I wanted to get advice on dealing with the old school “boys club” type of culture that may occur at firms on the smaller to medium scale. This is part of the reason why I have been going through the job search process (alongside other considerations), but my concern is also partially potentially running into similar situations in the future. Having talked to a few ppl within finance and at larger firms, it seems less to be an issue outside of the real estate industry (for obvious reasons), but at the very least less of a concern where you get more diversity of thought at larger firms.
Below are a few examples of what I have encountered at my current company (intentionally vague to preserve anonymity) :
-racist comments: asians eating dogs, comments that were racist against african americans, etc. Company makeup is heavily skewed toward a certain background
-misogynistic comments all the time about both coworkers and celebrities
-gifts that might be considered inappropriate
Is there a better solution than just hoping my next company is better? Is there an easier way to understand besides asking in interviews what the culture is like (everyone always answers the same way about how the culture is great)?
I spent almost a decade as the token liberal at a good ole boy firm in the Southeast and I generally had good luck just fighting fire with fire when the situation arose. Rednecks, racists, conspiracy theorists, and Trump voters aren’t exactly difficult to make fun of. Taking a moralizing tone, even when morally correct, isn’t going to make you any friends and is just going to make them do it more since the intention with these morons who never grew out of their 13 year old edgelord phase is to get a rise out of you.
Now that said, that approach may not fit your personality, and may be more difficult if you are a woman (the “inappropriate gift” comment is pretty creepy), so you really just need to ask yourself if you really need to work for such a company. There are plenty of bigger corporate firms that wouldn’t tolerate that stuff and plenty of smaller firms that don’t employ those kinds of people.
I guarantee you that you can tell, in a general sense, the political culture of a place just by looking at the cars in the parking lot, the attire people have on, how they talk, etc. Everything is so culturally divided these days it is usually painfully obvious. And if you whiff on it, there is always another company out there.
I pretty much exclusively only work at places that have Range Rovers in the parking lot, signet rings/Barbour attire and Received Pronunciation accents.
Unless you work at a large corporate firm, probably going to be hard to avoid. Maybe look for a women owned shop.
Look for firms where it is prevalent for people to include pronouns in their email signature.
This is like going to a Taylor swift concert and complaining there is a “girls club” culture
CRE was spot on. People feel more comfortable expressing a side of themselves that they tend to hide in a small environment with like-minded individuals. It's a safe space to be an ass. Sometimes they don't know how much of a meme they are because they've been in that environment for so long. Fish don't know they're wet.
You can't really change the culture in these places. Even trying will open you up to all sorts of retaliation that's difficult to prove and where you have no allies to where it's not even worth it for your mental health. People have to ask themselves why they want to be in a place where they and their ideas are not wanted. A beautiful thing about the United States is that people can choose to walk out the door whenever, and they can choose to work for whoever they want.
As politically incorrect as it sounds, you can definitely tell a lot about the culture by looking at a parking lot, bumper stickers, scanning what's visible inside of cars, pictures in an office, what's on the walls of the place, scanning the website, body language, reading between the lines during small talk, etc. Use a bit of street smarts. If you wanna take it deeper you can find out what type of lawsuits they've had and do some research on management, their university, frats, clubs, news articles about them, any lawsuits about their frats while they were in it, etc. There's a lot of publicly available information to help you build a real picture and a story about a place. I would just avoid these places instead of finding ways to deal with them. Life is too short. You're doing the right thing by leaving.
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