized position within the group. It could be women in male-dominated industries are an excellent example of that, because, by definition, if we're in a male-dominated industry, there's not a lot of us.

So, you see this with things like, years ago, I think it was the Apple watch or something, didn't have a pregnancy mode, maybe it still doesn't. I don't have an Apple watch, so I'm not sure, but it didn't have a pregnancy mode, because it was programmed entirely by men. Anytime you gained weight or something, they'd go, "Time to lose weight," which is toxic on its own – let's not empower diet culture here – but they'd go, "You've gained a bunch of weight, you better go running or do something else," but actually, it's pregnancy and it's very normal, and losing weight during pregnancy is actually not what you'd want, but because they are men and they don't experience that, they didn't understand that they'd have to develop for it. But if you had been a woman in that meeting and you had said, "Hey, I think we need to consider, periods and pregnancy as part of this health tracking app," that's an idea that might've gotten shot down, because they'd go, "Nah, I don't think it matters that much for the initial release. Maybe that's something that we add later on in version 2, version 3 or something like that."

Anytime you are an outsider where you come from a different background, you have a different lived experience in the world, this will create a scenario where you're more likely to have that separation between how you think the world is and how a whole other team of people do, which sets you up for that gaslighting dynamic to exist. You'll see this as well too with people who are neuro-divergent or disabled in some way, this'll be really common as well, because people don't have an experience of the way that the world presents for somebody who's disabled, the way that they have to navigate the world or for somebody who's neuro-divergent, the way that they think and the conditions that they need for the world to kind of function well.

Okay, and then ingredient number 3, that is really essential, is repetition. Gaslighting one time is not going to send anybody into a crisis wondering if they can trust themselves. Not usually… usually it takes a little more than once. This is kind of weird, because earlier I asked you whether or not we had experienced gaslighting or if we knew what it was. A lot of us know, I assume we know, not just because it's been a hot topic in the media, but maybe because we've had some experience with ourselves. And most people aren't manipulative monsters, right?

I don't know about you, but how many of us actually woke up this morning and went like, "Woo! I can't wait until I can emotionally abuse some folks at work! Hooray!" Anybody in the chat woke up like that or is it just me? I think it's probably just me. I'm probably the only person who's interested in manipulating everybody every day. And so, we don't do that. We don't go out into the world trying to harm people usually. And yet there are so many people who have experienced this.

So how does this happen? What's going on? And the reason that this happens and the reason that we end up susceptible to gaslighting is because the repetition doesn't have to be recent. It's not like I have to gaslight you repeatedly in four minutes, like I'm Shaggy, right? I can actually dole it out over the entirety of your life, or I can even have other people dole it out over the entirety of your life. And then, later when you innocuously pat your honey on the arm and he says it's ticklish, and then you're gaslighting him, then that's a bit tougher, because of the pre-programmed experience with gaslighting that comes before.

A history with gaslighting is a really essential piece of the puzzle to find out if the gaslighting is going to take hold and be upsetting. The places that you'll most commonly see this are parents and relatives; It's really common that we end up getting set up with this in our childhood. You know, I mentioned before, homes with addictions or anything like that.

We also tend to see it quite a lot with romantic partners, where in these relationships, where we're incredibly close and constantly having to navigate together, the way that we're going to live, we of course often end up in conflict and can, if there's a power dynamic or somebody who doesn't have good coping and arguing skills, end up getting gaslit and then end up constantly, throughout the rest of our lives if we get exposed to it enough, reaching for that, "Oh my God, is it me? Oh my God, I don't understand the world. This person's got it figured out, but I don't," because you've seen that happen so much that you slip naturally into that pattern.

I also want to say, we talk about gaslighting history coming from family or romantic partners. It also comes from literally all of society for traditionally marginalized folks. Most interactions when we talk about micro-aggressions or something like that, many, many times we'll run into the world where we're the only one with a particular viewpoint, everybody else thinks that we're way off base and we're sort of stuck into that gaslighting loop again.

We know the equation now. We want to take a healthy dose of denial of lived experience and then we want to multiply that by any power differentials we can scrounge up, by any amount of outsider experience that exists in our lives, and then all the repetition we've had since the day that we were born and that is going to get us our gaslighting quotient or something like that.

Gaslighting and Gender

You might be asking at this point like, "Hey, what about gender? It's right there in the title, Holly. We haven't talked about it at all." So, let's talk about it. We could easily call out any other intersectional identity here as well. Gender is the one that we're going to talk about now, but as I mentioned, any experience of marginalization or being one of only a few, or being one of the only ones against a large group of others will create this.

We're going to talk about the particular things about gender that really amp things up. So a gender dynamic, one that enables gaslighting, is our historical power distribution. When I say historical, I also definitely mean current, to be clear, but talking historically, it was not that long ago that women couldn't vote. Within my grandmother's lifetime it was not possible for women to vote and really only in the last… however long it's been, 100 years or something like that, we've been able to vote, (and by the way, for indigenous women in Canada, that was I think, 1963, that they got the vote). This is recent, this is not that long ago that that very explicit power in a democracy, the ability to vote, was not allowed in women's hands, or certain women's hands for much longer. Even back in the 1960s or something like that, if you remember watching on "Mad Men", when Betty Draper wanted to get a divorce, she had to seek permission from her husband to do it.

Not only did she not work outside of the home and not have any financial power, she would have trouble leaving the relationship or taking any control, because she doesn't have the financial privilege, but she also has to ask permission to be allowed to leave. Huge, huge gap in power. Similarly, another example from that same show – Betty Draper, when she went to see a psychiatrist at some point, in Season 1, the psychiatrist did not report his findings about her mental health to her, but rather reported it to her husband. Again, this is 50- 60 years ago. This is not that long ago.

This is the generation of our grandmothers, the generation of our mothers as well at that time. That reverberates over time, even if that's not the current situation. If I go and see a therapist now, they don't call up my honey and tell them all about their findings. I can just go and get divorced if I want to, right? But even though that's not the case now, we still live with all the reverberations through society of those things. That's still present in the way that my grandmother raised my mother and the way that my mother raised me and the way that all of us were raised.

So that's one thing, that the people who have had power traditionally, have been cisgender men. Secondly, women's opinions have been less valued traditionally than men's opinions. I mentioned earlier that historically, men have held power. A really normal, natural human being thing to do is to pay a lot of attention to the person that has power, the person who has the power to determine your economic future or your physical safety is somebody that you should pay a lot of attention to, make sure that you are aligned with and make sure that you kind of appease in some ways, because that's a really good strategy for staying safe and making sure you can pay your rent and all of those kind of things.

In a large-scale and small-scale way, we tend to pay attention and give weight to the opinions of people who have power to determine key aspects of our lives, and for most of history that's been men. I mean, even if you look at political power as a great example of that, there's how many female head of states right now? Less than 10, maybe less than five. I haven't done a count lately, but not many. In Canada, we've had precisely one head of state here that was a woman, and it was a temporary situation after somebody else had resigned, and it was back in the nineties and it ended before you could blink. We have not occupied that position of power very often, or for very long when we have and as a result, people don't pay as much attention to the things that we have to say, because it's in theory, less consequential to them than the opinions of somebody that does have the power.

The result of this is that the people with power's opinions get amplified and the people without the power's opinions are less valued, because people see them as less consequential. That is something that we're raised with from a very young age; We learn and reinforce this idea that this other person and the way that they see the world is more important than ours.

We talked earlier about how that's a key element of gaslighting. That I understand the world and you don't, so therefore, you have to listen to me and depend on me to correctly interpret the world.

The last gender dynamic that I want to call out is some specific sort of female-coded behavior, things that we're trained to do from a young age. Two that I want to talk about are peacekeeping and emotional caretaking. Emotional caretaking is when we take responsibility for other people's emotional health. I don't recall if I did this today, but quite commonly, if I stand up on stage to do this talk in person, back in the old days, I'd stand up and say, "Hey everybody, how are you doing? Are you feeling tired this morning? Has everybody had their coffee?" That is caretaking the audience. I'm checking in and making sure that they're all feeling good before I deliver my message.

This is a thing that women are taught to do in various ways, where we're making sure, above all else, that other people feel safe, secure, and happy. That that’s our job and it is something that we learned very, very early. Peacekeeping on the other hand is a variation on that, where if there's ever a fight going on, or there could be a fight going on, it's up to us to fix it.

What that often looks like for women is subsuming whatever it is that they need or want, to keep the peace. Maybe my partner wants to go on vacation to Hawaii and I've always wanted to go to Rome, but I think he's going to throw a bit of a fit, if we don't go to Hawaii, then I might avoid having that fight and instead, just go to Hawaii. Let me be clear, he would not throw a fit if we go to Hawaii, but you get the idea. It's subsuming the thing that you want to keep the peace and make it so that there is harmony and no fights happening, and also, that you're emotionally caretaking somebody else.

These two behaviours are both strategies that women use, that effectively result in them taking that lower power position within a pair, where the other person - their needs, their concerns, their emotions - are dominant and your job is to serve and protect everything that's going on.

That creates the power imbalance that we were talking about earlier that helps fuel the gaslighting. It's really like a perfect storm. It's no fun to be in this situation where you are in a male-dominated industry, part of a small group, so therefore, more likely to have that outsider view – where the power dynamics explicitly within the group probably often don't favour you –but also historically, because of the way we've all been raised and currently, because of the way we've been trained to peace keep and emotionally caretake and the way that other people have been trained to expect that.

I'm not trying to lay this on women and go, "Well, if you just didn't peace keep and emotionally caretake, then nobody would ever gaslight you," that's not true, but it is a part of the dynamic that has two sides where we do the peacekeeping and they readily expect to accept the peacekeeping and stuff like that, that helps enable this. We create this perfect storm where gaslighting is really often a go-to where we have a lot of historical context for it and it becomes easy to fall into.

Workplace Effects of Gaslighting

What if we're seeing this at work and not just in a Shaggy song – what would that look like? Well, people who are being gaslit at work would probably end up silencing their viewpoints and their opinions, which makes total sense. If you think your viewpoints and opinions are wrong and everybody berates you and gets upset with you every time you share them, the best idea is to stop doing that and then, they'll maybe stop getting mad at you.

You're heavily incentivized to not say as much so that you don't attract as much ire from the rest of the world. The other thing that you'll see is that they'll be less creative and they'll take less healthy risks. Again, because if every time you're creative and offer an interesting idea, or even a non-controversial idea, you kind of get stomped on and are told you've got it wrong - it doesn't help you to step out of line more and take even more risk and expose yourself to even more of that critique. Instead, it makes sense to be smaller. Don't step outside of the normal boundaries. Do everything that everyone else would do. Don't try anything new and don't take any risks, right? And as well, you probably won't take on any high-profile projects or go for promotions or go for big raises, because if you feel like you've got shaky balance and you're not quite sure how to walk in your shoes, the last thing you're going to do is volunteer to go walk on a high wire where everybody's watching you fall down.

To protect themselves from the pain of the gaslighting and from the reputational risks that can come from it, people tend to avoid attracting attention. They don't take on big projects, which are often the projects that you need to get promoted, to move ahead, to justify large raises.

All of these things result in less impactful ideas being advanced by women. More of the status quo, which is, ironically when we talk about hiring women or hiring different marginalized groups, we're trying to increase diversity. They get a broader set of ideas, but when this is going on, we absolutely squash that. At the end of the day, we don't end up moving up the chain of command, because we've been so incentivized to not do any of the behaviors that would help us do that. Yuck, no fun. "What a fun presentation, Holly. So glad we're doing it."

How to Deal with Gaslighting If You’re A Victim

Okay, so now what? Now that I've depressed you all, let's talk about how to deal with this. I'm going to go through how to deal with gaslighting, if you're a victim of gaslighting. I'm also going to talk about how to deal with gaslighting if you are the manager and you're seeing gaslighting going on. I don't think I have any actual slides about how to deal if you are the gaslighter, so I'll just tell you now: stop it. That's how you do it. All of those behaviours that I talked about and all the ways to increase it, delete those one by one from your behaviors and you'll be on your way.