A new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Tristan Botelho found that if we are overlooked when we perform well or praised when we perform poorly, we tend to pass that misrecognition on when we evaluate others.
This sucks. Your coworker misjudged a situation and seems to be unfairly misjudging you because of it. I can understand why that would create tension and discomfort.
Can you try to talk to her about it? Approach her and ask if you can have a few minutes of her time. Then try to explain that you didn’t mean any offense because you were talking about the low quality of the photography, not about the people in it and it didn’t occur that someone might take it to be about the people. After her reaction it clicked that it could look/sound that way, but that was genuinely not the intent or your thought process at all.
Heck, you could also take a good selfie and a bad selfie (or internet examples of this) and show her those as an example to highlight that the same subject in different settings can look starkly different, and that was what you were commenting on, not the subjects themselves. Hopefully that would clear it up.
This approach would take some humility to concede some to her perception of you doing something wrong because doing so might soften her up enough to actually listen to you, but I want to clarify that I don’t think you did anything wrong (and FWIW, I’m a woman).
Do you need to do this? No. But it’s clearly eating at you, and this is a way that might put it to bed. And if she doubles down and gets worse, then you know you really should put distance in how you interact with this person.
Like the other commenter said, it might be worth mentioning to your manager first though, especially if you have a good relationship there. Doing so covers several bases:
If she was spiteful enough to report you for what she perceived to be happening, you have the real version out there.
Your manager may have a recommendation on how to approach her better than what I said since they actually know each other.
Your manager may recommend not reaching out, for whatever reason. One possibility, maybe this coworker is known to stir the pot and this could be another example. Sometimes there are performance things spoken about only at the manager level.
I wish you luck and peace in moving on from this. It’s stressful to be accused of something you haven’t done because of a misunderstanding (I’ve been there).
Those are good advices and I will take them into consideration. I know I’ll get over it eventually, But at the same time I also know that one, she’s higher in the corporate hierarchy than I am, and two, if you were a boss and you heard a man trying to complain about being unfairly judged over a passive allegation of sexist creepiness versus a highly ranked and respected woman who made the allegation. It’s in your best financial interests to believe the woman and dismiss the complaints of the man.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that 99 times out of 100, it’s actually the man being a creep. It sucks to be in that 1% category this one time.
This sucks. Your coworker misjudged a situation and seems to be unfairly misjudging you because of it. I can understand why that would create tension and discomfort.
Can you try to talk to her about it? Approach her and ask if you can have a few minutes of her time. Then try to explain that you didn’t mean any offense because you were talking about the low quality of the photography, not about the people in it and it didn’t occur that someone might take it to be about the people. After her reaction it clicked that it could look/sound that way, but that was genuinely not the intent or your thought process at all.
Heck, you could also take a good selfie and a bad selfie (or internet examples of this) and show her those as an example to highlight that the same subject in different settings can look starkly different, and that was what you were commenting on, not the subjects themselves. Hopefully that would clear it up.
This approach would take some humility to concede some to her perception of you doing something wrong because doing so might soften her up enough to actually listen to you, but I want to clarify that I don’t think you did anything wrong (and FWIW, I’m a woman).
Do you need to do this? No. But it’s clearly eating at you, and this is a way that might put it to bed. And if she doubles down and gets worse, then you know you really should put distance in how you interact with this person.
Like the other commenter said, it might be worth mentioning to your manager first though, especially if you have a good relationship there. Doing so covers several bases:
I wish you luck and peace in moving on from this. It’s stressful to be accused of something you haven’t done because of a misunderstanding (I’ve been there).
Those are good advices and I will take them into consideration. I know I’ll get over it eventually, But at the same time I also know that one, she’s higher in the corporate hierarchy than I am, and two, if you were a boss and you heard a man trying to complain about being unfairly judged over a passive allegation of sexist creepiness versus a highly ranked and respected woman who made the allegation. It’s in your best financial interests to believe the woman and dismiss the complaints of the man.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that 99 times out of 100, it’s actually the man being a creep. It sucks to be in that 1% category this one time.