is “junior” derogatory, struggling employee takes lots of time off, and more

by Alison Green on August 26, 2024

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Is the term “junior” derogatory?

I recently had a minor dust-up at work that surprised me. I had a contract service scheduled to happen on-site at a vendor. Two of my coworkers expressed interest in attending in person with me to learn how it is done. These two coworkers are relatively new grads, about 10 years less experienced than me, and have job titles below mine, though I don’t supervise them. I sent a note to the vendor requesting permission for them to attend and in doing so referred to the two coworkers as “junior colleagues” of mine.

The coworkers were hurt. One brought it up to me.

I apologized for any hurt feelings and explained, sincerely, that I didn’t have or intend any negative associations with the word “junior.” I had used the word because I needed the vendor to be prepared for inexperienced people on the job site (they need physical monitoring). I also wanted the vendor to be prepared to answer more than the usual number of questions, and though I doubted they’d refuse the visitors, I wanted to give them a polite out if they didn’t want this particular job to be used as a learning opportunity. I also needed the vendor to understand that I still was the point of contact on the project and to some degree (by virtue of being there) was responsible for the conduct of my colleagues in a sensitive location not accessible to the public. I wasn’t just mentioning rank for funsies; it was relevant.

I spent a long time in academia, and there “junior” and “senior” were very normal words to describe grad students, postdocs, researchers, fellows, etc., of varying levels of experience. Usually, you literally were just referring to how long that person had been there. It was also very common for informal mentoring and teaching relationships to exist between “junior” and “senior” people within a level; I guess I thought that was part of what was being asked of me in having these coworkers attend this service site with me.

I certainly won’t use the word again now that I know these coworkers have a sore spot with it. Is this just them, or does this term have a broader connotation I’m not aware of? Is there a better way I could phrase things when I need to communicate a difference in seniority—oops!—I mean, in title, level of responsibility within the organization, or experience?

It’s completely normal to use terms like “junior” and “senior” in a work context! Sometimes it refers to how long someone has been there (particularly with “senior”) but more often it’s a reflection of the level of the position and responsibility the person holds or their amount of experience in the field overall. Sometimes, too, it’s a description of relationships relative to each other; you could be senior to me/my position but still junior to your boss.

Assuming “relatively new grads” means your colleagues graduated a year or two ago, they are junior; you’re not required to pretend that they’re not, and you had relevant reasons for mentioning it. (And in some fields they’d be considered junior far longer than that; it’s pretty field-dependent.)

If they weren’t actually junior, it would be understandable for them to feel like you minimized their expertise and competence, but that doesn’t sound like the case. You used a normal term in a normal way.

Related:
my coworkers say I should hold back because I’m early-career … but am I?

2. All-female staff at women’s health offices

I was recently at a gynecologist appointment, and noticed yet again that all of the staff who work there are women. This has been the case at several different OB-GYN offices I’ve been to, as well as at the women’s center where I’ve had my mammograms done.

While male OB-GYNs do exist, there haven’t been any at any of the practices I’ve been a patient at. But even beyond the doctors themselves, all nurses, medical assistants, ultrasound techs, phlebotomists, and even the receptionists have all been women. I know why they do this — many women don’t want men in the room during a pelvic exam or a mammogram. But how can they legally get away with only hiring women? Especially for non-clinical roles? I doubt the law prohibiting hiring discrimination based on sex has an exception for female-target health care. Is it really that men just tend not to apply at gyn offices?

The law prohibiting gender discrimination includes an exception for what’s called “bona fide occupational qualifications,” which allows employers to make a job single-sex-only if it’s truly necessary to the work. The law recognizes this exception in three circumstances: privacy (for example, you can preference women when hiring a women’s locker room attendant), “authenticity in the arts” (like in casting for movies or TV), and when the qualification “relates to the normal operation or essence of the business” (like the mandatory retirement age for pilots for safety reasons).

However, customer preference for men or women in a particular role doesn’t normally qualify.

I suspect what you’re seeing is largely self-selecting — for example, men tend not to go into mammography at all, and I suspect they apply for other jobs at women’s health centers in lower numbers too — but it’s probably mixed in with at least a bit of the people who are hiring giving preference to female candidates and no one having challenged that.

3. Can I address my struggling employee’s use of PTO?

My office has a generous time-off benefit, with about five weeks of vacation and 2.5 weeks of sick time, plus all the usual holidays and a two-week winter closure (paid). Most people end up needing to take 1-2 days a month just to stay under the vacation cap, but I have one employee who has the opposite problem and often uses up his accruals immediately. He takes many vacations each year, and needs additional time off for external commitments. This means he usually hovers around a balance of 2-3 days banked (compared to most other people who have 15-20 days available at any given time).

I’ve always believed that a person’s PTO is a compensation benefit and wouldn’t make anyone feel guilty for taking the time they are owed. But lately this person’s performance is starting to dip, and a few balls are being dropped because he’s overwhelmed. Would it be reasonable as a manager to say that he may have an easier time staying on top of things if he was around more often? It feels unfair that I may need to adjust projects and reassign work to others in the office to make up for his extensive travel schedule.

Yes, it’s reasonable to say, “The expectation is that you’ll manage your time off in a way that ensures balls aren’t dropped and doesn’t require others to regularly cover for you.” It’s also reasonable to point out that an especially demanding period isn’t the right time for optional time-off (that’s why some teams have vacation black-out dates or all-hands-on-deck periods) or to say, “I can’t approve a week off next month because it’s right before the major event you’re responsible for / you just came back from a week off and you have an accumulating backlog that needs to be processed by October 1 / or so forth.”

It wouldn’t be reasonable to say either of these things if they meant a responsible person would have a tough time ever taking vacation; if the guy’s workload is such that he’s never going to get time off without you adjusting projects and reassigning work, then adjusting projects and reassigning work is what you do … but otherwise, yeah, you can say this. But look at his workload first to make sure.

It’s also pretty common for companies not to permit unpaid time off at all, or to put limits on it. If you offer 7.5 weeks off per year, you presumably hired assuming the position would be staffed 44.5 weeks a year and it’s reasonable to require that (with flexibility for extenuating circumstances). So you might take a look at how the additional unpaid time off is playing into this.

Note: I’m assuming you know these are actual vacations and he’s not using the time off for medical reasons, which would be a different thing.

4. Stuck in the middle of a conflict with my employee and my manager

One of my staff members and my direct supervisor recently had a bad interaction on the public floor (both seem to be at fault). Both reached out to me after the incident. My supervisor asked me to bring my staff member in to have a meeting with the three of us. Is this appropriate?

It’s not inappropriate. But if at all possible, you should talk to them each individually beforehand and hear about what happened from their perspectives, plus find out what your manager’s goals are for the meeting so that you’re not walking in unprepared. Your manager should be willing to to prep you for what the point of the meeting is and, since you manage the staff member, should be open to hearing your input on the best way to handle it.

Ideally, if they were really both at fault, your role would be something like a translator — “Jane’s concerns were X, which is why she said Y / Rupert was coming from a place of concern about Z / here’s my take on how we can move forward.” But that won’t work in every situation; it depends on exactly what happened.

5. Still no photos on resumes?

I was wondering if your “no photos on resumes” (in the U.S.) ruling has changed at all since 2012? I’m curious because my friend asked me to review her resume, which she had created with a snazzy online tool. It looked nice, but it had a spot for a photo, which I always thought was a no-no. Have norms on this changed since most people have photos on LinkedIn or other easily-findable places?

Nope, it’s still the rule. Photos do not belong on resumes.

What’s happened, though, is that there are a number of truly terrible resume templates online  created by people who know a lot about design and absolutely nothing about resumes, and so you end up with awful templates that don’t suit their purpose at all. (See not only photos, but also templates with hardly any room for the stuff employers care about most, like job history and accomplishments.)

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  1. Ask a Manager* Post author

    A request that we not have a slew of comments on whether you personally would prefer to see a female doctor or not — that will derail us very quickly and isn’t what the letter-writer is asking about. Thank you.

  2. PNW Planner*

    I had an employee get upset because I referred to front desk staff. The context was in a group training, and I was referring to multiple employees who had to deal with the public as a major portion of their job.

    1. Jne*

      Cannot tell for sure but if they are being called desk staff only because they deal with the public, say if their job is to give complex legal advice, I could see how they might bristle at being referred to like a receptionist. OP’s case is different. Junior is not derogatory and I suspect the colleagues were just exposing their own insecurities.

      1. Allonge*

        ‘Front desk’ as a definition of certain roles is also not derogatory, no matter in which expertise.

        Sure, it should be clear in context that the point is that these people need customer service skills / interact with the public on top of the needed professional expertise, but it’s a legit distinction between two different roles that may need the same background otherwise.

        1. Also-ADHD*

          While “front desk” isn’t derogatory, it also doesn’t feel accurate to me as a replacement for “customer facing” either (unless they actually cover the front deal as a majority of their time). I’m not sure the context, but it does seem possible based on the comment that it was inaccurate and that’s why they got upset in that case. In healthcare, for example, there are many customer facing/interacting roles that would be inaccurate to call “front desk”. I think it’s fairly reasonable to get upset at any description that’s inaccurate. If you’re calling all staff that has interaction with external customers “front desk”, that would be potentially inaccurate in many industries/workplaces. Front of house distinctions in hospitality are common though.

          1. Allonge*

            Context is important for sure – from the context PNW Planner describes, the distinction was important to make and made sense.

            I don’t know about getting upset; I mean, sure, if something is (especially intentionally) dismissive of someone’s ‘rank’, then sure, but in a limited setting of a training even then… anyway, as you say, context dependent.

          2. LL*

            Yeah, front desk implies someone literally sitting at a desk greeting people as they come into the company/organization. Not everyone who interacts with the public.

      2. tamarack etc...*

        I’m finding myself oddly on the “OP1 should take a hard look at that” side. Because while junior is indeed not at all derogatory, it needs to be established whether these colleagues *are* actually the OP’s juniors. The OP seems to be using the term in a rather expansive sense: “you literally were just referring to how long that person had been there” is really not how “junior” should be used in the workplace.

        If these colleagues were indeed at the same rank as the OP, including the seniority ranking (step1, step2, whatever), then referring to them as junior because they have been newly hired and maybe not yet experienced this particular work situation would be incorrect. I’d refer to them as “new hires” instead.

        If however there is a difference in rank (*not* just in informal experience with the task at hand) between the OP and the colleagues, then they are in the wrong. New grads should not as a rule be hung up about being referred to as junior – except if there’s a good reason to think the OP was diminishing the co-workers’ ranks. For example, if the OP too is a relatively recent grad and has the same job title.

        1. YM*

          It is literally addressed in the letter that they hold junior positions relate to OP, and also are new to the industry (recently graduated) as opposed to OP that has 10 more years of experience. Both a difference in rank and a difference in experience in the field

          1. Great Frogs of Literature*

            Also, if a colleague and I have the same rank/title, but they’re new to the company, less experienced than I am, and I’m in charge of training them, I would think it perfectly reasonable for me to refer to them as a “junior colleague,” even if we occupy exactly the same place on the org chart. I wouldn’t do it just for funsies or to make them feel lesser, but if I’m bringing them into a meeting so that they can learn how to handle that sort of meeting, it’s a very normal way to refer to them when explaining their presence.

        2. Umiel12*

          I actually think that instead of not using the term “junior” again, the OP should coach these junior staff members on business norms so that they understand what is generally meant by terms like “junior” and “senior.”

    2. Angstrom*

      Maybe use “front line” instead? I’ve heard that used for a variety of customer-facing positions, including ones that were not desk jobs.

      1. Pizza Rat*

        I’ve seen senior used as an intermediate steps between say, individual contributor to team lead, but never junior.

        It makes sense, but if I were a young person who might feel after a couple years I’ve proven myself, it might make me a bit twitchy.

        2. a clockwork lemon*

          I’m in an industry where “junior” and “senior” are both actual job titles AND informal terms of address–I’m solidly a mid-career professional and don’t have a junior designation in my title but I’m still referred to as a “junior” staff member in some contexts and wouldn’t think twice about telling someone that I needed to check with my senior before approving something.

          Actually, now that I think about it, I still refer to one of my closest friends as “my senior from [company]” when talking about him to others, and we haven’t worked together in over five years!

          1. Cmdrshprd*

            I think it can also be relative based on experience and depending on who you are talking about/with.

            Like between you with 10 years of experience and joe with 1 year, you are the senior co-worker and joe is the junior co-worker, but if then you are talking about you with 10 years and Jane with 20 years, you would be the junior co-worker and Jane the senior-co-worker.

            So Joe might say I have to check with my senior co-worker @clockwork, but Jane might say I have to check with my junior co-worker @clockwork.

            1. a clockwork lemon*

              Exactly, or like someone is “senior” in terms of their tenure with an organization in ways that aren’t neatly reflected in their title. There’s a lot of nuance at play. In OP’s situation it seems like these employees are both junior in their org tenure AND junior in their overall professional experience. The term is appropriate and the juniors’ expectations are miscalibrated if they’re offended at their role/hierarchy level being accurately described.

          2. Junior Junior*

            I’ve worked in an industry where jr/sr titles are the norm and had a jr title for years, despite being well into my career. The only time I was insulted was when my manager referred to me as a junior junior to justify not giving me the salary increase I had requested.

            1. Great Frogs of Literature*

              Yeah, the only time I was offended about a junior/senior distinction was when my boss told me that he’d been given a slap on the wrist by the department head for inviting me to interview a candidate because “Frogs is not a senior member of the team” even though I’d been working there for seven years, was expected to do more complex work, and trained other members of the team. (Also it was the sort of workplace where it was normal for even quite junior people to be included in interviewing.) My boss had been working there for nine years.

              I was like, “So, is the cutoff for ‘senior’ eight years, or is it being a man? Because Boss was senior enough to be promoted to manage me when he’d only been here for four or five years.”

    3. Rex Libris*

      With this and the “junior” phrasing both, frankly, if this is the kind of thing people find it’s worth getting upset over, I want to live where they do, because apparently there aren’t any actual problems there.

        1. Friendo*

          The question is appropriate! The LW is not the junior staffer, but the best advice the junior staffer could get is to not be so thin skinned about this sort of thing.

  3. D*

    About 40% of OB/Gyns in the US are male, so I actually find it impressive OP hasn’t stumbled across one. I wonder if their office staffing also looks different, gender-wise.

    1. Mid*

      I think we need to see a breakdown between hospital based OB/GYNs and clinics/private practice, because I think the gender breakdown would likely be that more of the male OBs are in a hospital/surgical setting, while more of the female OBs are doing regular patient care in a clinical, BUT this is pure speculation based on personal experience and having friends in the medical field, as well as knowing men are (were?) over represented in surgery compared to other areas of medicine. (And, this is not saying this is how it should be either!)

      1. Christine*

        I’ve had three male OBs since adolescence, so over 50 years. One of them had a female NP on staff who did the pelvic exams.
        Iirc, all my mammograms have been done by women, but there was a man on staff at my most recent visit. I’ve had so many medical issues, I don’t care.

      2. Rock Prof*

        This is a good point. I’ve mainly had ob/gyn who are women in private practice, though really a lot of the people I’ve seen for regular pelvic exams are NPs and not doctors anyway. But the hospital ob/gyns I’ve seen were all men in the lead up to my c-section.

      3. Observer*

        I think we need to see a breakdown between hospital based OB/GYNs and clinics/private practice,

        There can’t be that much of a distinction because OB’s by the nature of their practice generally need hospital affiliation (At least in the US.) Either directly (most common) or through a birthing center.

        1. Ginger Cat Lady*

          The hospital I work for has a few hospitalist OBs. All men. And the OBs who have privileges there and do their own baby catching are about 75% women, 25% men.

      4. Junior Junior*

        I have spent the last 2+ years receiving more than my fair share of medical care in two different offices of a regional treatment center in a large US city.
        Only my surgeon (an OB/GYN oncologist) and his resident in training were male. Every other doctor, surgeon (I’ve had three), anesthesiologist, PA, NP, RN, phlebotomist, and even the front desk staff were female. I did have a spectacular male nurse in the hospital and one orderly that I recall, but that’s it.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          The OB/GYN practice I use has one man and a bunch of women doctors, and so far all of the nurses and front desk staff I’ve seen are women, although so far almost all of the nurses and medical front desk staff I’ve encountered anywhere in private-practice settings have been women. My mom has had a few male nurses and techs during hospital stays, though.

    2. Deuce of Gears*

      Interestingly, this probably varies by country – my father’s worked at a couple women’s hospitals in S Korea (head of surgical department) and the staggering majority of doctors were men, although the staggering majority of nurses/staff were women, probably due to gendered roles/career paths in that country.

      1. DJ Abbott*

        That’s how it used to be in the US. When I was a child (late 60s – 70s), A woman doctor was unusual, and a male nurse was unheard of.

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I worked for a male nurse as a nurse’s aide in the mid-1970’s (Dale was a great guy). True, this was the first time I ran into one.

      2. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        Similarly in Japan, where I lived for 9 years. I had an amazing male gynaecologist I found through word of mouth from Western female friends – he was popular because, unlike a lot of Japanese OBGYNs at the time, he wasn’t anti the Pill and made it very easy to get hold of.

    3. Emmy Noether*

      LW may not be in the US – I quickly googled for where I am, and it looks like only 10-20% male. Plus I suspect that, as Mid said, there’s a difference between private practice and hospital.

      I’ve personally had 6 female, 1 male in private practice, and I’ve always chosen for proximity/availability, so fairly random. In hospital it’s harder to count, because they’ve always been in and out, but there were definitely some men.

      The truly staggering asymmetry is for midwifery – I read that there are only 3 male midwives* in all of Germany.

      * yes, they’re called midwives even if male. The “wife” refers to the patient.

      1. Observer*

        The truly staggering asymmetry is for midwifery – I read that there are only 3 male midwives* in all of Germany

        I believe this. There are tons of male OB/Gyns. But midwives? I don’t think I’ve encountered a single one. I know of more than one person who decided to use a midwife primarily because they wanted a female practitioner, and this was the most straightforward way of accomplishing that.

        1. Breaking All The Barriers*

          I’ve personally known one male nurse mid-wife. Interestingly, he was an US Army nurse and the only mid-wife at our hospital.

        2. Media Monkey*

          i had a male midwife when i gave birth (UK – although i didn’t actually give birth on his watch – he was doing labour checks). in the UK midwives are the less “medicalised” way to give birth if they aren’t expecting any issues (and they they bring in the doctors if they need to). We have midwife-led birthing units in most hospitals.

        3. Kit*

          There are male doulas and midwives, although not as many because of the nature of the practice. FWIW, some pregnant people actually seek them out, in part because a male voice advocating for you can be really powerful in medical contexts.

    4. amoeba*

      At least in my part of Europe, the overwhelming majority of nurses/staff in doctors offices are also female in any case. I think between the doctors and dentists I’ve visited in the last years, there was exactly one staff that was male? Of course that’s just down to traditionally gendered career paths, but I’m not surprised that an OB gyn’s office isn’t the place I’d find the rare exceptions.

      (The doctors themselves tend to be pretty balanced gender-wise nowadays… and male OB gyns are probably at least more of a thing than male staff at their offices.)

      1. WS*

        Yes, my mother was a nurse and then a professor of nursing. She only once worked with a male nurse (1966-1989) and then there were never more than two men in any class (of about 300) until the early 00s, and even now it’s around 10% male. It is changing, but slowly.

      2. Anonys*

        This is exactly my experience in Europe (Germany) as well. My current OB/GYN is a a man but I have (as far as I recall) NEVER seen a single man as support staff in any private practice doctors office I’ve visited, whether GP, urologist, eye specialist, etc. I think historically, despite different duties in many ways, here these jobs have been perceived as being similar to office office admin/secretarial work – they are seen as “women’s jobs” and men are rarely choosing them as career paths.

        In private practice doctor’s offices where I am, there aren’t any nurses (only in hospitals) and I don’t think the support staff would do stuff like a pelvic exam – more like checking blood pressure/drawing blood and scheduling appointments. I think the equivalent in English might be roughly ‘medical assistant’? In Germany, you need to complete a specific 3-year vocational apprenticeship for this. Wikipedia tells me that in 2011, more than 98% of all medical assistants in Germany were women. Maybe it’s a bit higher now but even without any preferential hiring of women, it is statistically quite likely not to see male support staff in any given doctor’s office.

      3. Lady Danbury*

        Now that you mention it, I’ve had a mix of male and female dentists but the vast majority of other staff (assistants, hygienists, techs, even receptionists) have all been female.

        1. Kaitlyn*

          Yes! I was just thinking about the staff makeup in my doctor’s clinic – the entire administrative team, all the nurses, and about half the doctors are women, and the paramedical staff (social workers, etc) are also all female. Same for the dentist’s office. Same for the sleep clinic I went to.

        2. iglwif*

          Yes, same for me! In 45+ years of seeing dentists, I have never once seen a dude in a dentist’s office who was not a dentist (although for actual dentists, the gender split is about 50/50).

          1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

            My current dentist is female and she has female dental techs, but her receptionist is male (it’s her husband).

            1. iglwif*

              That’s cool!

              The dental practice I’ve been attending since the late 1990s currently has 3 dentists. Two are married (one male, one female), and the third is their youngest child (female).

              She is a great dentist, as far as I can tell, but I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as ANCIENT as I did when, at the end of a regular cleaning appointment, the nice new young dentist who reviewed my X-rays etc. introduced herself and I realized she was a FETUS when I first came to the practice.

        3. Dust Bunny*

          Weirdly, the one sorta-medical setting in which I’ve seen any male receptionists at all is at my vet’s. The assistants are more likely to be women but not as likely as at a human doctor’s office, and the vets are more evenly split, although my current vet’s office is all women veterinarians, too, and I think always has been (20-ish years).

      4. Elsajeni*

        Yes, I was thinking this also, and wondering if it just stands out to the OP more in the setting where the doctors are also all women — that is, we are sort of accustomed to, and unconscious bias primes us to expect, a doctor’s office where there are a handful of male doctors and a bunch of female nurses, receptionists, and other staff, so it’s the absence of male doctors that initially makes your brain ping on “hold on, is there something unusual going on in the gender balance here?” and start looking around wondering why there aren’t any men.

    5. Freya*

      Approximately 14% of the 410 urologists in Australia are female (according to the 2021 census). Of the 8 that are in the nation’s capital, 100% are male, which means if someone would prefer to see a woman about their post-childbirth urological issues, they have to drive over three hours. My own urologist is one of those 8 men, even though my own issues are not one of his specialties.

      1. Freya*

        Of OB/GYNs, Australia has 1900 and 65% of those are women (according to the 2021 census). On average, they work 53 hours a week, and 16% work less than 40 hours a week.

    6. Jay (no, the other one)*

      One of the job requirements for ob/gyn office staff is to proctor pelvic exams – there should always be a second person in the room during a pelvic. I was always taught that the proctor should be a woman regardless of the gender of the person doing the exam (I’m a doc who did primary care and did pelvic exams but I’m not gyn; I’m also a cis woman). Seems to me that’s a good reason to specifically hire women.

      That said, in 20 years in primary care I worked with precisely two men as part of the non-MD office staff. We had RNs, MAs, and clerical staff and the overwhelming majority of them were women.

      1. Cranky-saurus Rex*

        It’s interesting that you/your practice see the second person in the room as a requirement. I (cis woman, 40s) have always had my pelvic exams done by my primary care provider (no children, I only once saw an ob/gyn–when I got my tubes tied). None of my primary providers (all women, mostly MDs and one PA) have ever required a second person in the room for my pelvic exams, though there’s always signage letting me know I can request a chaperone be present. This is in Wisconsin, though multiple parts of the state.

        1. Texan In Exile*

          Interesting! I’m in Milwaukee and when a male physician did my pelvic, he didn’t even ask if I wanted a chaperone – he just summoned one, which is nice because then I didn’t have to go through the calculation of “If I say I want one, will he think that I think he’s a molester?”

          But recently, with a female physician and also with a female physical therapist, they each asked if I wanted a chaperone.

        2. BlueCactus*

          It depends on the practice, though it is becoming much more common to simply require one be present as part of practice policy unless the patient declines. My institution moved last year from a strong recommendation to a requirement to use a chaperone for any sensitive exam (rectal, pelvic, breast, urologic), though the gender of the chaperone doesn’t matter per our policy. In my experience we ask if the patient has a preference for the gender of the chaperone and do our best to accommodate that (I’ve never seen us not be able to.

      2. KitKat*

        I wonder if men in nursing and other non-MD medical roles are more likely to be in hospital settings for some reason? Anecdotally I’ve seen two male nurses in ER triage in the past year (separate dates/locations) but can’t recall when I last saw a male nurse, technician, etc. in a medical office. Extremely small sample size, obviously!

        1. Space Needlepoint*

          That’s where I’ve mostly seen them. There was one at my allergist’s office who gave me my shots, then he left to go to med school. He was fabulous, efficient and kind, never condescending. I barely felt the needles.

          I love that he chose to spend some time in nursing before going to med school.

        2. Drago Cucina*

          My husband went to nursing school in the 70s and then while in the Army was trained as a CRNA. Over the years it was a nursing field with mostly men. It began to change near the end of his career. There was also a number of programs graduating CRNAs that were predominately women.

          Anecdotally, based on the head hunter calls, hospitals, and doctors trying to coax him out of retirement, it seems to have shifted again.

          1. Drago Cucina*

            Checked the data. According to the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, 56.9% of CRNAs are women, and 43.1% men.

        3. JustaTech*

          I think this would be an interesting area to look at gender-based employment data.
          My family goes to a very large medical practice in a major city where they have pretty much everything but in-patient hospital treatment.
          The vast majority of the employees I encounter there are women – check-in staff, nurses, doctors. But then I’m going to be biased because I’ve been seeing a GP, an OB/GYN and a pediatrician, and OB/GYN and pediatrics do tend to skew towards women providers. (Though when I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s my pediatrician was a guy.)
          The phlebotomy lab and MRI lab seem more evenly split on genders, as was the physical therapy office.

          Gender imbalances are something that can be really noticeable in the sciences too – physics and engineering tend to skew towards men, where chemistry and especially biology tend to skew towards women. (Computer science was quite balanced back in the early days, but then skewed very strongly towards men and is only now starting to balance back out.)
          Since biology feeds into medicine, that can bias gender ratios all the way back at school.

      3. Raven Mistress*

        Having a “chaperone” in the room during a pelvic exam does NOT guarantee that the gyno will be ethical and professional in performing the exam. New York Magazine recently had a cover article about a major New York City hospital embroiled in a legal/medical scandal because a male gyno was molesting his patients while the nurse who was in the room stood with her back to the patient all during the exam. She could thus truthfully say that she’d never seen the male gyno abuse any patient! Of course she hadn’t – because she hadn’t seen the exam at all.

        A note about proctors/chaperones in the exam room; they are paid by the medical practice in which the gyno is well above them in rank and power. Speaking up or physically intervening to prevent a patient being molested or even raped could result in instant unemployment, a bad reference, and even being blacklisted in their field. Under those circumstances, what is the motivation to risk their present and future livelihood?

        2. Media Monkey*

          and larry nassar managed to abuse many children with their parents in the room as chaperones.

    7. Anonforthis*

      This. At my gyno/ OB group there are at least three male doctors. When I had my baby I had to see everyone at the practice toward the end in case one of them was on call and they all wanted the patients to know each doctor which I thought was great. My practice also has had male receptionists and phone answer service people although they switch (it’s a practice with more than one speciality so the people move around within the building to different practices).

      You should find the best doctor for you. My cousin saw a male gyno for years and I told her to try a female. The female was better for her as that doctor understood what she was going through and did not dismiss her.

      At my last mammogram appointment I saw two men employees and although the mammogram techs were female (if they were male I would have asked for a female I don’t want a male jamming in my breast) my radiologist who came to speak to me was male. I guess they have both but most times you don’t see them and you get whoever is reading your scans that day.

      I also lived in Europe in a major city and specifically wanted to find a female gyno and it took me a long time to find one and then to find one who was accepting patients.

      My SIL lives in a suburb in the Midwest and she has had a male and female gyno at her practice (we talk about it). As a young women in college I went and saw a male gyno and he did a pelvic exam without a female nurse present and it did
      Not feel right/ it didn’t feel like other pelvic exams I have had but I was too young to realize I should not have been in there alone.

      So they are there you need to find them if you want one but more women I have spoken with appreciate having a female gyno option as they understand what it means to go through a menstrual cycle, menopause, have a child, etc.

      1. Deborah Vance, Vance Refrigeration*

        My case was the opposite: my first gyno was a woman and I hated every second of that appointment. My second gyno was (is) a man and I trust him completely. That has nothing to do with gender, of course — it just happened that the woman in this case was a bad professional, and the man was a very good one. But I know many women who can’t, for very good and obvious reasons, stand the idea of having a male gynecologist, so I figure many clinics hire female staff because of exactly that.

      2. Dust Bunny*

        I’ve always had women. The first one was useless but the other two were great. Based on that admittedly not at all scientific sample size the difference seemed to be age–the first one was older and (possibly coincidentally) less versed in some historically under-addressed conditions. The second and third were younger than I am and very enthusiastic about treating All The Problems (in a good way).

    8. BW*

      I’d love to find a OB/Gyn that had an all women staff. All the ones I’ve found in my large city are mostly men.

    9. Dinwar*

      How is the distribution geographically? In California my wife’s OB/Gyn was a man, but in the South the practice is entirely women. My guess is that it’s a cultural thing–a man in the South that wanted to be an OB/Gyn would face ridicule from his colleagues (“real men” don’t do that, that sort of thing) and distrust from the general public. California is more open to men doing this sort of thing. That said, and this is entirely anecdotal with a sample size of one, but: The dude was a complete jerk who didn’t listen to anything my wife said. We ended up changing to a different doctor during her pregnancy because of it.

      Oddly, in CA the nurses were all women and in AL there were male nurses (most were women). I think it’s a matter of CA having more resources–the second time my wife gave birth (in AL) it was rather quick, and I’m pretty sure the nurse in the room literally grabbed a passing nurse and started giving the poor guy orders. I know she pulled the doctor away from what she was doing (fortunately nothing life-or-death). The hospital in CA had more staff and didn’t need to conscript people from the hallway.

      1. Armchair Analyst*

        This might be a generational thing – up until the late 80s or so most ob-gynes and pediatricians in the US were men and now the pendulum has swung the other way, leading you to think it is a feminine practice area that would lead to mocking. But see a movie like Animal House – ob-gyne used to have very different connotations

        1. MAC*

          I agree with the generational aspect. I’m in my 50s and my mom and her friends are in their 70s and 80s. They all think it’s extremely weird that my friends and I prefer a female GYN, and I think it’s weird that they prefer a male!

      2. jasmine*

        Is it that men in the south would face ridicule, or is it that southern women are a lot less likely to be comfortable with a male gyno? I think the latter is a lot more understandable and maybe makes more sense considering the presence of male nurses you saw

        1. Dinwar*

          Male nurses used to be ruthlessly mocked, and faced a lot of pushback in their careers. It’s changed, but you don’t see a lot of older male nurses in any fields in the South.

          I can’t speak too much about the medical field–I experience it as a patient, not a practitioner–but I can speak to the culture Given the reactions when I buy my wife feminine hygiene products, I imagine there’s going to be significant pushback. Men are expected to treat “women problems” as icky and to be avoided. Plus, as Armchair Analyst said, OB-Gyn used to have a very different connotation. Maybe once you were in the medical field you could get away with it, but someone who grew up wanting to be an OB/Gyn would be considered creepy. I’ve some experience with this. My 10-year-old son used to say he wanted to be a pediatrician when he grows up (now it’s developing prosthetics), and people had fairly negative reactions to this. Never mind the fact that every pediatrician we had was a man; babies were Women’s Work, and a man shouldn’t opt for that as his first choice of career.

          Generally it’s more subtle. Men are expected to go into Manly Professions, and medical care focused on women isn’t included in that (remarkably short and ill-thought-out) list. And they make that clear in a variety of ways, subtle and overt. And to be clear, this is changing. But it’s got a ways to go.

          I hope I’m being clear here: I’m describing, but NOT endorsing, this view. For my part, I’m a scientist, and am acutely aware of the lack of knowledge of women in medicine. Most of our routine medical treatments were designed for men, for example, and this has significant detrimental effects to women as patients. This is an area where we desperately need more data!

          You’re not wrong that Southern women would be a lot less comfortable with a male OB/Gyn. In fact, I’ve heard calls to ban men from that profession. But two things can be true; I think it’s a case of both of these factors playing into it.

          1. Texan In Exile*

            “Most of our routine medical treatments were designed for men, for example, and this has significant detrimental effects to women as patients. This is an area where we desperately need more data!”

            I hear echoes of Caroline Criado Perez and “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men!”

          2. Hroethvitnir*

            This is a great, thoughtful post, but specifically: people responding to a boy (not even a man!) wanting to help children negatively fills me with rage. So, so unhealthy – and the opposite of protecting kids.

            Prosthetics are also cool!

        3. Jessica*

          I mean, in states where increasingly broad swathes of reproductive healthcare are becoming criminalized, people who need that healthcare might feel that a doctor with the same skin in the game is more likely to help them access it.

    10. Spero*

      I’ve noticed the majority of male ob/gyns I have encountered are Maternal/Fetal Medicine specialists (high risk not routine care), or surgical-focused. I’ve only encountered one in routine care practice.

      The other thing I will say, I’ve interviewed for a heavily female role (volunteers sitting with rape survivors at the hospital) and we did have male volunteers, but we did a lot of functional testing and training regarding how they would interact in different types of situations. The majority of the men who applied we found were more interested in tracking down the perpetrator, or doing more longterm counseling, or ‘saving’ the survivors in some way vs just sitting with them in empathy. We found one of the best predictors was to ask if they were competitive – the competitive men were not great for that role and we usually diverted them to things like public speaking about assault. The men who did well in the role were WONDERFUL, but I think most of the men who initially were interested realized it was not well suited to their style of work.

      1. KitKat*

        I have a friend who went into Maternal/Fetal Medicine. He said he was interested in OB/GYN in med school, but heard it is more difficult to establish a practice as a male OB now. (Anecdotally, at the practice I go to the male providers always have WAY more availability.) He chose MFM because they are in higher demand and the issues tend to be more urgent, so gender preference is less of a factor in your career.

    12. Armchair Analyst*

      In Washington DC I went to a smaller ob-gyn practice where I had to go to another location or clinic or imaging place for my first trimester ultrasound. This is an invasive ultrasound- a wand is inserted into the woman / pregant person. The male ultrasound technician asked me and my husband if we would like my husband to insert it into me. That seemed so so odd- we both said no right away, but the technician said some couples do!

        1. Bella Ridley*

          I’ve had a boatload of transvaginal ultrasounds. Many technicians will ask if you’d like to insert it yourself, or if you’re there with a partner, if they’d like to do so, and then the technician will adjust accordingly. The thinking I’ve had explained to me is that some women would rather have someone they are already intimately comfortable with assisting with something like this, since they’re already there, rather than a stranger if possible. I don’t think it’s so wildly unusual.

          1. Kaiko*

            I have been asked if I’d like to insert it myself, but my partner was never asked if he wanted to do it!

          2. Former Imaging Technologist*

            *technologist

            I’m not nitpicking language, the word technician has a different connotation than the correct word.

    13. urguncle*

      I think many hospitals and hospital systems are also moving to a more heavily nurse-midwife care policy. In my experiences, midwives are the first line, dealing with uncomplicated pregnancies, routine screenings and birth control options and the OB-GYNs are doing surgeries, more complicated pregnancy care and screening follow-ups.

    14. iglwif*

      I’ve only ever seen one OB/GYN, because I’ve only been pregnant once, and he was male. Most of the reproductive endocrinologists I saw while trying to get pregnant were also male, though not all. The gynecologic oncologist I saw back in the day, to treat the cancer that caused me to need assisted reproduction, was a dude, too.*

      I’ve spent a LOT of time in hospitals, clinics, and medical practices over the years. In every single one — including those I mentioned above — the overwhelming majority of nurses, phlebotomists, imaging techs (ultrasound, mammography, etc.), medical receptionists, nurse practitioners, and LPNs/RPNs have been women. I don’t think this is discriminatory hiring so much as a pipeline issue.

      *These are all specialists you need a referral from your family doctor to see, so you don’t get a lot of choice. My family doctor–whom I didchoose–is a woman who works in an all-female medical practice. But honestly I don’t care as much that she’s a woman as that she doesn’t fat-shame me, listens to my health concerns with an open mind, and WEARS A MASK AT WORK.

    15. Laura*

      I’ve had multiple male OBs over the years. My experience after 3 high-risk pregnancies is that there was a higher proportion of men in perinatology (aka maternal-fetal medicine, a subspecialty of OB care) vs just standard OB/gyn practices though both were still majority female doctors/NPs/Nurse midwives.
      I’ve had lots of ultrasounds (both pregnancy and non-pregnancy related) and I don’t think I ever had a male sonographer.

    16. just some random dude*

      I am a man. At both of the urology practices I’ve been to in a big city in Texas, the urologists have been men and all of the other jobs have been done by women.

    17. Paint N Drip*

      Interesting. My women’s health office is staffed with several men, although mostly women, and my gyno is non-binary – though I suspect the NB doc is rarer, I didn’t think that distribution was strange or rare. I wonder if OP lives in a place where modesty or the divide of gender roles is particularly prevalent.

    18. Annony*

      I’m guessing that part of this is that we lump OB and GYN together. I have almost never seen a male doctor for a regular gyn visit (and not because I requested female only) but I did seen male OBs when pregnant and in the hospital when I was giving birth. I have not data to back this up but I wonder if men tend to be more interested in the childbirth aspect than general women’s heath. Or if the selection bias is less strong since a woman is far less likely to request a different doctor when she is in a time sensitive situation like active labor than if she is just having an annual exam.

      1. iglwif*

        I’m curious, what exactly is “a regular gyn visit”? What do people see an OBGYN for that isn’t (a) being pregnant and getting prenatal care, (b) trying to get pregnant, (c) trying to NOT be pregnant, or (d) dealing with a pregnancy complication, miscarriage, or other health problem above your family doctor’s pay grade?

        1. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

          Pap smears and the like? Also, I’d put trying not to be pregnant under GYN rather than OB. And then there’s checking out pelvic pain unrelated to anyone’s desire to be pregnant – endometriosis and the like. Quite a lot, really.

        2. basically functional*

          There are many GYNs who are not also OBs. Women have many health issues unrelated to pregnancy.

        3. Kelsi*

          Uh…a yearly checkup, pap smear, etc.? Mammograms, once you reach the age where you should be getting those regularly?

    19. RussianInTexas*

      I am in a very large metro in Texas, that contains the world’s largest medical center.
      Out of my last 4 OBGYN’s, one was male, but even then his entire office been staffed by women. My current gyn office is fully female. My dentist, who is male, has all female staff.
      My PCP office is all female.
      The gastroenterologist I went to recently lists some male staff, and there was one male tech present at my colonoscopy, but otherwise it’s probably 95% female.
      The cardiologist clinic I went to couple of years ago had probably 80% female stuff, including all doctors.
      The orthopedic surgeon I went to recently is male, there are couple of other male doctors in the practice, but all staff I encountered were women.
      I did not chose by any gender criteria, all doctors were recommended by friends or referred.
      I had some ER/hospital experiences in the last few years, and that is where I noticed a lot more of male support staff.
      P.s. – to another discussion in this thread. For probably last 15 years or so there is always been a nurse at my every single pelvic exam.

    20. Turquoisecow*

      My OB-GYN’s office has I think two men and five women, and when I was pregnant they rotated who you saw at each appointment because they didn’t know who would be in the hospital when you gave birth. If you got a pelvic exam from a male doctor they always made sure there was a female nurse in the room with you, but honestly there was usually one there with women doctors as well, in case they needed assistance.

      I don’t think any of the rest of the staff were male, though, and I don’t recall seeing any male nurses in the maternity ward when I gave birth. I have had male nurses and phlebotomists at other times I was at that hospital, though.

    21. Hats Are Great*

      My ob/gyn practice was half men/half women at the Dr. level (many more women as nurses and nurse-midwives). The men were great, and I chatted with them about gender imbalance in the profession, and they both said it’s getting harder for men build up a stable practice because so many women are reluctant to see men for female health issues — something they both were totally sympathetic to (as excellent ob/gyns who know many reasons why women might prefer to see women for pelvic exams), but they regretted that male medical students who were passionate about reproductive health were discouraged from pursuing it by the state of the market.

      I do think that’s a shame; men who are passionate about reproductive care should be encouraged (we need more fighting on the side of the good!). And there’s no reason they can’t be great doctors.

      I always ask my doctors how they chose their specialties (I’m a nosy person). One of the two men said he’d always loved babies, and when he delivered his first in med school and saw how joyful everyone was, he was sure he wanted to deliver babies for the rest of his life. The other had intended to be a surgeon (very type A, very competitive guy, definitely a surgeon vibe), but during rotation he saw a surgery on a uterus and thought to himself, “That’s the coolest organ I’ve ever seen! I want to work on JUST THAT ONE for the rest of my career.” (He was great as an all-around ob/gyn and my preferred doc, but he did specialize in the trickier surgeries in the ob/gyn world and often received referrals from other practices.)

      1. Hats Are Great*

        Also, PS, asking your doctors why they chose their specialties is great small talk and always gets you interesting answers. I’ve had dermatologists be very upfront that it’s a 9-to-5 that pays well and doesn’t have emergencies. I’ve had ER doctors tell me they were unrepentant adrenaline junkies and just couldn’t stop even when it was ruining their family relationships.

    22. Zephy*

      In terms of office staffing, in every doctor’s office I’ve ever been in (private practice as opposed to a hospital, specifically), pretty much everyone who wasn’t a/the doctor presented as a woman, even at practices where the doctor(s) are/were mostly or entirely women – nurses, techs, orderlies, admin and clerical staff. The exception to this is veterinary medicine, which is still heavily skewed female (even among the actual doctors), but there are a lot more male techs and admins in the world of vet med. Not a ton, still, but more than I’ve ever seen proportionally in human medicine. Hospitals are a different beast, the proportion of men to women is probably greater in any given hospital building vs any given freestanding private practice, at any level. Hospitals also tend to pay better than private practice/standalone clinics. There is probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation there (do hospitals pay better because they employ more men? or do more men work at hospitals because they pay better? truly it is a mystery).

    23. Immaterial*

      I’ve noticed that most of the medical office staff I’ve encountered are women regardless of the type of practice.

  4. Daria grace*

    #1 as Alison said, talking in terms of junior/senior is very normal in work contexts where there are important distinctions between the roles of people with different levels of experience. I wonder if this response an expression of a broader resentment about where they’re at in their careers and the opportunities available to them it’s worth keeping watch for other manifestations of.

    1. Worldwalker*

      It’s not only normal, it’s frequently part of actual titles. Are these people going to lose it because their job is “Junior Llama Technician”?

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        I’m guessing they work in a company or field where the term is not used, though still if they have lower job titles than the LW, they are junior to her, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. Unless they thought it referred to interns or something.

        1. Also-ADHD*

          We took Junior out of job titles (replacing it with other words that vary by function, not removing all Junior vs Senior roles) at my last workplace because it was limiting our ability to hire the best staff into those roles, even though pay was above average in most cases. Maybe the word will have broader fade out effects if young workers similarly are bothered by it? It’s interesting. Even when I was pivoting careers, I know I also avoided any title with the word junior in it (though the replacement titles were also commonly ones I’d avoid personally).

          1. Snow Globe*

            We took out the “junior” but left “senior”. We have Llama Groomers and Senior Llama Groomers.

            1. sparkle emoji*

              This is how my workplace does it. I’m not sure anyone would be bothered to be called the Junior Llama Groomer, but we do deal with clients so I assume that’s part of why they don’t give anyone a “Junior” title.

              1. Chas*

                I work in a field where my titles have always been Research Assistant or Research Associate (Assistant jobs were pre-doctorate, Associate post-doctorate), so I’ve never heard anyone call anyone else a “junior”. But I have been informally referred to as “the senior postdoc” due to being there the longest.

                In our case we usually just refer to newer staff as “our new [whatever]” because we work in a field where people generally have shorter-term contracts (1 or 2 year stints is very common) and most people take various different jobs over the years, so someone whose new to your workplace and techniques could very well have a lot of experience in general.

          2. LL*

            We don’t use “junior” in our titles at my organization and I like it that way. I’m an older millennial, so I guess early-middle-aged and also mid-career, although still in an individual contributor role, and I would bristle at being called junior.

          3. MigraineMonth*

            I worked at a company where any reference to level/hierarchy was discouraged. (We didn’t have “junior” or “senior” roles, or for that matter *any* path to promotion.) I suspect it was to hide the fact that there was so much turnover that no one had any experience:

            “You’re going to be helped by Jill and Jane, who know what’s going on here. They definitely didn’t start two weeks ago!”

      2. Grey Coder*

        “Junior” is pretty common in job titles in my industry, though lately I’ve also seen “Graduate” as the roles are aimed at people just out of university. (Though now that I think about it, that raises more problems, as good employers don’t strictly require degrees and there are many successful people without degrees.)

        People tend to work at “Junior/Graduate Llama Technician” level for 2-3 years, then the promotion to “Llama Technician” is almost automatic unless they are struggling.

      3. Smithy*

        I’m in an industry where junior is not in titles – and usually the bristling described I’ve seen is due to either larger issues with an individual or a situation.

        In my nonprofit corner, executive assistants or full time administrative support is less common. So it’s not uncommon for staff coming from other fields to expect junior staff to do more of those tasks for them despite it not really being their job. So when someone already abusing their seniority in that way refers to colleagues as junior staff it’s usually seen as part of a larger pattern of disrespect. I’ve also seen newer colleagues bristle against their perceived newness to a field based on a skewed personal view of their experience. And someone who is less familiar with larger realities a junior colleague has, might step into category one or two without either context.

      4. LW 1*

        We have “senior llama groomers” in our job titles, but no “junior llama groomers” – just “llama groomers”.

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      Academia (at least where I work) seems to now be moving away from junior/senior towards early career/mid-career as the terminology.

      1. Neon highlighter*

        We have early/mid career in terms of academic age. We also have “senior” in titles for some ranks, and “associate” meaning junior for others (although associate can outrank senior if it’s followed by professor not lecturer). You can be early career and a professor. You can be out of mid career and an associate lecturer (lowest rank).

        Personally I’d avoid referring to someone as junior unless it’s really relevant. If LW is someone to harp on rank I can understand why her colleagues would be annoyed at her stressing it. I suspect that it wasn’t as essential to stress as she feels. She comes across to me as condescending.

        1. LW 1*

          The environment we were entering was a veterinary operating room. It’s common for people who have never been there before to feel ill and require medical attention, to accidentally wander the wrong way and contaminate something, to accidentally get in the way of staff, to propose actions they don’t know are illegal, or to experience emotional distress. I guess in retrospect what I really wanted the vendor to understand is that everyone in the room, including me, needed to be looking out for the welfare and behavior of these two learners to make sure we all stayed safe and compliant.

          I get that maybe my phrasing could have been better, which is why I wrote in!

          1. Angstrom*

            Wanting to give the client a heads-up is perfectly reasonable. Next time maybe something like “first time seeing surgery” or “not yet familiar with operating room protocols” would serve the same function without ruffling feathers.

          2. Cmdrshprd*

            I don’t think using junior was wrong, but idk that junior necessarily conveyed everything your wrote above. You know the vendor and situation better than I do so maybe it did, saying junior co-workers would like to attend I would get they are less experienced and want to have a learning opportunity, but I would not think of the need to “be looking out for the welfare and behavior of these two learners to make sure we all stayed safe and compliant.”

          3. OMG! Bees!*

            I agree with Cmdrshprd. Having the title junior doesn’t automatically convey things like first time seeing an operating room, or even inexperience, just that they don’t have as much experience as you. It does hint that the vendor should contact you first for questions, but in many other cases, lower totem people are made the point of contact to free up time for the senior people.

            I wonder if they were upset because junior isn’t actually their titles? Pure speculation, but there have also been posts/questions of people not being referred to by their actual title and that would be off-putting to even insulting.

            I think maybe next time saying the things you want to convey directly rather than implied in job titles might be better

        2. the frogs are okay*

          I have never known a condescending colleague to go to the lengths that this letter write has in both apologizing and seeking guidance on if/how they could do better. Truly, I wish all my condescending colleagues were this thoughtful.

      3. Alan*

        Yes. I think “junior” would be seen as infantilizing among early-career people I’ve worked with. I would absolutely say “early-career” rather than “junior”. I’d also use “new hire” or “fresh-out” if applicable, but it doesn’t sound like that applies in the LW’s context. This is for software people, since industry might be relevant.

        1. Tally miss*

          I think Junior Llama Handler is a fine jpb yitle, but referring to people as “juniors” is emphasizing the hierarchy.

          I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the assumption (and probably origin) of calling people juniors comes from boys named after their father so could be replaced.

          Junior titles fine, people aren’t fine

          And I’m near retirement age so this isn’t a Gen Z are snowflakes thing.

          1. Alan*

            My employer doesn’t use the word. It’s just “llama handler”, “senior llama handler”, and “principal llama handler” :-).

    3. rudster*

      I wonder what the offended employees would think if they are ever in the UK, need medical treatment, and find out that they are being seen by a “Junior Doctor”.

      1. Sil*

        Hah, yes – though I have often felt this is a highly illogical nomenclature.

        In the UK, junior doctors are a huge proportion of the medical workforce – but they range from the newly qualified intern who may only have done their 6 years at medical school, to the person who has been working as a doctor for 15+ years, has completed postgraduate specialty qualifications (equivalent to board exams) and works mostly independently (doing their own outpatient clinics/operating lists/ward rounds etc).

        Calling the second person a ‘junior doctor’ is potentially confusing. But in the UK it really just means that they don’t have a permanent attending (‘consultant’) job – and the system there is designed to keep people in that ‘junior doctor’ group for much longer, to optimise NHS hospital staffing.

        Interestingly, in other professions in the UK similar usages can apply – barristers (courtroom lawyers) are called ‘junior barristers’ until they become a Kings Counsel (KCs are a relatively small subgroup of senior barristers, it’s not a default progression for all).

        So your 60 year old, enormously experienced courtroom lawyer may well be a junior barrister… For clarity, once you’ve been a junior barrister for over 10 years you get called a senior junior barrister!

        However I completely agree with the LW that in most cases in corporate America (as in academia), junior/senior are accurately used to delineate degrees of experience in a field and are perfectly appropriate terms to use in the workplace.

        1. rudster*

          Out of curiosity, did all the existing QCs automatically become KCs with Charles’ ascension to the throne?

          1. Caramel & Cheddar*

            We have Queen’s Council / King’s Council designations in Canada as well and they did indeed change (at least in Ontario).

          2. UKDancer*

            Yes, that’s correct. All the QCs automatically became KCs upon the Queen’s death and will remain so until a future queen takes the throne.

        2. bamcheeks*

          SAS doctors are also senior doctors, and you REALLY don’t want to imply that they are junior doctors!

      2. Caramel & Cheddar*

        I don’t live in the UK but every time I see the term “Junior Doctor” I die a bit inside. It sounds like take-your-kid-to-work day. I appreciate that it has a specific meaning over there, but it also sounds really infantilizing and if it were my job, I’d hope that my professional association would find a way to modernize it.

        1. Broadway Duchess*

          You probably wouldn’t feel that way if you lived in the UK and understood the context. You’re coming at it fron the outside and applying your feelings about the word junior when to a UK resident, it’s not likely to bring up feeling infantilizing.

        2. Meep*

          Isn’t it the same as saying “resident”? Meaning they passed med school and the internship, but are still in training for their specialty?

          1. Caramel & Cheddar*

            It doesn’t sound like it based on Sil’s comment above, where they mention that someone could be a practising doctor for 15 years and still be considered a Junior Doctor. My understanding is that you only do your residency for X number of years, where X depends on the specialty and location, before your title changes to something else (attending, consultant, fellow, etc.).

            1. bamcheeks*

              I don’t know exactly how US intern/residency works, but junior doctor means you’re still in training. That includes 2x years of Foundation training, and 7 years of Specialist training or 2-3 years of Core training and 5-4 years of Higher Level Specialist training. But that will be longer if you take time out between Foundation training and Specialist training, or between Core training and Higher Level Specialist Training, or do your training part time. So it will usually be 9-10 years, but could be 12-15. If you go into general practice, it’s minimum Foundation + 3 years, but some doctors will do Core or Specialist training and then go into GP.

    4. ABW*

      It was especially appropriate to say “junior colleague” in this sense because of the reasoning for their inclusion. The colleagues were going along on the meeting because it was something they had not done before, something they wanted to gain experience and learn about. It would be different, perhaps, if the colleagues wanted to go along to offer their input, to make connections, etc., as equals and peers. But being offended that someone senior to you calls you “my junior colleague” is not reasonable.

      1. Antilles*

        Agreed. The fact the visit apparently requires “physical monitoring” means this was providing relevant information to the vendor – e.g., that they might not have an instinctive understanding of industry-specific protocols.

      2. sparkle emoji*

        Yeah, the “junior colleague” phrasing feels particularly appropriate given this was a learning opportunity for them, and I think this reaction seems odd. I doubt that this attitude is generalizable to others, unless LW’s field has some very different norms around Jr and Sr titles than I’m familiar with?
        As far as actionable advice goes though, LW you mentioned in the comments that someone who’s inexperienced in a vet operating room needs special precautions taken. It probably makes more sense to list out what the Jr people will need if they’re allowed to come, as then everyone’s on the same page and you avoid this sensitive spot.

      3. I'm still eating*

        In my career path, I’ve been in the general “llama industry” for almost 25 years, with a variety of experiences. I could see someone calling me junior if I were new to the llama groomer role after being a llama trainer, llama vet, and camel groomer. It would feel demeaning even though I am new to the role, given my other related experiences.

        As others noted, being explicit on the reason for calling out newness ensures the audience understands the need for safety and monitoring. That would be a better approach.

    5. Richard Hershberger*

      There is an established linguistic pattern where a neutral term for a disadvantaged group is used as a term of disparagement. Recall that “idiot” began life as a technical term. These terms therefore fall out of polite use, replaced by some new term. Then the cycle begins anew. This pattern sometimes jumps the “term of disparagement” phase. There were stories about people evacuated from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrine who were offended by being called “refugees.” Was there as history of flinging “refugee” as an insult? Not that I am familiar with. But being a refugee is an undesirable status, so the disparaging connotation seems to have been assumed. I take the objection to “junior” to be a similar case. They hope to be senior employees some day, and wish they were now, so they take “junior” as an insult.

      1. Wolfie*

        You’ve perfectly explained what I was thinking but couldn’t quite articulate. Suspect this is what has happened with these colleagues.

      2. Worldwalker*

        It’s called the euphemism treadmill. Modern communication makes it run faster than ever, but it’s been around for a long time. Think about the white porcelain fixture in your bathroom: what’s its real name?

        1. Richard Hershberger*

          The term is not universally beloved, though I don’t know if it is for any reason than it’s being coined by Steven Pinker, who is not universally beloved.

    6. Stu*

      US Senators are referred to as junior and senior, depending on whether they were elected before or after the other senator from their state.

      1. sparkle emoji*

        And in some states with particularly long lasting senators, you’ll have senators who have decades long careers who will retire still as the Jr senator from their state.

    7. Ann O'Nemity*

      I think this is a term we’re going to have to phase out. In my recent experience, early career employees emphatically do not want to be called junior anything. They find it infantilizing and liken it to being banished to the kids’ table. Although the term can be useful to quickly convey information, such as in the LW’s example, it may not be worth the demoralization.

      1. Massive Dynamic*

        Throwback to the episode of The Office where Dwight is in charge somehow and changes everyone’s job title to Junior Employee.

      2. I Have RBF*

        That’s being overly sensitive.

        I was quite pleased when I got my first job in my new field, with “junior” title, at age 38, because it meant I’d succeeded in switching careers. Plus, I actually was junior, in that I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know.

        I would keep an eye on those two for attitude, because they are being unnecessarily sensitive to slights that are not there.

        1. Ann O'Nemity*

          Overly sensitive? Maybe. But it’s not just one or two people. I’ve encountered many early career workers who dislike the term. If you do an internet search, you’ll see it’s not an uncommon complaint. So I say, if it bothers enough people it’s worth changing. This is not a hill I want to die on.

          1. Friendo*

            Sorry, but sometimes the answer is that early career workers need to conform to their environment, not the other way around. What’s the alternative, referring to them publicly as “less experienced”, “new staff”, ect?

          2. Michelle*

            I choose not to use junior for basically these reasons.

            And I’ve also been told “early career” is problematic as well. It doesn’t accurately reflect folks who’ve changed careers, folks who’ve stayed near entry level their entire career, etc.

            So now I just avoid describing someone’s experience at all unless it is with specific facts. Which makes some conversations harder and longer, but its easier than arguing with folks who find specific terms upsettting.

    8. Deborah Vance, Vance Refrigeration*

      This letter is so bananas to me because, in my industry, is very normal to use junior and senior as job titles and as way to refer to, well, seniority on that subject/ job scope. So a person could be a junior within their job title, but still hierarchically above someone senior. (Say, a junior supervisor being hierarchically superior to a senior analyst)

    9. Michelle*

      I’ve met a lot of folks who object to “junior”. Easily more than a dozen in the last 2-3 years. There’s enough of them that as a manager I’ve tried to cut it from my vocabulary. I used “early career” or “early career professional” but was told that didn’t work for folks who’d been in junior roles for 20 years or who had career changed into our field.

      So now I stick to descriptive facts. “Colleagues who wish to learn more about X”, “someone who is being trained on Y”, “someone who’s curious about how Z works.” It makes their role and my role clear, is hard to argue with as long as my statements reflect a reality the folks in question would agree with.

      Does it feel dumb my industry has gotten rid of junior in almost all titles but retained senior? Yes. Is it worth arguing with folks about it? Also no.

  5. couture zebra*

    LW5:

    Photos on resumes open up more avenues to discrimination. It’s also why the recent trend where some applications are requiring short videos are also incredibly problematic.

    Resumes as they stand in the US have enough discrimination happening as they are – studies have shown that identical resumes where the only difference is a male sounding name or a female sounding name will lead to the male candidate getting an interview more than twice as often as the female candidate.

    1. Persephone*

      I’m in the design field, and the number of resumes/CVs I’ve seen with photos makes me want to scream. The only time I can think of where it’s appropriate for potential employers to need to know what you look like are casting jobs. Also birthdates, which can open you up to age discrimination.

      They’re also so over designed. A lot of companies use programs to process applications, so if the resume is over designed, it can’t read it—which means it’ll probably be tossed for one it can.

      1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

        Employers keep saying they want a simple resume that lists name, education, experience and other relevant information. No fancy fonts or gimmicks. Yet, resume services and templates keep pushing gimmicks.

        1. Antilles*

          That’s because resume services and templates need to push something. If you pay money for a resume review and their only change to your existing normal resume is adjusting a couple minor wording tweaks, you feel like your money was wasted. They need to make major changes to justify their own existence and make customers feel like they really got value. Especially since the entire process from the candidate side feels so random that it makes people *want* to believe there’s some way to stand out from the crowd, some shortcut to speed up the process, or some trick that we’re missing.
          I also suspect there’s selection bias in play. Let’s say you’ve been sending out resumes for a month with no bites, then you follow some advice to stand out by using blood red Comic Sans font. If you get an interview in the next batch of resumes, you’ll credit the gimmick for catching the interviewer’s attention. Maybe they didn’t get many applicants so they’d have interviewed you anyways, but you have no way of knowing that, so you credit the gimmick. And you also don’t know that you’re actively turning off every other hiring managers who might have considered you but instead immediately tossed your resume in the dumpster.

        2. McGovern's the One*

          Given the prevalence of photos in resumes in other parts of the world, i don’t know that it’s really a “gimmick” to suggest including one. With LinkedIn it’s easy enough to find a photo anyway.

          I wouldn’t include one myself if I were applying for a job, but as someone who hires it doesn’t matter to me either way if a candidates’ resume has a photo

          1. Carmina*

            This – photos on resumes are fairly common in my western european country. I’d say about half the resumes I see have one. It helps disambiguate in case of several people with the same name when I google them, so I don’t mind it.
            I think my country is also a bit less mindful about discrimination in general though (the laws are similar to the US in theory, but there’s less of a culture of discussing it in the open), so the discrimination angle is definitely a valid concern.

      2. rcrdscrtch*

        But in design, we’re expected to have photos on our portfolio websites. If not on the front page then in the “about me” section. So I understand why they do it if they interpret a resume as being a tl;dr version of their portfolio.

    2. DJ Abbott*

      I read that Taylor Swift’s parents gave her a unisex name so she’d be successful if she went into business.

    3. Panicked*

      I completely agree with you. I cringe when a resume comes accross my desk with a picture on it. I do know that this is fairly standard in other countries/cultures, but it just isn’t necessary here.

      Even though they *shouldn’t* be on a resume, I am amazed at the wildly inappropriate pictures people put on them! I’ve seen shirtless men, selfies (complete with tongues out and hands making peace signs), and more people with a drink in their hand than I care to count. If you absolutely MUST put a picture on there, at least use a normal head shot!

      1. Learn ALL the things*

        Once when I was on a hiring team, one of the resumes was three pages long and each page had at least one Memoji image of the applicant. It remains the strangest resume I’ve ever seen.

      2. Jules*

        We just went through a hiring process and probably 80% of the resumes had photos. All young applicants under 30, various races and genders. I guess I thought it was how resumes are trending now.

    4. Pizza Rat*

      Yes, yes, yes! It’s also why I refuse to put my picture on LinkedIn. Read my resume.

      I especially think videos are all kinds of problematic. Discrimination based on gender, race, age, weight, and autism or ADHD is easy. In the job search communities I lurk on, there are a lot of people who are withdrawing applications because of this and how dehumanizing it is. The damn things are marketed by HR Departments as, “You have the opportunity to show us what you like on your own time!”

      Takes the inter right out of interviewing. Then there’s the security aspect. Who is watching the video? How is it stored? For how long? Are you using it to train your bots?

      Apologies for the ranting tangent.

    5. Ali + Nino*

      I never thought about the short (recorded) video causing this issue – such a good point! Also, this is an extremely annoying requirement.

    6. Elizabeth West*

      I’ve done a video for an application twice, it was a horrid experience, and I will never do it ever again. It’s ridiculous unless I’m auditioning for something. Nope nope nope. I also won’t do that record-your-answers-to-these-questions thing. Just call me up and ask me the questions.

      My photo is on my online portfolio, but only because it’s also on my LinkedIn and that ensures people know they have the correct page for the correct person. It is not on my resume. There’s just no reason for it to be there, nor is there room for a photo without pushing it past one page.

  6. Jessie J*

    Removed because this started quickly derailing the conversation. The LW isn’t arguing that those spaces should be hiring men; they were asking about the legal implications of all-female staffs. – Alison

  7. Jne*

    #5. Maybe the resumes are for countries that are not the US? Photos in resumes are pretty standard elsewhere.

    1. stratospherica*

      Yep. I live in a country where photos on resumes are still the standard (along with marital/dependent status and gender…)

      2. Jennifer Juniper*

        I am guessing that women who are not conventionally attractive would have a hard time getting hired if photos are a requirement.

        2. Venus*

          I worked in Europe 10 years ago and asked an older (nearly retired) IT guy about photos. He said that they were officially requested for all jobs but not really required for IT, and that he recommended not including one unless the applicant was young and good looking.

    2. Persephone*

      Are they? I’m not in the US and it’s definitely not a thing here.
      I feel like it’s safe to say putting photos in resumes is a bad idea anywhere, even if it is the norm.

      1. Stardust*

        I mean, “elsewhere” doesn’t mean “everywhere else” just “some place that is not here”.

    3. GMS*

      Yep, in many countries in Europe, for example, this is standard. As is listing birthdate, nationality, marital status, and children (thankfully those last two are starting to go in the country I live in). But was definitely horrifying to me and I have had at least one person tell me these influence their hiring decisions, even when discriminating on these factors is technically illegal.

      1. amoeba*

        I didn’t know about those others, wow! Photos are still pretty standard here in Switzerland, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard about adding marital status or kids. I did learn in school to include my parents’ jobs for whatever reason but I strongly suspect that was already bad/outdated even in 90s Germany..

        1. Emmy Noether*

          I have reviewed a good number of applicant CVs now, and occasionally get one with marital status and kids (I don’t want to have this info!). Most have a photo, but some don’t.

          My father expressed surprise that I wasn’t asked my parent’s occupations during the interview and I was just like… Papa, NO!

          I feel like the standards are changing, plus there are international applicants and templates from who-knows-where, so it’s a wild mix right now.

          1. alle*

            It’s not just job applications for which the older generation thinks their professions matter. My mother is convinced that parents’ occupation still influences their children’s standing in society. No one has asked me what my (retired) parents did for a Liv ng in years.

            1. metadata minion*

              It certainly influences children’s standing in society in terms of cultural knowledge, wealth, etc., but yeah, nobody is going to be either impressed or disparaging upon learning what my parents did unless it’s *very* prestigious/weird/denegrated.

        2. Emmy Noether*

          Also, I can tell you the reason for including the parent’s jobs: it’s overt classism.

        3. Seeking Second Childhood*

          We were asked to comment on contractors being hired in India who would do some % work on our projects… very different resumes.

      2. rudster*

        I’ve seen a fair amount of German CVs, almost all included a photo, marital status, children, and hobbies/interests. However, these were mostly intended for sending to headhunters and not responses to a specific advert.

    4. You're A Married Spud*

      Do you have examples of where this might be more standard? Generally curious as I work adjacent to recruitment in the UK, and it’s a big no-no here – we still get CVs with photos because of the template issue Alison mentioned though (this is also compounded by educational institutions giving bad employability guidance).

    5. Catherine*

      I’m in Japan and it’s so standard to include a photo here that some places bin your resume if you haven’t put it in. Recruiters have scolded me for omitting it before. (Ditto marital status.)

      My biggest resume culture clash moment came when I was trying to make remote hires from the Philippines and 90% of the resumes I received had the candidate’s religion listed. I was appalled until a friend who lives there explained to me that it’s standard information used to plan workplace holiday coverage.

      1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        I mean, if you’re choosing candidates based on their religion for presumed availability that’s still religious discrimination.

        If you want to hire someone who’s going to be available over Easter weekend or Ramadan or whatever, *ask that question*.

          1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

            That’s true (I’m not in the US) but discrimination is still discrimination when it’s legal.

            1. Mostly Managing*

              Going to play devil’s advocate for a moment here.

              What if your current staff is 95% Religion A, and so they all want/need the same days off to celebrate their Most Important Feast Day.
              Would it not be reasonable to want to hire someone who was Not Religion A, so that your business could stay open on that day?

              1. Butterfly Counter*

                I’ll bite.

                Scenario 1 is that the 95% of your staff having A religion represents the larger community, which means 95% of the community will have off for the holiday and not be working. So why would your company need workers if the community they’re representing also isn’t working?

                Scenario 2 is that something is going on, discrimination or bias, if 95% of your workers are of A religion and it doesn’t represent the surrounding community. In that case, you should try to hire people that actually represent the community in terms of diversity.

                Basically, if everyone has it off, just close the business that day. If not, hire a more diverse (in all ways) employee population.

                1. Mostly Managing*

                  I’ll counter – it’s a slow day here!

                  Scenario One – Just because most of the population are celebrating Important Feast Day doesn’t mean that nobody needs to buy gas, nobody wants to get a coffee, nobody will have a plumbing issue or have their furnace break down. There are businesses that have 24/7 coverage (or at least full week coverage) for a reason!

                  Scenario Two – But surely knowing whether my new hire follows Religion A or not is going to help me hire a more diverse workforce? How can I hire people from a wider range of backgrounds if I’m not able to ask them about their background? (It is reasonable to assume that you can’t tell by looking at someone what their religion – if any – might be)

              2. Ali + Nino*

                I know a business like this and they have the same issue – almost everyone is Jewish (Orthodox) which makes it an appealing work environment for other Orthodox Jews who appreciate understanding around their unique needs. on the other hand, the business owners do want non-Jewish employees in order to expand the business’s operations/availability even on holidays etc. It’s tricky.

              3. General von Klinkerhoffen*

                But you don’t actually need someone Not Religion A; you need someone available to work during Festival A.

                It’s like saying you should ask if women have school age children because you need coverage at 3pm and women pick up children from school at 3pm.

                1. Mostly Managing*

                  Yes and no.
                  Given how often people see “Must be available to work X dates” and apply anyway because “probably it’s negotiable once I start” then I could argue that “not Religion A” is a reasonable requirement.
                  Or at least “not actively practicing Religion A”.

    6. Nebula*

      Yeah I was thinking this. An online template might be adhering to norms in other parts of the world. Personally I’m glad I don’t live somewhere where having a photo on a resume/CV is the norm, but I’m aware it’s a thing.

      1. Chocolate Teapot*

        I once heard of somebody being rejected for interview as the recruiter saw her photo and thought “that she doesn’t look as if she needs the money”.

  8. Roland*

    Re “even the receptionists” and “Especially for non-clinical roles” – frankly I feel like 95%+ of all receptionists are women at businesses I’ve frequented, so I actually think that’s the least notable staffing here.

    1. coffee*

      Yes, very true.

      This is a tangent from the letter but I do find it interesting just how big the majority of women in these jobs actually is. It’s possible that LW2 just hasn’t seen a big enough sample to encounter a man. (Also the whole “glass elevator” factor, where men are more likely to be promoted into management/less face-to-face patient work.)

      Assuming this letter is from the USA, women make up:
      – 88% of nurses
      – 90% of medical assistants
      – 80% of ultrasound techs
      – 84% of phlebotomists
      – 90% of receptionists

      As a caveat, I’m not sure how reliable all of those numbers are, since I got them from a quick google. But I didn’t find any that were particularly different from them.

      1. coffee*

        Also I’m glad customer preference doesn’t play into “acceptable reasons to discriminate when hiring”.

        1. Cmdrshprd*

          It can in a roundabout way be a bon a fide requirement of the business, think gentleman’s clubs, or breastaurants.

      2. KG*

        Bureau of Labor Stats has health care overall being 80% female and specifically:

        – 90% of nursing assistants
        – ~88% of all nurses (lpn, np, and RM)
        – 89% of medical assistants
        -80-ish% of all ultrasound techs
        – 75% of clinical lab techs
        – 70% of radiology techs
        – 67% of physicians assistants

        but only 44% of physicians.

        so yeah, there’s not much “getting away” with anything to have a medical office entirely staffed by women.

        2. Emmy Noether*

          Physicians is going to flip at some point too, because now the majority of med students are women!

          1. Health admin*

            Possibly not as they are more likely to work part time or take a break. In my specialised state health department that has family friendly hours, 8% of the admins, 0% of the counsellors and nurses, and maybe 20% of the doctors including the head of department are male. I think it’s a function of who stays rather than who applies.

          2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

            You’d think. But the length of women’s careers isn’t the same as the length of men’s careers, so newly-qualified ratios may not be the same as entire field ratios.

            (this is a factor observable in my unrelated field, where junior roles are much more diverse than senior)

            1. Emmy Noether*

              That’s true. Still, I do think it will flip eventually, if somewhat later. The dynamic you describe is also slooooowly changing – field ratios move at a glacial pace, but at least the glacier is moving.

              Getting qualified as a medical doctor is a heck of a lot of time, money and effort to invest and then not use.

          3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

            Maybe? Is there a leaky pipeline? In my old field of astronomy, grad students have been 50/50 for decades and it hasn’t filtered up fully, because at every stage they leave the field in larger numbers.

            1. Beany*

              Also senior tenured positions are rare, and tend to stay filled by the same person for decades (and it seems to me that professors are more likely to leave their position by expiring than retiring).

        3. CS*

          They’re also professions where a lot of people going into them are doing so as a second career. I’m a rad tech student, about 75% of the class is women, and about half are over age 30. I myself am in my late 30s and have been a SAHM for several years. It’s very common.

      3. Alicent*

        That makes sense. I’ve seen two male gynos, but out of all the dentists and doctors I’ve been to the non-doctor staff has been almost entirely female. I can’t honestly remember seeing more than one or two men outside of a hospital situation. Men just don’t go for those jobs.

      4. Learn ALL the things*

        Part of my post-cancer monitoring included getting blood work done 4 times a year for the first three years, and twice a year for two years after that. Nearly all of the phlebotomists who did those blood draws were women, and this was at a standard medical lab, not a women’s clinic.

      5. WOOLFAN*

        Yup, I was thinking that whatever department I’m going to at the local medical center, the receptionists and nurses are almost all women or female presenting. At least where I am I’d say it’s approaching 100%. I think there is only one male nurse I’ve encountered, and he is actually a NP in the pediatrics department. (My kid is a teenager and I am pretty sure he is the only man I’ve ever seen working there in any capacity.) So I guess it doesn’t feel remarkable to me that so much of the staff in the women’s health dept. would be female, because it pretty much matches my experience in other departments.

        I am surprised to see the stats for phlebotomists. I am pretty sure that my perception of that is skewed by the time period when I was getting frequent bloodwork, and one of the phlebotomists at our clinic was a man, and quite memorable to me because of his close resemblance to the TV character Dexter. (Which, if you know the show, you will understand why I remember that so clearly. Also, he was really good – needle went in like butter with no pain every time. Which, in the context of his character resemblance, almost made it eerier.)

      6. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        We have about 35 medical coders in my department, and two of them are men. (And only one of those two is a white man, to boot.) All our team leads, managers, and our director are also women. I think our sister department has … also two? men out of about 40 team members, both individual contributors. Our shared executive director is also a woman. I think her boss is a man, but his boss and grandboss are women.

      7. Mango Freak*

        Yeah, I was surprised that LW was surprised to see a medical office staffed by women. It’s so rare that I see a man-type-person in a role other than doctor at a doctor’s office.

    2. dePizan*

      I worked in two alternative medicine clinics for a total of about 9 years where I was office manager over the reception desk. For various reasons, we had a good amount of turnover at both places and we paid higher than average for the roles and included health insurance for roles that were under 40 hours (this was pre-ACA and expansion of state Medicaids, so not everyone did). Not once did we ever get a male name on any of the resumes that were submitted during our job openings.
      One of our male doctors would have absolutely jumped at that, as he sometimes joked a little about differences in communication styles between him and the reception staff and feeling like he was misunderstood for a more direct communication style.

    3. LW2*

      That’s true that more women tend to go into most of those fields. I have seen male receptionists occasionally at the dentist, etc. though. And when it is an all-female staff at the dentist, I don’t think anything of it. I don’t wonder if they had to refuse to hire a man to deliberately maintain an all-female office. But when it’s at a gynecologist office, I *do* wonder if it’s deliberate, and if so, how they legally get away with it.

      1. coffee*

        Yeah. It seems like it’s not legal, but if they were discriminating then I guess they’d get away with it until someone sued them, or possibly community pressure if it came out and people took their business elsewhere.

    4. GlitterIsEverything*

      I work in medicine, and have for 27 years.

      In general, more women than men apply for medical support roles – front desk, billing, techs, MA’s, labs, etc. In my career, where I’ve worked in multiple offices of varying size (1 doctor to 50+ doctors), I’ve seen less than 20 techs and only 2-3 front desk staff who were men.

      This is an industry phenomenon, not just an OBGYN phenomenon.

    5. Elizabeth West*

      I visited a local hospital for a radiological test last month, and the receptionist who checked me in was a man. He was really great at it, too. The imaging tech was a woman (also great). The flip kinda made me happy, tbh.

    6. lindyhopper*

      Yes, I think this is my experience at most medical offices I go to, not just OB/GYN. Thought there are rare men in clinical support roles, 95%+ of the patient access reps, phlebotomists, MAs, etc. are always women regardless of medical specialty in my experience as a patient.

    7. Lena*

      I am a medical receptionist/secretary. When we were hiring at my last job 100% of the applicants were female. Every other clinics I am in contact with, is 100% female admin and nursing staff. I don’t really know why the letter writer is surprised by that!

  9. nnn*

    Does anyone know how people who dislike being referred to as junior would prefer for the concept to be expressed?

        1. Not Australian*

          NGL, I had one boss who absolutely unironically used that expression – and it was *way* before the Minion movies came out… And yes, it *was* part of a pattern!

          1. Annemoliviacolmuff*

            If your username hasn’t immediately ruled her out I would have thought this was my old boss.

    2. Orv*

      At a TV station job my boss and I once wore badges at an open house with stick-on videotape label tags that said “master” and “dub from master”. ;)

    4. Ellis Bell*

      In teaching, in the UK, the terminology is official, and has just changed from “newly qualified” to “early career” and the supported induction period has changed from one year, to two. Not only that, but recently research has found that the greatest gains in the progress of an ECT happens over the first five years. You’re now officially a fully fledged teacher after two years, if you pass (the second year after the one year NQT period used to have a high drop out rate) but a lot of the training materials explicitly talk about how important the first five years are, and it is expressly communicated that it’s supposed to be tougher, it’s the steepest learning curve and to hang on in there because it gets easier after five years of experience. I wish this had been made so explicit to me when I started out; it’s only clear how long it takes to gain experience after you’ve gained it.

      1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        Is it a bit like only actually learning to drive *after* you’ve passed your driving test?

      2. happybat*

        I always think we miss a trick in Scotland, where despite full registration after one year, we do see retention issues in the first 3-4 years. I think we could fix it with sabbatical. If people who worked their first five years got a year’s paid sabbatical to do their Masters in year six, I think that would have a fantastic effect on retention and help move us to an all-Masters profession. I also think that five years or so experience really helps to get the most out of further professional learning.

    5. andy*

      In front of customer? Not at all unless really necessary for something. I am definitely senior, but wont undermine my junior colleagues by labeling them as such in front of customer.

      1. Susan Calvin*

        How is it undermining? Obviously don’t tell the customer “This is Wakeen, he only started yesterday and we’re giving him your project to practice on”, but some basic expectation management benefits everyone, in my experience.

        1. andy*

          It makes them automatically less trusted and their words are then automatically devalued. It is making situation harder for them, because they end up “communicating uphill”.

          1. Insert Clever Name Here*

            Or it tells me that I should be prepared for some things to take perhaps a bit longer as this person is not as familiar with the role/requirements, that I might need to give more explanation in my answers, and that those things aren’t because this person sucks at their job but they are not as experienced in the field as the person with 15 years experience I usually deal with so therefor…be patient?

            1. andy*

              In my experience, patient people are patient and aggressive people are aggressive. Then there are hierarchical people – if they know someone is “lower” they are more unpleasant.

              When we are sending someone to fill the role, he is supposed to full the role.

              1. Susan Calvin*

                Maybe it’s because in my context, people have delightfully fuzzy job titles such as “consultant” and you usually have a bunch of people with similar profiles divide work among themselves, so the “junior” is basically part of the role definition – if a customer got the idea somehow that Wakeen and I were peers, and he kept asking him questions above his paygrade, Wakeen will look at best kinda lazy by always deflecting to me, or at worst causing a mess by not looping me in and giving incorrect information because he is missing context.

                Essentially, flagging someone explicitly as a junior is a way to take the heat off them, and if they’re working independently enough that there is no one else in charge, they’re not juniors anymore.

              2. Worldwalker*

                So how about if we call everyone “CEO”? Customers will all treat them well, and by not acknowledging any differences in experience or skill, those differences will just go away, right?

                1. andy*

                  There is no senior CEO and no junior CEO. There is just CEO. So, the obvious difference is that junior and seniors are labels in are attached to the actual rule.

                  The CEO is a label for the role. It does not says anything about skills or experience. If you are 21 years old and started your first company, you are not junior CEO, you are CEO exactly as 50 years old person running an established company.

                  You send over a analyst. If you tell them this is junior analyst, you just made the analysts life harder. If you are sending a new analyst and old analyst, you say there will be two analysts on the meeting.

                2. Potato Potato*

                  Finance industry enters the chat

                  Everyone employed at my company is at least an Assistant Vice President, including me, a lowly junior engineer. I have no idea why.

      2. Leslie Santiago*

        Even if you’re needing to get the points across that OP referenced? I also don’t see how calling them junior is undermining. Junior doesn’t mean bad, it just means less senior.

      3. Anon for this one*

        To cross threads a bit, I’ve seen a lot of nurses (long-term chemo) and the one who was just starting was very up front about it! It made me more patient to understand why she didn’t have the procedures down quite as well as the rest. I understand some people may differ, but overall I think it balances out. (All but one of my chemo nurses have been women, and I’ve probably seen a good dozen by now.)

        1. Tangerine steak*

          But for how many years would you expect this nurse to be highlighting themselves as junior? 1? 5? 10?

          I do wonder how experienced they actually are. 10 years less than LW could mean they started in the industry 6 weeks ago – or 16 years ago! Their titles might be lower than LW’s but are they actually “juniors” (whatever that means in their industry).

    6. Also-ADHD*

      Situationally, in LW situation you can say something like “My colleagues want to learn about this process, I’m inviting them to join us.”

      1. pally*

        This is how to say it!
        The whole idea is to convey that the co-workers don’t know the process. It’s not relevant whether they are junior to the OP or senior to the OP.

        1. Silver Robin*

          agreed, good point. Relative status is a shorthand but we can just say what we want to imply outright instead without bringing status into it

        2. Green great dragon*

          I think you do need to specify somehow they’re newish. I’ve visited our sales offices as a new member of staff to learn about processes, and I’ve visited as a more senior manager to understand more about how our processes are implemented by the sales teams and those were two very different visits, but both of them we so that I could learn about the process.

          1. Also-ADHD*

            I think you just convey whatever info is needed to convey—new or experienced (in the field or company, and one can be new to the company but experienced in the role/related task and vice versa, so one word doesn’t work for all forms of newness). Shorthand isn’t necessary because the message isn’t that long to begin with and you’re more likely to create issues than fix them with shorthand unless this is an extreme hierarchy with firm bounds (such as indicating someone’s medical certification area, to indicate what work they can do etc). Junior/senior is kind of an archaic hierarchy where Junior is dying out in many firms and they just put Senior/Lead in some titles but don’t “demote” from base role to Junior.

      2. No creative name yet*

        Agree completely. I don’t know if in OP’s field all of the context they were trying to express is actually implied by “junior”, but it seems more effective to just explain the purpose of including them. Years ago in my work there was a big dust up over a training program for “junior staff”; that’s in part because it was geared towards early career staff (like workplace norms), but not everyone in those positions was early career—some were new to the field but later in their careers, or hadn’t been promoted but had the position for several years, etc. Being precise about what you mean with “junior” rather than using the label has little downside.

    7. CubeFarmer*

      I simply rolled my eyes at the two “junior” colleagues in the first letter. Nothing marks you more as “junior” than to be offended by its perfectly accurate application in a professional environment, and then to express that you are “hurt” by it.

    8. Massive Dynamic*

      How about just… the job title? No need to signal to the world How New someone is to the job – if you hired them for the job then that’s what they will do. So: Accountant, Paralegal, Customer Service Rep, Sales Administrator, etc. etc. Just say the job. Add a Senior in there for seasoned folks (and pay them more) but there’s no need to Junior anyone.

    9. Michelle*

      Some are okay with “early career”, especially if they are actually early career and not someone with 10 years of experience in another field who’s recently career changed or someone who’s been doing the job for 15 years but never progressed much beyond entry level.

      Where it makes sense I use the word “new” or “learning”. “Rachel is new to the team and wants to learn more about how we work with contract llama feeders.” or “Chandler is ramping up on vendor relations and would like to shadow me to see a strong vendor relationship.”

      And yes, its clunky. When it actually matters, like in staffing discussions, we use official job titles/levels since we all know that someone at level B still needs support and coaching and someone at level D can work independently on all but the hardest tasks.

  10. Myrin*

    I’m surprised by #2’s question because I have literally never, in all my life and in all the dozens of doctor’s offices I’ve been to, specialist as well as general care, personally encountered a medical assistant who was male, so I don’t think this has anything to do with gynaecology in particular.

    I recently learned through their website that our vet’s office now has one male assistant and when I was still in school, two of my friends were training to become medical assistants and always talked about how there was one guy in their class of 30 and only three in total in their whole school of several hundreds.

    And even with doctors – my best friend is one and I remember her talks of how even back in 2010, when we started university, there were drastically more female students than male ones. I don’t know if enough male doctors have retired yet for this to have an impact on the overall gender distribution but I do see comparatively few young male doctors in practices nowadays.

    All that is to say – well, maybe it’s different in the US, but here, employers wouldn’t really even have the opportunity to discriminate because there aren’t really a lot of male candidates qualified and/or interested to begin with.

    1. Morning Reader*

      That seems unusual to me to not have encountered a male in a medical setting. What is a “medical assistant” in this context? My local hospital has male nurses; I don’t know how many but enough that I havent noticed it as unusual in years. I have a male doctor; 2 PAs in that office, one of each gender. I think all the nurse practitioners I have seen have been female; maybe there are more female nurses who have moved up to NPs already. I think most radiologists I have met are female.
      Gender of practitioners doesn’t matter to me much. What I find concerning is that almost always, when I have a “doctor’s appointment,” I’m seeing an NP or a PA. The actual doctor listed as my “primary care physician” for 7 years now, I’ve only met twice. The others are pretty good but I always wonder what they might be missing.

      1. Myrin*

        I didn’t say “no male in a medical setting”, I said “medical assistant” and meant that in the sense of “person working in a medical practice/doctor’s office” (I actually consulted a dictionary so that I would use the correct English terminology and that’s what it came up with and it sounded reasonable to me – apologies if there’s a technical English term that’s clearer).

        Obviously I’ve been to male doctors before! (In fact, both my GP and my gynaecologist are male.) And with nurses working at a hospital, at least the three I’ve been to recently, I’d even say that at least a third of those I encountered were male.

        But the people working in doctors’ offices (except for the doctor), doing reception, drawing blood, setting up ultrasounds etc.? Like I said, literally never.

      2. doreen*

        I’ve encountered male nurses/NPs/PAs in hospitals and there’s a man who is either an an NP or a PA at my primary doctor’s office – but aside from him, the only men I’ve ever seen other than the doctor in a private practice is one sonographer and one office manager. Everyone else from the medical assistants who weigh me and draw blood to the receptionists to the people who do the billing are women. To some extent, I think that’s self-selecting because I rarely see men working the front desk anywhere.

        But regarding the letter, there’s something I don’t understand. Which is why an employer can prefer women for the job of locker room/restroom attendant on the basis of privacy but the same does not apply for a medical role. The person who is in the room while I’m getting examined by a gynecologist or a mammographer is likely to see a lot more of me than the locker room/restroom attendant. I’ve rarely been in a locker room without individual spaces and never in one where people stripped down to nothing in an open area.

        1. Silver Robin*

          Not a lawyer, but here is my guess:

          Because the only thing the locker room attendant is doing is making sure you are following the rules of the locker room. They have no specialized knowledge of the bits they might chance to see and getting a view is a consequence but not a necessity of their role. So the law allows employers to reduce the chance of someone exploiting that vulnerability (there are assumptions baked in here that I am not going into).

          Doctor, on the other hand, has the expertise to ensure you are healthy and support you if you are not; they have to be able to examine you in order to provide that expertise. Standards of professionalism for medical practitioners also involve handling that vulnerability with care. Not to mention that getting into the medical field so you can see people’s bits is just…so much work for such a tiny reward. Becoming a locker room attendant to act sleazy is way easier. Therefore the assumption is that the doctor is *not* trying to be gross.

          Patient preferences absolutely still exist, for a variety of reasons, but that is the logic behind the law, I think.

        2. spiriferida*

          I imagine it’s because people select their own personal doctors (to the extent that’s reasonable for their area), but don’t select their locker room attendants.

          1. doreen*

            I guess I wasn’t clear – I’m not talking so much about the patient choosing the doctor but about the doctor/facility hiring assistants. Sure, I can choose a female doctor if I want to – and I can also decide not to choose that female doctor because I’m not comfortable with a male assistant observing/assisting with my pelvic exam. But apparently the doctor can’t legally prefer a female assistant while the gym/pool/radiology center can legally prefer a female locker room attendant. ( The place I go for x-rays has separate male and female locker rooms with curtained cubicles). I don’t understand why “privacy” is an exception in one situation and not the other.

            1. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

              I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that Alison or her source is using the locker room attendant as an example that doesn’t need to be explained, not to mean “only locker room attendants.”

              If I understand what Alison is saying, the doctor can in fact prefer a female assistant to assist with/observe a pelvic exam. But that doesn’t extend to allowing gender preferences for work that doesn’t involve that sort of privacy concern, like medical receptionist, even at a gynecologist’s office.

            2. SpaceySteph*

              I agree, I thought that was odd as well. If anything, the privacy concern is even greater in a medical setting than a locker room. In a locker room presumably you can go behind a curtain/into a stall if feeling shy, but in gynecology you will have your bits on full display and cannot do otherwise.

              That said, I have given birth to 3 children, 2 of whom were in distress during labor, so in addition to the regular several labor and delivery people, I also had a full NICU team there as well. A good 20 people saw my bits emit a human head, some of which were men. I’d get changed on a street corner at this point for all the modesty I have left.

      3. Roland*

        “medical assistant” is a specific healthcare title that people are hired for. I’ve also only encountered female MAs as well. They have taken my vitals and whatnot before the doctor shows up. (I’m sure they do other stuff too, that’s just my experience seeing them.)

        1. Learn ALL the things*

          At my dermatologist’s office, the medical assistants do things like taking photos of areas of concern that the doctor wants to look at again the the future for comparison and setting up any equipment if they’re doing an in-office procedure.

    2. JetBlu*

      I’ve been in medicine for 25 years. I’ve seen many OG /GYN male physicians. Just as many as female. A scattering of male MAs. Males tend to be RN or LVN.

    3. ThatGirl*

      My husband is a licensed mental health counselor, and while there are probably a fair amount of male PsyD/MD/PhDs, the clinician level tend to be dominated by women. Because of this my husband probably has a slight advantage in hiring – he’s currently the only non-woman in his university wellness center (which has both a medical and counseling side).

    4. Kitten*

      Let be real, men don’t want to make as little money as a medical assistant makes or a medical office worker.

      1. Texan In Exile*

        Yep. All I can think of when I read these comments is “These jobs must have low pay.”

    5. BigLawEx*

      Interesting. I see males all the time in LA. Maybe 20-25%. More at UCLA than Cedars-Sinai IMO. I have seen fewer in the EU, but not zero, more so at private specialty clinics than public hospitals/clinics.

      1. Sillysaurus*

        It very much depends on the clinic. I work in pediatrics and we have a couple of men on staff but you’d never see them because they’re all in support roles like scheduling. I am a hiring manager and have had exactly one male applicant in my 3 years in this role. I definitely can’t hire people who aren’t applying, so here we are.

    6. Lenora Rose*

      This: Before asking if it’s illegal to discriminate, you need to prove the staffing is due to discrimination, not natural distribution. And while I’ve met male Ob/Gyns, I would in fact be mildly surprised if anyone else in the office was male.

      2. JustaTech*

        Right: if everyone who *applies* for a job is of one demographic group, and there isn’t a discriminatory way in which the job was posted that would limit knowledge of the job opening to that group (ie, it wasn’t only posted in the women’s locker room at the country club), then it isn’t discrimination on the part of the employer.

        Which is not to say that it isn’t an issue to be addressed, but it’s likely a larger, systemic issue of pipeline and historical segregation of work.

    7. Rebecca*

      I’m a cis female MA working in family practice in WI. We do a lot of GYN care and exams.
      While support staff is majority female it is 30% cis male MA, LPN and EMT.

  11. TheBunny*

    LW#1

    I once had a coworker get upset with me for saying the following when giving directions to our office “go to the 2nd floor, 2 doors down on the left. When you walk into the office you can speak to the person at the desk immediately when you enter”.

    The upset person…who was notably touchy about everything…said I should have given them her name and title. And was incredibly annoyed I didn’t.

    OK…except the desk was staffed on a rotating schedule by more than one person and I had no way of knowing who would even be at the desk when the people arrived. (It was the responsibility of the people in charge of staffing it to make sure someone was there, etc…there was no set schedule.)

    Sometimes people are ridiculous.

    2. Sparkles McFadden*

      “Sometimes people are ridiculous” is going to be my default response to everyone about everything for the rest of the week.

    3. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      So I guess you should have said “It will be Jane Smith, Touchy Receptionist, or whoever else is on duty at that time”

  12. Myrin*

    Quite frankly, I feel like the fact that the coworkers in #1 were hurt and upset by this proves that they are, in fact, juniors.

    1. Nodramalama*

      I agree. Being upset by being referred to as junior when you are junior, is quite weird to me.

      1. Myrin*

        For sure, but I was specifically talking about “being labelled as ‘junior'”. Not that there aren’t senior people who would become all huffy if you referred to them as junior but I do think there’s something that reads “young”/”inexperienced” about the “hurt” verbiage in particular.

    5. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      How often do we see letters or comments from people complaining they aren’t taken seriously because of their age (or their perceived age)? I think that may be factoring in to how people react to the neutral and factual title of “junior”.

    6. Lady Danbury*

      Completely agree, lol. It reminds me of a previous role where a graduate trainee complained that the CEO was disrespecting him by calling him “Sir” instead of knowing his name. This was within the context of the CEO addressing the entire graduate trainee class, not a one on one interaction.

    7. HSE Compliance*

      I’m not sure I agree. I’ve had significantly more senior individuals get way more touchy about that inclusion of “Senior” on everything. I’ve had maybe a handful of “Junior” staff get weird about the term “junior” which usually was solved by an explanation of “no, that’s really the level this role is at, it’s not at you in particular”.

    8. korangeen*

      Yeah I was thinking it’s possible they’re so junior that they don’t yet realize that “junior” can be a common term in workplace settings.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        I think this really hits at the crux of it. It’s not inherently offensive or demeaning, but they might not be used to it – especially if they work with similarly-aligned coworkers, and don’t realize where they fit within the larger breakdown of the company. I’ll admit when I saw the title of the question, I thought it meant being CALLED Junior (like OP saying ‘thanks for your help, Junior’ or introducing someone ‘this is Junior’) which I do find to be infantilizing, so the context really matters

      2. Anonymous Demi ISFJ*

        It certainly could! At my old job (tiny nonprofit) someone once circulated a document referring to “junior staff” which was not a designation that’s been used in the company before or since. I (the only millennial in a room full of boomers) automatically assumed that it referred to me before someone explained to me that it also referred to one other colleague who is the same age as my oldest uncle.

  13. I’ve got the shrimp!*

    I am curious of OP1 is a woman and the 2 ‘juniors’ are male and if that was a factor.

    The only reason I am curious is that I find the use of junior/senior to be a totally normal term to use and I am wondering if there was some good old fashioned misogyny at play and not just egos being hurt over a standard work phrase.

    2. LW 1*

      We are all women. One of the coworkers is a POC, which I understand can mean she needs to be more conscious of how she presents herself and is presented by others. I didn’t anticipate this would hurt either of them in any way, or I wouldn’t have said it.

  14. Nodramalama*

    For LW2, im not all surprised that “even the receptionists” are women. I worked at medical clinics as a receptionist in high school and all through uni and never worked with a man. And I can’t remember a time since that I’ve gone to a doctors clinic and been served by a male receptionist.

    1. MaleStaff*

      Most of my medical offices – and unfortunately I have a lot at multiple hospitals and a few standalone offices – have more male reception staff than female, although not obnoxiously so.

        1. blah*

          They mean that while there were more male staff, they weren’t obviously outnumbering the female staff.

  15. MrsThePlague*

    I completely agree with the assessment of the junior/senior labeling, but I’m curious whether you would recommend that the LW reach back out to the two employees involved and explain it to them? Not by way of ‘apology’, but rather as a teaching moment for them, since they are new to the workforce?

    Would it be okay, since this is a common and correct thing that the junior colleagues weren’t aware of, for the LW to continue using it moving forward?

    I guess I’m wondering, if we frame this as introducing the two employees to workplace norms, what the best process would be, assuming the LW is in a position to engage.

    1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

      > Would it be okay, since this is a common and correct thing that the junior colleagues weren’t aware of, for the LW to continue using it moving forward?

      “Would it be okay” gives them the option to say no, though. I would skip that part!

      1. kalli*

        I read this as asking whether it would be okay to keep using it because they have expressed not liking it, alongside the question of whether it’s recommended to use it as a teaching moment – not asking them themselves!

    2. WoodswomanWrites*

      Maybe it’s because my career has been in nonprofits, but I’ve never been in a work situation where people were referred to as junior.

      I’m thinking about how I would have worded the request to the vendor. It would likely be something like: “Is it okay if I bring two of my colleagues? They haven’t observed this process before and they’re interested in learning more about it.”

      Sometimes I think I live in a different universe than others here. Or maybe just the Bay Area in its unique weirdness.

      1. Angstrom*

        I’d be more likely to use something like “newer” or “recent hire” or “new to our group” if it was important to convey that they were less familiar with the work.

      2. Snow Globe*

        It may be that you’ve worked in smaller organizations? In a larger organization, it’s common for there to be roles where people will progress over a number of years from a lower level to higher level, while doing similar work. This often includes changing titles. In a smaller organization, there may only be one Llama Groomer and one Alpaca Groomer, there is no need for the junior and senior designations.

      3. Government worker*

        I’m from the Bay Area and I don’t find the use of “junior” to be weird at all. But I’ve spent most of my career in government where there is a very specific classification ladder.

    3. Also-ADHD*

      Just because what LW did is normal doesn’t mean it would be right to continue doing it/argue why they are right to do it if they know it bothers their colleagues and it’s easily avoided (which it is, you can say someone is there to learn a new process etc. instead of calling them junior and the few extra words it takes are reasonable to expend if you know using the description “junior” bothers someone—it may be common or uncommon in different industries/functions, but if you know it bothers someone, I think you enter different territory).

      1. Paint N Drip*

        BUT if it bothers them AND it’s common in the industry, I do think it’s a kindness to discuss that with the ‘junior’ coworker. The conversation shouldn’t be “you’re wrong because this is normal” but I do think a ‘you should be prepared for that language/stratification in this company/industry’ kinda talk would be a kind, mentoring action

        1. Also-ADHD*

          It sounded like it’s more common in the industry that LW used to work in (higher education which tends to be very old school hierarchy and seniority based) than the industry that they currently work in, though if the coworkers are likely to continuously encounter this from others, LW could address that. It didn’t sound like that to me from the letter, so the polite thing is to do what LW plans to do and adjust to their feelings because that’s what kind people do and it’s not that hard to be considerate here.

    4. Tangerine steak*

      I disagree. I think the LW should take this as a teaching moment for herself and think about how she’s referring to her colleagues and the impact that has.

      When she describes them as junior how do vendors/colleagues/clients etc see them? What biases are unnecessarily brought into play by that approach? How much extra work has she created for her colleagues to be taken seriously by her choice of framing? What do they need to achieve to not have a as huge “junior” label highlighted for everyone? If someone older had the job would they still use that term?

      I’ve worked across a few different industries, some very rank conscious (some even with actual epaulettes showing uniformed rank (not military)). There are always people who are more conscious and vocal about rank than others. I’ve only ever introduced by rank to highlight their achievements – never to highlight how junior someone is. I also wouldn’t use the word junior unless it was actually their job title. So I’d say my colleagues Mary and Petunia, who are Junior TeaPot Designers – only if officially that was their title.

      1. Worldwalker*

        Definitely, refer to all of them as CEO. After all, if you don’t acknowledge differences, they go away, right?

        1. sparkle emoji*

          I agree that the reaction was odd, but I think this is a little extreme. There are other ways of conveying what the LW wanted to say: “These colleagues would like to come and learn, and need some precautions taken due to their newness” that avoid the word Junior, and if that helps LW have better relationships with her colleagues, maybe it’s worth it to her.

          1. Friendo*

            Needing some precautions taken due to their newness strikes me as just as bad. Using a standard term means you don’t need to negotiate feelings everytime you type out an email.

      2. deductivesalt*

        100% agree. Collegues don’t need qualifiers. Just their actual roles. If their titles didn’t include the word “junior” in it, just saying it is rude.

        1. LookAtMeI'mTheManagerNow*

          At my company “actual roles” according to HR are pretty much gobbledygook. I have never had bad results being upfront with customers about what “junior colleagues” are doing for them, or saying “Shema is a new junior hire and she is listening to this meeting as a learning experience; we expect she will start on your project next week to work on X”. I think it has to be okay to directly state that people with less experience have less experience.

      3. Analytical Tree Hugger*

        “What biases are unnecessarily brought into play by that approach? …What do they need to achieve to not have a as huge “junior” label highlighted for everyone?”

        Well, then we also need to ask, what necessary biases are brought into play? From the original letter: “These two coworkers are relatively new grads, about 10 years less experienced than me…”

        It’s completely reasonable to approach how you work with someone differently because they lack general experience in a field (i.e., a new graduate) versus if they lack experience in a specific task and “junior colleague” conveys that concisely.

        If there’s a lack of basic courtesy and decency, that’s going to happen regardless of the specific label and changing the label doesn’t address the root issue.

        “If someone older had the job would they still use that term?”

        Where do you get ageism in any of this?

      4. I Have RBF*

        I was pleased as punch at age 38 to get a “junior” title in my new field – it meant that I had made the career switch. But I had worked my way up in another entire field before that.

        “Junior” is both a title, and a descriptor. If I have two years experience, and my colleague has twelve years experience in that field, that colleague is perfectly within their rights to call me “junior”. Getting upset about it is juvenile, overly sensitive, and sets them up for years of unhappiness.

        I’m now 63. If I changed fields again, I would once more start at the bottom, and rightfully be called “junior”.

    5. anonymous here*

      Yes. Because otherwise they’re going to get all hurt and annoy someone without the kindness and patience of the OP.

      They need to know professional norms. Please inform them.

  16. Nancy*

    LW2: many of the jobs you list have a much higher percentage of women than men in those roles. My PCP’s office has no men on staff, nor does my physical therapist’s offices. Male obgyns are also becoming much less common. I’ve seen American Medical Association reports that have said over 85% of new obgyn residents are female. So it is much more likely that the offices have few, if any, men applying for the roles.

    1. Overthinking It*

      I don’t know what a PCP is, but am surprised be your Physical Therapist practice. The place I go is 50 – 50 (I mean the people working with patients, both therapists and techs. The staff scheduling and taking payments are exclusively female). Perhaps your place is smaller and it’s being all female is just . . . luck of the draw??

        1. Nightengale*

          or Primary Care Provider because some PCPs are nurse practitioners or physician assistants. PCP is specifically to be inclusive of both physician and non-physician “providers” who can prescribe and make independent medical decisions.

      2. Nancy*

        Primary Care Provider. My point was that having an all-female medical office is really not unusual or exclusive to obgyn, not that PT office are typically all-female.

      3. Sillysaurus*

        70% of physical therapists in the US are women. And that increases depending on specialty; about 85% of pediatric physical therapists are women. So not having any women at a PT practice isn’t really that odd. Definitely partly a luck of the draw thing.

  17. Flip a coin a few times and it's all heads*

    #2 Sometimes, it just happens. I have absolutely worked in places where by pure chance it was all female staff, it got to the point that it was causing cultural difficulties with very specific population’s urological problems. But also, we can’t really hire male staff who never wanted to work there to start with.

  18. BellaStella*

    LW4 if it is not too late please follow the advice given. There is a power differential in play here too that your manager is holding power over both you and your report. Absolutely get clear on their request and listen to both separately. And if needed bring in HR to guide this. Here is my example:
    I report to J and J reports to M.
    In the past 2 years I have had a few challenges with M due to them saying things about our team needing to work all night at events, and well, just not managing the team but always wanting to be at events as centre of attention and favouring a missin stair by never getting them to do that person to deliver work.
    So in April we had a team meeting to discuss a plan for our team and in the room were M, missin stair, and three colleagues. J was on holiday not present so this is the same as in your case you were not there. I asked about setting up a chart for the plan that included roles and responsibilities and deliverables, to clarify tasks timelines and alleviate stress. At this point I was told that this was not acceptable. Ok fine.
    Fast forward two weeks later and J is back from holiday. Nothing has been said since meeting at all by anyone on team. I get email from M to J with me in copy and this email is a response to an email from October so like 8 months before. All it said was ‘J please set up a meeting to talk about BellaStella’s attitude.”
    Um what?
    So I go to J to ask what it is about and he says, “M says you disrupted the entire meeting two weeks ago and are the reason we do not have a plan.”
    How in any reality is this what I did and said?
    HR is involved as this has been part of much bigger problems on the team with M lying and doing this kind of ongoing bs. Please listen to your staffer fairly LW. If your manager is reasonable this can be worked out well for all but a neutral person may be needed to help.

    1. Overthinking It*

      Unfortunately, this doesn’t sound like it’s a misunderstanding that can be explained, nor that your grand boss being self-protecting, which might be smoothed over by someone a knack for diplomacy. It sounds like he just doesn’t like you, and you need to be preparing to change jobs. It sucks, but it just isn’t realistic to count on your supervisor being able to protect you from him.

      1. BellaStella*

        Exactly and this is why I am looking for a new role. It has been a mess for a while now.

  19. Seb*

    in the UK men cannot be mammographers. interestingly they can be sonographers which would include transvaginal scans although I’m not sure how many actually do.

    1. WS*

      Huh, I’m surprised that it’s not allowed! I’m in Australia and there’s some male mammographers and sonographers are about 50/50. I think all but one of my transvaginal scans have been done by men.

      1. Mia*

        I think the difference is there are many other types of ultrasounds for many other parts of the body, while mammograms are for one thing only. I don’t think of it as customer preference, if privacy exceptions are allowed for things like locker rooms then I would think the same privacy exceptions could 100 percent also be applied to mammograms. I was way more exposed, for a much longer period of time, then I ever am in a locker room, and also had the tech physically touching me.

    2. ABrit*

      How odd about mammographers! A quick google shows that it’s the subject of lots of debate. I have had a male ultrasound tech for a transvaginal ultrasound so can confirm that the number is certainly non-zero.

      1. GythaOgden*

        Sonographers do a lot more work than just OB/GYN. Ultrasound is used a lot in imaging for cancer, which unfortunately we found out with my husband’s experience. It’s probably the first step in a lot of cases because it doesn’t involve large machinery, radioactivity, dangerous levels of magnetism or claustrophobia-inducing spaces for many routine scans.

        The cultural image is of ultrasound being for maternity imaging (and I’ve seen canine ultrasound done on a litter of puppies my colleague’s doggo was carrying, which was utterly cute) but it’s a wider field than most people realise.

    4. Testing*

      That’s weird! Last time I had an x-ray it was of my chest, and the radiographer was a man. I mean, why couldn’t the same guy do my mammogram….?

      1. Mia*

        Have you ever had a mammogram? I had my first one earlier this year, and I can completely understand.

      2. doreen*

        Probably because the last time I had a chest x-ray no one was touching my breast to place it on the plate properly.

      3. metadata minion*

        Everywhere I’ve been, a chest x-ray is done either in street clothes or a hospital robe, so they’re not seeing or touching anything that they wouldn’t be seeing/touching for them to x-ray any other part of you.

          1. Observer*

            That’s extremely unusual.

            I’ve had a fair number of chest x-rays, and never have I needed to be actually naked. Generally in a hospital robe rather than street clothes, but never actually topless. And no one ever needs to touch anything but my shoulders, arms or back for positioning.

              1. fhqwhgads*

                But in this context it’s not an issue of being fussy or unfussy about nudity. It’s an x-ray. It’s completely unnecessary to remove a shirt/hospital gown for a chest x-ray. So why add the extra step?

              2. Anonymouse*

                I’m not all that fussy about nudity in a medical setting but if a rad tech asks me to take my clothes off for an x-ray I’m asking for their supervisor. Either they are a creep or they have a profound misunderstanding about how x-rays work. They have no business performing an x-ray on me in either case.

        1. Testing*

          Well my apologies for not qualifying for a mammogram yet according to the age limits we have here.

          I have had male gynaecologists and male medical students inspect my vagina, and I’m pretty sure that’s more invasive than a bit of prodding on my boobs.

          1. Nonsense*

            Ok, so, extend that thought – if you find that a vaginal exam is pretty invasive, then you can understand why some women would not want men to do the exam, yes? And thus, also would not want a man to handle their breast exam as well, which is technically less invasive but involves a hell of a lot of manipulation of the tissue?

            I, unfortunately, qualify for early mammograms based on my family history and personal history so I’ve been getting the exams for 5 years now – and I will tell you right now, it is the most hands on exam I’ve ever had in my life. They need to make sure they scan all the breast tissue and that means pulling and pushing all which ways and all over (and God help you if your tissue is dense like mine). I’m personally not bothered by having a male doctor for my exams, but I can very easily understand why other women would feel more comfortable with a female presenting doctor instead.

          2. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

            A mammogram is invasive in a different way–they’re not using tools to inspect/position your boobs–the best way is to just literally move them with their hands. It’s not prodding–it’s twisting, positioning, shifting, lifting, and a whole range of motions that often hurt like f*ck. They also take awhile (sometimes up to 30 minutes–not for the whole visit, just for the mammogram). It’s nothing like an X-ray or even an ultrasound scan.

            I’ve only had two, and I would feel really, really weird about a guy doing them, versus a vaginal exam like I’ve been getting every year since I was in my 20s.

            1. Testing*

              Oh, they don’t use tools to feel whether your cervix is getting ready for your baby to come out, either, that’s manual work.

          3. RussianInTexas*

            A mammogram in not a “bit of prodding”.
            It’s actually longer than the vaginal exam, there is a lot of manhandling, squeezing, readjusting, constant touching, all by hand of the tech. It’s very literally hands-on.
            I’ve had a male OB, no issues. I would not want a male mammo tech.

    5. Sled dog mama*

      In the US it’s becoming increasingly difficult for men to be trained as mammographers. I don’t know anything about the legality of this. Men are sometimes excluded from students roles in mammography clinics and since hands on training supervised by a qualified person makes up a significant portion of the requirements for the credential it means that men are often unable to get the experience that allow them into the role.

      1. Mo*

        Is it a case of patients refusing care by a male trainee? You’re always allowed to say no to a trainee assisting in your care, and I could see it being much harder for men to find enough women to allow them to participate to get their required experience in the allotted time.

    6. Labyrinth Attic*

      I’m also in the UK and was very surprised by the implication that mammographer wouldn’t come under the “privacy” exemption of gender discrimination laws in other countries. It’s a very hands-on experience!
      But I’m also aware that 1% of Breast Cancers cases are in AMAB people. Two AMAB people in my family (one cis-male one NonBinary) have needed investigations for breast lumps – thankfully for both they were benign. The cis-man went further down the is-this-cancer path and found everything was so gendered – even the information leaflets were pink and flowery! AMAB patients deserve the same privacy and respect as any other patient (and may prefer to see a same-gender practitioner if possible) plus there are logistical challenges in scanning a flat-chested person so they need to be seen by experienced staff. So there probably shouldn’t be a complete ban on male/AMAB mammographers.
      (There should also be consideration of the needs of trans-masculine patients particularly if they haven’t (yet) had top surgery)

      1. Good Enough For Government Work*

        I’m a cis woman and I also get deeply annoyed by the pinkification of breast cancer stuff. (Also gynae stuff, which I’m currently unthrilled to be dealing with.)

        I don’t need stuff about cancer to be prettified and girlified. It’s cancer. F*ck off.

      2. Orv*

        I remember reading an article by a man (AMAB) who was diagnosed with breast cancer. He mentioned how awkward it was to have to go to the “women’s health” section of the clinic to get a mammogram done.

    7. Florence Reece*

      Huh. There’s no law about that here (to my knowledge) but this comment did make me realize that my network has a Breast Care center that is almost entirely female. I became very familiar with it because I had to get breast ultrasounds every 6 months for three years, and I never saw the same tech twice. 100% of my techs were women. In fact, when I had to get a biopsy there, I had a male surgeon and a female nurse who stayed in the room during the procedure. That’s been my only surgery since I was a child so maybe that’s the normal process — I certainly didn’t question it at the time — but in hindsight, I can see that being a precaution to make sure all patients feel comfortable.

      It’s an interesting question! I’ve never gone to an OBGYN because my PCP always does my pelvic exams, but when I had a male PCP for a few years he would explicitly give me the choice to schedule that with him or schedule with his female PA. I know all PCPs are trained to perform pelvic exams, but I imagine many patients opt for a female practitioner when that’s possible.

      In a semi-related vein, my friend is a pelvic floor physical therapist. Apparently there’s essentially the same problem there…for both genders. Women don’t tend to want a male PT working so intimately with their genitals, and men *also* tend not want a male PT poking around where men need pelvic floor poking. Interestingly, I’ve also heard that from male friends about their routine care in general. I’ve had multiple exes with…maybe not “hangups” but certainly some unprocessed feelings about not wanting another man to check their testes for hernias or, god forbid, perform a prostate exam. I’m sure that must be a recent trend since PCPs were overwhelmingly male for such a long time, but it’s very interesting to see how that has changed as women have more access to physician roles.

  20. NotAllFemale*

    OP2, as a counterpoint, I’ve never been to an OBGYN office without male doctors and they seem to have a similar proportion of other medical staff (nurses, phlebotomists, techs) as other medical offices. I have noticed most (in some cases all) front desk staff have been women (or at least female presenting).

    Mammogram staff – which tend to be in the radiology department and not the OB-GYN office – skew much more heavily female. I should note I am always assigned female techs because I have to go topless for the whole procedure because of mobility limitations that make switching a gown on and off impractical so that could affect my perception. I have also only gotten mammograms in one location whereas I have experience with 8-10 OB-GYN offices over time.

    My first four OB-GYNs were male. I hated it as a teenager but my parents thought I was being silly. Several of the places I went including my college assigned by luck of the draw and you could only switch if you had a genuine problem with the dr you were assigned. The last few offices I’ve gone before my current office ask if you have a preference. I currently use a female nurse practitioner who was recommended as someone willing to deal with my current physical limitations so I don’t know how this office normally assigns patients to clinicians.

    1. JJ*

      In the late 2000s-early 2010s I went to a doctor at a women’s health center that advertised having an all female staff, and honestly that was part of the reason I went there.

    2. Worldwalker*

      I can’t remember the last time I had blood drawn by a male phlebotomist. In every medical office I can think of, everyone except for most doctors has been female.

      1. But maybe not*

        Interestingly, this is my experience in healthcare settings, but when I donate blood, it is generally 50/50.

  21. Not Australian*

    TBH I think the only way that the expression ‘junior colleague’ could be tweaked at all is to say ‘*more* junior colleague’, i.e. not as senior as a senior colleague but not entry-level either. However that’s *really* splitting hairs, and frankly I can’t understand what the said junior colleagues are complaining about. Are they, in fact, junior? Yes? QED.

    1. Zelda*

      IIRC, in Latin, the -ior ending is comparative, so “junior” doesn’t even mean absolutely “young,” but only “younger.”

      1. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        But we’re speaking English. The history of words is fascinating, but it doesn’t dictate how words are used in the present (even when it’s the same language, but over time).

  22. AlternatePerspective*

    LW1, I question whether they were upset you called them junior staff or that you introduced them as junior staff to clients/folks outside of the company. Most introductions would not include that information, but rather just indicate you brought colleagues A and B to observe (or assist or whatever’s appropriate). If you felt the client needed to know and approve, I’d expect that conversation to happen ahead of time and more privately, especially if you wanted to make it clear you were still their point person.

    I would not have objected to being called a junior llama wrangler inside my company in situations where ranks mattered, but I would have felt somewhat undermined if I were introduced that way to llama owners, especially if I might end up working at their farms in the future.

    Maybe I’m in the minority, but I see why they might be upset and also an odd choice given your stated goals for introducing them that way, and it has nothing to do with not understanding their junior status.

    1. Green great dragon*

      This happened in the initial request to the vendor, not in the in person introductions, and it seems like relevant info to me.

      “I’d like to bring a couple of junior colleagues” hits differently to “I’d like to bring a couple of senior colleagues”. LW themselves say the were expecting the vendor to set aside extra time to allow the colleagues to ask questions, but presumably wouldn’t want anything else changed. Peer-colleagues mightn’t need extra time. Senior colleagues wouldn’t need the same level of explanation, but the vendor might want to offer for someone more senior on their side to attend to help answer more senior-level questions.

    2. Tau*

      This was pretty much my thought! And the thing I also wonder is whether the offended colleagues understood her reasoning for mentioning it. If they felt like she brought it up out of the blue for no good reason, I can see how they felt undermined and like OP1 was being weirdly hierarchical, and that has nothing to do with whether they’re OK with being called “junior” in a company-internal context or as their job title.

      In any case, I’d personally probably steer clear of “junior” when talking to external parties and instead phrase things like “they’re new to our llama shaving department and it’d be helpful for them to observe how we do it in practice” or something like that. It has the advantage of making it clearer, IMO; OP1 is expecting the vendor to pick up on a lot of assumptions and expectations just based on the term “junior”.

      (Also, if I swap the wording… I cannot imagine talking about “my senior colleagues” to an external client. Specific titles, sure – “let me talk to my CTO”, hell, even “I’ll introduce you to Joe, one of our Senior Llama Shavers”. But just “senior colleague” as a descriptor feels weird and self-undermining somehow. That makes me think “junior colleague” is probably also best avoided.)

      1. Parcae*

        I’m a high level individual contributor at my job, and “my senior colleague(s)” is one of my go-to phrases when dealing with external clients! I use it because our job titles don’t make the hierarchy clear to an external audience. It would only be undermining if I was trying to hold myself out as having authority that I don’t have.

        Unsurprisingly, I would also use “junior colleagues” in a situation like the OP’s. It’s useful shorthand.

      2. Caramel & Cheddar*

        “Senior colleagues” doesn’t rankle me nearly as much as “junior colleagues” does, I think because usually if you need to loop in the senior colleague(s), it’s usually because they *do* have a level of decision making authority that you’d need to defer to and you can’t move forward without it. It’s short hand for “I need someone else’s sign off on this” which I don’t think is undermining so much as just “this is how our company works for expenditures above $X / decisions about Y” etc.

    3. Caramel & Cheddar*

      I had to read way too far down into the comments to find this! Unless “junior” is in the person’s job title, I honestly don’t see how it was relevant to bring it up with the external contact. LW quite understandably wanted to prepare the vendor for the possibility of the additional staff asking more questions / needing more oversight, but they need those things because they’re unfamiliar with the task, not because they’re junior. A colleague more senior to LW who wanted to tag along would have needed the same support/patience if this was their first time observing the task.

      1. Analytical Tree Hugger*

        From the original letter: “These two coworkers are relatively new grads, about 10 years less experienced than me…”

        So, no, they aren’t just unfamiliar with the task, they’re new to their roles and likely this industry, so they are junior in a broader sense than if they had been working for a while in this field and knew most of the normal protocols and procedures.

        1. Caramel & Cheddar*

          Ah, see, I don’t think it automatically follows that a senior person will have a better sense of norms and protocols around a task they haven’t done, so that’s probably the disconnect here. I think if you need a third party to be prepared for X, Y, Z from your team, it’s worth detailing what that is (which LW did) rather than relying on an assumed understanding of what “junior” (or for that matter “senior”) entails.

          1. Pyjamas*

            But LW does know the workers and the skills, so she does see.

            Also, has no one else noticed that LW1 wrote that she “ certainly won’t use the word again now that I know these coworkers have a sore spot with it”?

            Rather than second guessing LW, what wording would YOU suggest?

            (Me? I think the problem was cc-ing the employees on the email. That’s almost certainly where they saw it)

  23. TechWorker*

    On #3 it’s not clear to me whether they are taking time unpaid (which I agree the manager could easily not permit given the generous PTO allowance) or just that the reason they use their PTO is a mix of holidays and other commitments.

    I don’t fully understand the answer in this case – surely if they go from a balance of 2-3 days to a balance of 15-20 days they would just have one year where they take a lot less PTO but after that be able to go back to their current amount. Perhaps that is what the manager is thinking would help but not sure I fully understand why that one year with less time off will make a big difference to their ability to do the job. If they’re struggling it seems like the wrong thing to focus on.

    1. TechWorker*

      But also I don’t live in the US so it’s possible I’m missing something about how PTO works.

      (Where I do live PTO is a legal right and whilst employers can ofc say a particular time is not convenient I think I’d be in a dodgy place if I tried to encourage a struggling employee not to take it, or take less than their allowance).

      1. GythaOgdeno*

        I’m in the UK with a robust PTO allowance, but I work in NHS facilities management and the nature of the job means everyone up to and including regional managers are basically covering the smooth operation of sites vital to patient wellbeing. We have a use it or lose it schedule (we can roll over up to 5 days but only with a very good reason why we couldn’t take them and they don’t accumulate) and a very encouraging culture regarding time off, but it’s a trade off in return for taking AL responsibly and there being an instance system for sick leave. (UK practice is stricter on sick leave because it’s decoupled from leave compensation. Management can impose limits on instances per year and ask for weekly check-ins, and also consider termination for long absences, but this must be on a case by case basis. We require self-certification/doctors notes for occupational health monitoring. It’s the trade-off for more generous leave policies, although the actual sick pay minimum is pretty ungenerous.)

        It’s most likely that OP3’s employee is trying to create a de facto altered schedule in a job with a lot of coverage needs. IME people get a bit awkward about such things because of our business needing coverage even at senior management level, and it’s written down in our company handbook that we can’t just use flexible working or AL to create regular days off every week. We’re needed for availability reasons on a five day a week schedule, and while there’s no problem with taking odd days off here and there and holiday doesn’t have to be used in week long chunks, we can’t simply work a 4/10 by condensing our contracted hours down into four days or set up a standing day off by using PTO every week. We also have to give good notice — eight weeks — of time off exceeding two working weeks so we can find coverage. I’ve been used to negotiating informally between my colleagues because of coverage needs, and now I’m in a slightly senior role, I think out beforehand about commitments that fall at regular times of the month — for instance a building users group meeting that happens on the fourth Thursday and which really needs continuity of minutes from one month to the next because of several big issues that are trying to get resolved. I therefore try to fit my need for a week off and even other trips around this fourth Thursday. I also know a chief exec who never took time off at the beginning of a month because he wanted to always be at the new starters’ induction day to welcome people to the organisation. As a new starter myself into the role of ‘Most Junior of Junior Minnows’, I was thrilled to be in an org where the CEO cared enough about that to be there on an ongoing basis.

        So while it may seem ungenerous on the surface, your company is giving you PTO as a benefit and you do need to use it sensibly around big commitments. To me it sounds like the guy is in that kind of a job and thus needs to be a bit more collaborative in when he requests or takes time off.

        1. Freya*

          At the start of the year, I knew I wanted two specific days off during a time that is a slow period for my work – but because it’s both school holidays and a slow period, I knew it’s a very popular time off request amongst my co-workers (like, half my coworkers ask for time off during two specific weeks most years), so I knew I had to book it then and there (so I did, and only just got in before the coworkers who had to be refused for coverage reasons). I’m quite looking forward to those two days off next month!

    2. kalli*

      Plus if they always have a balance of 2-3 days they’re not taking more than they’re allotted.

    3. Also-ADHD*

      It could be a matter of bad PTO planning for the role, but just “take less PTO” is odd feedback if they’re not going into the red/taking more than allowed (going into the red is even allowed in many companies that clear the balance at end of year so everyone doesn’t take all their vacation at the end of the year).

    4. doreen*

      If the person uses up their accruals immediately and “hovers” around 2-3 days in the bank, that means they are probably taking at least a few days a year unpaid for the other commitments. I don’t read “hovers” to mean that they always have a minimum balance of 2-3 days , but rather, that there are times where there are no days and times where there are 4. And that is often going to mean needing unpaid time off when your balance is zero and you need to take a day off to get your couch delivered. One day a year is not going to affect your work, but I’ve known people who took a couple of weeks off unpaid every year and that did affect their work.

    5. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      They don’t go from 2-3 days to 15-20 days, everyone else has 15-20 days while this person has around 2-3 days in the bank due to PTO off.

      Which it doesn’t matter how much is in the bank if their time off is causing problems for others. Not that you can’t take time off, but you need to plan. You can’t look at your balance and go, hey week available, I’m outta here. Which I think is more the problem. You need to look at your balance and your workload and figure out, hey, if I get to this point in the project, its mostly waiting for other people so I can take off. Or plan your year’s worth of time off, then plan your projects around it.

      1. el l*

        Agree, that’s how I read it too.

        Having a day job means you do have to do a small amount of balancing your vacation desires against deadlines, known periods of busyness, and coverage (if that’s a thing in your industry). Not saying you can’t take time off, you should, just…timing matters. And when a pattern is developing of balls getting dropped, yes, employers are absolutely in their rights to say no.

      2. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

        Exactly. I have plenty of PTO I can use, but I’m not going to use it at times when I know I need to be around for specific work events or prep for those. I’m going to save it for down times in my work. Because frankly that’s less stressful for me anyways.

  24. Caroline*

    My husband took some voluntary, approved time off at an inopportune time last year and dropped a ball in the process. As a result, his office implemented vacation blackout periods at key times this year. But their work cycles on a 2 and 4 year cycle…they have a few events per year but the major events are at longer intervals. This is a huge year, and between major and minor events he has **five months** of blackout periods. We had a milestone anniversary this year and wanted to take a trip, and we have to wait until December because every other time we wanted is either blacked out for him, or my (much shorter) busy season at work, or too miserably hot in the destination we chose. Fortunately next year should be quiet and restrictions should be minimal.

  25. Elle by the sea*

    I wonder if these resume templates have been created by people who aren’t American. There still are many countries where resumes with photos are the norm.

  26. Editor Emeritus*

    In my mind, the term “junior” should only refer to experience, not position in a hierarchy.

    My second job in the UK was with what turned out to be an extremely hierarchical boys’ club of a company, with a boss who would only assign me the least challenging projects that came up. I was certainly qualified to do more, with about 25 years experience in communications. (I knew it was a step down from my previous position, but the job description had made it sound like a much more autonomous role.)

    So yeah, I was insulted when someone referred to me as a junior employee, as if I needed hand holding to do simple tasks.

    1. Caroline*

      In that case I’d probably use phrases like “just joined our team” and “is shadowing me this week”. If safety awareness was concern, I might add something like “Dave has considerable experience in widget sales, but he’s new to the industrial side of the business and wanted to see a factory floor for himself” to convey that you might need more instruction on how to be safe.

  27. Irish Teacher.*

    LW1, while I wouldn’t think “junior” is derogatory in and of itself, if your company or field doesn’t use it, I could see it coming across that way. It’s not a term used in teaching (at least in Ireland) and while it would be reasonable for me to describe a new grad as a “newly qualified teacher,” for me to describe them as a “junior colleague” or “junior teacher” would make it sound like they have less responsibilities or authority than I do, which isn’t true.

    So I could see that coming across poorly. I don’t know if your field is similar or not.

    LW5, I wonder if another factor could be increased globalisation. There do seem to be countries where a photo is expected and an online tool may not have been from an American site. I’ve read advice here and elsewhere that made me wonder if I was missing something, then found out the suggestion is not applicable to Ireland. Thank you notes were the big one.

    1. EA*

      OP1’s description shows that this is clearly not a school or education setting, so I don’t think teaching terminology is really relevant advice. As Alison said, it’s different in a corporate setting where using junior and senior is normal. I was a teacher myself, and honestly it’s just completely different; you can’t just translate school workplace advice to most other workplaces.

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        I wasn’t suggesting that education terminology is likely to be relevant, just giving an example of how they could sound off in a field which does not use that terminology. From the letter, it sounds as if it might also not be used in the industry she is in as she mentioned it having been common in her previous field, which I took to mean she was using a term from her previous field even though it is not used in her current one.

  28. Elsa*

    I read letter #3 a few times, and it looked to me like the “problem” here is that one employee is taking all or most of the vacation that he is allotted, while the general workplace culture is to only take about half of the vacation days that are given. “he usually hovers around a balance of 2-3 days banked (compared to most other people who have 15-20 days available at any given time)”

    This is messed up. Vacation days are part of employees’ compensation and they should be expected to take all or most of them! There is no virtue in having 15-20 days in your vacation bank that you never use. And if an employee’s workload is so heavy that they fall behind if they take all of their vacation days, then that is a problem with the workload.

    1. Alan*

      Yeah, I had the same thought. Alison’s response here seemed different than what she’s said in the past. The issue really shouldn’t be taking the time off but rather the failure to produce as expected. And I saw no indication that the person was taking leave without pay, just that they were using the vacation allotted to them.

    2. jasmine*

      Yeah the comparison makes me wonder if employees in general are able to take all their vacation days while still meeting their job requirements. If they can, then OP should start encouraging everyone to start taking more time off! 15-20 days banked is a lot. And if not, then they need to be upfront about it when hiring. If I’ve given a PTO allotment, then I expect to be able to take all of it, it’s part of what I consider in the offer.

      If you think it’s reasonable for the employee to get the job done while taking all of their PTO, but they’re still dropping balls, then that’s a different issue. But the fact that others are leaving so much of their PTO unused is concerning.

    3. Festively Dressed Earl*

      LW #3 is missing a key piece of info: is this employee dropping the ball/overwhelmed because he’s never around, or is there something else going on? It’s worth looking at other reasons the employee is floundering before jumping straight to ‘overuse of vacation time’.

    4. fhqwhgads*

      I read it a bit differently. I thought that LW was indicating the employee in question basically uses all their vacation as they accrue it, leaving a very small leftover. Whereas the rest let it accrue larger, and then take their however-long vacations, and then accrue again.

  29. andy*

    I do not refer to younger colleagues as Juniors in front of customer, ever. It lowers their authority, generally makes them less trusted and there is absolutely nothing to gain by doing it. It actively makes their work somewhat harder for no gain.

    1. Wings*

      Well, the way I read it is that LW usually performs the work on client site alone but is now bringing along two other colleagues to observe and learn and needs client permission for them to get access. It’s not outrageous to explain that to the client and there’s a lot to be gained. If a vendor explained that to me, I would apply for the permits and escort them for their visit (host on site is mandatory and expected in our industry) but without any explanation, I likely would just tell them that unfortunately we can only allow one (properly vetted and authorized to work alone) person at the site, no exceptions. Whether they would call their colleagues “junior” or “in training” or something comparable would make now difference to how I’d treat them.

      1. AlternatePerspective*

        They can explain that they’d
        like two new colleagues to observe (without commenting on seniority) privately and in advance which also gives the client the chance to say no. That should happen regardless. The actual introductions up arrival/meeting should just use terms like “my colleagues”

        1. Wings*

          They can but for “relatively new grads” (according to the letter) with significantly less experience than LW “junior” sounds like an accurate description (in relative terms) so they don’t necessarily have to go out of their way to come up with alternative wordings. After all, the question was whether “junior” is derogatory (it’s not according to Alison) and andy was saying that it’s always undermining (which I’m arguing it’s not always). This sounds like a long-term B2B vendor/client relationship and when you are asking the other party for a favor, being truthful, clear and concise is usually the best way to go. There is no indication that the term “junior” was used more than once in the initial request to permit observers.

        2. Myrin*

          OP referred to the coworkers as “junior” prior to their meeting in person:
          “I sent a note to the vendor requesting permission for them to attend and in doing so referred to the two coworkers as “junior colleagues” of mine.”
          And given that she has thought about this so much that she’s written a relatively lengthy letter to an advice columnist about it, I’d bet that upon arrival, she used basically anything but “junior coworkers”.

          1. Pyjamas*

            I assumed the note was an email and that she either cc’d her colleagues or forwarded the thread to them after bender ok’d the request

      2. andy*

        I would say that I have two colleagues to observe and I would like access for them. It is honestly weird that you would allow team to come only if some of the team are juniors, but not if the observing people are seniors.

        1. doreen*

          I think that’s very dependent on the situation- at my last job, it caused a to-do more than once because someone met with people from another agency who were not his peers. It wasn’t that these commissioners couldn’t have met with someone from my agency – but it should have been the commissioner of my agency, not a first-level manager. So if someone wanted to bring senior colleagues to observe, I would have checked to see if someone senior to me should have been present as well.

        2. Angstrom*

          As I understand the OP, the term was being used to set expectations , so shorthand for: “They may ask questions that show a lack of knowledge or experience. This is not an accurate reflection of our firm’s expertise.”

        3. Wings*

          That’s not what I said. I said that the context is relevant and often cannot just be omitted. If you were asking me a favor and inconveniencing me and gave no context for the request, it would be an (almost) automatic rejection. This sounds like a long-standing B2B vendor/client relationship and many contexts could be beneficial enough for us to justify the added effort and cost of hosting observers (training new/junior/whatever colleagues, improving processes and bringing along a development manager/lean practitioner/whoever etc). But the observing might be very different depending on the context (so it does matter) and there’s nothing inherently wrong for someone to be learning something; we’ve all been there. To me it sounds that “junior colleague” is an accurate and concise description of someone who is a “relatively new grad” and has significantly less experience (in the field at least). There are other words that could have been used as well but there’s nothing inherently wrong with “junior” either (like Alison explained too).

    2. Observer*

      generally makes them less trusted and there is absolutely nothing to gain by doing it.

      Well, in that case, of course you are correct. But in the LW’s case it is actually necessary to “lower their authority” and there is specific gain in that they want the “juniors” to have time to ask questions, and also they will need to be physically monitored. In other words, absolutely relevant information *for the LW’s situation*.

      I think it’s important to be able to distinguish situations and that’s a skill that these two people don’t seem to have developed yet.

      1. Friendo*

        Neither of those things mean junior! You can be a mid-career person transitioning to a new role, you can be someone new to the department who has worked at the same organization for a while.

        1. Alan*

          We may still disagree but I recently worked with just such a person and I would still say “early career” because for them, with their new role, they are early in their (new) career. I might also say “new to the job”, “new to the industry”, “new to our team”, whatever applied. I wouldn’t call them “junior”, especially if they were an older person. In the employment contexts I’m familiar with, that would be seen as oddly infantilizing.

          1. Friendo*

            New to the team and new to the job just mean different things than junior does and I think as many people would find “new to the career” or “new to the industry” as off putting as junior depending on their situation.

    4. LookAtMeI'mTheManagerNow*

      I don’t see how it benefits a genuinely junior employee to be presented as being responsible for things they aren’t. I want my clients to know who is junior and who is not so they know who to call in what situations. It benefits nobody when they’re using a junior employee as a primary POC – especially not that junior employee who gets put in an awkward position.

      1. Michelle*

        Agreed. Which is why I explain why I want to bring someone to a meeting or why I’m assigning a task to a particular person.

        “Two of my colleagues are learning about vendor relationships and would like to come along on this visit and ask some questions. Can you accomodate that?”

        “Angela’s our person for X so she’s taking that part of the project off my plate. ” or “I’ve asked Marcus to complete Y on this project.”

        Yes its more words, but it allows you to make expectations clear. I’d say all of these phrasings make the speaker/author look more in control and leader-ly.

  30. andy*

    With paid time off, it sounds like the colleague is not using too much of it, he is using it as it comes. Unless the expectation is that other people wont actually use the accrued time and will let it expire. Or am I understanding it wrong?

    1. len*

      I read it the same way as you and I was confused by the response. Surely if he’s provided that much PTO he should be allowed to make use of it all? I also didn’t see anything to indicate that the specific timing was an issue. If the company doesn’t function well if everyone works only what they’re actually hired for (45 or so weeks), seems like that’s on the company and not the individual.

    2. Green great dragon*

      I didn’t understand it either. The letter doesn’t suggest he’s taking any unpaid time, so he will have taken more in his first year or so than his colleagues did in their first year or so, but at this point everyone seems to be taking their allowance each year.

      Maybe LW’s thinking that since he’s got room to bank more, they would like him to take less than the allowance this year to get on top of the work? But I don’t think that’s a fair request.

      1. Lexi Vipond*

        That depends what the ‘additional time off for external commitments’ is – if he’s rushing to use up his annual leave allocation in the first part of the year and then needing extra time off for reasons that are sympathetic but not covered by e.g. sick leave, then that could be a problem.

        1. Green great dragon*

          That’s fair. It’s not how I read it, but if that’s what’s happening then a conversation about keeping enough banked to cover these commitments would be very reasonable.

          1. Lexi Vipond*

            Yes, I wasn’t sure either.

            I can see how the situation where someone gets behind with their work for no obvious reason and then vanishes for two weeks would be immensely frustrating – even in the UK where taking leave in blocks like that seems to be more usual than in the US – and I would probably be quite cross if I was being asked to cover for someone in that situation, assuming they’d had roughly the same workload as me to start with.

            But I’m not sure it’s a leave issue, rather than a general performance issue.

    3. What I think*

      The letter sounds to me like LW believes an employee who is performing badly, should not be taking extended vacation however, there does not seem to be an actual rule that says that. It appears to be a preference on LW’s part. Maybe LW should investigate if she has the authority to put that plan in place.

      1. Jennifer Juniper*

        I can see how it would be bad optics if a struggling employee took time off as soon as they accrued it. I am American, so there is a culture of not using PTO but being expected to let it expire.

        1. andy*

          But then the whole “generous PTO” is more of a scam then a real thing. If management promise PTO so that people work for the company, but then in reality punish people for taking PTO, then I would clearly fault the management.

          The struggling employee should be dealt with regardless of whether they use PTO or not. Maybe they are lazy, maybe they have too much work, may million things. But just denying him promised benefits is not the proper solution.

          1. Elsa*

            It kind of sounds to me like the employee is struggling because he’s being given 52 weeks worth of work to do, so then when he takes the vacation time given to him he looks bad.
            This sentence really struck me: “It feels unfair that I may need to adjust projects and reassign work to others in the office to make up for his extensive travel schedule.” I mean, isn’t that what happens when people go on vacation? It seems perfectly normal that coverage should be arranged when people are taking time off. The point of getting paid time off isn’t that you do twice as much work the week before or something.

            1. Lady Danbury*

              Completely agree with this! It sounds like there’s a bait and switch situation regarding “generous time off” if most people have 15-20 of 25 vacation days (5 weeks) available at all times. The problem isn’t the employee, it’s the company’s expectations of actual use of PTO. Of course the employee’s struggles should be addressed with them. But you wouldn’t tell a struggling employee that they should give back part of their salary that they’ve earned!

              1. Elsa*

                Yes, I was thinking “bait and switch” as well. Even when I read the letter, at the beginning I was like “wow, this employee is so lucky to work in a place with so much PTO,” and then as I kept reading I was like “oh no, not lucky at all, I’d rather be at my job with a smaller PTO allotment but at least it’s all real.”

              2. doreen*

                It might be a bait and switch – but it might not. I had two jobs where most people almost always had at least 15 days of some kind of leave available but it wasn’t a bait and switch. Most people stayed at those jobs a long time and vacation rolled over up to something like 40 days.

            2. Boof*

              Honestly it depends a lot on how senior the role is.
              If LW3’s employee mostly has long term projects and commitments, or is mostly in charge of things at a high level, then they should absolutely be the one setting their own pace/projects/meetings in a way that makes sense instead of asking their boss to coordinate.
              If they’re relatively low level and at the mercy of a bunch of other people’s projects and schedules, well they should try to plan time off around that or if it’s just impossible to do so discuss further with their boss the workload.

    4. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      No one is saying not use it — its just plan accordingly. You can’t just say hey I got some time saved up I am out of here. You have to plan and not drop your extra work on colleagues reguarly. Sometimes, stuff happens, you gotta do what you gotta do. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. It seems more like vacation takes precedence over work. Which is not why someone is hired.

      1. HonorBox*

        That’s how I read it too. It seems like the employee is prioritizing time off over that which earns him the time off. Of course when we’re using PTO something we do may have to shift to someone else, but if there are balls being dropped and work performance is suffering, it makes a lot of sense to ask the employee to adjust.

        It might actually be easier to prioritize projects and have proper coverage if someone is taking a larger chunk of time a couple of times each year versus three or four days regularly. While that isn’t everyone’s preference, I know, it might make things less challenging in this situation.

        There’s nothing wrong with approving PTO, or not, when coverage is there or when projects are wrapped up.

      2. andy*

        But OP is complaining about that person not having accrued PTO. They are not complaining about PTO being taken without planning or warning. This is literally one of the sentences:

        > Would it be reasonable as a manager to say that he may have an easier time staying on top of things if he was around more often?

        If you would not took the vacation, you would had more days in the year to do the work. That is what this says. This person is not producing as much as manager wants. It could be that they are incapable, it could be that they have been assigned too much work. And manager wants to solve it by taking away their PTO, because then there will be more working days.

        1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          Balls are dropped and work has to be re-assigned. Don’t selectively quote. The LW pointed to an overall pattern of not accruing because they take a lot early on, while others have banked time this person does not. Then they take off causing problems for others. So it is definitely more a case of plan your PTO better than don’t take time off.

      3. Frankly, Mr. Shankly*

        For me, I have no colleagues- I’m a department of one, with constant day to day work piling up, interspersed with high volumes of day to day and special projects. There’s literally never a good time to take off. And they let me know it. I could lose days at the end of the year and my manager is treating it like that’s my fault- she’s the one that’s constantly letting me know that I can’t take time. And, tbh, taking time feels like I’m punishing myself because I come back to hundreds or thousands of updates to process that have built up….. it’s not fair to me me and it’s a risk for the company to not have coverage for me. So, yes, I feel scammed because while the job is what gives me the vacation, I’m set up to lose part of my compensation.

        1. Boof*

          I say tell your manager when you intend to take PTO and ask your manager who will be covering while you are out. If manger says no point blank ask them if they are denying you to be able to use your PTO. Basically ignore the hints that taking time off is undesirable or, if you’re feeling up to it and know there won’t be consequences, call it out “if you’re stressed about me taking standard time off what about hiring someone else” etc etc. And, of course, jobsearch*
          *I am sort of assuming any place that gives you a hard time about taking normal agreed upon time off would be even worse off if you actually quit and probably knows it and so won’t push you too hard about it/will readily back down if you call them out.

      4. jasmine*

        So I guess I’m a little confused about dropping extra work on your colleagues, because I’ve never worked on a team where taking vacation didn’t give the rest of the team more work to do. It’s inevitable, but I never wanted my coworkers to not use PTO because of that

        1. Orv*

          It depends on the job. For example, I’m university staff, and lot of my workload follows the rhythm of the academic year, so if I’m judicious about when I schedule my time off I can minimize the impact on the department.

  32. Harper the Other One*

    LW1: when I was right out of college, I have a feeling I might have had my feathers ruffled by being called a Junior too.

    Today I am in my mid-40s and retraining so cheerfully title myself a Junior financial accountant because I understand that’s it’s about experience level at my specific job, not some sort of statement about me as a person.

    I’d suggest that you talk to both employees and point out that this isn’t like saying “pay attention, junior” in a dismissive way; it’s a description of experience level that can be held by someone of any age.

    1. PotsPansTeapots*

      Yep, I changed industries and am now in a junior role at my new company. I would have no qualms about someone introducing me to a client as a junior — I still have a lot to learn, more so than other employees! However, it definitely would have rubbed me the wrong way at my job fresh out of college. I agree this could be a “workplace norms” teachable moment, though I would keep my eyes open for signs that these workers aren’t being treated with respect in other ways.

    2. WellRed*

      This right here! I would probably have been bothered in my 20s. Now? Eh, I know who I am and what I’m capable of.

    3. Government worker*

      I’m a middle-aged career change student and I admit it can be awkward. At my new job someone even asked me if I was “a senior” because that’s how they refer to people with “senior” in their job title. But I am a student, which is even lower than trainee, and I’m not offended by that reality. It’s just a fact that I have the most junior position in the unit.

    4. Texas Teacher*

      When I returned to teaching after 15 years, I took a job at a new school district and my administrator gave all the new (to campus) teachers t-shirts that said, “Rookie.”
      I didn’t feel like a rookie but there was certainly a learning curve with the district and all the new technology, so in some ways I was a rookie! Never wore the t-shirt, though.

  33. allhailtheboi*

    LW2 raises a really interesting question which I’ve talked about with my boss in my previous job a lot. I worked in a care home, where residents (especially women) would sometimes request their personal care to be done by a carer of the same gender. We would have been heavily penalised by the regulator if these requests weren’t adhered to. Yet there is nothing in my country’s law which would legally allow us to hire on the basis of gender in this circumstance. We were lucky that most of our residents tended to be women and carers are predominantly women – I have no idea what we’d have done otherwise.

  34. Name and address supplied*

    I’m very glad to see a letter about a serious issue that I’ve attempted to raise in the past. I’m applying for roles in a field in which practically everyone—at least 90 percent on those in HR, 80–85 percent of those in the departments to which I’m applying, and a similar number of those who are successfully hired—are women, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in the least bit concerned that men who apply for these roles may not be being treated 100 percent fairly. Even if my suspicions are completely unfounded, the process certainly gives the appearance of being biased in favor of women applicants, all of whom can expect to have their applications reviewed by women, with those who are shortlighted being interviewed by panels of women and with those who are successful going on to work in women-dominated environments.

    Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed when trying to break into an industry in which the group to which you belong—whether Black, White, male, or female—are severely underrepresented? How should applicants address these concerns without fear of recrimination?

    1. KiraTheCat*

      I don’t know that I have tips, but as someone hiring in a very female dominated profession (medical adjacent, working with children), I would LOVE to have some male applicants. I know I have clients who would bond better with a man (because when male professionals come in they’re like a whole different kid), and having a male perspective on some of the issues families bring us would be incredibly helpful. I have been actively hiring for the better part of my time in this role (3 years) for one or the other of 2 roles and have received 0 male applicants for one of the 2 roles I hire for, and 0 qualified male applicants for the other (as in, asking for a wide range of degrees or experience related to children, and the application being from a web dev or graphic designer, or finance person, with no attached cover letter to explain the apparent career shift). I ask myself every time whether there are any males in the pool I can interview, and even on second look they’re not making it past the “slightly relevant experience or training” screen.

      Personally I think, if you have the choice, that an organization that bristles if asked about gender disparity in a field where it’s well-known that either gender is a minority, probably isn’t one you want to work for. I know we’re mostly women – if you want to talk to a male employee about working here to get a sense of the vibes, or ask questions about what we do to ensure that minorities are treated fairly and have opportunities, go ahead. I want to hear about people’s concerns when we’re hiring, otherwise I can’t address them so that we can both figure out whether it’s a good fit.

      1. Name and address supplied*

        Thank you very much for your response. My most recent male interviewer did in fact say that they had received a more diverse range of applicants than usual—he went on to say what I’d already noticed, which is that the overwhelming majority of those who work in this particular field are White women—so perhaps bringing this up directly isn’t the worst idea. That said, I find it very difficult to believe that a not-particularly-attractive man in his thirties asking a college-educated twenty-something-year-old woman why they don’t hire more men wouldn’t immediately give her “the ick” and lead to my application being shredded!

        1. Observer*

          That said, I find it very difficult to believe that a not-particularly-attractive man in his thirties asking a college-educated twenty-something-year-old woman why they don’t hire more men wouldn’t immediately give her “the ick”

          Well, yes. Because your framing here is really problematic. Why are you assessing the interviewer’s attractiveness? Why are you assuming that the interviewer is not only assessing your attractiveness, but judging your behavior based on that?

          But also, why would you ask that question? You know that the field is heavily dominated by women, and so is the *applicant pool* so it’s to be expected that any given company is going to have a fairly female heavy staffing ratio. So the question comes of as more like a challenge / whine by an entitled white guy than an honest attempt to understand the situation.

          A better question would acknowledge the imbalance and ask them how they handle it. It’s important to realize that in heavily male dominated fields, women have the same issue but in many companies it would be *very* poorly received for a female applicant to ask such a question. This is something that your interviewers are very aware of. That’s not your fault, of course, but it’s likely to color how people “hear” any question you ask.

          1. Name and address supplied*

            I made no comment whatsoever on the attractiveness of anyone other than myself. I also didn’t mention my race—you simply assumed it. As for the rest of your comment, it comes across less like constructive criticism than an attempt to excuse the way things are; if you wouldn’t accept “but Black people don’t apply for these roles” as a valid excuse for racial disparities in the workplace then I’d suggest that you should stop using “but men don’t apply for these roles” as an excuse for sexual disparities.

            1. jasmine*

              Observer did mistakenly make a point about you referring to the interviewer’s attractiveness, but they did weren’t making excuses and the rest of their comment stands. Your framing of the situation is still odd. You still made a point about attractiveness and how it would affect how your question would be perceived. And she’s right that the way the question is phrased will come off poorly in an interview, and also is just a vent (“why is this thing about your company messed up” is just not going to get you useful answers even if the interviewer doesn’t mind it- as opposed to “how are you working to address the disparity in your department”).

              Of course “Black people don’t apply for these roles” isn’t a valid excuse, but do you think Black applicants can ask “why don’t you hire more Black men?” without sounding confrontational? Regardless of their age or gender or attractiveness (??). But Observer already mentioned that when she said that women wouldn’t be able to ask the same question in male-dominated fields.

              “A young woman wouldn’t take this question well if it’s asked by an older, unattractive man” is problematic phrasing regardless of what the question is, and the fact that we’re talking about a disparity that affects men right now does not absolve you from sexism.

              1. jasmine*

                *why don’t you hire more Black people, not why don’t you hire more Black men

                ugh typos galore. I should’ve proofread

              2. Name and address supplied*

                I think Observer made my point for me when they wrote that “the question comes of as more like a challenge / whine by an entitled white guy than an honest attempt to understand the situation.” The reality is that certain questions are perceived differently based on the race, sex, age, and, yes, even the attractiveness of the parties involved. Acknowledging that fact doesn’t make me a sexist any more than it makes me a racist, an ageist, or a lookist—that is, not at all!

    2. metadata minion*

      What does upper management look like? There are plenty of female-dominated professions in which men are still advantaged in hiring and promotions.

      1. Name and address supplied*

        There are certainly more men in upper management, though no more than you’d expect in a fair system (perhaps 45–55 percent). But that doesn’t particularly concern me. I’m looking at entry-level jobs and, over the past year or so, I’ve dealt with dozens upon dozens of women—HR officers, heads of department, and so on—and no more than, say, half a dozen men. That upper management is more balanced doesn’t seem to have any effect on hiring.

        1. Roland*

          > That upper management is more balanced doesn’t seem to have any effect on hiring.

          That is an assumption, and one I would not assume myself. I’ve definitely heard of cases where men somply applied waaaay less, and that actually led to male applicants having an easier time. Imagine, if you’re hiring for 10 roles and haev 2 male apps and 100 fmale apps, you could hire 100% of male applicants and then the fact that only 20% of staff are men would absolutely not mean that men were discriminated against, the opposite if anything. Even balance in higher ranks can also suggest that men have an easier time being promoted. Not saying either of those IS for sure the case in your field, but they are strong possibilities.

  35. General von Klinkerhoffen*

    LW5: I’m pretty sure that “snazzy” and “resume” are words that should generally not coincide.

    In fact, I would assume that a snazzy resume would be immediately disqualifying for many roles. And those where it would be advantageous would not want candidates to have used a template!

    1. Also-ADHD*

      Eh, I have hired to roles where design would’ve been somewhat relevant to resumes (design/creative focused or inclusive roles) and templates are fine. Good use of a good template!

      I do agree pictures don’t belong on US resumes (others have noted different cultural expectations) but it’s a little silly to me to think of it as addressing bias in any way with how many roles I’ve seen use portfolios, links to LinkedIn, or even videos early in the process, plus they learn what you look like sooner or later either way. If people are going to be biased, I’d rather they be biased quickly enough I don’t set time aside to interview.

  36. Dood*

    I don’t know if my comment posted before or not, but LW3, if you haven’t already done so, I’d advise touching base with the employee to ensure you’ve done everything you can to support them and set them up for success, including putting any accommodations or adjustments in place they might need. I don’t think focusing on them taking their leave that they’re owed as part of their remuneration package is the right approach.

    1. Boof*

      Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it sounds like the employee is taking all their normal PTO, all their sick leave, and some sort of unpaid leave or something on top of that? “needs additional time off for external commitments” – I’m not really sure what that means (is that the sick leave for doctor visits, or additional unpaid time off, or even extra paid time off for lots of random urgencies like needing the plumber to come over or something, IDK) – I’d agree if they were taking the allotted PTO and no one else was I’d seriously look at workload/culture, but if they’re really regularly exceeding their PTO and falling behind then they really need to examine whether they’re right for the work, or if they need to be part time, etc*
      *I s uspect someone will bring up medical accommodations but I’m pretty sure that “pay full salary for less work” is not a reasonable medical accommodation, vs “allow flexible schedules” “allow WFH” basically still get commensurate work for the pay in the end is the intention.

  38. Nanashi*

    Japan requires photos on a resume, though I’ve seen some expats get away without for an initial online application.

  39. Bud Nipper*

    LW2 – Can we please stop using “even” to describe groups of employees (“even the receptionists”)? It reeks of classism.

    1. Nebula*

      I think in this instance, the LW meant it to convey ‘even people who have no clinical contact with patients’.

    2. Nancy*

      I think LW2 simply meant receptionists don’t need to see patients undressed, so there wouldn’t be a patient comfort reason for not hiring men.

      1. LW2*

        Exactly. Someone who doesn’t want a male doing her pelvic exam shouldn’t have the same problem with a male being the one to check her in for her visit, or do her blood draw. Absolutely nothing against receptionists at all.

  40. ElliottRook*

    Re: #1, I’m 38 and was raised in the US Bible Belt/south. There IS a connotation of “junior” as meaning younger, inexperienced, unqualified to take over the family business, etc.–and it can come across as overly familiar, like an older male customer calling a younger female staff member “sweetheart” or “hon.” The younger staff members may not be familiar with the rank context (junior/senior), and are taking “junior” as meaning something borderline derogatory. In that case, their annoyance would be totally justified! I think this calls for a conversation to make sure they understand the other context (rank/tenure within the organization) to clear the air. If they’ve got the wrong impression, the right information would be good for them to have going forward.

    1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

      I agree, I don’t think they understand the context of why OP used junior. And it could happen again with someone else. In my experience it is pretty common to say junior or senior and sometimes its even in their title.
      I think OP should have a conversation with them to clear the air. The others may have experience and can explain why they felt the way they did. It could be very valid reasonings, and the OP can explain why she called them Junior.

  41. AnonRTnow*

    for OP #2 I work in healthcare (have worked for 2 of 3 major health systems in my area) and can tell you that most OBGYN have a bias towards any qualified self-identified male candidates. (meaning they specifically recruit and try to hire them). Alison is correct that what you are seeing is that most self-identified males do not go and apply for these types of positions. I can tell you that whenever an OBGYN trainee (think resident or fellow) APP (think nurse practioner or physician assistant) or attending (think MD or DO doctor) joins a practice the clinicians are SO EXCITED. The same goes for all levels of staff. Unfortunately it is difficult to find qualified candidates who self identify as male.

  42. Lily Potter*

    #3 – I’d begin the discussion with this employee about why he’s struggling and if there’s support that can be given there. The employee needs to be held the same standard of work output as his peers but maybe there’s some kind of impediment to that happening that’s unrelated to PTO. As a part of this discussion, it would be fair to remind the employee that even when he goes on PTO, he’s still responsible for making sure his job gets done. Anyone who’s worked successfully in a salaried role knows the fun of having to work like crazy right before and right after a vacation week – it’s just a part of work life but it may not be something that LW3’s employee has absorbed. The job has to get done whether you’re on PTO or not, but LW#3’s employee may be thinking “well, I may be a week behind but I was on PTO so it’s okay”. Ummmm……no. You overproduce ahead of time, make sure someone is covering for you while you’re gone, and you deal with a mountain of work when you get back. It sucks, but it’s how it is in many places.
    Obviously, this conversation to be handled delicately, because you don’t want the employee to leave the conversation thinking that they can never take a day off – but it would be a kindness for LW#3 to make sure their employee understands this professional norm.

  43. Nightengale*

    It’s mostly self-selection

    Health care – out side of doctors and administrators – skews very female
    I worked at a rehab hospital for awhile where 80% of the employees were women.

    In the case of doctors, it depends widely on the field
    OB-gyn and pediatrics (my field) are increasingly female
    Pediatrics residency programs are about 75% female these days
    Some surgical fields are almost entirely male – 18% of orthopedic surgery for example

    Things are changing. In the early 1990s my father was doing physician recruiting for a hospital that only had male OB-GYNs. He was told “you can’t place a male OB here” meaning the patients wanted to have the option to have a female doctor. He did hire a woman. She changed in the nurses locker room because the rooms were labeled doctor/nurse rather than men/women.

    1. Elle*

      I work with a lot of OB/GYN, pediatric and dental students through work. They’re almost all female. Same with the medical assistants. I have no idea why but we’ve all noticed it.

    2. Kitten*

      I think in the 90’s was the beginning of women being the majority of OB/GYNs prior to that it was hard to find a woman doctor

      1. Nightengale*

        yup. In the 1990s, when my father was recruiting the first female OB to that hospital, I was in high school. I’m now a doctor myself (and to bring up another thread, not even a junior one). When I was in medical school in the early 2000s, most of the OB-GYN attendings were men but most of the residents were women. One of the male residents I worked with had transferred in from another program to fill a spot due to the high rate of maternity leave among the residents.

  44. Michelle Smith*

    LW1: For once I am going to disagree with the advice given. It’s not derogatory necessarily in every culture, but it was jarring to me just to read. The same information could be communicated by simply stating that they were there to observe you because they’d not been on that kind of call before.

    For what it’s worth, my bosses have never referred to me as junior in any of the jobs I’ve ever worked in, across several industries and government. My current boss introduces me as her colleague to outsiders, no qualifiers.

    1. LW 1*

      Interesting! Thanks for your perspective.

      My current and past bosses have never introduced me with the word “junior”, but it’s very common and normal for them to introduce us by job title (which makes the hierarchy pretty clear). It’s never felt weird to me. If we’re talking with someone external, I actually want them to know my boss is my boss so they can interact with us more effectively.

      From the responses, it sounds like this is an industry culture-specific issue. Do you mind if I ask – is hierarchy not referenced much at all in your workplace culture, or is it just that you use different words for it?

  45. Hyaline*

    Ok I can see how *if you don’t know that it’s incredibly common parlance used to describe length of time in a job* junior could sound infantilizing. In other situations “junior” can be used to put people down (“easy there, junior”). So I’d give these employees grace for their outsize reaction, but know they’ll thank you for introducing them to (very!normal!) terminology later.

  46. JP*

    The PTO question is something I’ve been struggling with a lot. I have a coworker who I believe negotiated for more time off as part of his compensation package. He likes to travel, good for him. But, it means he’s off a lot, so there are issues of coverage, as well as issues of him pushing work off onto other people because he doesn’t have time to address everything. So, of course resentment builds up, but then I also feel guilty because he’s just taking advantage of this benefit that is part of his compensation, which is his right to do.

  47. jenny_linsky*

    The letter about female staff in medical offices was very timely: just last week I was getting a mammogram, and after years of having them done and noticing I’d never seen a male mammogram tech at any of my appointments, I asked the tech if there are any men doing the job. She said that she’s aware of one male mammogram tech in Florida (we’re in Pennsylvania) who had to go to court to get the job, as initially the employer didn’t want to hire him because they didn’t think women would be comfortable with a male tech. She said “I agree with him legally–he has the training, he should be allowed to do the job. I just wonder how many women would be comfortable with him.” I do suspect it is largely a self-selecting kind of thing.

    1. metadata minion*

      I wonder if there are any mammography clinics that specialize in trans clients. I’m getting my first mammogram in a couple months, and I think I’d actually very slightly prefer a male technician, because it would take away a bit from the emphasis on “hello, WOMAN, welcome to the WOMEN’s health center for a scan of your WOMANLY BOSOM”. Sigh.

      1. Butt in Seat*

        That’s a great point and question.

        I do know the large health system near me has moved away from everything in the mammography areas being pink (pink gowns, etc) for exactly that reason.

      3. Orv*

        I’ve been avoiding it for pretty much that reason, although my situation is slightly different.

  48. Nonanon*

    LW5:
    Purely based on anecdotal evidence, I think “picture on resume” might be Bad Advice Given by University Career Centers(tm)(I’d stick a jingle in there if formatting allowed for it). My partner recently had to build a resume for a class assignment, and I was flabbergasted that he had to include a headshot.

    1. Another Hiring Manager*

      Someone mentioned elsewhere that it’s standard practice in some countries to do so. I’ve received some pictures with resumes.

      I don’t like the practice, but it’s becoming more common. I remember a comment here a few years ago where someone said they wouldn’t interview someone who didn’t have their picture on LinkedIn. The (ir)rationale was, “they must have something to hide.”

    2. Jobhunter*

      The irony of the no photo on resume thing is most employers request applicants’ LinkedIn profile now or even prefer to review that instead of your resume, and that does have your photo, so….

    3. Kevin Sours*

      Not only is it not great advice in the US, it will 100% get your application tossed for Federal Government positions.

  49. Governmint Condition*

    I’m not going to take sides here, but I am going to say that my agency renamed all job titles with “junior” in them, in favor of “assistant” or “trainee,” etc. They left most of the “senior” titles alone.

    I don’t know the reason, but some of us have speculated that the word “junior” was seen as age discrimination as it may have dissuaded older people from applying for those positions.

  50. McGovern's the One*

    It’s often said here that a resume is a marketing document, so if in a candidate’s estimation photo would be better in that regard why not A/B test some appilcations?

    1. Beany*

      But you’re supposed to be marketing your *skills and experience*, not your *appearance*. (Unless your appearance is inextricably linked to your skills, i.e. acting or modeling.) It’s no more relevant than listing pastimes like crocheting or SCUBA diving.

      I work in a sheltered academic environment, and the only place I encounter personal photos is on posters in poster sessions at large conferences . I think the idea there is that you want to make it easier for passers-by to know which nearby person (usually a student) to interrogate further on the poster contents.

      1. McGovern's the One*

        Agree that it’s not relevant, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be effective in some cases. A LinkedIn picture isn’t really relevant either, yet it’s fairly standard.

        1. Hlao-roo*

          It depends on what the candidate’s goal is. If the goal is “get a job, any job?” Maybe a photo will help them get a job (I think that would mostly work in cases where the candidate is conventionally attractive).

          If the goal is “get a job that is a good match for skills and experience, working for a hiring manager who evaluates for those things and not on gimmicks/biases?” A photo could easily be counterproductive because (1) managers who are in tune with cultural norms are likely to discard a resume with a photo for being outside the norms* and (2) managers who are drawn to the resume with a photo likely are because of (conscious or unconscious) bias, which means they might not spend as much time/energy making sure the skills and experience of the candidate are a good match for the role.

          *This of course assumes a cultural norm of no photos on resumes, so wouldn’t apply to places where a resume photo is expected.

          1. McGovern's the One*

            I get what you mean but I don’t think it’s as binary as that. To me, discarding a resume just because it has a photo isn’t really any different than valuing one more because it did.

            1. Analytical Tree Hugger*

              When I was a hiring manager or on a hiring panel, I would discard a resume with a photo because it’s not worth the risk of spending time on someone who doesn’t understand norms for the field (I’m based in the U.S.).

              I think discarding a resume with a photo (when that’s not the norm) is different from valuing a resume more with a photo because the former is aligning with a generally agreed on standard.

              How much of this curiosity about A/B testing is purely theoretical for you versus based on personal experience hiring/recruiting?

              1. McGovern's the One*

                I have been hiring folks for years, and I’m in the US. I wouldn’t include a photo in a resume myself, but I wouldn’t care if a candidate did.

                It’s true that it’s not the norm, but in my case at least I don’t think there’s a correlation between an outlier resume and not understanding overall best practices for the job.

            2. Orv*

              I would consider seeing a candidate photo risky because it would open us up to charges of discrimination. I don’t think I’d throw out the resume but I’d resent the candidate for putting me in that position.

  51. JelloStapler*

    My husband is a dentist- the wide majority of support staff in the pool are women. There are plenty of male OBGYNs where I live.

    1. Bast*

      You know, I’ve seen this on other comments and I’ve noticed it as well — the dentist pool may be split down the middle, (and my office is — 2 female dentists, 2 male) but the staff are exclusively female. Every hygienist, assistant, biller, front desk staff, etc., are female. They have all been female the entire time I’ve been there, despite front desk having a fairly high turnover.

      In my time in the legal field as well, I cannot think of a single male receptionist I’ve encountered either. Paralegals and legal assistants, yes, to a smaller degree than women but still there, yet not a single male receptionist.

  52. HonorBox*

    OP4 – I think you absolutely need to get clarity from your manager about the expectations for the meeting. You’re being put in a tricky spot because you supervise one person and report to another. I totally agree that meeting with each person individually is going to be the best path forward because you need to be able to mediate effectively since it sounds like both people were in the wrong. Ultimately, it may be that you need to get them to both agree that there is responsibility on both sides of the table.

    I will say that if your manager is only looking for your report to apologize and accept the responsibility entirely, it probably doesn’t make sense to have the meeting. But you don’t know that until you ask them. And if they’re not looking for just that, and are looking for mediation, I think you need to ensure that you have their understanding that you’re helping move forward from a difficult position and both sides need to be accepting of the outcome and can agree to move forward.

  53. Trixie the Great and Pedantic*

    re 5: thoughts on other job sites asking for photos? When I was unemployed and looking to get started on Fiverr, I stopped filling out my profile when I saw it asking for a headshot, because that seemed like a *really* good way for people to pick their freelancers on non-work reasons.

  54. Who knows*

    #1 – I’ve only worked in academia/tech where junior/senior is used as the LW describes, so this is interesting insight!

    What anyone should NOT do is what a senior coworker at my last job did, which was to refer to all the junior employees as “bachelor’s-level” when in fact many of them had master’s degrees. (Furthermore, she used that assumption to make a blanket-level statement that because we “only” had a BS, we couldn’t possibly understand a certain concept.)

  55. Nancy*

    LW5: it is standard in some countries to have photos on resumes. That’s the template your friend used.

      1. McGovern's the One*

        I’m in the US and wouldn’t submit a photo with a resume myself, but as someone who also hires I wouldn’t hold it against a candidate at all

  56. Looper*

    LW2- In my 20 years in healthcare, non-physician staff tended to be about 5 women for every 1 male employee, sometimes even less men, and my practice areas included emergency med, oncology, and urology, “the gyn of the penis”. It’s the nature of healthcare.

  57. Mid-level worker bee*

    LW 1: how far into their careers were the two junior persons? I ask because, although I am solidly mid-career (think 10-15 years in the same role), I do often work with colleagues who have 10+ more years than I do in the field. So while I am junior relative to THEM, and have a healthy level of respect for the experience gap, I am also not “junior” – and would be very annoyed at being described that way to an outsider. I’m admittedly hyper-sensitive to this: I’m female, in a male-dominated industry, and look young for my age, so people I interact with regularly make incorrect assumptions about my experience. Being introduced as “junior,” besides not really being accurate, would exacerbate some of those problems for me.

    That being said, all of the reasons you shared for using the term were relevant information that needed to be communicated, regardless of how far into their careers these persons were. I don’t think there was anything wrong with describing them as junior if they were indeed new to their role. If, like me, they are mid-career and were simply new to this particular context, I personally might have phrased it a bit differently – “Jane and Joe have been working with us in Teapot Contracts for 10 years, but have not yet been to the Teapot Assembly Room – is it alright if I bring them?” (Or whatever.)

    Yeah, it’s more words, but arguably the information that these professionals, though new to the environment, are not “new” to their role, is just as important as all the other information you wanted to communicate. For example, per company policy I provide intro briefs to EVERYONE who comes to my particular worksite (regardless of seniority or role in the company). The powerpoint deck I use is the same, but I always ask about their experience so I can tailor the conversation accordingly. Jane who has been working eighteen years is probably going to receive and understand the information differently from John, who has two years in the field, even though neither of them have ever been to my site before.

    1. LW 1*

      Good point!

      One was just hired a few weeks ago out of our corporate rotational program. One has been working for I think ~3-5 yrs, but recently advanced out of a technician-type role into a higher level position that requires more critical thinking and independence. The one who raised the issue was the recent rotational, but I’m pretty sure both felt hurt.

      1. Mid-level worker bee*

        That sounds pretty junior to me. I would also be very surprised to hear that objection from a new hire.

  58. Florence*

    Nurse of 12 years here! I can tell you that men very rarely pursue female health, not just for the sensitive nature but for their own protection. They can’t operate with the same level of independence because they often need someone else present for, for instance, a cervix check on a labor and delivery floor so they aren’t accused of inappropriate touching or inappropriate behavior. I think it’s a sec preservation thing. And honestly no one is going to have such a passion for mammography that they are going to want to put themselves in a dangerous position by risking normal touching being interpreted wrongly.

    1. Alan*

      That’s really interesting. I wonder if the same concern decreases the prevalence of men in teaching, childcare, etc.

      1. Orv*

        I think men have perceived childcare as risky ever since the “Satanic panic” prosecutions of the 80s.

      2. Now hang on a minute*

        Now hang on a minute. You may not have liked my comments in response to someone else in another part of the thread, but what on earth did I say in response to Alan that violated any of the rules? My comment was in direct response to his and expressed my belief, in an entirely calm and reasonable way, that this is ib fact a concern that many men have. Why am I being penalized for sharing my perspective?

        1. EDIA*

          I don’t know what you said, but I also don’t consider getting a comment removed to be “being penalized.” Comments get removed all the time for the sake of keeping the comment section respectful/relevant/functional. You’re not being personally targeted, it’s just that out of multiple (all?) of your comments apparently none pass the smell test. This site isn’t a public forum and never claimed to be. AAM can and does moderate by her own personal judgement.

  59. Former Retail Lifer*

    OP#5: My mom found herself job hunting again after 40 years due to the pandemic. She sent me a resume to review before she sent it out and, yup, it had a photo. It’s a relic from the 70s or 80s, I think? I’ve been applying to and hiring for jobs since the 90s and by then it already wasn’t a thing. As I’m aging, I’m really happy to see Alison’s answer that it has not become a thing again!

  60. Alex*

    #2 reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend. She works in a field that is majority women, but serves a population that includes a lot of young black men. Understandably, for their next hire they really wanted a Black man, but no qualified Black men applied. She was complaining that her bosses were “holding out” for a Black man and refusing to hire any women (she was complaining mostly because they are currently understaffed.)

    On one hand, my gut is that this is illegal, but what is the threshold for a “bona fid occupational requirement”? The office feels that they can better serve their population with a diverse staff, and I would agree that that is a good goal! I would say that it exceeds just plain “preference.” But refusing to hire more women did not seem legal.

  61. Cardboard Marmalade*

    For LW2, another commenter mentioned that this might be a geographically-influenced cultural bias you’re seeing, and I’d like to add another piece of anecdata to that, because I’ve been using a queer health center for my PCP and gyn healthcare for the past decade or so, and I’ve found that there’s a much more balanced gender representation there across all roles. Lotta male receptionists, and I’d say close to half of the folks I’ve received gyn care from have been men (both cis and trans). Obviously I have no idea what their hiring practices are like, but it feels safe to say that since part of their mandate is creating a safe and inclusive space for folks of various gender expressions, that ends up being reflected both in who applies for roles there and who they hire. All this to say that I think it’s a fascinating question you’ve raised, and I am so curious now about what kind of research (if any) has been done to quantify staffing differences across geographic regions and for serving different populations.

  62. BigBird*

    #5–just for laughs–My daughter graduated from an Ivy League school and one of her friends (Phi Beta Kappa AND gorgeous AND fluent in Mandarin) was told by her grandfather to include a photo on the resume she submitted to the US State Department! Fortunately she didn’t and was hired anyway. My daughter was horrified but it was a good example of what earlier generations of women had to deal with.

  63. SometimesMaybe*

    Junior – At first I thought this was a ridiculous letter. Junior is completely fine, and working with a lot of new grads, I am familiar with the we are all equal mentality, but the more I thought about it I see that it can be very context dependent. For example I dislike when senators are referred to as “the junior senator from North Dakota”, because their responsibilities are the same, in a leadership role, and junior sounds like a reference to not real (like getting a junior camp ranger sticker). But the way the way “junior” was described in the letter it seems perfectly reasonable and not at all demeaning.

    1. BottleBlonde*

      Yeah, I’m of two minds about it in general. It calls to mind a kerfuffle that happened recently at the hospital where my partner works, over whether it was appropriate to call new attending physicians a few years out of fellowship “junior attendings”. Obviously years of experience is important as a physician, but it was ultimately determined that referring to them as junior was disrespectful and also confusing because they have the same job and responsibilities as a “senior attending.”

      I think it’s appropriate if the person’s level of work is actually junior, but I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate if the only distinction is years of experience.

      1. Nightengale*

        That’s interesting. I definitely felt like a junior attending my first few years out of fellowship and wouldn’t have minded being referred to as such. Experience really can matter even if the job is the same. I’m 11 years out now and definitely don’t feel junior now. I’m an expert in some areas in my field and still learning in others (and plan to keep learning forever).

    2. Government worker*

      My understanding is that seniority in Congress does have real implications, like in terms of committee appointments, negotiating deals, moving bills through the system. So “junior senator” can be entirely appropriate to the amount of power they actually have.

      1. SometimesMaybe*

        I cede your point, however a junior senator from California might actually have years of service over a senator from Colorado. Titles themselves might have actual implications but the designation of junior may give the wrong impression of actual sonority, especially when dealing within a party.

  64. BottleBlonde*

    I’m interested in #2 – my OB/GYN is part of an all-female-staffed practice, and it is definitely a feature, not a coincidence. It’s right in the name (“Women’s OB/GYN of XX County”) and their website emphasizes that 100% of their staff (physicians, nurses, office staff, etc.) are female.

    I do strongly prefer a female doctor, though I mainly go to this practice because my specific doctor came highly recommended. I personally wouldn’t be bothered by a male scheduler or other office personnel, but I suppose some women might seek out a 100% female office for trauma-related reasons. Could it be legal for that reason?

    1. Dawn*

      I think someone would actually have to challenge it in court; in this case it’s kind of hard to give a blanket “yes this is legal/illegal” because I don’t believe there’s ever actually been legal precedent set on this.

      A lawyer could, of course, argue it both ways. I’d fall more on the side that it’s discriminatory on the basis that many people in that office won’t be involved in the examination side of things at all, but for a definitive answer you’d need it to go in front of a judge, and not a lot of people are rushing to sue for that one.

    2. Cinnamon Stick*

      My last GYN was at a Women’s Health Center, with only women medical professionals. The hospital system also has a Men’s Health Center. Some things are just easier to talk about when you’re with the same gender. They don’t, at this time, have anything dedicated to trans health.

      I agree with Allison that it’s likely self-selection, but it would be damn hard to prove otherwise unless someone notices a pattern of men applying and being rejected.

      I’ve had both male and female GYNs and my main concern was that they listened to me. One of the women was much less gentle during the exam than the men.

    3. 1 Non Blonde*

      I was wondering how this plays out with cultures who are more modest. I live in an area with a large Somali population, and have more than once wondered if it matters the gender of the doctor to this culture. Which I suppose I could easily google, but here we are.

  65. DisneyChannelThis*

    With regards to time off, how do you know when it’s okay? I’m slightly struggling with some aspects of my job, but I still want to use my PTO, it is part of my compensation package. I already have noticed that when I tell my boss I will be taking time (small like 4 day weekend), he doubles or triples my workload. It seems like the culture here is very much go above and beyond right before vacation to “earn” it. Whereas to me, vacation time is usually because I’m already very burnt out, I don’t want to work extra right before a trip, Im trying to pack, clean etc for the trip already!

    1. Lily Potter*

      Your boss shouldn’t be doubling or tripling your work before you take PTO. However, it’s on you to figure out how to get your job done while taking PTO. This is going to be office dependent, but in many cases for salaried employees, it IS going to mean working more beforehand or after you return from your time off.

      Now before someone chimes in that “It shouldn’t be that way!”, I totally agree. The thing is that very few companies keep extra people around to cover for PTO & vacations. The work still has to get done. What this usually means is employees working more before/after their time off and a co-worker nominally “covering” for you while you’re gone. Of course, this means that everyone has to add “cover co-workers’ vacation” to their own plates in return. LW3’s struggling employee might cry “I shouldn’t have to worry about working before/during/after my PTO!” but something tells me that they’re not covering for their co-workers in return.

    2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

      I’d be looking to get out, frankly. If that’s the culture then that’s not a place I’d want to work for very long. You have the right way of thinking about how to use your PTO!

    3. Tradd*

      I’m in an industry (intl transportation/customs broker) where the work HAS to be done while I’m gone. That means I’m getting documents, etc., ahead of time for when I’ll be gone and for a day or two after I’m back. If it’s stuff I can’t transmit to Customs before I leave, I do all the data entry so the other person in my dept can just hit the submit button while I’m gone. It means more work for me before I’m gone, but that’s just the way it is. I have friends who can just put an out of office on and no one deals with their workload while they’re gone. They don’t understand why I have to prepare in advance for being gone.

      DisneyChannel’s situation is different, but greatly increasing your workload, unless it’s to make sure stuff is done ahead for while you’re gone, is just wrong.

    4. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Consider yourself lucky. The real nasty is when your PTO gets approved and your workload triples when you return, cleaning up after messes made in your absence and redoing work correctly, leaving you more burnt out than before your vacation.

      1. Tradd*

        I just got back from being off two days the end of the week for an outpatient gynie medical procedure to, among other things, see if I have cancer. The amount of BS I’m having to clean up today is incredible. Some people (coworkers in other departments, customers) are incapable of handling me being gone. My coworker who covered for me did a good job, but the amount of idiocy I’m dealing with this morning is incredible.

      2. Tradd*

        I have actually cancelled more than one vacation in the past when getting ready to be gone and dealing with everything after my return would have been much more stressful than NOT going on vacation.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          Likewise, and taken equipment with me and worked remotely during the days of my vacation.

      3. Industry Behemoth*

        You should have seen the time at my PastEmployer, when accounting couldn’t figure out during my two-week absence which firm account to charge an in-house catering invoice to.

        I had to get someone to tell accounting, “Charge IB’s invoice to Firm Account Z1.” And that was two weeks *after* I got back, and discovered indirectly that accounting hadn’t handled the invoice correctly.

    5. Space Needlepoint*

      Yikes! You earn your PTO time by doing your work every day, you shouldn’t need to have it piled on right before. Especially since it will pile up while you’re gone anyway.

      I find that culture rather strange. If my direct reports are taking time off, all I want them to do is meet deadlines before they go and not leave anything hanging.

      Best of luck navigating this. I wish I had some useful advice.

    6. D.*

      same here!!! twice this has happened to me after medical leave. I’ve been out trying to take care of my health, usually returning before I’m really well enough because of financial pressures, and I get double the workload almost as punishment – thus exacerbating the health condition further, thus requiring me to take more leave… vicious cycle, and I don’t really know what to do about it.

  66. Spicy Tuna*

    For #2, I think a case could be made that there is a bone fide need for certain doctor’s offices to be staffed by women. I was trying to make an appointment for a mammogram and I was really surprised when a man answered the phone at the radiology center. I hung up, called back at a few other times, but it was always a man answering. I ended up making an appointment at a different location because I didn’t feel comfortable making the mammogram appointment with a man. It felt gross.

    1. Dawn*

      That’s, uh.

      He was just taking your appointment details, my goodness.

      I’ll leave it at that but I don’t that the argument that that’s “bona fide” holds water in that scenario.

    2. Tradd*

      With my medical group, which is part of a big hospital group, you call a central number to make appointments for all sorts of procedures, including mammos. You have no choice who answers the phone and arranges your appt time.

      1. RussianInTexas*

        Same. I have most of my doctors in the same huge hospital group, they have the central scheduling.
        Whoever answers your phone is not a person you would see in person, probably ever.

    3. RussianInTexas*

      Ummm…ok
      You know that the person answering the phone is not the person who will be doing the mammogram?

      1. RussianInTexas*

        Also, I just noticed you wrote “radiology center”. People are going there for all sorts of imaging, not just breasts.

        1. Industry Behemoth*

          Or sometimes a facility offers other types of tests as well. And sometimes men get mammograms too.

          On one trip to my local breast health center, I saw a guy who I eventually realized was also a patient and not a patient’s partner. The waiting area seats were individual alcove-style, and he did try to keep a low profile while waiting.

          1. RussianInTexas*

            The breast center I go to has a separate door to the male mammogram patients. The waiting room is fairly open, and the women are waiting in robes, so this is probably to protect everyone’s modesty.

            1. Dawn*

              I think also probably a lot of men are embarrassed to have to be screened for “breast cancer”.

              Speaking as a trans woman, I really appreciate when medical facilities limit the number of people I’m going to have to interact with in any situation that’s going to make my, uh, trans-ness obvious (for example, you can’t wear a wig in an MRI machine.) It just helps preserve everyone’s dignity as much as is possible when they can accommodate your desire not to be seen by other members of the public in circumstances you might personally find embarrassing.

    4. Observer*

      I ended up making an appointment at a different location because I didn’t feel comfortable making the mammogram appointment with a man

      This level of customer preference is highly unlikely to fly, from a legal POV. You’re not doing the actual mamogram with him, he’s just the scheduler.

      It’s possible that a case could be made for requiring the actual mamographer to be a female, but that’s a very different thing.

      Also, how do you know that the doctor who actually *looked* and your scans was a female?

  67. Jessica*

    Regarding BFOQs, I don’t understand how it’s legitimate to hire women only for a locker attendant role that may see female patrons naked, but not legitimate to hire women only for a role that gives women pelvic exams. Serious question, why?

    1. Caramel & Cheddar*

      The barrier to entry for becoming someone who gives pelvic exams is significantly higher than it is to being a locker room attendant, so the roles where the former is required are by nature harder to fill. For example, where I live, it’s really hard to find family doctors who will move to small or rural communities; it’s very possible a town might have only one person capable of providing a pelvic exam, and that person might be a man.

      1. Dawn*

        Well, also, the OBGYN themselves frequently owns the practice, so they don’t have to “hire” anybody.

        But that aside, the LW is talking about the staff of the entire office – and of course not every single person in that office is giving pelvic exams. I’m sure the receptionist, for example, only very rarely gives them.

        1. Nightengale*

          that’s probably less and less the case although I don’t have exact numbers at hand.

          More and more doctors offices are hospital owned, especially in fields that do a lot of inpatient work/surgery, but really overall. Setting up private practice, “hanging up a shingle” and doing all your own hiring is becoming less common.

          I’m a doctor looking to bring on a nurse practitioner soon and I do expect to be part of the interviewing and hiring process but I am not really going to be the one “hiring” the person in the sense I would be if I were in private practice.

          1. Dawn*

            No, but the point is that you didn’t hire yourself. OP of this thread said something about, “only hiring women to give women pelvic exams” and that’s… not really how medicine works.

      2. Dahlia*

        This is honestly an interesting conversation as someone who lives in a rural area in a country where a lot of your OBGYN stuff is just done by your family doctor.

        Our last main doctor technically specialized in ENT for a while before going back to general stuff and occasionally had to catch a baby because the person didn’t make it to the hospital with an actual labour and delivery unit.

    2. Observer*

      I don’t understand how it’s legitimate to hire women only for a locker attendant role that may see female patrons naked, but not legitimate to hire women only for a role that gives women pelvic exams

      In addition to the issue of barrier to entry, there are some other differences. The clinical nature of a pelvic exam changes the dynamics of the interaction. And while the pelvic exam is more intrusive by far, it’s also more limited.

      Also, there are legal guardrails around patient privacy. Now, I realize that those don’t always work, because perverts are perverts and they may not care about the legal risk (or think that *they* will never get caught.)

      But for normal and reasonable people these differences do make a difference in how the whole interaction takes place and in the safety of the patient / user of the locker room.

    3. Reading Rainbow*

      Because you select your doctor and do not select your locker room attendant. If you do not want your pelvic exam to be done by a doctor of a specific gender, you simply don’t make an appointment with a doctor of that gender. You’re not choosing a personal locker room attendant out of a lineup as you walk in the door.

  68. Throwaway Account*

    Re same sex medical staff for ob/gyn care – I believe that they have to have a woman in the exam room in some exam situations. So that means extra staffing if the practitioner is a man. That might be part of it too.

    1. Space Needlepoint*

      I doubt that’s much of a factor. The woman observing doesn’t have to be another doctor. It can be a nurse or assistant.

      1. iglwif*

        In fact it’s extremely unlikely to be another doctor. OBGYNs are expensive surgical specialists, and paid accordingly; nobody’s going to ask one of them to chaperone another when there are RNs, NPs, etc. — who make waaaaaaaay less money — available to do so.

    2. Reading Rainbow*

      Having an observer / chaperone / whoever is not a requirement for male physicians only. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are practices who handle it that way, but it’s not standard and would be foolish imo. If an exam should have a third party there for safety, that’s true for all instances of that exam regardless of the gender of the provider.

      1. RussianInTexas*

        I have had a nurse present for pelvic exams for the last 15 years or so regardless of the gender of the doctor.

        1. Reading Rainbow*

          Yep, and usually they do not point out that this is what’s going on to the patient. They just have someone there “assisting” them with the exam.

  69. Dawn*

    LW2: I think Alison’s argument about self-selecting is a compelling one. I’m a trans woman, and I doubt I’d apply for positions with an OBGYN’s office simply because I don’t want to go through all of the trouble of applying and interviewing just to be excluded because someone is transphobic. It’s literally not worth my time to apply for positions where the likelihood of discrimination is high, and I’d assume that the same applies to a lot of men applying for jobs.

    I only have so much time and so much energy and I’m better served spending it where it is most likely to pay off for me.

  70. Dawn*

    #5: Other thing to bear in mind there is that a lot of online content nowadays is made outside of the United States, and English is the international lingua franca.

    Like, to the best of my understanding, it’s still the norm for resumes to have photos in India, and an awful lot of English-language content online now comes out of India; just because you see something that’s in English, doesn’t necessarily mean that it was made with US norms in mind.

  71. I don't work in this van*

    If “junior” is not in the title, I can totally see this feeling icky. Reading above, it definitely seems very industry-specific, but I’ve only ever seen “Senior” applied as a qualifier, never “Junior.” I have seen “Associate,” which I think has less negative association. But I think in this case, it’s more that these folks don’t have experience doing this specific thing. I can imagine someone more senior ALSO not having done this specific thing, so how would you introduce them? E.g., I have 20 years experience in llama wrangling, but I’ve never wrangled a pig. Would that still be a junior colleague?

    1. LookAtMeI'mTheManagerNow*

      I got people complaining about “Associate” once because “it’s what Walmart calls its employees”. Anything that implies less experience will ruffle some feathers and also be used inappropriately by jerks, yet continues to have a legitimate purpose.

    2. TheReflex*

      Where I work we would have Associate-Junior-Mid-Senior

      Now it’s Associate-Level 1-Level 2-Senior . Nobody is offended to be called Junior anymore…

    3. judyjudyjudy*

      “Associate” doesn’t mean anything to me. The LW’s intention was to convey their lack of experience. I have zero clue if associate means no experience, a little experience, or a lot of experience.

      1. TheReflex*

        Right. Since in my line of business “Associate” normally means “fresh out of college”. I have no idea why “Junior” is deemed offensive but “associate” is fine

  72. Camellia*

    I’m 68 years old and had to start seeing an OB/GYN when I was 16 (no, not for pregnancy). The doctor was male. All the doctors I ever saw were male. It never occurred to any of us to insist on/search for AFAB doctors. Is this an age thing?

    1. Texan In Exile*

      I think it’s an “availability of female physicians” thing. My mom took me for my first pelvic when I was 15 or so and it never occurred to us to ask for a female doc because female docs were not really an option.

    2. Insert Clever Name Here*

      I don’t know that it’s an age thing so much as an availability thing — because I have the choice of seeing a male OB/GYN vs a female OB/GYN I have the opportunity to both have a preference and choose a provider based on that preference. I’d hazard a guess that there were even people who saw OB/GYNs in the ’70s that would have preferred a female doctor even without that being a choice they could make, just like there were people who would have preferred a male, or who didn’t have a preference at all.

    3. Dawn*

      My general experience is that it’s most common for middle-aged women (of which I am one) to demand a particular gender (or other characteristic) of practitioner.

  73. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    I’ve had 2 male and 3 female so that tracks with the ~40% male who go into OBGYN.

    At 3 of the clinics there were front desk workers who were male, but all the nursing staff were female which may actually fall under the privacy rule as all the clinics offer a female chaperone and both male gyn’s required it.

  74. CorporateDrone*

    The junior/senior letter reminds me of a coworker of mine who got upset because I wrote an email outlining my expectations of which parts of my role he would cover while I was away. (Something that was explicitly requested from the project manager)

    Specifically my coworker felt that using the words “As discussed, I am expecting” and “if needed I think you can drop the llama meeting” implied I see him as a junior member.

    I haven’t quite worked up the energy to address it with him aside from sending the email to a trusted coworker on a different team to ensure that I wasn’t being inadvertently condescending or something. They concurred my coworker was being insecure.

    In the letter writer’s case the folks in question ARE junior. I’d just tell them I didn’t mean to offend them and inquire how they would have introduced themselves. If they were hoping that the vendor didn’t know they weren’t the same level of seniority, maybe it would help to explain why the vendor needed to know they had less experience.

  75. Aphra*

    To LW1 – in the UK the countries which make up the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and some of the islands around the mainland) have their own, separate legal systems. In England and Wales, only barristers are entitled to argue cases in higher Courts. In England and Wales, when we say ‘lawyer’ we mean barrister. We also have Solicitors who can argue in lower Courts. Barristers are separated into Juniors and Silks, Silks being those called King’s Counsel (KC) who have been in practice for 10 years, have demonstrated skill in advocacy, been recommended by the Lord Chancellor (very senior lawyer who technically holds the highest rank of State) and completed a successful application process. It’s quite common for Junior barristers never to ‘take Silk’ and to remain Juniors throughout their career. It’s in no way a derogatory term in that context and some of the finest lawyers I’ve worked with have been very experienced Juniors.

      1. UKDancer*

        Barristers wear the wigs as a rule in criminal and some other cases. Some solicitors do apply for higher rights of audience allowing them to appear in the same courts as barristers and in those cases they can also wear wigs but of a slightly different design.

        Kings Counsel also wear wigs but again the design is different. Judges also wear wigs.

        There is an exemption for people wearing certain religious headwear, and examples given of this include the kippah, hijab and Sikh turban. I know of one Jewish barrister who wears his wig over his kippah but don’t know if that’s a common thing.

  76. Jessica*

    How on earth is having a female locker room attendant about “privacy” but having a female OB-GYN only about “preference”?

    1. I should really pick a name*

      You can choose you OB-GYN, you can’t choose your locker room attendant.

  77. I Have RBF*

    These two coworkers are relatively new grads, about 10 years less experienced than me, and have job titles below mine…

    The are junior to you. They are recent grads and have ten years less experience than you.

    IMO, they are being precious snowflakes. They seem like the type that expects to rise to CEO in five years or something, and expect to be people managers in two years.

    If they are under 30 and RCGs, they are junior. They are no longer college seniors, top dogs, they are back at the bottom in the working world.

    They need to grow up.

  78. Dandylions*

    #2 Legally there is likely no problem, not in small part because most women’s centers are part of large hospital networks where their overall hiring averages are fine. It’s also not like there are quotos on this stuff. Places only get in trouble in the US if its a legally hostile working environment. The fact that most nurses are women, most piplenenschools are filled with women majoring in nursing, etc. is not an issue so long as you are not making it difficult or negative for the few men that are nurses.

  79. Where are the men?!*

    Every OB/GYN practice I have used (in my approximately 40 years of having a functioning female reproductive system) has had a mix of men and women with mostly women. My current practice as a group of midwives for many of the services, so I haven’t had a male practitioner since my c-section in 2001. All of my mammography techs (approx 15 years) have been women, but I did have male ultrasound technician at my regular radiology practice when my breast cancer was being diagnosed. So, chances are good that either there are male employees that LW may never have seen, or it’s just the way things fell together with the applicant pool.

    1. Space Needlepoint*

      Quite so. When I was receiving radiation treatment for breast cancer, the tech was a man.

  80. TheReflex*

    #1 It seems to have become a thing in Software Development too. It used to be Junior/Mid/Senior. However some of the, well, “Junior” Developers take offense and their title is now “Software Developer level 1″…

  81. AC*

    Why would a privacy exception apply to locker room attendants but not to clinical roles in mammography or OBGYN?

    1. Dawn*

      As “I should really pick a name” already said, “You can choose you OB-GYN, you can’t choose your locker room attendant.”

      Not to mention that there’s already a drastic shortage of medical professionals of all stripes in most of the developed world; it’s not very useful to tell 49% of the population, “sorry, you can’t work in this branch of medicine” when a lot of people genuinely aren’t bothered and just want good, professional care.

  82. 1 Non Blonde*

    Is it possible the employee in LW3’s letter is struggling for a different reason? LW sees “takes a lot of PTO” and “overwhelmed at work” to be a cause and effect, which is quite possibly not the case. Is there training that this person needs on a process to complete their work? Do they have issues with coworkers? Maybe their desk isn’t comfortable!

    I think the conversation needs to start with what you’ve noticed about performance and leave out talk about the PTO. For a start, at least.

  83. TiredAmoeba*

    I don’t work in healthcare but know quite a few people who are and men tend to focus on the more lucrative specialties like surgical nurse. Also, women can be very weird about men being in “women’s” spaces, which would make them much less likely to pursue those roles. Hvae you ever seem the way a male early childhood educator is treated? It’s pretty awful. I can’t imagine being a non-doctor male in gynecology. Male OBs are already often accused of being perverts.

    1. Dawn*

      Sometimes – probably more often than not – that’s legitimate and not weird at all; I would hardly want to get into the history of relations between men and women but there’s reasons women are taught to do things like holding their keys as a weapon when walking alone and never leaving their drinks unattended.

      But there is a notable difference between “women’s space” (nice scare quotes btw) and “medical procedure”.

  84. SusieQQ*

    I find the term “junior” pretty infantilizing and have stopped using it, even with people who self-describe as junior. I’ve opted for saying “lower tenure” or “less experienced” instead. I agree with Alison that it’s normal to use though, it’s just a personal preference that I get a little bit of “ick” from it so choose not to use it.

    One of the problems I’ve seen with that word — and maybe it’s not unique to “junior” — is that sometimes it can seem to stunt people’s growth and confidence. I’ve had to tell people before that while they may be the lowest tenure and least experienced person on the team, maybe even with the lowest title, that does not make them “junior.” As in, they’re not entry level. They’re fully contributing, competent, trusted, well-respected employees and it hurts them when they’re constantly apologizing, qualifying their statements, and otherwise exhibiting a lack of confidence.

    1. Dawn*

      I think I’d prefer “junior colleague” over “less experienced,” if for no other reason than people would be wrong about the latter much of the time.

      Just because my particular role is subordinate to my manager’s, doesn’t mean that I’m less experienced – it’s frequently the opposite.

      I really don’t agree that it has all of the freighting that you’re assigning it.

      1. Beebis*

        I wouldn’t be offended by someone calling me junior but I would find it very odd if I referred to myself as such and someone refused to call me anything other than “less experienced” or “lower tenure”

      2. SusieQQ*

        Well, sure. I wouldn’t say someone is less experienced if they actually had more experience.

        I guess it depends on what you’re trying to say when you use the word “junior.” If it’s literally someone’s job title, then go ahead and use it. If I mean that someone is lower tenure or less experienced than someone else, I’ll just say that instead of junior.

    2. Lenora Rose*

      Lower tenure, especially in a job with no tenure or more, no hope of tenure, would just feel backhanded. And yes, I am aware tenure also means the duration of a thing, including general employment, but the fact that it also has its other meaning in academia means that when talked about in workplaces, I associate it with having a position where one is shielded from involuntary departure, something very few workplaces have.

  85. Junior Commenter*

    In my work, we have Teapot Clerks and Senior Teapot Clerks. Regular clerks aren’t referred to as “junior” so it would be a little weird if someone made a point of referring to them as such, and also some clerks continue in that capacity for over a decade, retaining the same title while getting regular seniority and cost of living raises (we’re all union, so it’s very standardized), but it would be weird to refer to them as “junior” when they’re extremely experienced and capable, and simply haven’t been promoted into the senior role (because there are a lot fewer openings at that level).

    This just isn’t the kind of thing where it’s an across-the-board thing. It depends on where you work and the type of work being done, and official job titles, and all of that. But “junior” certainly isn’t automatically or inherently derogatory.

  86. Reading Rainbow*

    LW #2: I think you are making a big assumption because you don’t have bigger context. Nurses, medical assistants, ultrasound techs, phlebotomists, and medical receptionists are all professions that are overwhelmingly dominated by women regardless of the specialty. If you spend a lot of time in medical offices, as a patient or an employee, the grand majority of the people you see will be female. I’ve worked in several practices that had nothing to do with any gender-specific care where all staff except physicians were female.

    I don’t think there is employer-side selection happening here because it’s an OBGYN– I would imagine that male applicants might self select out more often, maybe, and there are already not that many men doing those jobs in the first place and this sort of gender breakdown in a medical office is common across the board. Healthcare is an extremely female field on the whole, until you’re talking about the people with the most power and money, but that’s a different conversation.

    You do see more men in some very specific places and I do wonder what the cause of those pipelines are. Like, anecdotally for me, radiology techs handling xray or MRI are frequently men for some reason? That is the one niche I can think of off the top of my head where I always see a lot of dudes.

  87. Becca*

    I go to an explicitly all female obgyn office (ie all of the MDs are female, it’s stated on their website and is a draw for many people who choose to go to their office). The administrative staff is not all female. I only saw female nurses/medical assistants but I’m not sure if that’s explicitly promised or not.

    I wonder how that works – if it’s because the MDs are partners in the practice so they’re able to determine that they want an all-female practice? Or it might be ok because they’re part of a larger hospital network and the hospital as a whole isn’t female-only and there are other practices for the men to work at?

  88. coral fish*

    #3 – I find Alison’s response very confusing, the letter doesn’t mention him taking unpaid time off??
    LW doesn’t mention her employee submitting last minute requests or anything – just, actually using his benefits. Which it does sound like she has a problem with. Unless they’re running into a negative balance or something, there shouldn’t be a medal for hoarding PTO.

    I have been in a culture before where the workload meant it was impossible to actually take almost any PTO / there was guilt around using it. Never again!

  89. Anony8383*

    #1 Is the term “junior” derogatory

    You can and should continue to use the term “junior”. That’s just shows their naiveness to the work world if they are offended by it. So many junior/new hires out of college that I worked with want to immediately be senior after 1 or 2 years of working and they are so naive and don’t realize that they have much to learn before earning that senior title.

  90. Thisishalloween*

    The resume photo aspect is always interesting to me, since including it is very much the standard in other countries.

    1. Lenora Rose*

      It strikes me as a strange thing to include, in that it definitely opens up options for discrimination (actionable, like race or gender or age, and ones that aren’t actionable but definitely happen, like lookism and fatphobia.)

      I know what when we received resumes with photos, the resume formatting wasn’t taken into consideration one way or the other.

  91. iglwif*

    LW5: I was recently involved in a hiring process for my congregation (I’m on the board) and some of the résumés we got were incredibly weird, design-wise. I’m talking big blocks of colour, little icons, fun fonts … I don’t recall any with photos on them but frankly it would not have surprised me.

    I mean, some were deeply, deeply weird content-wise, too. But I’m talking about the ones that were interesting to us, but we had to fight through a lot of inappropriate design elements to figure that out.

  92. Designer*

    I can assure you that the people putting together those “snazzy” resume templates do not actually know anything about design, either. One of the basic rules of design is the form should follow function—a resume design that does not make it successful as a resume has failed as a design. (On a taste level, though, they’re generally corny and hideous-looking as well as ineffective.)

  93. Mockingbird2081*

    I used to handle hiring for a large OBGYN practice with an all-male physician team. To ensure patient comfort and protect both the doctor and the patient during exams, we employed female medical assistants, as most female patients were not comfortable if the other clinical staff member in the room with the doctor was also a man. Additionally, our staff was predominantly female because there was generally less interest from men in applying for roles in an OBGYN office. Although I was always open to hiring men for positions such as receptionists, billing specialists, managers, or surgery schedulers, we rarely received male applications (except for management, lots of male applications for manager).

  94. Anonymous For Now*

    I would not want some random dude to be the “chaperone” for my pelvic exam especially given that I will only see a female gynecologist! I agreed to having a male assistant in the room when I saw my dermatologist because all he could see was my back and I don’t care who sees that part of my anatomy.

  95. Anonymous Today*

    I am finding the first OP’s junior colleagues annoying and I’ll never have to deal with them.

    This form of vocabulary policing is getting tiresome. Ironically, by acting this way they might as well be wearing signs that say “We are junior staff”.

Comments are closed.