The tyranny of “normal”

Ugh, I just got a maddening example of this today.

One of our directors, an older (55+) man with a background in building security and operations, refused to share one of the company’s data banks with me because “[he doesn’t] trust [me] with that important information,” and “what if [I] changed the spreadsheet format?”

The thing is, I’m the company’s data analyst, and him restricting the data from me literally makes it impossible for me to do my job (without throwing statistical validity out the window and just making wild estimations without grounding in data). I’m also a PhD candidate in a field closely allied with data science, so definitely know my way around a spreadsheet / databank. I say this not to brag about myself, but just to make it clear that I’m qualified for this position.

Still, I’m young-ish, a woman, and from an ethnic minority background. All these things count against me in this small town. This director probably just subconsciously assumes that I’m incompetent. I’m not sufficiently “normal,” by his measure of normal. He saw no problem giving the data to the last person (older man, very much “normal”), despite the fact that he had very little experience in data science or analysis.

This is the kind of stuff that really fuels my misanthropy. Just the blatant judgment on “normalcy,” qualifications be darned.

/r/misanthropy Thread