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| Women in the workplace - 1950s or 2012? |
In my previous
workplaces, I had never noticed an obvious gender bias among either the proletariat
or the ranks of senior management, mainly because there wasn’t one. On the
whole, there were near-equal numbers of female and male managers and, if
anything, there were more women staff at the officer level than there were men.
Maybe it’s do with the sector. The public sector, with its family-friendlier
policies and emphasis on work-life balance, has always been attractive to
women, especially those with families.
But the gender
imbalance in the European workspace is more subtle. It’s not so much about
numbers of women in the workplace but attitudes to the women there. There are
two types of women in the corporate arena in which I work – the dolly bird and
the dogged bird. And guess which one gets further ahead? The one who is
serious, focussed and gets the work done with little fanfare? Or the one who
looks good, sounds good but does very little to add to the bottom line? No
surprises there then.
What has been
shocking, though, is the blatant way in which hardworking women are simply not
heard and are treated as a bit of office fluff, irrelevant. They’re listened to
but ignored, consulted but patronised. Don’t get me wrong. The dolly bird isn’t
taken seriously either but she does get what she wants. The dogged bird is
taken seriously – ostensibly, at least - but doesn’t get what she wants. In the
end, neither wins. This may just be a private sector thing where it’s easier to
get away with such flagrant prejudices but the fact that it persists is
disturbing.
Then there’s the
outside workspace, the interaction with clients and partners. One day, at a
conference for about one hundred middle managers from across Europe, I hired a
trainer to deliver a workshop on public speaking. After delivering three
sessions to three different groups, she says to me: “I could see a couple of
the men looking at me thinking, What does
this little woman think she can teach me?” I sympathised, really, but
thought to myself, Try being black and a woman
and reading the thoughts of those men… and
the women to boot! But then this isn’t a competition and, again, there are
no winners.
Which brings me
to another point. It’s not just men who perpetuate the gender bias. Women are also guilty of propagating
it, which is, perhaps, marginally worse. We all know the stereotype of the
woman who manages to climb the corporate ladder by acting like man only to pull
up the ladder when she reaches the peak. That stereotype doesn’t quite
apply here. In this case, the perpetrator is a woman of a certain age, somewhat
north of fifty, for whom youth is an issue. Threatened by younger, rising stars,
she is quick to dismiss their input and resist their management and even
quicker to denigrate them to the boss, a man of a similar age and background to
her own.
And that leads
me to this. The relationship between gender, race and class is well documented.
Being black and female means that you’re usually at the bottom of the totem
pole, just one rung behind the black male. But being Eastern European and
female, my colleague assures me, also has its problems in western Europe. The
same woman of a certain age who is resistant to management by younger women
once allegedly said of her younger
manager: “These Eastern Europeans, who do they think they are? They’ve only
been in the system for five minutes and they think they know it all!” Ouch!
But Europeans
don’t want to worry about a little thing like racism. What with their economies
in the toilet and their futures down the drain, the only thing left to do is
blame those pesky Others – migrants and immigrants - who keep flooding their
shores and who should be grateful that they were allowed onto the continent –
or into the Union - in the first place. Yes, because what Europe needs right
now is more Europeans who can’t work, won’t work and expect to be paid for the
privilege, too. (See German companies are
like Italian companies).
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