Sex and Success | Being a woman in business
- Dev Team
- 06 Aug 2014
By Erin Dunham
There have been a few significant points in my life when my gender has been overly irksome to me: when I turned thirteen and I wasn’t allowed to play on the boy’s teams in sports anymore; when I was sixteen and I could not come to terms with why boys would disrespectfully lift up my kilt and why other girls would giggle when they did it to them; and when I joined the corporate world in my twenties and I submitted to the conditions of success grossly equating to my acting as though I was male.
Recently in an interview I was asked what the greatest advice ever given to me was. My answer was the truth, “If you’re going to be a woman in business, accept that you’re in a world of men and act like a man; never let them see you cry, never be moody, always be hyper-rational.” That advice has served me well. A detached, rational person isn’t who I ever was, but it is who I have become out of my sheer drive to become a leader in my field.
Recently, I had dinner with a friend who is a successful woman in the business world. After a bad day at work interpersonally, she spent half of the meal reassuring herself that she was a good leader by repeating the sentence, “I don’t think having empathy makes me a bad manager, I think it makes me a strong one.” She said these words at least ten times throughout our discussion. I have worked with her and I know her to be a very capable and ingenious leader, yet there she was in front of me trying to find some sort of comfort in her leadership style which, respectfully, is often considered by people as quite feminine. She is unbelievably empathetic, caring and she would never put herself above someone else’s interests. These are excellent and respectful qualities; her superiors thought of these qualities as inadequate.
I don’t need to repeat the obvious and recurring injustices that women go through repeatedly in the professional world like having lower pay than men for doing the same job and that men hold the vast majority of upper management jobs in major companies around the world. Most of us are quite versed on the subject of inequality in the workplace. My concern has never been the vast and obvious discrepancies because I see them as a personal challenge. My concerns are the small nuances that we let happen in front of our faces every day and we accept because it’s “not that bad”.
My partner in business is a man, his name is Matt. This has proven to be pinnacle to our successes as a team; it has been much easier on me to have him as a figurehead of our businesses. A few weeks ago, I was introduced as his partner in business, by my partner, to a man in his late sixties. He shook my hand and told me how lucky I was to have such a successful boss and then he inquired what I did for him. He asked me if I was the book keeper. I smiled and looked to my male partner to make the correction. He told the older gentleman that I practically did everything and that he reaped the benefits of it. The gentleman laughed heartily, patted me on the shoulder and said, “That’s nice”. What’s nice? I wondered.
My mother still refers to our three businesses as “Matt’s” and she thinks it’s cute when I talk like a “businessman”. Other family members have made it clear that they think I have been “lucky” rather than that I have worked hard.
The difficulty for women in the business world is not the job being too hard. It isn’t the male competition either. It is not as challenging as you think it is to climb the ladder and to try and reach the top as you form protective callouses on your hands. It is the slivers from the wooden rungs that get caught in your fingers that sting the most. The backhanded comments by our loved ones, kindly mocking our ambitions. It is the condescending smile on a person’s face when we are introduced as business owners (we know that smile is the same one you give your grandkids when they unknowingly make a cute face when as they poop). It is the fact that we have to earn our employees respect and dedication when it belongs intrinsically to our male counterparts.
To quote my partner Matt after an unbelievably sexist encounter with a local businessman in our field: “You just have to accept it. That’s the way it is, people want to think a man is running the show”. The truth is, I feign acceptance because I have to. No one responds well to a strong woman fighting back every time a sexist remark is made. Far too many people (both sexes) consider strong women to be “bitches” when, in fact, if a man acted the exact same way he would be evaluated more positively.
I am not weak; I am strong. I am a great leader and entrepreneur and I know that makes some people uncomfortable. It is time that businesswomen cease to make people so uncomfortable. Let us be respected rather than celebrated. Just let us be.
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