one stage to another is one that seems impenetrable for women.
Fraternity is built with people who are like you. “The human tendency to gravitate to people like oneself leads powerful men to sponsor and advocate for other men when leadership opportunities arise.”1
Whether the ticket to entry was a shared love of golf, fishing, or some other activity that I have no interest in or time for, I’ve always been stymied by the fraternity. I’ve tried to crack it. I’ve learned how to tell jokes. I can order, and enjoy, scotch. I’ve been known to smoke a cigar. I’ve been encouraged to be tougher, be more like the boys – learn to play with the boys. I’ve been told that I should spend more time after work hanging out with the guys. Literally, all words of wisdom I’ve heard.
Fraternities have built a certain kind of toxic business environment of insiders and exclusion. I questioned the assumption that I should try to join.
What I find most fascinating is I’ve been rewarded for learning to drink brown liquor and hang with the boys. I’ve been held up as evidence that a woman can successfully navigate a male-dominated company or industry. On the other side of this, I’ve watched senior women be fired for drinking too much and “misbehaving,” yet I’ve never seen that happen to a male executive.
I once had a person walk up to me at an event, very late in the evening, and tell me, in front of many of our peers, that he liked to “get nekked.” For real. That underneath his suit was a “wild and crazy guy.” He then asked me if I’d like to go back to our hotel with him.
A friend of mine witnessed this. He offered to walk me back to our hotel. We escaped. The behavior was explained away by this group of men, saying that he was just “having too much fun!” and they laughed about it for years. His behavior was excused because he was part of the fraternity.
We’re Not Helping Each Other
I was employed in a senior role at one company, and it was suggested to me that I meet with one of the most senior women in human resources. She was one of the only other women on the executive team, and she was incredibly powerful. I was told she’d be a phenomenal mentor.
I’ll never forget my meeting with her. I set up some time based on her schedule, but clearly I wasn’t a priority – as a new, young, female executive. She kept moving our appointment time and time again. This went on for months.
Finally, almost a quarter later, we both found ourselves at an offsite board meeting. I approached her later in the day, after we’d both completed our presentations. I sat down and we started chatting. It was all very amiable. At one point I paused, and with a significant amount of deference in my tone asked her for advice on navigating the company. It was a high school boy’s locker room for sure… I commented on how successful she had clearly been at doing so, and I asked her if she’d be willing to work with me.
She paused and said, “No one helped me. Why should I help you?”
I’d asked for help and been denied. It was a moment of having to find a whole new layer of inner strength. I decided at that moment that it was up to me to do something to change the game, to try and make sure that no one else received that same answer.
Years later, I read an article that described what I’d experienced: second-generation bias. One of the components of second-generation bias is the bidirectional feeling that there is limited worth. That means that younger women may have a bias against older women in the workplace – that they may not be the people to go to for networking, career help, and so on, and that older women may have a bias against the upcoming generation.
That whole notion of “No one helped me. Why should I help you?”
I refused to believe that was an appropriate response. I have made it my mission to help younger women. As word spread, I had a constant stream of requests for mentoring. It got to the point that I had to structure my weeks with very specific rules. There were only so many hours that I could spend with women who were in search of guidance – in and outside of work. One happy hour a week, two lunches.
Still, I knew I wasn’t helping everyone that I could, so I started creating informal women’s networks. I’d connect women who were more senior and with a mentoring mind-set with women who were newer in their careers. I opened up a night a month to a women’s happy hour where women from all sorts of industries came together for networking opportunities. Women formed bonds. Women gave and received advice. Women shared and created job opportunities for other women.
I worked at another company where I asked the senior human resources leader if I could start a women’s network. She told me that she didn’t think that was a good idea. After all, if we organized women, other groups would organize, too. I did it anyway. It was underground, but I created it.
I have continued to create those networks, both formally and informally, at every company I have worked for.
I’ll never forget the day I left one firm. The announcement went out, and I was stunned by how many e-mails I received. There were thousands. The woman in charge of my life, my executive assistant, made copies of several of them for me. The two piles that were important were the ones from people she knew were important to me. The other pile, from women who I’d never met, writing to tell me that they’d seen me speak in an all-employee meeting, or that they’d heard about how I’d helped a friend of a friend and how I was a role model to them. That they felt more confident in their ability to speak up because of me. There were hundreds of those. I still have that pile of printed e-mails.
My Children, or Lack Thereof
In my 20s and 30s, I was asked time and time again why I didn’t have children. It started as such an innocent thing, I think. Many of the women around me, if not most, had children. Younger women, older women – they all had elected to have kids. It was almost as if I were looked down upon for having made the decision not to have children.
I was asked this question by colleagues and associates so many times that my answer became so ingrained, it was an extension of my personal elevator pitch. “I loved playing with Legos and Lincoln Logs when I was a kid. I never had any baby dolls that I carried around, pretending to be mommy. Motherhood was never a calling for me, but I’m so glad that it is for you!” Huge, bright smile on my face.
As I got older, the questions became more hushed. People actually had the audacity to ask me if we’d been trying but were unsuccessful. Were we not able? Quickly followed by some heartwarming story of a friend or family member who had success with in vitro fertilization or my favorite, “When they stopped trying so hard, it just happened!”
The first time that happened, I was stunned. Really. Stunned into silence. It was one of the first times in my life I didn’t have a retort. How do you respond to that? My “I loved playing with Legos” line didn’t work. The voice running through my head told me that it wasn’t appropriate to say, “I have no desire to have children.”
No one seemed to ask my male counterparts that question.
Then there was the year that I was told I was the highest-rated and best performer, but that my bonus wasn’t going to be as big as I thought it would be because my boss needed to ensure that the bonus dollars were spread around – because my male peers had families.
I got stronger.
Mansplaining
If I had a dollar for every time I was interrupted, I’d be retired by now. Then add to that “mansplaining,” and I’d be retired and supporting all my friends and family. My friends and I have had this conversation for years. And it still happens. Every. Single. Day.
According to Merriam-Webster: “Mansplaining is, at its core, a very specific thing. It’s what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.”
One of my favorite mansplaining stories is from a panel I was on. (We could talk for days about the underrepresentation of women on panels and as speakers at conferences,