What if…?

What if women stopped thinking about how to conform to the male standard and focused on pulling in, promoting and championing other women?

There is no shortage of material either online or in the press about Gender Equality.   There are also countless “resources” telling us how to change our ways.   These “resources” suggest that if we change our way of – talking, thinking, dressing, walking, laughing, prioritizing, apologizing, and behaving we might just become more successful in the workplace.   I don’t buy it.

To be clear – I do believe there is some level of conformity necessary to be successful in any environment.   What I don’t believe is that changing ourselves by pitching to the male audience is the way to go about balancing the gender scales. I have seen it do just the opposite.

A familiar topic in the discussion of women in business is our purported inability to “get along”; that we don’t support each other and that we create drama.   Perhaps this isn’t true in every business.   It is, however, a very common theme in the male-dominated financial services industry – most specifically in and around trading businesses.  With twenty-five plus years on various trading floors, I can tell you that there is a significant imbalance between men and women in key and senior roles. That imbalance can create tension among the women who are trying to fit in  (as all those “resources” noted earlier would recommend), to get recognition or get ahead.

The higher you look in these organizations, the fewer women you will see.   There are more than enough different theories on why that is the case – but I have my own theory on what has contributed to this problem. I believe that our history of not fully supporting other women has held us back.  I think many of us have wasted time distracting ourselves by competing with one another for that chance to be “one of the guys”.  I think that distraction and competition has given men the excuse to pass us over for promotions and other career opportunities.

I do not believe that all men (or even most men) consciously decide to favor men over women. Anyone who has done any hiring knows that sometimes when you have two candidates that are fully qualified and largely equal you often have to “go with your gut” when choosing. You may consider who makes you most comfortable and which person “feels” right for the role. Many men are more comfortable around men than they are around women.   So a male hiring manager’s “gut” will often push him to a male candidate.  And ironically women may often let the role go to the male candidate because of their expectation that a man would acclimate better to a group already full of men.   I know this because I have done it myself.

It never occurred to me that I was discriminating against women.   I was just more comfortable around men. For years I was often one of the few non-administrative women on the trading floor.   As a senior manager, I was almost always the only woman in the meeting. It wasn’t until I was finally leading a team that was more than fifty percent female (incredibly rare on a trading floor) that I realized that more women meant less tension. There was no infighting.  Everyone was comfortable around one another – both men and women.   They were not necessarily all best friends and had a normal amount of friction, but it was easily sorted out amongst themselves.  It was very unlike those years before when I led a team of ten or fifteen with only two or three women who would often square off on incidental topics.     With this balanced team, I was never called on to referee unnecessary arguments and I was never BCC”d  on one of those long rambling emails where one person rips the other one to shreds about some perceived slight, with half the trading floor copied.   Working with this team is what started me thinking about gender balance in the workplace.  They completely changed my perspective on working with women.  They are what inspired me to start this website and the other projects related to it.

From all of that, my challenge has become – how do “we” get more women into key roles within male-dominated firms?

The first step:

Women need to be as comfortable working together as men are. Men need to be comfortable that the women around them are comfortable with one another.  

What if women were confident that support and encouragement would come from every woman they encountered in their workplace?   What if women stuck together and were not distracted by competing with or challenging one another?   What if women in male-dominated industries were as comfortable with each other as men?   What if Women stood together to challenge gender bias in the workplace?  What if women put women first?