“What the f#@& were they thinking?” said the senior partner in the meeting, almost immediately followed by a sheepish-grin-adorned, “Pardon my French, lady”.
I was flummoxed. And then, I looked around. I was the only female in the room.
It was the first of many more to come, in many meeting rooms, over the years.
Swear language isn’t for the delicate female ears, I have been told. It is risky as hell, what with #MeToo and all ha ha ha, I have been reminded, if only in jest.
But you know what. Whenever someone apologises for the ‘F’ word they use in front of a woman, I wonder how few women they must be used to working with, how few girls they must have studied with.
More importantly, I get acutely conscious of a strange kind of othering, albeit a chivalrous-sounding one.
The men are here for the backslapping friendships, unpolitical terms included; the women are esoteric beings, nice to deal with from a distance.
A young girl I met a few days ago put it quite well. “I can never be buddies with my boss like my male colleagues can. It’s not that he means to discriminate, he just doesn’t know what to talk to me about. But, he is able to bond with the men, perhaps on general dude stuff."
So, should everyone start using swear words at the workplace to get to equal footing? Will that help gender-agnostic buddy-dom perhaps?
Erm.. no.
Well then, should everyone clean up their language, to remember the sensibilities of the odd woman here and there, rather than apologise post facto?
No, not at all.
I come back to the same answer yet again, at the risk of sounding painfully repetitive.
We need more equal representation in those meeting rooms, in the cafeterias. At the workplace. We need to all consciously work towards normalising the female presence in our midst, while biting our tongues at the odd bad word we slip out, gender notwithstanding.
Words matter. But a different kind of words, not the swearing kind. Perhaps next time you say “hey guys”, pivot to “hey folks”. Replace men with persons, strawpersons even (consultants will be familiar with storyboarding, a bare shell deck with key messages, that we famously call strawman). Be inclusive about your after-work-hour invites.
It is ok if you don’t hold the door open with all the chivalry you can muster, as you have always been taught to. Just don’t shut doors to opportunities on us, to mingle, to network, to feel more belonged.
Let us be, work with you as people, not just as females.
*Not a typo. I wanted to pun ‘misplaced’ with ‘Missplaced’, but Ms is a more equal term than Miss and Mrs.
P. S. Views strictly personal. Post doesn’t refer to any organisation that I am currently associated with.