From my experience it's far harder for women to be assertive than men. I've yet to see an assertive woman not be tagged by some people as "aggressive" (being polite, "bitchy" is the undertone), even when I found them an absolute delight to talk with. I've seen this in interviews, I've seen this in the workplace with coworkers. I've seen plenty of guys I personally found to be complete assholes, who others still listened to.
Now, why do you come across as hostile? When you are being assertive, do you do so showing respect to others? Consideration for their views and where they are? Does everyone walk away feeling comfortable that their voices have been heard and their objectives are going to be met?
I am confident and assertive. But I bend over backwards to make sure that other people's viewpoints get considered and respected, even when I know them to be wrong. I don't tell them "you're wrong", I ask them questions to dig in and surface issues that they don't have answers to, and then I suggest ways we might address those, slowly shifting their perspective to mine, while showing them that I am looking to solve their problems. I am almost always the loudest voice in the room, even if I'm not the most senior person in the room, but other people usually don't mind that because I carve out room for their own voice to be heard, and show that I am listening to them.
As best I can, yes. Part of it was likely cultural. I was in Europe at the time. But, no attempt on my CTO's part was made to come to some understanding about what was going on (someone claimed I said something offensive, which was definitely not my intent). In general I've never had the authority du jour attempt to be understanding. It's really fucked up my life, and at this point I am angry, have every right to be angry, and have no idea what to do about it.
In this particular case that jackass has wasted/will waste 2-3 years of my life. If I could break his nose or more I gladly would.
Look for that in your next role. It helped me tremendously.
Obviously, I don't know the specifics, but the way you speak about it sounds like you were unable to empathize with the person in question, and that means there were considerations you were not privy to, that made it so your being assertive had you coming across as obnoxious rather than helpful.
It has to start there, with you empathizing with them. No one makes decisions in a vacuum. Unless you believe them to be legitimately insane, they have a reason. It might be one you disagree with, or is ethically dubious, or cowardly, or similar, but understanding it, and the misunderstanding, fear, etc, that underpins it, is key to being able to show them that you respect their concerns and views.
Here's a personal example; I worked for a place where the VP in charge of our department was given the choice of "here's 8 million dollars to engage this ludicrously expensive consulting company, that has execs playing golf with our own execs, or, you can instead try and build a team from scratch, which you've not done, and have them build the product instead". As you might expect, he chose the former. Though, he also had a mandate to start building a team for other reasons anyway, and I was part of that, and we started by looking at what the consulting company was building, as we would inherit it. And it was crap. Complete crap.
Now, we didn't know he had this terrible choice at the beginning. We didn't know any of the pressures or expectations he was under. All we saw was that the super pricy consultants were delivering crap. And we expressed that.
What did he do? He was in a no win situation, and so chose to bury his head in the sand, ignore what we were saying, but get angry at how aggressively we were saying it.
Now, admittedly, that's a cowardly response. But in hindsight I can see how easy it would be to feel powerless in that situation, despite being a VP. I dropped the ball in handling that; had I understood his considerations better, and pitched myself as trying to solve his problems, rather than my own (my problems being we were inheriting this bucket of crap, his problems being that he felt he HAD to deliver, and this was the only way that was even remotely possible), I likely could have made better headway (by offering solutions with tradeoffs, yes, we can't have this in the defined timeline, but we can instead do ~this~, and that will minimize the visibility of the problems while giving us time to fix things, etc).
I got better at handling that kind of situation because I was lucky to have a couple of friends, one of whom was above me, and one who was a peer, also dealing with the same situation (and plenty more to follow over the next few years); we could discuss the situations and better figure out our mistakes.
To saying something offensive; when you found that out, did you immediately go to the CTO and apologize? I've had that happen too, multiple times, where someone (not even in my hierarchy) took offense at something I said. As soon as I found out I immediately went to them and apologized (arguably a non-apology even; a "Hey, I heard something I said bothered you. I'm sorry about that; I'm not sure what I said, but my intention was never to offend you. Please, in future, let me know ASAP so I can better learn to recognize it when it happens and hopefully keep it from happening again"); in both cases it turned that person into an ally for me, as they recognized that even if I was aggressive or (inadvertently) offensive, I still valued them.
I've been searching inwards for years now, and at some point there is nothing left I can do. I've routinely been fucked over by authority. In this case it cost me 2-3 years of my life and setbacks in school.
At this point my scholastic "record" (accidentally submitted failing grades to a school) at all of the good state schools precludes me from admission despite good performance in HS, and despite submitting my psychiatric record.
So... it's bullshit. I see a lot of people talking about not being a victim, but everything I do is thwarted. There is no choice but for me to be the victim, and society doesn't care.
2-3 years wasted - please, even working a job out of your field for that amount of time will teach you new things. You are hooked on this school situation as being the roadblock that's seemingly impossible to overcome. Figure it out.
The choice is yours to be a victim of circumstance. Time to get your ducks in order and have a little humility and compassion for yourself instead of throwing your hands up and calling bullshit. This is life.
https://medium.com/@phillip_hayes/montaigne-1-by-diverse-mea...