While in a career exploration phase, I was referred to a woman with an unusual first name (privacy issues prevent me from sharing her name, so I’ll make one up—“Rourke.”) “Rourke” also had a very strange last name, “Annette”. When a friend had given me her contact information I thought, “what an unusual name.” I was eager to speak with her; she had risen in the ranks of the field I was exploring, organizational psychology, and was now an established practitioner and professor.
I called her, not sure what to ask. I didn’t know if I could accomplish what I wanted—to be a leadership consultant—with a Masters in OD. I had been told that many people with an OD degree go into human resources—something I didn’t want to do; only a sliver of them consult. I was almost certain that this woman would try to talk me into working in a corporate HR department. Her advice wasn’t what I expected.
We set up a time to talk on the phone. Immediately after our hello’s I commented on her name.
“Rourke Annette is so unusual; I like it,” I said.
“That’s not my real name,” she said. “It’s really Annette Rourke.”
I figured she just wanted to be different, but I asked her anyway, “So why did you change it?”
“Back when I was in school, twenty-some-odd years ago, there were no women in my field. I wanted the good jobs, but I wasn’t going to get in the door being a woman, so I changed my name.”
It chilled me to think that, even now, when women are getting key positions in what was considered a man’s field, she still went by her pseudonym.
I was wondering whether I should get my credentials on the East Coast, where I had been accepted into a program at a “name” school, or do a commuter program in the Bay Area, where I was and still am living.
“Don’t do the commuter program,” Rouke said, “You need the name behind you.”
“But if I get the education, why does it matter?”
“It will always matter for you, for us. We need all the degrees and prestige we can get because we are women, and we’ll always have to do better, be better, to be on par with men in the corporate world.”
This advice sounds so generalized when it’s offered up like that. But honestly, isn’t that the philosophy by which so many of us women subconsciously abide when making our choices? We won’t always have the luxury of picking the best schools, or the best companies to work for, but we always have that lingering feeling that, perhaps, if we just stick it out a little bit more than men we might get an equal reward.
Before anyone starts throwing their Ivy League degree at me, please understand that I am not griping about women seeking education to further themselves. Education is what got us where we are in the first place. Education is essential; but what kind of education are we talking here?
There’s the education of ideas—stimulation toward making things possible in the world; then there’s the education that has often come with it—the education of mannerisms, empirical (read: often emotionless) and results-oriented (read: revenue-oriented) thinking. The education of being male.
This is the same thinking that constructs the corporate ideal of success. And women such as Rourke, who have actually enjoyed this kind of success, feel half-realized, because, really, they’ve only brought half of themselves into the boardroom.
I read an ambivalent article in Workforce Magazine about women in management. Some companies, such as Cigna, see a big upside in training high-potential female leaders to take top positions. Why? In Cigna’s case, “women make most of the health-care buying decisions in households. Having them in key positions offers more insight into that consumer base,” explains writer Eve Tahmincioglu.
Somehow this reason strikes me as lame. It feels like some woman with a tenuous link to corporate strategy generated buzz around this fact in order to provide some metric proof for why she deserved a promotion. And, if this was the case, more power to her! She used empirical reasoning to appeal to empirical people. But what would have warmed my heart is if women’s inherent capabilities, and corporate’s understanding of their value in a company’s leadership, were what drove Cigna to spend $2 million annually on promoting women into top positions, not some market-driven hypothesis.
Consider the real nature of business. Yes, we can measure its successes and its failures, but we can’t always predict if campaigns/products/management teams will be successful. It’s often a matter of gut instinct and chemistry. Sometimes mushy gushy stuff, like people (ooops, sorry—human capital) need to be juggled with a P&L. Sometimes things go wrong/get off-schedule/go way off-budget despite the business plan. Women typically understand these less controllable aspects of business than men.
And yet, research firm Catalyst says that the number of female board members and senior executives at corporations is still at (insert abysmal, negligible numerical percentage here).
And still, every year, companies shake their heads and stomp their Florsheims and say, “That’s not right—we need more women!” And every year a few women step up to the plate, having gone through the rigors of executive life—countless permanent press shirts, leadership retreats and scotch-and-sodas with senior management—having proven themselves equally capable, if not more so, than their male counterparts. They sit at the cherrywood table and forget who they are. They act like men.
I once had a glorified sales job. When I took it I was told that I would be working creatively with clients, developing solutions for them and growing the relationships—this was what I was told by one of the people who hired me—not coincidentally, the woman who ran the department. The reality, however, was much different, and once the harsh winds of the Dot Com bust were felt by management, the job became not so glorified. Translation: I cold-called for my supper.
I had to chat up customers and attend trade shows to generate leads. I did what I was asked and returned from every trip with an Excel spreadsheet detailing who I spoke with, their title (decisionmaking ability), key points of our conversations (how close were they to buying), and next steps. All interactions were given a number that most salespeople are familiar with—a 90, a 50, or a 10—which helped my manager create a sales forecast that would create an expectation with senior management we would never live up to.
As much as I hated this job, there were some redeeming aspects to it. Going to the tradeshows I occasionally had enjoyable conversations with people, usually non-prospects, who told me very interesting things: the state of the industry, how the companies at the show were being perceived. Things that, at a business that didn’t judge success by how much I “closed” would be not only interesting but valuable.
At one of these tradeshows I endured the indignity of having to tour around a show floor with my newly minted boss, who wanted to show me how schmoozing the client should be done. He was a fan of the solution-centered sales philosophy, towing the line like anybody in the field must say they do, but his actions spoke much louder of the opposite. He tried to control the conversations, used sloganing to convince potential customers that he knew their problems better than they, and once out of earshot, used demoralizing epithets to refer to customers who didn’t buy into his logic.
I was hardly blameless in all this. I found that, over beers when we did a post-mortem of the event, I was nodding in agreement and adding color commentary: “Stupid cow. Can’t even understand the product…”
As the night wore on, and he and his other male colleague got drunker, and more, well, male, more comments were made about how so-and-so was screwing up, and how our admin—the stupid bitch—was going to get canned for opening up her stupid mouth and telling management that she wanted to move out of her position and do something else.
For the first time that evening I started to feel the pinch. I could mock customers who had said no to us, and I could temporarily suspend my disbelief in our mental superiority, but now I was feeling, well, icky; like I was letting down a sistah. All this woman wanted was to be heard. Hell, all our CUSTOMERS wanted was to be heard. And this apparently was too much to ask—at least in the world of these men.
I was asked what I would do this woman who asked to be moved out of our department. I knew what I was supposed to say (“Can her ass!”), but that’s not what I was thinking. Honestly, I was proud of this woman for speaking up, but that would hardly go over with the primates sitting next to me. So I sold out.
“What she did was a very stupid thing,” I said. “But she’s still young. Don’t fire her for it.”
The two men turned their ire on me; not only had I sold out, I had sold out unconvincingly. I didn’t have what it took to sell, they said; I had brains, but not the "balls". More words were said—the kind that, had I really not taken the words to heart, would have made me rich from settlement fees. I really felt that I wasn’t man enough to handle the job. And, even as the man-dominated department failed to make the numbers (in retrospect, it was a just after the recession, and we were jamming the wrong product down people’s throats), I still wondered, what am I doing wrong?
In the end the woman who asked to leave our department “resigned.” My boss had a going-away party for her, but, brilliant woman, she didn’t show up. Looking back on that time I don’t really blame my boss and his male colleague for what happened. They were just enactors really—knuckle-scraping henchmen for the real person in power. The person that our admin had gone to for a heart-to-heart on her career path because she thought she would be heard; the person who headed up the department—a woman.
The Workforce article also made another cogent point. It’s not always the companies that keep women from filling the top positions, it’s the women. There truly is a lack of females qualified for these positions, or, in the case I mentioned, a lack of qualified females in the positions. They may seem qualified, but they fail to bring what women have to offer management--compassion, the ability to relate and intuit.
Looking at it another way, there are not enough females willing to give up their values for a position that men deem worth having. We’re not qualified to take these spots and never will be because they weren’t made for us. They were made for men. And some of us may aspire to fill them, but in doing so we risk stuffing our curves into that sickeningly straight-edged box, and wonder why, with the privilege of being in this exalted place, do we not feel right at home?
This was an amazing series...written with keen insight and honesty....thoroughly enjoyed it! Joy
Posted by: Joy | September 30, 2004 at 05:26 PM
For more stories about women in high places check out Eve Tahmincioglu's new book, 'From the Sandbox to the Corner Office' at http://www.sandboxbook.com.
Posted by: Fan of strong women | September 26, 2006 at 06:34 PM