Still a Man’s World?

I have a female shiba inu who has just turned 20 months and had her first season. So interesting to observe male dogs behaviour around her especially those who hadn’t been neutered. I couldn’t help but compare it to meetings I have had where I have been the only single female. There is something that appears to exist deep in the evolutionary make up of some males that might make for fascinating observation if I wasn’t so frustrated at not being able to get my voice heard. As soon as you put another woman in the room, this behaviour softens. I promise you it does. I have witnessed it enough times now to be sure and several times with the same group for variable consistency.

I had one such meeting just last week as I write this. External stakeholders coming with their desire to lay out their credentials or, using my dog metaphor, piss all over the meeting. They wanted to ensure I continued to smell their scent for hours afterwards. As I shared this story with my other half I was clear that I didn’t think they consciously set out to achieve this objective. I don’t think in their meeting preparation they highlighted their core goal as scent spreading, but nonetheless that is what I witnessed. Within the meeting preamble small talk it was evident I wouldn’t get a word in and to be honest I decided not to try. It was a meeting where my core objective was to gather intelligence and the more I let them think they were comfortable to pass without judgement, the more intelligence I would get. And my strategy worked.

Even when I do have a strategy for managing these meetings, I leave them upset, frustrated, feeling undermined and incredibly lonely. When I haven’t prepared for this behaviour or when I need to get my voice heard, these feelings increase ten-fold. On one occasion, not that long ago, I broke down in front of my daughter a few hours later struggling to manage the intensity of negative emotion that hadn’t dissipated when the meeting ended.

As I write this I know I need to balance my reflections and my emotions with the many, many meetings I have when this behaviour isn’t obvious – or in fact evident at all. I am able to write this because I have just come from a positive meeting where I was again the only woman in the room and I was also the convener of the meeting. The experience was uplifting because I felt comfortable and secure enough to share my still messy thoughts on what good looked like for me in the next phase of our venture and I felt supported and understood as I spoke. Another recent meeting where I was the only woman left me feeling incredibly empowered when senior male leaders that seriously outrank me made sure the rest of the room knew that I had the lead on the project we are discussing. And that meant so much – perhaps because it hasn’t always been the norm.

But why does this matter and why am I writing about it? It started as a way to manage my own frustration and anger at the ‘territory marking’ meetings and how hard it is for me to manage my emotions during them – despite the fact that I have found a way to navigate them to get what I need. It is also a way to get my voice heard through my own medium and in my own way. But I truly hope, as I write this with my own teenage daughter, that the next generation of women will have it better than me. Just like those who broke the glass ceiling before helped me to have it better than them.

Writing this has also enabled me to find empathy. The white middle-class, middle-aged male finds themselves very much ‘out of favour’ with the narrative people want to present. No one wants to be referred to as a member of the ‘pale, male, stale’ group irrespective of the privilege those of us on the outside think it brings to those who are. And as I teach my daughter to treat teenage boys like puppies by ignoring the behaviour she doesn’t like and giving her attention as a reward for the behaviour she wants, I realise that some grown men aren’t much different! I am sure there is a very small minority of men that will deliberately want to undermine and hurt women in the workplace, but I must remember that those who tend to upset me are just puppies needing more instruction on which behaviours aren’t acceptable.