Why women should interrupt men
Getty ImagesRecent turmoil in the Uber boardroom has raised the issue of ‘manterrupting’. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway says men shouldn’t interrupt less, women should interrupt more.
Last week, David Bonderman dropped the mother of all clangers.
In the middle of a discussion on Uber’s sexist culture, he let slip a crass joke about how women talk too much. He interrupted Arianna Huffington, his fellow Uber director, and he got his facts wrong. Women don’t talk more than men. He’s been given a lot of stick for all three things, and has quit Uber in disgrace.
But on one thing, I’m on his side.
As a dedicated, life-long interruptor, I feel honour-bound to stand up for him. Interrupting gets a poor press. It’s thought to be rude. And when a man interrupts a woman (as they do all the time) it’s deemed particularly bad. Eric Schmidt was recently taken down for ‘manterrupting’ when the Alphabet chairman interrupted the only woman on the panel. And when Mr Bonderman talked over Ms Huffington, the New York Times set down to write a long article deploring the practice.
Getty ImagesThe remedy, most people seem to agree, is for men to be made to stop. A couple of months ago, in celebration of International Women’s Day, an app was launched called Woman Interrupted. Any man downloading it is made to repeat three times, “I will not interrupt women any more” and then awarded a black mark for every transgression.
This transcript is taken from The BBC World Service’s World Business Report. You can subscribe to the World Business Report podcast here.
Yet this isn’t the answer. If all men are forbidden from interrupting female colleagues, they will not start listening to them more assiduously, but will switch off altogether. A woman – or a man – should always be interrupted if he or she is being boring, or if the person doing the interrupting has something more urgent to say.
Most business conversations, and almost all panel discussions, are boring quite a lot of the time. When someone starts to talk, the gist of what they are trying to say often becomes clear during the first sentence or two, after which, there seems little harm if someone else chips in with something fresher. Not only does interrupting make things snappier, it keeps everyone on their toes. The fear of losing the floor forces you to make your point more briefly.
Men should not be made to interrupt less, women should be made to do it more. Many find this sort of thing hard, but having cracked it myself I can assure them it isn’t. When the speaker takes even the slightest pause for breath, you simply start talking yourself.
On Mr Bonderman’s third point – whether women do talk more – there’s a lot of conflicted evidence, and the answer is that it depends on context. Anyone who has ever sat in a board meeting, or has watched the behavior of a panel of experts, can tell you that there is a direct correlation between how important someone feels themselves to be, and how much they bang on. Thanks to the skewing of corporate life, most of the most self-important people still tend to be men.
Getty ImagesThe solution to this is obvious. When such people start to hold forth, others should make a point of interrupting. Those who do so should never be punished for rudeness. They are performing a public service.
Lucy Kellaway writes about management and office life for the Financial Times. Read more of her columns here.