There once was a woman I worked with - she was a team boss, and the men I worked with gave me all this advice about working with her and how you have to look for what she's saying, not how she's saying it. I was expecting some dragon-like monster yelling fire and brimstone.
But that never happened. She just said facts as if they were facts and didn't pad them out with "I feel maybe..." "it could be wrong but".... and "i dunno, but it's possible that."...
Several years later, at another job, I got feedback in a performance review -- it was at a company that asked everyone to give feedback -- and one of the anonymous paragraphs said I was rude and that I needed to start adding, "I feel like" in front of my statement, so I don't upset people. It was pretty blatantly someone who didn't like women talking.
I started noticing the women at that company pre-pending "I feel like" in front of most of their sentences to avoid upsetting the dudes.
There's a similar account here https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/10/13/jennifer-lawrence-has-a-point-famous-quotes-the-way-a-woman-would-have-to-say-them-during-a-meeting/
Back at that first job I described, I think the team boss was saying things the way all the other people she worked with all her career did. She was a woman working in tech, just like me, graduating and then coming to adulthood while going to a tech job five days a week. She had only worked with men, and she talked like all the men did.
But the way she talked got their hackles up. My colleagues would get a normal request in a normal voice and imagine it was yelled at them and full of insults.
When you're used to women tiptoe-ing around you, never telling you what to do.. when you're used to women adding minutes of "how are you?" doing extra emotional labour, like they're your mother at work, and then hearing the normal matter-of-fact language you'd get from men, coming from a woman, it made them angry, sad, and very often raging at the audacity.
