my coworker keeps messaging me about my face during meetings

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I am a full-time, mid-level female manager at a large consultancy, and I sometimes work with a senior strategist (a contractor). He has an off-putting habit of utilizing Zoom DMs to make comments that make it clear he is scrutinizing me instead of paying attention to the meeting. Things like, “Something must be funny!” or “You look vexed! LOL”

While I am sometimes guilty of sending an email or responding to someone on Slack during a meeting if I’m not actively presenting or leading, I don’t think my face is doing anything out of the ordinary. Another colleague of mine has said she has gotten similar messages from the strategist. I checked with one of our male colleagues, and he says he has never gotten a message from the strategist about his facial expression.

The last time I got one of these messages, I responded, “I think it is just my face. :D”

Is there anything else you suggest to push back on these weird messages? We don’t work in the same city, so will never have a chance to casually chat in person. It feels very much like he only does this to female colleagues.

Yeah, it’s super common — and super annoying — for men to feel free to comment on women’s faces when they’d never make the same comment to another man. Ask any man how often he’s been ordered to smile by another man.

Sometimes it stems from the underlying, though often unconscious, belief that women should always be pleasant, decorative objects … plus, women’s faces and bodies seem to be up for assessment and feedback all the time and in every context.

If you try to shut down the men who do this, they’re generally shocked, even insulted; they’re just being friendly, they claim! But the fact that they only do it to women gives the game away.

To be clear, there are plenty of times where friendly coworkers might trade messages during meetings like “I can see you’re barely holding it together over what Roger just said” or so forth — where it’s just friendly camaraderie. But this doesn’t sound like that, even if he thinks it is.

Anyway. Some options:

You can just ignore your colleague’s messages if you want. Just because he wants to send them doesn’t mean you owe him a response. And it’s possible that being ignored every time might make him feel weird about continuing. This is probably the best option.

But if you want to address it more explicitly, you could say, “It’s really distracting when you comment on my face during meetings.” If you want to soften it, throw in a “I know you don’t mean anything by it but” at the beginning of that. (Technically you don’t need to soften it, but the message is going to get delivered either way and work dynamics might mean you benefit from cushioning it a bit.)