How do I handle a difficult senior team member?
I work in a small division within a large company. For context, I am the only woman on the team and I feel like I am often being treated separately from the guys.
I have a coworker (Alex) who is not my boss, but is senior to me within the team/ by title. Alex is very social to my male peers (takes them out for lunch once a week, gives them advice, etc), but almost completely ignores me.
When I say anything to him (be it “good morning”, “congrats on getting engaged” or asking him a question) he won’t respond. There was a period of 2 months where the only thing he said to me was chewing me out for not letting him know I would be out an hour early for a Dr appointment even though I wasn’t working with him on anything and had alerted my boss and the team members I was working on projects with.
When I work with him on a project, he will not respond to any messages/items I send him for several days to a week (and sometimes 2-3 weeks), and then respond saying it’s “very urgent” meaning I have to work late night to get things done. If I take longer than 20 mins to respond to him, he gets angry. He won’t speak to me except to sporadically say things like “what is the progress on item X”, which is some specialized task that isn’t part of the standard process that he wants but never asked about.
How do I manage him? It feels like I’m a whackamole character waiting for the mallet to randomly come down, and I’m exhausted. I’ve talked to my boss about it before, and he talked to Alex about being more respectful. It lasted about 2 weeks and then he was worse than before. I don’t think my boss will do much else considering that he likes Alex.