You’re Probably Just Imagining It: On Gaslighting & Startup Culture
Gaslighting is “an attempt of one person to overwrite another person’s reality.” The term comes from the 1944 film, Gaslight, in which Ingrid Bergman’s husband enacts the longest con on earth to convince her that she’s losing her mind and gain control of her inheritance. One of the ways he gets her to doubt her own sanity is to flicker the gas lights in their home, then deny he ever saw it happen.
Today, “gaslighting” serves as a convenient moniker for a particular kind of emotional abuse where an abuser undermines their victim’s autonomy by making them feel as if they’re not a reliable interpreter of reality.
Have you ever seen a man dismiss a woman’s concerns or objections by telling her she’s “acting crazy”? That’s gaslighting. Have you ever witnessed someone tell a person of color that a situation they identified as racist was actually just “misinterpreted” or “misunderstood”? Also gaslighting. It can be used to silence someone from speaking out about oppression in a single interaction, and it can also be used to manipulate and control someone throughout the lifecycle of a relationship.
Gaslighting is usually spoken of in the context of intimate partner abuse, but because it is something that can occur within any human relationship, it can happen in any kind of environment — including the workplace. In fact, when it comes to the women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups who are working in tech, we’re hardly talking about gaslighting at all (and we need to start).
Re-orienting the conversation.
Members of marginalized groups already function in a world that fails to acknowledge and legitimize many aspects of their lived experience. They experience erasure in the form of mis- or under-representation and tokenization, they undergo silencing in the form of victim-blaming and tone policing.
In a million different ways, women and POC need to fight for their own lived experience to be accepted as true and real. This is a boundary they face every day, and it is a boundary that becomes significantly more difficult to transcend if you’re the only woman or person of color in the room.
The difficulty that women, POC (particularly Black or Latinx people), and LGBTQ individuals face being seen and heard is especially significant in tech, where they face serious underrepresentation. Furthermore, once members of marginalized and underrepresented groups do manage to make their way into a job in tech, they have a hard time staying due to rampant internal sexism and outright racism. Most importantly, when members of these groups speak up about racist or sexist behavior, they’re often told it never happened…and that’s where gaslighting comes into play.
Workplace gaslighting can take on many different forms. You may be manipulated into doubting your own experiences by being told things like:
You misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misremembered reality.
For example, you were reprimanded harshly by your founder in front of the rest of your team, and later realize that he never speaks to your white male coworkers that way. You ask your coworker whether he’s noticed the difference in treatment, and he tells you that your boss treats everyone that way, “you probably just don’t notice it.”
At your startup, your workload is significantly heavier than that of your teammates, and you’re the one always tasked with jobs like taking and distributing meeting notes, handling correspondence, or fetching coffee and food. You try to speak to a teammate about it, but are told that you don’t actually have a lot on your plate. They suggest that maybe you’re just not used to working in a fast-paced startup environment.
You teammate says something sexist over lunch, and you decide to confront them about it. They immediately ask you when, where, and how they exhibited that behavior, and how many times it occurred before. When you have trouble remembering specifics about every instance, they claim you’re exaggerating and your memory can’t be trusted.
You’re imagining things that don’t exist.
In meetings, you realize that your team (composed of primarily white males, including your boss) does a good job of listening to each other, but consistently talk over you and the one other POC in the room. You attempt to tell someone about it, but are told you’re imagining things: “I was in that meeting, and I didn’t see that happening.”
You attempt to report behavior you consider racist, oppressive, or damaging, and you’re told “that didn’t happen because you’re [member of marginalized group];” “no one is treating you differently;” or “we don’t have a diversity problem here.”
You notice that an investor has trouble making eye contact with you or addressing you directly, and you suspect it’s because you’re the only woman on your team. Upon bringing it up to your founder or colleagues, you’re told that you’re overlooking several instances where the investor in question did address you or has addressed other women, you’re just not noticing them.
You’re allowing your emotions to distort reality / You’re too unreasonable to reliably interpret reality.
In a team meeting, your founder takes a moment to address your performance in front of the entire team. You don’t understand why your performance is being addressed at all, nor why your white teammates have never been publicly assessed in this manner. Later on, a teammate tells you that, while he understands your frustration, you let your emotions get the best of you and “overreacted.”
Your boss said something harmful and problematic in passing conversation, and you attempt to engage them about it later. Instead of listening, they begin to ask you for a more “rational” argument. Your attempt to engage is further interrupted by relentless scrutiny of your premises and conclusions, and they maintain that until you can be more rational, they won’t acknowledge your perspective.
At team lunch, you get into a conversation about the Black Lives Matter movement. You express support and solidarity, but soon drop it because you can tell it’s making your teammates uncomfortable. Later on during a meeting, you calmly suggest going with a different strategy than your coworker during a routine product review, and he waves his hands in the air and says “Ok, just calm down. No need to get heated.” This treatment persists, implying that your behavior is routinely volatile, angry, or unpredictable.
You’re engaging in disordered thinking.
You decide to speak out about an instance of sexism, racism, or homophobia and your coworker exclaims that you’re “obsessed with race/ gender/ oppression.”
You saw an investor act in a sexist or problematic way toward one of your other teammates, and in speaking to them about it later, you are told “not everything is about race/gender.”
After one or two attempts to be vocal about oppression in tech, one of your teammates tells you that he sees your perspective as inherently negative: “It’s like you want everything to be sexist/ racist/ homophobic.”
What happens to you when you no longer trust your own reality?
These types of gaslighting are particularly potent in startup culture, where they tend to piggyback on the oft-romanticized notion that developers, software engineers, and CEOs are hyperrational beings (and therefore, always correct). Being told that you’re only upset about someone’s behavior because you “don’t understand how devs are” or because you’re “less logical” than your colleagues is a way of coercing you into thinking you’re wrong to be upset about your own experiences. It also has the consequence of making you feel alien and ostracized within your own field; of making you doubt that you fit, belong, or can succeed in technology.
Gaslighting doesn’t need to be intentional to occur. You may even feel like your founder, teammates, and colleagues have your best interest at heart as they gaslight you.
However, good intentions do not cancel out the very real consequences of the actions themselves. For those who suffer the effects of gaslighting, the effects are immutable. Unsurprisingly, people who have had their word repeatedly called into question eventually end up facing serious self-doubt. Not only that, but they grow accustomed to seeing themselves in a different light, as difficult to work with or less intelligent or less socially perceptive than their coworkers.
You end up feeling like everything’s your fault (because you’re being told that it is). You feel constantly confused about your read on situations (because someone in a position of authority is telling you you’re bad at interpreting them). Gaslighting chips away at your self-esteem because your perceived notion of self (as a logical being with reasonable reactions and wants) is being radically undermined. All of a sudden, you’re looking at your relationship with your mind in an entirely new light — one that poses that relationship as combative and untrustworthy rather than reliable and consistent. These feelings can veer into a deep depression, particularly if you feel as though your entire team is in full agreement with the person who is gaslighting you.
To that point, gaslighting is often amplified in groups (like families). Startups in particular work very hard to foster close-knit communities and work cultures. It’s not unusual to hear a founder speak of their company as a family. This is a beautiful thing… when modeling your company on the concept of family does not also invite familial dysfunction; problem being, it oftentimes does. Even without the familial aspect or the emphasis on company culture, many tech companies consist of a small number of people working constantly in very close quarters. Within these close confines, many employees look to their founders, CEOs, and managers for social cues as well as professional ones.
In the unfortunate event that a company’s culture tolerates, supports, or even encourages gaslighting behaviors as a response to employees warranted concern about their very real oppression, POC, women, queer folks and other marginalized people are at tremendous risk of being left with no support when it comes to reporting instances of sexism, racism, or oppression. Where treatment like this persists, it is no surprise that members of marginalized groups end up abandoning their careers in tech to pursue other, more tolerable work environments.
Why is this happening?
Within any relationship, gaslighting is evidence of a power dynamic where one party (or parties) stand to gain something from abusing their power. Gaslighting is a way of coercing someone into compliant behavior. When it comes to the workplace, gaslighting can stand to benefit those in power: after all, it’s less likely that an employee will report abusive or inappropriate behavior if you cause them to question whether anything abusive or inappropriate ever happened in the first place.
Eventually, victims of gaslighting stop reporting instances of harassment or oppression altogether because they no longer trust their own read on reality, or because they’re simply too deflated to go through the same interminable justification process that they know they’ll have to face. When victims are subdued in this way, they’re far less likely to complain about being overworked or underpaid, something that presents as particularly advantageous for early-stage startups.
Moreover, where employees feel strongly alienated from their own right to report instances of oppression, there is no accountability for their colleagues and superiors. This makes it possible for those in a position of power to fire someone for unfair reasons and call it a “poor fit,” to demand their employees work overtime without due compensation, to refuse to pay them a living wage while affording themselves six-figure salaries, to fail to fulfill safety requirements in the workplace, or even to sexually harass or assault them.
Gaslighting is a way of undermining someone’s authority in the most fundamental sense; it is questioning someone’s ability to be authoritative about themselves. The result is you become incapable of acknowledging your own oppression and your own emotions — even to yourself.
So, what can we do about it?
Gaslighting is like many forms of abuse in that acknowledging it and naming it holds tremendous power. With that in mind, it becomes crucially important for POC, women, and members of marginalized groups to understand gaslighting when it happens and trust themselves. In this environment, members of marginalized groups must trust their own assessment of their experiences, to trust their memory, perception, and to trust their absolute right to speak out about oppression and prejudicial behavior. Speak up if you can, get out of the toxic environment at all costs, but above all — trust yourself. Understand that your feelings do not have to make sense to someone else to be real. Your objections do not have to fit within someone else’s reality to be heard.
On the other side of the coin, it’s important to be supportive of others who might be victims of gaslighting in your workplace, among your friend groups, and in your own families. Above all, this involves educating yourself about emotional abuse. It also involves making a habit of listening to and acknowledging someone’s experience (even if it does not fit within your worldview). In the same way victims of gaslighting are given the charge to trust their own experiences, those who witness abusive behavior have an obligation to support those victims, too.
Finally, it’s important to understand that within the close-knit, often familial context of an early-stage startup or small tech company, gaslighting can snowball into group behavior — it can become part of the company culture. When this occurs, it leaves disadvantaged or marginalized employees significantly at risk and very much alone when it comes to speaking out about instances of discrimination or prejudice. This is why educating each other and ourselves about the various forms that gaslighting can take in the workplace in general (and in tech in particular), is vital to combating the manipulation and silencing. Gaslighting requires further inspection and acknowledgment across our entire work culture, especially within environments like tech startups, where these behaviors are more likely to be sanctioned than challenged.
Originally published by Model View Culture and cross-posted here with their permission.
If you do witness abuse and misconduct in the workplace, you can report it here: https://www.mysafeworkplace.com/IncidentTypeSelection.aspx, or here: https://www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm
