“She has grown very fast in this company,” a colleague told me. “Oh that’s nice. How did she crack it?” I asked excitedly, not noticing the smirk on my colleague’s face.
I was greenly naive and naively green like that during the early years of my career.
And then, it kept happening. Again and again. And again. Till it was no longer an uncatchable cue or an ignorable one-off.
When a man gets promoted, it is usually because, “He is very smart. He closes deals so well. Clients love him.” When a woman moves up, it get into the territory of “Is it even surprising? You know how things work here.”
And the reasons co-workers come up with range from ‘Must be a diversity tick-mark’ to ‘She is very close to the boss’.
No, I am not making this up. It even has a name. The “only” syndrome. More eyes and more scrutiny on women because they are a stand out in the otherwise homogeneous male groups.
That isn’t the only problem.
As a woman progresses up, most seniorboss-employee relationships become male-female. So, even a thriving working equation runs the risk of being construed as, “Surely, there must be something personal here”. A conclusion no one comes to that easily about a boss-subordinate relationship where both are males.
You know what has personally bummed me the most all these years? The indirect impact on the rest of the female workforce that’s looking for role models to look up to.
The first time I went “Wow, she’s the only female partner? I want to hear her story some day,” I got bombarded with lot of ‘helpful’ information about how she must have manipulated people and the system to get where she got to.
The next time I looked for inspiration from another senior woman leader, all I got was info about how crappy she was at her work and she must be getting onto a PIP if the organization knows what’s right for them.
There was this one time I had an assignment to interview female role models within or outside my organization, as part of a training program. I excitedly bounced off the name of a super successful senior woman leader as a potential person to speak to with my then (male) boss. He shot down the idea immediately with a vehement “Oh not a good choice”. Smelling something more than straightforward rationale, I kept asking “why, why do you say that”. He eventually gave up telling me, “No red flag in particular. She’s just very aggressive. I don’t know if that’s the kind of role model you want to talk to. But yeah sure go ahead, whatever.”
So what? What’s the point? You ask me.
Nothing. Except, the next time you second guess and bad mouth why a woman got that promotion or landed that plum job, take a step back and ask yourself - Are you blinded by her gender and looking for answers to simply belittle her?
If each of us consciously, honestly, and consistently do this exercise, the corporate world might eventually become a more equal place for both genders.
We do owe that much to the generations that come after us.
P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.