GoddessDeeva and I first met in the noisy, crowded and suitably-Socialist-sounding bar tent called Bread and Roses on the Thursday evening at the Glastonbury Festival in 2013. We were in a huddle of reprobate Lefties, trade union activists and social workers, all soaking up the Workers' Beer Company's finest and looking forward to a full-on festival weekend. Loud music was involved.
Deeva and I have become firm friends since (which goes to prove that new friends met at Glasto aren't just for festivals), and we've found that we have similar views on a lot of what I'll call "rights issues". As a former Director at Amnesty International, I do have my own personal soap box when it comes to human rights, labour rights, women's rights and more, so it's been great to meet someone in Deeva who can get as passionate and agitated as I do about these things.
So Deeva's union work and blogging got me thinking about my experience of what the world of work is like for women, particularly women in senior management roles. You know what? It can and generally does suck. Big time.
Over the last thirty years I've worked in the public, private and voluntary sectors, and, frankly, I can hear the same slow sucking sound in all three. They each suck in their own slightly different musical key, but they've all got the same problems with a lack of pay equality and unhealthy gender imbalance at senior levels. Yes, there are opportunities for capable, confident ambitious women in each sector, but those basic inequalities are still there, despite all the good work of great trade union representatives and organisers like Deeva.
What *really* gets me back up on my soapbox however, is how piss-poorly most senior women behave in the workplace. Given the choice, I would *never* opt to work for a woman as my line manager, given my experiences. The ones I've worked for have either been macho ball-breakers in pin stripe suits, all trying to bully and out-tough the senior men, or the girly flowery-dress-and-matching-cardigan kind, who are all pretty, pretty smiles and a bit flirty on the surface, but are devious, lying manipulative bitches underneath. You know who you are.
Now, I'd *love* this not to be the case, and to be able to say that I've had really great, supportive, mentoring professional female bosses. But *everywhere* I've worked, the higher up I've been in the management hierarchy, the fewer women there have been and those above me have been either those Ball-Breakers or the Pretty Bitches. (I can only think of two exceptions in my direct experience, and I am still friends with them both after many years. No names.)
Getting on my soapbox yet again, the worst of this by far is that both the Ball-Breakers and the Pretty Bitches, the BBs and the PBs, treat the women who report to them so badly. They seem to be able to relate to male colleagues, peers or seniors, but female subordinates = fair game, allegedly.
Somehow calling this behaviour "inappropriate" or "unprofessional" doesn't quite cover it. To give a couple of examples, I've had a female Deputy CEO (a BB) make jokes to an entire senior management team about how fabulous my breasts are, with *those* hand gestures. The gestures which sad, misguided, ill-informed men make in lingerie departments. (My male manager, the CFO, was mortified, and told me after it had happened in my absence. I did not take it as a compliment). In other news, I've had an annual performance bonus down-rated by a female manager (a PB) on the alleged grounds that I was "stubborn and always right". Yes, I was right. PB simply failed to respect my professional property expertise and didn't understand that I was actually correct and knew what I was talking about. If I hadn't been "stubborn" and I had followed her advice, the organisation we both worked for would have lost a deal worth over £8 million. I'd probably have been sacked if that had happened...
The big, whopper elephant in the room problem here is that the BBs and the PBs both advance themselves and protect their own seniority in the workplace by *putting other women down*, particularly those women who are their subordinates and direct reports. That's not OK, and for me that's a soapbox issue.
I manage a lot of people in my current job, men and women alike. I try my hardest to treat them all professionally, fairly and equally. I don't always get it right. I sometime wear a pinstripe suit. Some of my staff colleagues are more capable than others, but that doesn't mean that the best should get treated better by me than those who are less capable and need more of my support. But what I never do is seek to make myself look better by putting *any* of them down. I'm hanging on to the thing that if they do well, all of them (female and male alike), then our whole team will do well. That means we're doing our job.
So why is it that there aren't more and better senior role models for women in the workplace? It is 2015, after all. Why do the upper echelons have a female population of lots of BBs and PBs who treat other women badly? Maybe it's because there just aren't enough women in senior roles, and those who are have had to be either a BB or a PB to get there, to climb the greasy pole. I think that's just taking the worst of how senior men behave and copying aspects of that.
I do think there's a better way. It needs senior women to actively choose to behave differently, to be better role models for younger women coming into the workplace.
Meanwhile, I'm not putting up with it. I'm calling it out every time it happens, in the same way I'd call out poor behaviour by a male manager or colleague. The BBs and the PBs are on notice from me. It's time, ladies.
Ang, known in some online places as Lady Clanger, is an atheist, Socialist republican, a keeper of parrots and humongously large felines. She's an activist in mind and at heart, who strives to Do The Right Thing, even if daily life sometimes gets in the way. Views here exclusively her own.
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