New intern

[Anonymous]

I'm torn. On the one hand it's offensive to tell a woman, any woman to be quiet and listen and learn. It's also not great to read the room first in a new situation.

Really depends on all the personalities involved. Only OP knows.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm torn. On the one hand it's offensive to tell a woman, any woman to be quiet and listen and learn. It's also not great to read the room first in a new situation.

Really depends on all the personalities involved. Only OP knows.

Good lord not everything is about gender/race/whatever underrepresented group one can claim.

Treat everyone the same. In this case, annoying intern is annoying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm torn. On the one hand it's offensive to tell a woman, any woman to be quiet and listen and learn. It's also not great to read the room first in a new situation.

Really depends on all the personalities involved. Only OP knows.

Why is it offensive to tell a woman to be quiet when she's babbling like an idiot in a client meeting?

Go ahead, tell us, please.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Posting to see if you think I’m being unreasonable or have the wrong idea about how to host an intern.

A new intern - a first year law student - started yesterday. We met straight away and discussed a couple of assignments to start working on, and I also told her that she would be welcome to shadow me in meetings so she could learn more about the work I do and the company. (I lead part of the legal team in a public tech company)

I had her shadow me in a couple of meetings today. I expected her to sit quietly (after brief intros) and just listen.

But instead, she spoke often, asking a lot of questions. To be clear, these weren’t clarifying questions to help her get to know the company and understand the issue (which also, to be honest, I’d rather she didn’t do in these meetings because people have limited time, our meetings are relatively short, and I’d be happy to chat about these questions separately afterwards). These questions were sort of like the kinds of questions I might ask if I were trying to get to understand the problem better and get to a resolution.

Except that because she doesn’t know anything about the company or the legal issues, they were not good questions and they were leading people down random paths that were unnecessary. I didn’t want to interrupt, but it was a waste of time and she was missing the key issue (that I wouldn’t expect her to have known at all, but I also didn’t expect her to be talking so much!)

Anyway, of course I did interrupt because we needed to come to a resolution, so I steered things back on course. But it has been bothering me because it just wasn’t what I was expecting from an intern! I definitely never did this and I don’t think she should have done.

So - am I being unfair?

You should have told her this ahead of time. How was she supposed to know? She probably thought she was expected to participate. Now you should explain to her what you expect.