How do you console colleagues that that attribute a bad experience to gender/race/disability?

Question

There are some comments that appear on this SE as well as frequently on the academic subreddits, that mention how to deal with some situation because of personal trait X.

Here is just generally one such example:

How do you handle students who speak to you in ways they would never speak to a male teacher? For example, I just had a Zoom meeting with a student. I thought he wanted to ask content questions; instead, he told me how the way I have my class set up doesn't work for him.

I do know there are studies showing problems with student evals being baised against women and minorities, so there is some difference in experiences.

However, when a colleague mentions this to someone of that group (i.e. female prof. complaining to male colleague, black prof. complaining to white colleague, etc.), what is an appropriate way, or the expected way, to respond?

On one hand, I wouldn't want to be dismissive of their experience and how they feel. On the other hand, I wouldn't want someone to feel that they are being targeted/treated unfairly for something out of their control. Having lived in many countries, it personally never felt good (and would often ruin my day) to think it was because of race/ethnicity that someone was treating me poorly, and I did find comfort knowing they were just in general a rude person to everyone. However, my own experience may not be generalizable.

So the two extremes of the situation seem to be:

1. Respond by sympathizing, saying sorry this is happening to you, and leave it there. If trying to actually help and give advice on what to change, may seem like blaming the person.
2. Respond by letting them know its not just happening to them, implying its not because of their personal trait but rather the student/others fault in general. This at the risk of seeming dismissive of their experience.

What would be a helpful approach to such a situation.

Answer 1

Obviously it's possible that either one of these cases could happen: there may be cases where someone encounters a hardship/problem/frustration due to race/sex discrimination, and there may be cases where a person encounters a hardship/problem/frustration that is non-discriminatory, but they incorrectly attribute this to race/sex discrimination. One of the things that makes it difficult to distinguish these cases is that the intentions of relevant actors are not usually apparent from a single case --- evidence of discrimination sometimes only emerges via statistical evidence over large classes of cases (and even then it's complicated to infer).

Since both kinds of case are possible, both kinds of responses you mention will be reasonable in different situations. I don't think there is any way to create a one-size-fits-all rule in the abstract case because the correct response is ultimately going to depend on how plausible/implausible the assertion of race/sex discrimination actually is. In each of these cases you are probably going to have to form a judgment on whether the causal-premise of the complaint is plausible or implausible, and act accordingly.

You seem to be concerned about the case where the causal-premise of discrimination is implausible. There are definitely some situations where you know for sure that the complaint has a false causal-premise. For example, there are cases where someone says something like, "People would never do X to people of type Y" or "Ys never have to put up with X" and you are a person of type Y and have regularly experienced X and/or seen X being done regularly to people of type Y. In dealing with this type of case, it is legitimate (and even helpful) to push back on a false causal-premise of the complaint, but there is some nuance required to do this best. A good method in these cases is to express sympathy for the hardship/problem/frustration, but augment this sympathy by injecting examples where people of type Y have experienced X. You can also explicitly reject their causal view of the problem if you want, and it is fairly easy to do this as a short aside in the course of making a larger statement expressing your sympathy. If you do this effectively then your examples will bolster your assistance by exhibiting empathy for the problem, but you are also giving some information that helps to correct the false causal-premise. Give the person some time to absorb this contradictory information and let the discussion stay on listening to their problem.

Ultimately, there is no incompatibility between giving sympathy for a hardship/problem/frustration, and helping to diagnose the causal basis for the problem (including disagreeing with them on the causality). As you point out, sometimes people are comforted to find that the difficulties they are experiencing are common to others, and have been successfully dealt with by others.