Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [83]
They can take many forms, from a male co-worker making a disparaging remark about you to your boss excluding you from the golf outing to management arranging for belly dancers to perform at the sales convention. In some offices women get labeled in demeaning ways. Management consultant Nancy Hamlin says she was called in to consult with a company in which the three top women were referred to as “the good girl, the bad girl, and the bulldog.”
With some forms of guerrilla chauvinism, you may not even be sure you have a justifiable gripe. One minute you're convinced you were purposely left out of a meeting, the next you're wondering if you're overreacting. You're like the heroine in a movie in which your husband is trying to make people believe you're losing your mind so he can collect your fortune.
Even when you're certain there's been a slight, intentional or unintentional, you may feel silly raising the issue. I had a male boss who was absolutely terrific but wouldn't make eye contact with me when he was in a meeting with me and another man. In these situations the third party would invariably pick up on the exclusion and before long, he would ignore me, too. I worried that if I ever said anything to my boss, he'd look at me as if I'd announced that Elvis was hiding in my office.
And that's the kind of thing that does happen when you raise the issue. They act as if you're paranoid, lacking in humor, or overly sensitive. A friend of mine once had a horrible male boss who loved to lake little digs at her. She was having lunch with him and a client one day and the topic turned to diets because the client had ordered her salad without dressing. My friend, who looked terrific, had lost thirty pounds over the course of the previous year, but she chose not to say anything about her own weight loss because she didn't consider it appropriate. Her boss, however, announced, “You should have seen Patricia last year. She was a three-hundred-pound porker.” When my friend confronted him about it later, he said, “Can't you take a joke?”
This guy was the devil in disguise, but I believe many men simply are ignorant. They want to do the right thing but they've never learned how. I'm not an expert in this area— what woman is? But here are a few things I've found that work for me.
Say Something
Trust me, it won't go away if you ignore it. Now you may expect that I will suggest a verbal lashing for the perpetrator, but that won't get you what you want. Recently I saw some sample dialogue in a magazine about how to handle a male harasser, and it was pretty tough stuff: you were supposed to admonish the guy and threaten to take it to the top. Though you may be totally justified to fight fire with fire this way, and it will make you feel good too, you could easily burn yourself in the process. Jane Hedrick Walter, president of Career Development Consultants in Greensboro, North Carolina, says, “You have to avoid being offensive. You may be within your rights, but I feel a woman has to remind herself, ‘If I offend, I'm dead.’”
Where Possible, First Try a Little Humor
Not everyone feels comfortable with this approach, but it's a natural response for me, having grown up with five brothers, and it often gets the job done. You put the guy on notice that he's stepped over the line, but you have also let him see that you will not exact a penalty—not now, at least. There's that great moment in In the Line of Fire in which Clint Eastwood, a fifty-plus Secret Service agent, says to Renee Russo, “The secretaries get prettier and prettier around here,” even though he knows she's an agent. Rather than bristle, she lobs one back: “And the field agents get older and older.”
The trick is to be funny in a way that doesn't encourage his behavior. My strategy is to make my remark humorous but leave off the smile. A man in my former company ran into me having breakfast in the lobby of a hotel he'd been staying in, though we weren't in town for the same business. Across the room he yelled, “You kept me up all