Leaning In is a Band-Aid
Last week I took part in a panel discussion hosted by Out in Tech. The subject was Womxn Leaders In Tech, and the panel consisted of 3 femme-identifying people, all of us sharing our stories, experiences, and insights. One question posed to the panel was (paraphrasing), “Given that most people perceive me as looking ‘child-like’, how can I be taken more seriously in the workplace?”. Now, let’s be clear, I haven’t looked childlike for more decades than I’d care to admit! But having been raised male and then abdicated some of that privilege, I do have some insight into how people have to behave in order to get taken seriously. My advice to this audience member was to walk into the room projecting the image that ‘I have arrived… we can start now’. To sit on the front edge of the most prominent chair in the room. To call people out when they interrupt. Basically, I told her to ‘lean in’.
For the audience in that room, I don’t think it was the wrong answer, but I do want to apply some nuance and context. And I also want to say, unequivocally, that the assertion that this is a problem for women to solve is bullshit. The people who have to solve this problem are the people that created it: wealthy white straight cisgender men. These are the people that created the corporate patriarchal culture that we navigate on a daily basis, and only their loss of that privilege will create the opportunity for the rest of us to show up authentically, to focus on OUR strengths, rather than those traits that are ‘supposed to be’ our strengths. That loss will only come about as a result of deep, intentional work on the part of corporate leaders.
I recently wrote, as part of a conversation in @Zapproved’s #inclusion Slack channel,
There is a paradox present here, insofar as inclusion, as in f’reals inclusion, can’t be granted by the privileged party. We can’t pull people into it, because those people (or others) can be just as easily pushed out. Real inclusion comes from the surrender of privilege, not the granting of it. Convincing a privileged class to do this is nigh impossible…. assuming that they even understand the mechanics of HOW to do it.
The people responsible for breaking down the cultural structures currently in place are the very people who thrive in those structures. This is problematic. It is also necessary.
After the aforementioned panel discussion, an audience member, Sam Sterns (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samsterns/), reached out to me to challenge my answer, and this article is largely a result of that conversation. They linked me to an editorial in The New York Times, which I found particularly compelling and timely (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/sunday/feminism-lean-in.html). The author does a nice job of putting words to an aspect of this conversation that was proving slippery for me. In particular, she highlights that, as in so many other aspects of our culture, women in the workplace are given a target to achieve (Be less feminine, behave in more masculine ways) that is inherently misogynistic, and more often than not, when they achieve that target, they are castigated for it, called out as bitchy or uncooperative.
At the moment, most of American corporate culture is a man’s game, and if women want to win, those are the rules they have to play by. But this isn’t sustainable. We need to ensure that those working to support those structures find themselves increasingly in the minority, becoming ever more irrelevant. And there’s hope! There are increasing numbers of companies that are doing this hard work in one way or another. My own employer, Zapproved, is doing amazing work in this arena, as are many others, and I’m hopeful for a future in which my daughter and my grandchildren get to show up authentically, and be recognized for what they have to offer rather than how well they play a role.
