Hi all,
I don't know where to turn on this. I work in a small company, my boss who is an amazing person and has given me so much and helped me really kick start my career has had some accusations over the past little while. But now I've heard a few stories that really show that he's done some shady stuff. My boss has been like a brother to me and is a close friend. I have no idea how to digest this and I have no idea who I could talk to, so I'm just posting here.

I don't want to lose a friend, he's been nothing but amazing to me.

Edit: thank you everyone. I'll keep reading the comments. I just need to reflect on this and I appreciate your discussions.

Edit 2: There is proof enough to not deny things, inappropriate and agressive advances and groping stuff. Nothing good.

After a recent incident I've had with a male colleague at work this past week, I feel lost and downtrodden on how to move forward in my career. I've experienced various forms of misogyny in most roles I've held, but this has been the worst offense I've encountered. It honestly has me sick with stress and I feel so alone in how to handle it.

For context, I am often the only woman on meetings and regularly have to lead groups of all men. I've done this all throughout my career and have accepted it as a norm. While I have encountered issues in the past, never anything as egregious as what I dealt with the other day. I am often having to verify and source technical information to ensure project items are on track and this requires me to connect with various individuals. When some recent concerns were brought forward for an ongoing project, I was continually given the runaround by this male colleague. Due to days passing and the lack of cohesion for the issue of concern, I attempted to have a group discussion amongst the relevant folks.

This action sent that male colleague into an absolute rage of which I was the target. An action that I have regularly done for months without issue and is a run-of-the-mill thing for communication was misinterpreted by him. Instead he viewed it as an attack and ran to my lead to accuse me of running to higher-ups to assert he isn't doing his work properly; a completely opposite story from what I had done. This male colleague proceeded to yell at me like an abusive ex and is proceeding with excluding me out of important discussions. My lead is also male and due to this male colleague running to him first, he sided with him when I attempted to connect about how I was treated. When talking with both men to explain or try to understand their perspective, I was continually talked over, hushed, and essentially silenced into submission. I was told I am now a risk to team cohesion and that I am causing problems when I have been receiving nothing but praise from all others for my work.

I'm honestly so distraught from this experience and the lack of support from my lead. Each meeting with the male colleague that screamed at me has me on edge and I feel sick when determining how to get the answers I need for my work. Instead I am having to find a way to get placed on another project and the stress of sorting this with my company's HR. My confidence in my capabilities feels wounded and I am filled with anxiety now even when talking about topics I am familiar with. I am struggling to move past this and have the energy to find something better.

For those of you who have experienced similar misogyny in the workplace, how did you overcome incidents like these? How did you stop feeling so broken by how it affected you? I'm so worried about landing another project or job that will have these same issues and I really don't know if I can take being treated by men like this in the professional world anymore. How do you interview or gage a company to determine you won't encounter this again? I am so bitter of continually seeing men have this behavior, yet have been rewarded in their careers by being elevated to positions of authority. Any advice, sharing of wisdom, or any support would be greatly appreciated.

At work there's a project that was originally pitched as an automated system we would build for a new client, and now the conversation has shifted towards automating away some data entry tasks for an existing client. If the project is successful I would guess that some or all of the people doing the data entry tasks would be out of a job. And if it's a resounding success I would guess that the powers that be would be eager to apply it in other areas and potentially put more people out of jobs.

This project is in the very early stages of gathering requirements and whatnot so it's not really clear what exactly we're building or what my role in building it would be. But it involves a technology that's new to us (natural language processing) and often times I end up playing some role in a project that involves learning something new, even if it's just in some small way.

So yeah, I know automation replacing low-skill work is nothing new and if these jobs can be automated away, they will be sooner or later, but this is the first time I've been confronted with the idea of using my skills to put people I don't know out of a job and it sticks in my craw. Normally I love automation and interacting with new (to me) tech even if it's nothing groundbreaking and I'm just doing the plumbing to connect system A to interface B, but in the past it's always been in the name of freeing up people from tedious tasks so that they can do more interesting and more important work, rather than "freeing" them of their paycheck. So I'm finding myself adding this to the small but compelling pile of frustrations I have with this job and weighing it against the also-small but also-compelling pile of things I love about it.

Anyway, if you've ever been in a position where you were asked to automate away someone else's job, how did that go? What did you do?

If you haven't, what do you think you would do?