For a truly committed, truly professional woman who wants
to make a real mark on the world in a big way, it's about
respect. Comment #12 starts to get at it a little. The other
comments are from women who don't, as they readily
admit, really want to work. Their families are more
important.
I don't think that's what the topic of this report is about. Not
at all.
But if you've read the thoughts of women surgeons and
scientists, or read the blogs of women in academia, you
know that everywhere a woman goes, no matter how
accomplished she is or how successful, some man feels the
need to explain things to her or assume he knows
something she doesn't - even if he's not in the field at all
and she's a world-famous, published author.
I'm no world-famous expert in an academic field, but I do
my damnedest to stay at r near the cutting edge of
technology and the state of my art. I spend money on
training and, when I see that I'm weak in an area, I study
until I'm strong in it.
And still, after 30 years in my business, having made no
effort to cover the grey in my hair, when it's acknowledged
that I know more about a given market than anyone in the
room, I'm the one who's expected to defer to men who
know less.
It gets old, this business of not being believed. Of knowing
what the proper course of action is, and having to wait while
the boys do it wrong the first time and then realize they
could have saved themselves a whole bunch of time if
they'd just realized I actually did know what I was talking
about.
Folks, if you want to know why women are unhappy, look at
that flat place on their foreheads. Listen to that rasp in their
voices from all the times they stifled a scream.
As I sit here, a good friend across the country is dealing
with an idiot supplier her client insisted she use. This
woman is partners with one of the giants of our industry and
every bit his equal creatively.
But this vendor, caught in shocking levels of technical
inadequacy and ignorance that she wouldn't tolerate in her
freshman students (yes, she is a highly regarded university
instructor) has gone around her to the client - which she will
now lose, probably for the crime of bitchiness as well as for
the lousy print job somehow magically becoming her fault.
No man in a similar situation would - well, no man would be
in a similar situation. A guy would be able to call the client
and say, this vendor just doesn't cut it, and your job is going
to suck if we use him - and the situation would get resolved.
But if she says that, the client won't believe her. He
believes his buddy. And he believes whatever his buddy
says about her when the piece winds up sucking.
No matter how many awards she's won with other clients,
somehow, it's her fault she wasn't able to mind-meld this
inferior vendor, with the wrong equipment and no
knowledge of professional methods, into another award-
winning piece.
And, when you hear people say that women have to work
twice as hard to get half as far, that's what they're talking
about.
You have to work twice as hard to get to do the thing the
right way in the first place, and twice as hard to get the
resources to implement it properly. And then, yes, chances
are good that the week before the thing is due, you'll have a
husband out of town, two sick kids and a holiday dinner to
put on, but that's minor.
But what probably is really frosting a lot of these women's
cakes is to wake up after 20 or 25 or 30 years and realize,
damn. I thought it would get better when I made director, or
VP. But if she's till having to prove herself to a higher level
of idiot who doesn't believe what she says, ever, it gets
really old.
Really old.
