Gloria Stern, forty-year-old mother of two, effulgent blonde, Harvard Business School graduate, owner of a mean backhand at tennis, semi-retired gourmet cook, and senior vice president marketing at Mistral Laboratories, is sitting alone in the main board room in the main board room among the debris of the monthly planning meeting. It is five-thirty on a moist spring afternoon. Outside, she can hear her male colleagues gunning their cars in the parking lot. In a few minutes they will be heading for the fabled world of martini buckets and sympathetic bosoms.
Gloria shakes her long hair loose which gives her face a softer look. Little stress lines appear around her mouth as she tightens her jaw to apply lipstick. She is a beautiful woman whom time and the job have touched with an invisible shadow. She has a headache, her mouth is sour from too many cigarettes, and she feels her period coming on.
But the meeting had been good. They had approved her new medicated shampoo plans – in spite of a strong rearguard action from the pharmaceutical division. But it had been a close thing to get the budget allocation in face of so many other projects claiming priority. Gloria had had to summon all her reserves of restraint at times to disguise emotions which others would have pounced upon as being quintessentially female and therefore unbefitting a senior executive. And fortunately Dave Silver had been there.
Dave Silver is Gloria’s division president and her mentor since she joined the group eight years ago. It is almost a father-daughter type of relationship. Dave has guided her through the two major hurdles that a management woman must face: the crucial transition into middle-management, and the quantum jump into the very top of the hierarchy.
In common with most successful women in business, Gloria was an only child and had enjoyed a strong and sustaining relationship wit her father, which had lasted throughout her adolescence and college years. He had helped her to develop so-called masculine qualities ad objectives without in any way abandoning her notion of herself as a female. Given her father’s values, Gloria was given the support by both her parents to challenge the conventional limitations of the female role in business. In many respects, Dave Silver had taken over from her father.
Gloria had learned how to become a good team player. This was important to her in developing a male view of the organization and to share with men the ability to exploit personal relationships for long term goals. Unlike many women, Gloria learned how to be flexible in group situations, not to make a ‘cause’ of small issues and not to take criticism too personally.
The crux of women’s problem in business is that while men are brought up to recognize that they will have to work all their lives, women typically hedge between a full scale career and the more conventional female role until they reach their middle to late thirties, when it is hard for them to make the major transition to middle-management. Consequently, women often tend to be more concerned with immediate job fulfillment than with long-term ambition. This can critically affect their attitudes towards people and their jobs in a way which reinforces their sexual stereotype among male executives. And potentiates their problems in the organization; ironically the stereotype derives mainly from childhood and adolescent conditioning, rather than any intrinsic differences in character between the sexes. As a result, women tend to become more task and skill oriented than men. They have a compulsion to prove themselves in the world of men by excelling in a specialty. This tends to make them good supervisors, but unable to delegate effectively at the middle-management level, in particular to male subordinates.
Gloria had been lucky. Her husband, Tom, understood the imperatives which her upbringing had instilled, and had helped her to make a definite career decision before she was thirty. They had married while Tom was still in medical school, and had the children early. Gloria was therefore better equipped than many women to make the crucial break-through into middle management.
It hadn’t been easy. Gloria had decided that she could only move upwards through the organization if she proved herself more competent at her current job, at the job above her, and at the job below her, than any man available. This took enormous amounts of energy and concentration, and threatened at times her life with Tom and the children. Along the way, she developed tactics for handling a range of potential embarrassments; from avoiding tears in public and unwelcome sexual overtures, to chairing recalcitrant peer-group meetings.
As she reached senior middle-management and became more sure of herself and her abilities, Gloria no longer felt a need to sublimate or make excuses for an essential part of her femininity. Not that she had led a double life in and out of the office. But she now felt more relaxed about herself as a woman and as an executive. She felt freer and more open in her work relationships instead of translating her perception of males styles into her behavior. Her transition into top management a year ago was accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and congruence; she had come to terms with the costs and rewards of building a career. And she had remained a woman, true to herself.
Gloria lights a last cigarette and thinks back over the meeting. It occurs to her that life would be easier if men were more liberated from their gender stereotype with regard to female executives. It’s been a long way, baby. Gloria puffs on her cigarette and allows herself a few moments of silent, private emotion.
Roger Collis 1971 Werbung/Publicite
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[This is an archive story from a collection of about 100 which I am including in my new book, ‘Management Man.’] www.rogercollis.co.uk