Welcome to the latest installment of Millennial Perspectives, this time from my friend Natalie Braverman of theQuestionable!
When you’re a woman of our generation, you’re told you will enter the workplace and get the equality that your mother and your mother’s mother were never able to get. You’ll be seen as a capable member of the team. You’ll be treated no differently than your male counterparts.
My current job has really tested this theory.
My supervisor is a woman, but she’s working at a higher level and isn’t in the nitty gritty of the day-to-day the way I am. In my world, the manager above me is a man and everyone in our partnering department is a man. Day-to-day, I am the only woman I deal with. There are days I come out of a meeting and question my place in the department. Not as a productive member of the team, but as a young, female member of the team.
In my old job, I worked directly for a woman. This woman lured me into the job by saying she saw “a lot of herself in me” and by promising to be my mentor. It was one of those offers you can’t refuse – she looked me straight in the eye and did all of the things you should do to get a person to trust you. But my trust, as it were, became misplaced. It was clear those were just words. Her actions never matched up, and I was left without a mentor, and ultimately, without a job. I got laid off.
The experience made me question working with women, frankly. Could they all be that backstabbing? I’m happy to report that the answer, in my experience, is no, as my aforementioned female supervisor in my current job is nothing but supportive. I was happy she ended up being the polar opposite of my first boss, but I was even happier I didn’t have to risk anything with the rest of the team I was working with. They were all men.
But that has brought on a whole new set of problems.
Imagine being the only woman sitting at a table in a conference room with about eight men surrounding you. Outside of work, that’s a situation that provides some pretty fantastic odds for a single woman. Inside of work, I wouldn’t say I thought anything of it…at first. But then there was a joke about fetuses. Then another about “life beginning at conception.” And then the words “pro-life” were uttered. I looked around for a sympathetic female eye, but none could be found. I was the only woman in a room full of men laughing at vaguely-abortion-related jokes.
Was I uncomfortable? You bet I was.
If I wasn’t the only woman in the room, or if I wasn’t a woman in my twenties, would that have happened? Probably not. And THAT is what makes me question my place in the department.
In situations like the one I described above (and trust me, there have been a few), I’m torn between feeling offended and something way more confusing: thankful. Half of me is offended, as a woman, that men would joke about things they don’t personally (or bodily) know about, like the pro-life/pro-choice debate. But the other half of me is happy that they’ve seen past my gender. They’re telling the same jokes they would tell if I wasn’t there. They DON’T see me as different.
Or at least that’s what I tell myself so the other half of my mind isn’t disgusted with the people I work with and whom I genuinely like most of the time.
However, a couple separate instances have occurred that make the ugly half harder to ignore.
One of the participants in the previous anecdote is what you’d call a repeat offender. He has accused one of the other men in the department – a man who happens to be gay, by the way, though it’s not stereotypically obvious – of having a crush on me. Why would he think this? Could it be because I like to joke around with that member of the department because we’re friends? Or maybe it’s because he works better with me than he does with the repeat offender? I’m honestly not sure.
What I DO know is that he has commented on this “crush” multiple times. One was at a social event, the first time he revealed his theories on the team member’s feelings for me. But that one was private and not as embarrassing as the second time. We were in a meeting, the three of us, and when the team member and I started joking around, the repeat offender told us to, “Get a room.”
Get a room.
Those are three words you say to two friends when they need to shut up and make out already. Those are NOT three words you say anywhere in the context of a workplace. I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. I was too speechless to defend myself. Thinking someone has a crush is one thing, but saying it in a meeting is completely different.
It made me feel as though the only way the repeat offender thought I could get my job done was to use my femininity. To flirt, basically. Then, if I have a male member of the team wrapped around my finger, and only then can I succeed. And if THAT isn’t a sexist outlook on how I do my job, I don’t know what is.
At the end of the day, I don’t quite know what to do about this situation. It’s not bad enough that I would consider going to HR. Most of the time I don’t even notice that I’m the only woman in the room. But the times I do, it’s glaringly obvious. My current approach has been to dish back the sass – show that I can hang with the men and their humor. I can’t decide if this makes the situation better or worse.
What I DO know is that I earned my place in my department as a respected worker, not because I’m a woman who knows how to use her femininity, but because I’m a woman who knows how to do her job. And at the end of that same day, that’s what’s good enough for me.
Have you ever experienced gender discomfort in the workplace? If so, how have you handled it?
Photo Credit: EricDanPhoto
The post Only Woman in The Meeting appeared first on Working Self.