MIT Materials Department faculty meeting interruption pattern (gendered)

Concrete behavioral instance of the chauvinism problem. The senior archaeologist faculty member tells Tom that men interrupt women but not other men in faculty meetings; Tom verifies and intervenes by saying "excuse me, she's still talking, let her finish." The lesson Tom draws is that leadership requires identifying the actual mechanism, not just the diagnosis.

I'll take a moment — if any of you have to leave, go ahead and leave. One of the things I did when I sat down with the two women faculty, the archaeologists, I said, okay, tell me what the problems are from your perspective. The senior woman said, well, if you go to a faculty meeting, you'll find that the male faculty, if a woman is talking, the males will interrupt her in mid-sentence, and they won't do that to other men. So I went to the next faculty meeting and I paid attention to this. It was absolutely true. So what did I do? If a male tried to interrupt the woman when she was talking, I'd say, excuse me, she's still talking, let her finish. Slowly the faculty learned — not by my telling them they were being chauvinist, because they didn't even know they were being chauvinist. This is one way where a little bit of leadership can go a long way, if you understand what the problem is.