The Dickhead Dominated Industry
Before we begin, an apology to my mother, who raised me better than the language in this briefing and who will be reading it anyway. Mum, I tried to find another word. I sat with thesaurus tabs open like a scholar but there is no other word. Some behaviour can only be named accurately in the vernacular, so today we are going to be accurate.
The coffee catch up
I recently sat across a cafe table from a friend who is a senior manager in an industry that is, on every external metric you could pull, male dominated.
She was not having a career crisis. She was having something quieter and more corrosive. She was being frozen out, left off invitations and excluded from the conversations where the actual decisions get made. When she raised it with the male colleague leading the exclusion, she was told she was being “too emotional” and “too sensitive”. Which is a fascinating piece of feedback to give someone who has just calmly described a pattern of exclusion with dates attached.
The language available to her for what was happening was the language we all reach for: “well, what did I expect, it is a male dominated industry after all” she added.
She said it the way you say something you have said many times, like a diagnosis that has stopped being useful. She is not wrong on the numbers though and the industry is male dominated in exactly the way the data says it is.
But watching her carry that phrase around so heavily, I realised the phrase itself was doing nothing for her, or any of us.
It described the room but it did not describe the problem.
The problem with the phrase
“Male dominated industry” is a headcount.
It tells you who is in the building but it does not tell you why your calendar invitations keep going missing, why your composure gets read as coldness and your directness gets read as emotional or why the same behaviour that makes a colleague decisive makes you difficult. The phrase gestures at all of that but it names none of it, and what it does instead, quietly, is hand you a frame where the problem is men. All of them, categorically, as a demographic.
That frame is unhelpful for two reasons.
The first is strategic. If the problem is men, there is nothing to do about it except wait for the demography to change, which is a multi-decade project you cannot action from your desk on a Tuesday. A problem you cannot action is not a diagnosis, it is just a weather report and it feels entirely deflating, you cannot change it in the same way you cannot change the weather, try as you might.
The second reason is that it is not true, or at least not precise, and imprecision is expensive. Plenty of the men in my friend's building are not the problem. Some of them are actually her best allies. Meanwhile, the phrase “male dominated industry” gives cover to the actual culprits, who get to disappear into a demographic instead of being identified for what they are.
What she is actually dealing with is not a male dominated industry.
It is a dickhead dominated pocket of one.
Dickheadedness knows no gender
I can say this with the confidence of lived experience, because the cruellest treatment I ever received in my corporate career did not come from a man.
It came from a woman and I have written about it at length in A Love Letter to My Female Bullies, which remains one of the harder pieces I have published. The exclusion, the undermining, the strategic cruelty dressed up as standards. Every technique my friend described over coffee, I have watched deployed by a woman against a woman.
That experience recalibrated me permanently.
Gender may tell you something about the structural headwinds a person faced getting into the room, which absolutely matters and deserves its own analysis. But it tells you nothing reliable about how they will act once they are in it.
Strength of character does that, and character is distributed across every demographic with magnificent indifference to our gender identity.
The behaviour actually has a proper academic lineage, as it happens. The Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski spent his life studying how people without empathy or conscience (aka dickheads) rise through systems, coining the term “pathocracy” for what happens when a small pathological minority takes control of a group of otherwise “normal” people.
He was writing about governments, but he was clear that the same dynamics capture corporations and institutions of every kind.
The pattern is always the same: the pathological few rise, the decent majority adapts or leaves, loyalty gets rewarded over competence and anyone who names the behaviour becomes the problem.
If you have ever watched a workplace and thought “the worst people here keep getting promoted and I cannot understand why”, you were probably not imagining it. You were watching selection effects.
Some cultures select for dickheadedness the way others select for excellence, and that selection is the problem, not the chromosomes of the people being selected.
The profession has a whole toolkit for making the namer the problem, particularly when the namer is a woman, and I catalogued it recently in How to Silence a Woman in Seven Easy Steps. “Too emotional” is a subset of step one in that manual and it is not a new addition either.
The lesson
I think that this reframe matters because accurate diagnosis determines proper treatment.
If the problem is men, your options are either despair or demography.
But, if the problem is dickheads, suddenly you have a workable situation, because dickheads are countable, identifiable and specific. You can map them. You can notice that there are four of them, not forty, and that two of them hold power while two just make noise.
You can notice which senior men are embarrassed by them, because those men are your allies and champions of change and they are usually more numerous than the phrase “male dominated industry” would ever let you see.
You can also notice, honestly, whether the dickheads are incidental to the culture or whether the culture is breeding them. That distinction alone tells you whether the organisation is worth your fight or not.
Now, I am fully aware that there is a version of this that sounds like I am letting structural sexism off the hook, so let me be very precise.
The structures are real. The data on who gets promoted, who gets interrupted and whose emotion gets pathologised is real. The “too emotional” line lands on women in a way it rarely seems to lands on men. Sexism, and all of the ism’s, is one of the favourite tools in the dickhead toolkit for “othering”, exclusion and creating psychosocially unsafe workplaces.
But the tool and the hand that holds it are different things, so you must fight them differently:
You fight structures with policy, transparency and collective pressure.
You fight dickheads by naming the behaviour precisely, refusing the easy reframe to “male dominated industry”, documenting the pattern and denying them the ambiguity that they love to operate in.
My friend cannot fix the gender ratio of her industry. She can absolutely build a file, find her allies and make one specific person's behaviour legible to the people above him (who may or may not also be dickheads irrespective of their gender, and this remains to be seen).
What to do with this
If you are in my friend's position, retire the phrase “male dominated industry” from your internal monologue for a month and replace it with an audit instead.
Count the actual dickheads. Name the specific behaviours, in writing, with dates, because a pattern documented is a pattern that can be escalated and a pattern undocumented is a vibe.
Identify the decent people of every and any gender identity, because they are your coalition and the phrase you have been using rendered half of them invisible.
Then look hard at whether the behaviour is tolerated or cultivated. Tolerated can change. Cultivated means the culture is upstream of any individual and your energy is probably better spent on an exit than a crusade.
If you lead people, understand that every dickhead you tolerate is a policy. People below you cannot see your private discomfort, they can only see the promotion, the shrug and the meeting where it happened again. Whatever behaviour you permit at your level, you have published as the standard.
My friend is going to be fine, for the record.
She is precise, she is documented and she is now counting dickheads instead of men, which has shrunk the problem from an industry to a list of names short enough to fit on a coffee napkin.
That is what a useful diagnosis does.
Sorry again, Mum. There really was no other word.
Mel
