In a two-week period in 2017, Senator Kamala Harris was interrupted during two separate panel hearings while interrogating Rod Rosenstein and antebellum avatar Jeff Sessions. The sight of an “opinionated” woman bringing down the hammer on poor little white guys was too much for Senate Republicans Richard Burr and John McCain, who both interrupted Kamala during both hearings (that’s a total of four man-terruptions) to ask her to please allow the men to answer the question they were clearly avoiding.
Later, on Anderson Cooper, Trump campaign troll Jason Miller praised Sessions for knocking “away some of the hysteria from Kamala Harris.” Interesting how the human doing their job is treated differently when that human has a vagina, huh?
Sadly, this is a situation every woman in corporate America has firsthand experience with. Do you dare participate in meetings? Offer out-of-the-box ideas over email? Allow words to exit your mouth around others? Then prepare to suffer the wrath of the threatened businessman—a sensitive creature who wants his female co-worker to be a woman who smiles and laughs and is affable to whatever comes her way. He wants to work with the kind of woman who doesn’t let her job title (CFO) get in the way of helping out during meetings (taking notes). Women who twirl into rooms and hum Huey Lewis songs while at the copy machine. He doesn’t want to spend his 9 to 5 with a woman who asks to join the C-suite golf game. Or after-work whiskeys. Or other “man business” stuff.
Kieran Snyder at Fortune took a look at performance reviews from tech companies to see if there were any patterns between how women’s job performances were evaluated compared to men’s. What she found will not be shocking to any woman reading this—female employee reviews were more likely to include words like “abrasive,” “bossy,” “emotional,” and “irrational.” (My greatest regret as a Texan is not competing in Miss America just so I could introduce myself with the intro: “Abrasive, bossy, emotional and irrational. Howdy, I’m Miss Texas!”). In contrast, the reviews of the men who needed improvement included encouraging and soft statements like “you still have some skills to continue to develop.”
“The message is clear: women, how dare you? And guys, let’s get in there and give it another shot, huh, bro?”
It’s not just performance reviews, the punishment for fucking up is greater too. The Bank of England did a study looking at 10 years of data tracking financial sector jobs and found that when women fucked up, they were 20 percent more likely to get fired, even though men are twice as likely to be repeat offenders (and their mistakes are often more costly—right Ken Lay, Charles Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, Walter Forbes, Jon Corzine, Bernard Ebbers, Kareem Serageldin, Richard Scrushy, Dennis Kozlowski, Joseph Nacchio, Daniel Mudd, and Richard Syron?).
The message is clear: women, how dare you? And guys, let’s get in there and give it another shot, huh, bro? Everyone makes mistakes.
Bain and Company did a study that will make you want to burn your belongings and start an all-female commune (not the point of this piece, but a great idea). They found that when women start their careers, 43 percent of them want to work towards a job in top management and are pretty confident they can do that. But after time, when they’re really good at their jobs and have finally learned all the Keurig flavors to avoid, their aspirations drop by half while men’s stay the same.
“There are no consistent rules women can rally against or adhere to. The rules are constantly being dictated in different, confusing ways by a myriad of types of terrible men.”
While you might think there’s a compromise of straddling gender norms to live in some unknown middle ground where you’re constantly adjusting your personality to fit the scenario, consider the sheer effort that goes into the ever-moving goalpost of other people’s biased garbage. I’m not interested in how sitting up straight in meetings oozes masculine power. Do you know how many utterly rotten looking men are killing it in the entertainment and gaming industries? Men who haven’t felt the power of a straight spine in decades?
There are no consistent rules women can rally against or adhere to. The rules are constantly being dictated in different, confusing ways by a myriad of types of terrible men, and it’s a waste of our precious pay-gapped time to figure it out. If you see a self-help book filled with pages lecturing you on how to “be more like a man at work,” throw it on the ground and pour your menstrual cup blood on it (in public or private, your call).
But here’s what wecan do. Find allies at work (other women is a good place to start). When you find your people, start talking. Share stories and salaries, look for patterns in how everyone is treated. They will be there. And don’t change who you are, stay loud and assertive—and take notes on wack behavior so you call out people on their bullshit when needed.
Lastly, remember this take away from Kamala Harris story. When she was flexing her prosecutorial muscle on Jeff Sessions, he pleaded to her “I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous.” Keep ’em on their toes—and let ‘em sweat, gals.
