Office Politics | FemaleBreadWinners

Is the ‘Emotional Work’ of Women in the Office Undervalued?

I recently spoke with a male client about how he envisaged an office with more women. He leads an IT team, and had never in his career worked with more than a handful of women at once, so this was an exercise in imagination on his part! He started by talking about added innovation and creativity, but then mentioned a routinely undervalued factor in the modern workplace. He admitted: “I think it would just be more social and my team would probably be better behaved!” These are all good reasons to ensure your team has a balanced mix, as diverse teams are indeed more fun and innovative. However, this X factor of sociability is not valued monetarily. This “sociability element” is seen as additional benefit – but not something worth paying for.

Improving camaraderie is not valued as an additional skill set precisely because women do more of the “emotional labour” involved in a smooth-functioning team. This point was brilliantly explained by Lauren Bacon in a piece entitled “Tech Companies: Stop Hiring Women to Be the Office Mom” for the online magazine Quartz.

Lauren Bacon, an internet entrepreneur, also hears from male colleagues how they appreciate the ‘civilising effect’ of women. She began to notice this pattern with a male boss who was technically competent but lacked EQ. Instead he hired women around him to improve the office atmosphere. Bacon explains:

“Now, the thing is, looking back on it, I can see that he genuinely wanted his workplace to have those things, and he didn’t know how to do that himself, so he hired someone (female) to do it for him. I think he really did value her emotional labor, in his way. He just didn’t have the awareness to appreciate that a) women don’t want to have all the emotional needs of a workplace delegated to them; b) emotional rapport cannot be the sole responsibility of one person (or gender); c) I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that this woman didn’t have ‘coordinate everyone’s lunches and facilitate office conversations’ in her job description; and d) I feel pretty confident she was not given significant financial compensation for those aspects of her work (even though it sounds like those skills were rare gems indeed amongst her coworkers).”

She describes: “the problem is that while the outputs (better communication, better self-care, a stronger team) are valued in their way, they aren’t valued in visible ways that afford women prestige. The parallels with women’s un(der)paid and often-invisible labor in the domestic sphere are perhaps too obvious to warrant spelling out, but I’ll go ahead anyway: Because we live in a culture that undervalues emotional and domestic labor, a significant portion of “women’s work” (like childcare, food preparation, housekeeping, elder care, and social planning) is uncompensated. And as a result, if you want your company to have someone on staff to ensure everyone is happy, well fed, and comfortable, you will likely hire an “office mom”; that person is overwhelmingly likely to be female; and she is almost certainly underpaid (and afforded less prestige & power) compared to her technical colleagues.”

This wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself-and I’ll be the first to admit that it is damned hard to hire women into technical roles, as I learned first-hand when hiring coders myself- except that there are a couple of complicating factors:

1. Coders are lionized in the tech sector, and are compensated for their technical skills with higher wages and positional power – so women without coding experience are automatically less likely to advance to senior positions or command the highest salaries.

2. There is a culture in tech companies that simultaneously reveres the “user” (at least as a source of revenue and data) and places low expectations on coders to empathize with users (or colleagues, for that matter) – creating a disconnect that can only be bridged by assigning user (and team) empathy responsibilities to another department. An extreme example of this is the frequent labeling of brilliant coders as having Asperger’s Syndrome – and the simultaneous absolution of unskillful communication as par for the course.

So long as we accept these as givens, we will continue to see women in tech struggle in underpaid and under-respected roles while men in tech earn far higher wages and prestige. And we will continue to talk about the challenges of communicating “between departments” without acknowledging that those departments are heavily gendered-and that the paychecks are, too.”

Strategies for Female Managers – Managing the Office Junior Who Wants Your Job

strategies for female managers I was recently coaching a professional woman, Miranda, who had been hired in a Team Leader role for a Telecommunications firm. As she was new to the organisation, she hadn’t hired any of her direct reports, and it was made clear to her from her manager, that she would have limited power in replacing any of them. This did not initially phase Miranda, as she had always been able to develop good rapport with colleagues. However within a few months, Miranda found herself being challenged by a direct report – Jackie, who Miranda suspected felt sidelined when Miranda had been hired. Miranda had no problem with the quality or reliability of Jackie’s work – rather her challenge was in having Jackie second guess her decisions to the point of rudeness. What could Miranda do? If you have ever been in this situation, you know Miranda has a couple of options:

1. Start off by looking at Jackie’s background and determine where her approach is coming from? Had she ever been led to believe she would be hired into the Team Lead role before Miranda arrived? Turns out Jackie was a recent MBA graduate. In her programme Jackie had to fight to be heard and was rewarded for the bluntness in her approach. Now Jackie was in a more collaborative environment, this approach wasn’t winning her any loyalty from Miranda. However, it did help explain in part where Jackie’s approach came from.

2. When she cut Miranda off mid-sentence in front of the group, Miranda kept her cool and asked Jackie to hold the thought for discussion after the meeting. Knowing that she wasn’t going to help the situation by chastising Jackie in public, Miranda spoke to her afterward saying: “I appreciate your suggestion, but I prefer to continue with my plan in this instance.” We also discussed how she could give credit publicly to Jackie when she does have a good point. It validates Jackie’s opinion and reminds her that they were on the same side.

3. If Miranda felt the rudeness got out of hand, she decided she would say in a still and confident voice: “I may not have all the answers, but my decisions are based on years of experience in I.T. I welcome respectful dissent, but know that I always have a reason for doing things the way I do”.

4. After some discussion, Miranda recognised that Jackie’s forthright style probably also stemmed from wanting to take on more responsibility so she could progress. With this in mind, Miranda delegated her a six month stand-alone project she thought would keep Jackie happy. Interestingly, in taking this stance, Jackie did have to turn to Miranda over the subsequent months for advice – a move she probably never anticipated! Several months later, Miranda reflected: “I think Jackie’s enjoyed the project and found it a steeper learning curve than she anticipated – but I also think it’s given her a greater sense of respect for what I have to do on a day to day basis!”

As a working woman, if you’ve ever been in this situation – how did you handle it?

Women Penalised for being ‘Angry’ but Men Rewarded for Same Trait …It’s Enough to Make you Furious

New research published in the Psychological Review, corroborates a body of evidence that we see angry men and women very differently. Men expressing anger in the workplace are given higher status and seen more positively than men who express sadness. One guess who gets penalised for being angry? That’s right, it’s professional women.

Interestingly, people are also likely to attribute his anger to external circumstances, like others being obstinate or him being in a difficult situation. On the other hand we see women who show anger much more negatively, plus we attribute her anger to internal factors such as: “She’s just a bitter person” or “She’s out of control”. This view was taken whether the woman in question had high or low seniority at work, and I think partially explains why women are not as frequently seen as ‘leadership’ material.

This issue was highlighted during Hilary Clinton’s run for the presidency, when the Chair of the Republican National Committee chastised her as being ‘too angry’ to be a viable presidential candidate. As Dowd responded in an article entitled “Who’s Hormonal: Hillary or Dick?” in the New York Times: They are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she- monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies . . . . This gambit handcuffs Hillary: If she doesn’t speak out strongly against President Bush, she’s timid and girlie. If she does, she’s a witch and a shrew.

The same has happened more recently against Michelle Bachmann, a Republican presidential candidate when Newsweek magazine ran a wide-eyed cover shot of her with the title “Queen of Rage.”

Anger, like sadness, pride and happiness are all normal feelings in the modern workplace – but we limit the range of emotions a woman can display before penalising her. Whereby we actually reward men who show anger, when it comes to women we assume she is not competent to handle challenging workplace situations, therefore limiting her progression. Women who showed anger were consistently given lower status and lower wages than unemotional women and angry men.

I also think it’s a pretty poor indictment that we reward angry men above sad men, again limiting to a certain degree what characteristics we ascribe ‘successful’ men. One way around being labelled an angry woman, is to point out how any anger is situational and external, such as a difficult boss, being kept out of the loop, a period of organisational change.

The research indicated that if women breadwinners can show their reaction is due to these external factors, in the same way we assume them to be for men, the prejudice against her completely disappears – indeed doing this for another woman you see unfairly labelled is a great act for the sisterhood, and helps people reshape their assumptions about angry, working women.

Cubicles for Cryers: Is Crying in the Office Letting Down Our Gender?

As a specialist who works with women in male dominated fields, I have heard my fair share of stories about crying on the job. That’s why I was so pleased to hear Women’s Hour tackle the issue of crying at work.

I was even more delighted to hear my good friend Vanessa Vallely, founder of www.wearethecity.com being interviewed. Vanessa gave her impression about emotions running high across the city, and even spoke candidly about the times she had become emotional at work.

I recognised myself and many of my clients in her story of working all hours on a specific project away from her family for 38 days straight, only to be told she wasn’t getting the promotion she expected. She talked about what it felt like to receive that news; “You could almost hear me crack.” Vanessa pointed out “excessive use of any emotion, anger, passion, tears…” was seen negatively in most companies.

She agreed with the host Jenny Murray, that women are much more likely to get negatively labeled “emotional” rather than “passionate” which is a more respectable term for the same set of behaviours. They discussed research suggesting that most women felt if they cried at work, they were letting down other women. They worried they were pandering to the stereotype of working women as highly strung and too sensitive at work.

While it is never advisable to get a reputation for being a cryer or “overly-sensitive”, I think crying has been over-criticised as a career killer. I think that while crying probably is best done behind closed doors when at work, it shouldn’t be held against someone. If anything, it just displays how strongly they feel about a decision an much they care.

My coaching clients invest an inordinate amount of time and mental energy to their careers. They love what they do and are always striving to get better. They read on their subject, confer with colleagues, often give up their evenings and weekends to their career. When they have a knock, it’s only human to take it hard. To tell them “not to take it personally” is unrealistic and dismissive of their dissapointment.

On the bright side, a unexpected benefit to a wee cry in the Ladies is how you can often find support from those you don’t know, but who recognise the struggle and reach out. A client I’ll call Sarah, once told me how in breaking down in a cubicle after an argument with her new boss, she escaped to the loo but ran into a colleague, Moira, in another team who reassured her that Sarah’s boss was a ‘known idiot”.

Sarah said ” Just hearing he had that reputation made me realise I couldn’t take it so personally, that others also found him difficult. Plus Moira and I began to have coffee every month and I still am in touch with her, sharing our crazy stories about work, four years later. She became an ally when I didn’t even know I was looking for one! For more tips on handling office politics click here.