Not whiney at all . it is a real issue. Values have changed. In order to process things sometimes we need to verbalize. hard when you care about your work. But as you see, you can do good work without compromising yourself. I am slowly learning what many younger people already understand, that self care matters too. I am slowly learning to say “No that doesn’t work for me” and that I cant always step up. I cant give 150% anymore because I am too physically and emotionally depleted. But you guys are like the energizer bunnies, hard to slow down. But when you do , you find its ok, and you feel better. (if its allowed) 50-60 hours is too much. I cant and don’t want to do that much. If you cant do it now when???
That is the issue I have finding a job at my age. I have to consider that these are my make hay time. I don’t have 20 years to give in my personal life. I cant work every weekend. I have my husband. We want to travel. because if we don’t now. then we wont be able to later etc… Time doesn’t wait for anyone. Don’t you swish we could live forever, so much to do. (I hope this makes sense).
Hey, MP, belated happy birthday.
And…I don’t know how…or I’d work fewer hours 
The work world is so different than it was several years ago. Much more is demanded/expected from employees but the street does not seem to go both ways. I loved the job I worked in until last summer (corporate finance) but I left for a job in the same company because I knew that I should have been at a higher title/pay level. I worked a lot of extra hours which was fine but I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I am now at a different job with the same company. I like what I do, it’s not as mentally demanding and just a regular 40 hours - no more basing my life around my work schedule. I am at the same level and same pay, but it feels like a raise since I work fewer hours. The hard part is that I really am a corporate finance person and miss that. I also know that at this point I will not ever have the career I had hoped to have. Some of that is due to my taking a ten year break from working. Some of it is due to the business world not really wanting older women.
I continue to build up my life outside of work. Have taken up some new interests in the last few years and joined a running group. My goals these days are less about work and more in my personal life.
Not trying to give advice here because everyone’s situation is different. Just know that I “get it”.
Well, today I took a very long lunch…went to D’s reception venue to sign the contract, went to Home Goods and bought toss pillows, went to a new place and tried Laotian food. (It was very good.) Lunch with a friend scheduled for tomorrow.
Now I just need to make myself leave at a decent hour.
I wonder how much of it is that MP was an attorney when most were men. Now it is not like that. I see it in the women docs especially surgery. Have to work harder to prove yourself.
I do think it’s the case that work that is done by a woman is generally devalued, seen as worth less.
The executive team of our company is so stereotypical - all male, except for the VP of HR.
Am currently visiting a female CFO with an Ivy MBA. She would say the same thing.
I would also agree. As a women in a mostly dominated SW engineering field (embedded systems) my opinion is often overlooked until a man agrees with me. Really? Why?
I remember that happening frequently. I would pose a solution and it would be glossed over until a
man said the same thing. Another irritant is that when I would pose a task that needed to be addressed
I would be told I could do it for the group. I never heard a man be told the same.
A few years ago I resolved to never be the note taker for a group or meeting again. We could be having roundtable discussions at the law firm and even twenty-something men would look to me (or another woman) to take notes, with the excuse that their handwriting is poor. I will also no longer plan birthday celebrations or other parties at work (unless for a close friend, when it’s my idea.) [I will, however, make reservations for a group to get the Open Table points.]
The other “women’s work” I will do at work is to clean up after people at meeting. I think it’s so gross to be at a meeting where lunch has been brought in and then people sit there with their half empty plates for hours. I will gladly collect plates and cups in favor of a clean work environment. Note that I contained my compulsion to clean up until I was over 40 (and a partner), so people wouldn’t think it was my job to clean up.
D and I were just discussing this last night. She is heading to an MBA program this fall. I have some good stories about assumptions people make about women. Like the time I was working in a former company and a newly hired man saw me making a copy of something and asked me to do his copying. Uh…I was a Director in the Accounting department. Just one example.
Ooooh, have to jump into this discussion … 2 stories, although I have more:
(1) Wa-a-a-a-y back in my very first full-time job after college, I had been hired as a Management Trainee; there were several, the others all male. One morning my boss (male) asked me to get him coffee. I deliberately “misheard” him and acted as if he had asked me if I wanted coffee – so said something like, “Yes, I’d love a cup; I drink it black.” He was totally shocked/confused. I think he mumbled something about not having asked me if I wanted coffee and then just sort of left … presumably to get his own coffee. He never asked again.
(2) When I owned/ran my own business ( a mailing & shipping service), a copier sales rep (male) came into the store. I was the only person out in the front, and he asked to speak to the owner/manager about the copier. Needless to say I chewed him out about his assumptions – and told him I wouldn’t EVER deal with him, even if he was the last copier rep on earth. (Yeah, I get pretty wound up about this stuff.)
Cbb… the coffee…genius!!!
In my field which is female dominated , I find men can get away with so many things that women can never get away with. The woman would be fired
When I was about 25 and picking my first jury, a middle aged man on the panel actually asked me if my father knew what I did for a living! His tone was very disapproving, so I said something like well considering that my last job was as a stripper, he’s pretty okay with this one. The panel wound up busted, but I felt great.
I also used to always be asked if I was the court reporter I also used to be called sweetie or dearie an awful lot. My reaction depended. Many times, it was an older attorney who was just acting his age. If it was someone young enough to know better or that I thought was trying to be offensive, I would often get snarky. One guy called me sweetie very sarcastically in front of a female judge and I just looked at him and said I wouldn’t be YOUR sweetheart for all the gold in Fort Knox and don’t ask me again. Then, the judge woke up and told him not to speak to women that way.
When I was in college, I worked part time for a small agency that handled insurance claims. The owners were two men in their early 50’s. Every day, they would ask me if I would please mind getting them some lunch or coffee or whatever and to please make sure to buy myself lunch or whatever. I was very poor and working my way through school and they didn’t pay me that much, so the gesture of offering to buy me lunch was very much appreciated. I attended night school the days I worked and the lunches they paid for for me let me have food on those days. They never questioned my purchases and would never take the change. They usually gave me a $20 even for coffee and that was alot in the early 80’s. i never took their asking me to get coffee as sexist or anti-female. I was the office assistant and at that point in life, my time was clearly less valuable than theirs.
Techmom, the dicey issue was always when I was both (1) the only female, and (2) the junior person at a meeting or closing. Yes, if an admin is not available, the junior person should get coffee, make copies, etc. But when I did the “low person on the totem pole” work, I was always pretty certain that the others in the room assumed I was the admin or paralegal, rather than the most junior lawyer.
And yes, even now, a Caucasian male is given the presumption of competence, and has to do something really terrible or neglectful to lose that.
What really bothers me is my bosses boss does it and she is a woman. I mean really? What don’t you trust about what I said and why? Especially when time and time again the men all agree with me on my team.
Not only do men value the opinion of a man over a woman, but many women do as well. Lots of women prefer to hire male lawyers - they are more comfortable with their advice.
MP and others, does that imply that an employer who is paying attention to market realities (and is not trying to change the world) should do the following?
- Hire women for internal functions because the employer gets much better quality for the same wage IF it listens to them; and
- Hire men for outward-facing functions because clients will value them more solely because of their maleness.
I had a very talented female consultant on my team for five years. We encountered significant sexism at a couple of our non-US clients. In one case, they loved her but didn’t didn’t listen to their able female employees. My team member wanted to go tell the boss about the sexist culture and to use their female staff better and I had to tell her that we were not there to fix their sexist culture. We could and did make sure that the voices of the women were heard (and let the boss know when X or Y had a very good idea or did a good piece of work) but we weren’t hired to do organizational development consulting. In the other case, this same consultant would have been the ideal team lead, based upon her prior industry experience and her work with us, for an engagement with a traditional company in the Gulf. Unfortunately, the client told me that a woman could never be the team lead, even if appropriately covered up. She and I talked about it. We weren’t going to changing the sexist nature of their society. We had to decide if we wanted to take the engagement or not, with other staff. Interestingly, our second best person was a Jewish male, and he was perfectly acceptable to the client.
This consultant became a single mother and couldn’t keep up with the travel – often international and often last minute travel – that our firm requires. After a custody lawsuit with the father, she joined one of our Scandinavian clients, where childcare and healthcare are covered by the government and work is a lot more 9-5ish. She misses the challenge and interest of what she was doing for us but her life does work a lot better. She was a complicated person – talented but somehow had a knack for making her life difficult (well before the single motherhood) and then looking to others including me to make it easier. So, I thought her departure for our client would be good for everyone.
So if it’s a foreign culture I’m not for going in and changing things up but I deal with individuals that are US citizens and for the most part were born in the US. In my line of work due to it being software engineering with embedded systems there are a LOT less women than men. Less women graduates to pick from. I don’t expect to get away with anything and expected to be treated as my colleagues regardless of gender but that also means that I expect the same back and should be treated as such. Bit of a hot button for me I guess. 