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Men, Women, and Workplaces
June 1949. The American Medical Association’s annual convention was held in Atlantic City, filling the run-down seaside town’s parking lots with out-of-state Cadillacs. One of the main events of the weekend was demonstrating a new tool for training doctors, medical color television, a futuristic-seeming replacement for the tiers of ringed seats of the traditional operating room surgical amphitheater. But TV was too poor a teaching substitute until color came along. After an elaborate luncheon was over, a spokesman for the manufacturer, Smith, Kline, and French, strongly suggested that the doctors’ wives leave the hall, as the live images would be very graphic.
To his surprise, most of the ladies stayed and watched, most of them impassively sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. (I mentioned it was 1949, right?) Someone explained to the SKF man that the women were, or had been nurses, and had seen far worse. “They met their husbands on the job”. In 1949, that was as common a fact of women’s lives as hats, white gloves, and handbags. For women, getting ahead in life generally involved marriage, with the goal of marrying “up”. It had always been the way of the world.
November 1977. A brave new world for men and women, after the overlapping but different ‘50s–‘70s cultural revolutions associated with Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and Ms. magazines, but far from a completely changed one. Xerox Corporation held its worldwide conference for executives in Boca Raton. The last day was Futures Day, when most of the attendees would finally get their first-ever look at the next-generation office technology that the company had been creating since 1973. To them, the Xerox Alto workstation was a TV you could type on, like the personal computers that were just beginning to appear. But Alto came with word processing (a new term) built-in, networking, and a new invention that played to Xerox’s strengths, the laser printer. Attendees were invited to step forward and spend some time using the new equipment.
The men were moderately impressed. “Interesting” was the consensus, but by and large, they weren’t that excited by seeing what a productivity step like this could mean for business. By contrast, their wives, nearly all of them well-to-do or outright wealthy, jumped right in, folded their Chanel tweed jackets, kicked off their high heels, and started typing and formatting, exclaiming to each other what an amazing thing this was. It looked incongruous, even funny as the rich ladies quickly figured the system out.
But it made sense. Almost all of them had been secretaries. That’s how they met their husbands: on the job. For the 1977 wives, many of the furtive office romances that led to matrimony took place in the Mad Men era, 1960-’70, back in that mixed time that fell between Playboy and the phenomenon we’d come to call, simply, the women’s movement. In 1974, New York Magazine did an issue about the world a quarter-century back. The lead article was titled 1949: Feminism’s Nadir.
Only a few years later, now forty years ago (where does the time go?), I encountered that “future office”, even the very same networked computer system, now christened the Xerox Star. A friend of mine, a fledgling lawyer, got me a temp job in a large, busy law firm when another job offer fell through and I needed rent money fast. I was there for a couple of months, first as a file clerk, then as organizer of their rapidly growing stock of magnetic media.
The law firm was a well-oiled machine that ran lean and stacked up the billable hours. Think litigation, not Perry Mason. Except for the three partners, the other two dozen or so lawyers spent their long workdays reading documents, dictating into a microphone, or (more rarely) talking on the telephone.
The product of all this endless, day in and day out, talking and dictating and interviewing and deposing was handed off to a large secretarial pool, pounding away at IBM Selectrics. Only the three partners had their own assigned staff; everyone else competed for resources. And if the firm were an army, the officers were all men, and the enlisted ranks were about 90% women. That was pretty typical in those days.
Not one of the lawyers so much as had a typewriter in his office. There were no computer keyboards on their desktops either—not quite yet. By contrast, by 1981 there had already been generations of college women who’d helped their boyfriends by typing their papers. Wives typed their husbands’ ways through law or medical school. That was perfectly normal in those days. Unless they’d been clerks in the armed forces, few men even knew how to type. Many men prided themselves on it.
The costly Xerox Star system was, so far, only used for editing and formatting the most valuable of their legal documents. Only the top echelon of secretaries, the firm’s uncompromising Bene Gesserit, was permitted to work with it, and the elite corps of young women at its three terminals were accompanied by one full time (male) systems technician who I suspected, even 40 years ago, of merely pretending he was needed.
Five days a week until well after five, the two dozen men with fancy sheepskins on their walls were separately trapped in their surprisingly small and un-fancy offices, although making a lot of money. By contrast, the five dozen or so women were all massed in big, noisy open-form offices, a vast, busy, and very social unit that amounted to a female company-within-a-company. They spent most of their work lives typing, correcting, and editing the work product they got on tape from the lawyers. The rivers of talk led to rivers of printed text, which led to rivers of money, which led to all of our paychecks.
The older ladies frequently showed patience while tacitly helping teach newly hired-but-“green” young male lawyers how to deal with the firm’s assembly-line pace. The women weren’t lawyers, and in that era had rarely expected to be. They expected, deserved, and got, respect for the jobs they did choose. So it was with muted, oddly mixed feelings that they greeted a young woman, fresh from a Florida law school, newly admitted to the California bar. This wasn’t a rarity by 1981, but it was still new to most of the lawyers and secretaries.
If this were a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the women would have stood up as one, proud and sassy, with a big, smiling round of applause for the new attorney. Sure, a couple of unattractive, clueless men in the office might have tried to get handsy with her, but she’d have effortlessly put them in their place. Gestures of sisterly solidarity would have covered her path like rose petals.
In real life, though, it didn’t work out as simply as that. So far as I could tell (admittedly, a real limitation, but there was little to no privacy there), the men didn’t try to hit on her. She got an office and staff support equal to her male coworkers. A no-nonsense sort, she got right down to business. A brisk, successful transition, by all appearances.
But the stereotype-breaker was: the women didn’t like her and didn’t like working with her. Partly it was her chilly personality. She didn’t go out of her way to relate, and she clearly didn’t see herself as being much like the other women. In effect, she saw herself as needing to prove herself as if she were an officer among enlisted ranks; they saw her as a stuck-up snob who thought she was better than the rest of them. Neither was entirely wrong. Despite what the era’s slogans said, Sisterhood isn’t always powerful.
There was another, entirely human and understandable element in the secretaries’ reactions that did track with female dissatisfaction with the workplace, a mixture of only semi-admitted envy and an undercurrent of self-blame: here she was, making the big bucks and giving orders. What did I do wrong?
My temp job lasted four months. The managing partner offered me a full-time gig, which was more than decent of him, but the real job that I’d been holding out for came through. About a year later, out of nowhere, a lawyer sent me an invitation to one of their elite social mixers at the Beverly Hills Country Club, which I was happy to attend.
As the evening drew to a close and I started drifting towards the exit, I fell into the conversational circle of an elegantly dressed woman in her late forties. I’d later learn she was the wife of one of the partners. I was introduced, rather generously, as someone who’d once worked at her husband’s law firm. When I told her I wasn’t a lawyer she perked up. “Oh, thank God!”, she said, laughing. She asked what sort of things I’d seen in my time there and I told her.
I wasn’t surprised that she was conservative; in Beverly Hills, it was not nearly as rare then as it would be now. The boards of directors of L.A.’s other country clubs went after studio chiefs as marquee names; BHCC went after Buzz Aldrin. One of the other guests lit her cigarette while the valet ran to fetch her car. She turned her attention back towards me. “I know you’ve heard lots of bad things about the Fifties, but for me, it was a wonderful time in my life. I liked being an office girl”. She looked amused at my (no doubt) doubting expression.
“Oh, I knew I was luckier than most. There were some drawbacks once in a while. But I met a fine man and married him. Women today don’t get a full picture of back then”.
That old quote came to mind: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. Its lessons are rarely simple or one-sided. She was talking about her life twenty-five years earlier. It’s been forty years since this conversation took place.
She sighed, stubbed out the cigarette, and donned her fur coat. Blackgama, the best of its time. The valet re-appeared with the car. She smiled and nodded goodbye. The big black Cadillac swallowed her up and she vanished down Wilshire Boulevard.
Published in General
Most of those women probably went from data entry by keypunch machine, to data entry by video terminal.
Well, I suppose they did, but it wasn’t long at all before researchers were entering their own data. Some of the older professors continued to have others do it for them, sometimes by lab techs, in order to save steps. In other words, there wasn’t a separate job called “data entry operator.”
That was in the university world of academic researchers. Most of these younger women probably went into the business world, but with increased automation and such, I don’t think it was really much of a long-term career path. One did see job ads for that kind of work for a while, yet.
I worked for several, including way back. It actually worked better for me than men, because if the man was an alpha type, we would clash; I’m not big on taking orders. Not a problem with the women, who were all smart enough to not tell me what to do, and instead tell me what they wanted to accomplish, leaving it to me to figure it out.
Fortunately, all my bosses were like that. I tended to be that way with the people who worked for me, too, but a few times was unpleasantly surprised to find that some people needed more direct supervision, sometimes because they didn’t know how to take initiative, and once because someone assumed he could define the task when I needed some very specific work done. Well, now that I think about it, there were two of the latter.
One reason I got used to women in the workplace, either as bosses or employees, is that I observed that they often worked harder than their male counterparts. YMMV.
Great piece, Gary! As always. A shame so few people read it. (#obviouscomedy)
Kudos for the Dune reference.
Something I observed that I don’t think has been mentioned at all. A supervisor or manager of employees in a workplace must face personnel conflicts. I spent years in executive level management with subordinate managers including many, sometimes most, female. Conflict resolution had to be among the skills of the females because I saw almost none while dealing frequently with instances rising through the organizations under male supervision. This can be a plus in a stable operating environment whereas other skills are more critical in development of new approaches.
I don’t entirely disagree with this, but I had an interesting experience back in the 80s.
I worked in a not-attached-to-a-branch bank office with a pretty raucous group. Happy hour was attended several times per week; we knew all the local restaurants that had the best food to go with our 99 cent well drink. The bankers were a mix of male and female; the support staff (of which I was in charge) exclusively female. I don’t know of any hook ups that occurred in those five years, but the comments and daily patter would land us all in HR today.
Long story, but I ended up working for the same bank out of San Francisco, where I spent 50% + of my time for the next five years. Everyone was support staff and a healthy mix of male/female up and down the seniority ladder. Most of the men were gay.
If took me awhile to figure out what was so different. And finally it dawned on me – I was getting checked out by the men in SF, but they were checking to see if my shoes matched my belt; not the “checking out” I was accustomed to.
When I wasn’t in SF, I was wandering around bank offices throughout California. All of them exclusively run by men, almost always with a strong female right hand. Since I was trying to get information and never the bearer of good news, I became a master at dressing just sexy enough to hold the male’s attention, but acting and dressing professionally and friendly enough to get past the female gatekeeper.
When you write a post, if you’re lucky, you get lots of personal observations that illustrate how many different angles there are in a subject. Like @she, like @thereticulator, like a bunch of other R> members, @annefy’s comment is a great example.
You’re describing the perfect model for the Business Analyst role in IT. The job is to talk to individual workers, and get them to spend possibly hours detailing every single aspect of their job. The perfect candidate is an attractive young woman. Not a stunner, not drop-dead gorgeous, but pretty and pleasant. Because the men enjoy the attention from a pretty young woman, and women prefer to deal with other women, as long as they aren’t seen as threatening.
All of which really proves my point that sexuality is used by women in the workplace. Be nice if we could be honest about it.
Drug reps usually look like they are an anchor for Fox News. I wonder why?
You nailed it; my title was “Systems Analyst”
I was 100% aware of it at the time, and am 100% honest about it now. My sell by date has long passed and my looks aren’t going to throw open a lot of doors, but my habit of being friendly and concerned and female still works. I used to joke that my voicemail message should start with: Press 1 if this is the first female voice you’ve heard in months. (I sell construction equipment and my customers are 99% male)
Decades ago, I read an article about a woman, a former cheerleader, who recruited just-graduated women who had also been cheerleaders, and trained them to be reps for pharmaceutical companies. Just what you’re talking about. In thinly disguised form, it was a comedy plotline on The Big Bang Theory, where waitress Penny, the show’s bombshell, becomes a rep, and (of course) turns into a dynamite salesperson who, Mary Sue-like, suddenly becomes knowledgeable about pharmacology. So you’re right. But–
–who hands women that power? Men. Who can choose to ignore that power? Men. Hypothetically, if the doctors were all gay, how effective would the cheerleader strategy be? They couldn’t use their sexuality if we didn’t let them.
It’s an unbalanced equation, but a man who looks like Ashton Kutcher is also going to get noticed. How many politicians get their jobs because they “look like” someone strong and trustworthy? How many non-entities like Gavin Newsom have a step up in politics because they’re tall, fairly good looking, and with perfect teeth? Democrat John Edwards is another example.
Maybe I was lucky. When I was in sales (a profession far more dependent on a ‘connection’ between seller and ‘sellee’ than most), many of my major accounts were of the scientific and engineering, or of the legal, type. I was usually working with highly-placed decision makers, and on the legal front, the fact that I’d worked in a law office myself stood me in good stead. But, most remarkably, in the scientific and engineering markets (US Steel, Koppers, Allegheny Power, Rockwell International, etc.) it was my connection with what Mr. She called the “veggies”** (engineers) that lifted me up. They were, simply, charmed to find a female who was interested in their lives and their profession, and who’d listen and could understand and extrapolate from her own experience, even if not always completely correctly, an understanding of their technical needs.
God bless those guys. The sales I made to them (in the millions of dollars) enabled Mr. She and me to live a decades-long dream of a life in the country on a small farm, to be able to buy the (often rather expensive) equipment we needed to set up, and to put in place the underpinnings of a financial firewall that would sustain us, and the rest of the family, in the hard times to come.
Dave, Stan, Harvey, Bob, and many more (including Amy, perhaps the only ‘girl’ among you), thanks. And thanks for never making me feel that any sort of quid-pro-quo between us had anything of a sexual nature to it.
**I think this was a reference to what’s now known as “Carnegie Mellon University” but which was, when Mr. She attended its engineering school, called “Carnegie Tech.” It’s best known for its two schools–engineering, which graduates the ‘veggies,’ and theater, which graduates the ‘fruits.’ The graduates of both of which are celebrated and famous.
I think the pharmaceutical businesses were probably already in a severe corrupt state when these exploitive approaches were devised. With little in the way of moral integrity at the base this is not surprising.
Actually it’s not about Penny understanding thing, it’s that she had and developed an ability to memorize, including the menus at places where she worked, and so could remember and recite sales pitches for Big Pharma like she did for Cheesecake Factory. It wasn’t about knowing pharmacology, and my guess would be that the cheerleaders didn’t really know a lot about pharmacology either. But if you can remember and repeat what the company says about the pharmacology, that might be all they need, at least at that level. More technical questions get forwarded to the scientists.
The goal of one character in an unfinished novel I have been working on is to be the second prettiest woman at the party or in the office.
Actually, this from the start of the same episode is also… “important”… (Penny recites Sheldon’s explanation for what that place on the sofa is “His Spot.”)
When I was building restaurants I always knew when the wine salespeople came in looking for management. They were almost always good looking women.
Although that’s not a case of women using sexuality in the workplace, but men hiring women in the secure knowledge that other men will act like saps.
Yes it is. They dress for it.
Of course, it’s not like this is a uniquely American thing. Far from it. In fact, compared to most cultures, we’re a helluva lot nicer. After the collapse of Communism, in the Nineties the Czechs used to run ads in business magazines, featuring posed photos of attractive women holding steno pads–“The Czech Republic is the model location for your European office!” (Italics theirs)
It is a thing that happens because men and women are different.
We each have some advantages and disadvantages in life due to sex. Women usually don’t have to dig ditches, plant explosives in the treads of enemy tanks, or carry sacks of potatoes up five flights of stairs. Men, on the other hand, don’t become pregnant, or be judged their entire lives on looks alone, or get beaten or killed by their wives or girlfriends. Neither side has it easy.
For every wily beauty making her way into the job market on looks, there will be other women, older perhaps, or merely ordinary looking, who didn’t get that job because men didn’t want her as much. So they’re doubly disadvantaged, in the competition for jobs and for romance.
It’s probably not even a uniquely human thing.
It still goes on even in the 24th Century, or so we’re told:
I sell a little part for $25; in certain types of motors it’s not if it goes out; it’s when. Guys will call me when the part goes out and they need it. I have it right here in my desk and mail it out.
Women? Whether the saw is theirs or they’re calling for a boss or a husband, they buy two minimum. Sometimes as many as four.
I mentioned it to my husband to file under the ever-growing list of differences between men and women. His response: Nah. The guys are happy to have an excuse to call you every once in awhile.
Your husband is awesome.
He really is.
To the larger point, I talk. A LOT. But I also listen. And over the years, I’ve noticed the stories that people tell are often about extraordinarily bad service, or extraordinarily good service. I, for instance, still tell the story about the manager at Casual Corner (long gone) who refunded me every penny for an outfit that was stolen from me at the mall MacDonald’s. (The thief returned it to Casual Corner and got also full refund)
So when I started my business, I wanted to be someone’s story like that. The person who will move heaven and earth to get you what you need.
My worst customer ever? A late Friday afternoon call. A customer called needing a very specific type of diamond blade, not readily available, and needed it to be delivered the next day in the early morning. We had the blade; I begged and cajoled the shipping department, and miracle of miracles it was delivered right on time (Saturday deliveries were never very dependable)
Five or six days later I got an email from the customer inquiring about price matching, as they’d seen the same blade advertised on the Internet for $10 cheaper.
And she wanted a refund for the difference. That was a hell no, Ghostrider. If any of my male customers ever tried such a move, I don’t remember. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember.
In theory that problem has a correct solution; for a given number of motors and a known mean time between failures you should know how many kajiggers you need in stock at any given time. I don’t believe there’s a variable in any of those equations for “getting to talk to a pretty girl”.
Let’s just say I’ve got my doubts about the whole field of industrial engineering.