Executive Coach and entrepreneur Rachael Wood has a view on almost every subject imaginable through both her own professional and personal experiences and those of her clients. She will be sharing those views most pertinent to today’s woman in a new column on FMWF.com.
Addressing a forum of bright, 20-something City women last week, the questions that I was asked centred on how I had coped as a woman in the City, how I had succeeded in male dominated environments and how I had juggled being perceived as an attractive woman with being taken seriously as a professional.
The answer to all of these questions is the same: I’ve always simply focused on the job at hand and not concerned myself with the fact that the person doing the job happened, in my case, to be female.
It is a repetitive theme in my work that women worry intensely about being held back in their careers because they are female. These women hypothesise about how they might be perceived, whether they being taken seriously or properly respected, rather than spending the energy doing a great job. The irony is that usually the anxiety about this exists before anything negative has happened.This can manifest itself in bitterness and suspicion that grows if unchecked, until eventually they become less effective in their professional roles and find themselves dropping behind their peer group on the career ladder. A painful example of the self-fulfilling prophecy at work.
As a naive 20-year old myself stepping foot onto a trading floor for the first time many years ago, I remember bracing myself for a barrage of comments about blonde hair correlating with intellect and a daily critique on my wardrobe. Did it happen? Of course, but equally the alpha males who stepped onto that same trading floor with me were taunted as being too fat, too thin, too posh, too geeky or too flash. In short, we were identified by our most obvious differentiating factor, which in my case was that I was a blonde girl, and that formed the basis for comments intended to amuse the floor. The important point is that the comments were not made because I was a girl, but because I had chosen to work in an environment where banter is as certain as lots of computer screens and anyone looking for a cosseted working environment simply shouldn’t choose that one.
Women should celebrate their natural ability to multitask, their high EQ and their plethora of choices and stop worrying about a glass ceiling until they hit it. One can’t imagine that Margaret Thatcher spent a lot of time worrying about how far she could go, she simply got on with the job in hand. Likewise, the Body Shop’s Anita Roddick, Lastminute.com’s Martha Lane Fox and Ultimo’s chief executive Michelle Mone have all believed that they could do it rather than hesitating that a glass ceiling might stop them.
It is a sad fact that often it is women themselves who constrain their female peers. I know of high-powered female professionals who would remove expensive jewellery or ‘dress down’ before a pitch with female clients for fear of being too threatening. Some of the worst workplace bullying starts in ladies toilets and continues with a round of poisonous Chinese whispers aimed at an unlucky colleague. Even worse, the media still enjoy to stereotype women according to their looks. Indeed, when Management Today unveiled an issue celebrating young successful businesswomen, with the emphasis equally on celebrating the business success and the woman behind it, a female journalist from the Financial Times felt the need to write a catty column accusing the publication and the women as damaging the cause of women by “flaunting” their sexuality and creating a “footballer’s wives” stereotype.
Surely, decades of striving to change the rigid gender stereotypes for both men and women in order to allow men to be the primary carer for their children if they choose to and women to be the breadwinnerare exactly about breaking stereotypes rather than exchanging one for another?
We would all rail against the advertisements of yesteryear; “We’ve got nothing against stunning-looking girls,” states a Dictaphone ad from 1971, “if they do their jobs properly. But how many of them do?” Or a 1968 ad for Lily disposable cups, which declared that Elsie “always looked great but her tea wasn’t so hot. Then she got married.”
We have lived through the power suits of the 1980s with big shoulder pads and bigger hair, the more relaxed 1990s as businesswomen became more focused on what they could achieve than what they could wear; and now we are settling into the new millennium with more women at the helm of their own companies, confident enough in themselves to present themselves honestly and do things their own way.We should praise that confidence and welcome the freedom to be perceived as feminine and sharp in business.
Women have fought hard for many years for equal rights to choose. The women who succeed are those who choose to focus on the opportunities not the obstacles. They put their energy into what they can achieve and not into considering what they cannot. They earn respect and are taken seriously because they perform well.
How have I succeeded in business across three different male dominated industries? I am good at what I do. That’s it.
Tags: glass ceiling
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