Introduction
In today’s business world we are familiar with seeing women in senior and managerial roles, but being a woman in business brings whole new elements into play in the terms of values and attitudes in the business world. If you were to ask men if they regard women in business as equal most of them would probably concur that they do. If you ask women in business if they feel equal to the men, I think you will find they do not. A common reaction amongst men is that they do not feel comfortable working for a woman boss, although some men say they do not mind.
Although there have been a great many advances since the days of my mother who was not expected to work once she had children, women have still not reached the level of equality you would expect in this day and age. During the sixties, seventies and eighties there was a huge shift from the down trodden woman who was kept by their husband, to the independent woman of today who can fend for herself. But somewhere along the line I feel we have lost something that is of merit and that there is still some way to go to get the balance right. Studies have shown that women in business in many cases still receive less pay than men for the same work in spite of the legislation introducing equal pay.
Historical Attitudes
When I was young my mother stayed at home and looked after the children while my father was the bread winner. In those days young women who did work were expected to leave their jobs once they got married. It was seen as a stigma on the man if he could not afford to support his wife. It did not matter how poor you were the woman still did not go out to work and she was expected to manage on the wages the husband brought home. In fact my parents got married and moved in with my grandmother because her husband had just died and she had lost her income. This way my [dad|father} took on the support of both women although my grandmother did some work, helping out two or three days a week for my uncle who was a butcher. Old attitudes die hard and it has taken several generations for it to become the norm for women to share in the burden of earning income.
My paternal grandmother who was also widowed however was a natural business woman. She used to have a ‘pack’ of clothes, mostly underwear which she trudged around the local area to sell and the customers paid the cost of their purchases off weekly. Her business was a cross between door to door selling and a clothing catalogue. She had an instinct for business but lived out of her time so she only ever made a pittance compared with the opportunities of today.
Responsibilities in the Home
During the early years of my childhood the roles of men and women were clearly defined. The woman had the responsibility of looking after the family, children, husband and any other relatives who lived with them and the man was responsible for providing the money to feed, clothe and house everyone. It did not matter how little money the man earned the wife had to manage on it. In other words cut their coat according to the cloth.
We were lucky because although my father was a builder and therefore earned a great deal less than the miners in the mining village where we lived, my mother and grandmother were very clever. They made nearly all our clothes, baked and grew fruit and vegetables so although that did not earn us actual money it did however mean that they saved money and we had things we would not have had if we had to buy them. My mother was clever at managing the money such that people had no idea how poor we really were as we always looked decent (In Wales it’s called being ‘Tidy’) and had enough to eat.
It seems that for many women, things have come in a kind of full circle through the application of technology and the return of cottage industry styles of business, where a woman can work from home running her own online business whilst still being able to care for her family and home.
One of the easiest ways in which a woman can work more flexible hours is by doing freelance work. When you are freelance you can more or less pick and choose the work you do, and when you do it.
Throughout the world there must be thousands of women who have setup this kind of business creating and supplying products and services through ecommerce websites and managing to avoid having to compete in the ‘normal’ corporate world of business which is fast becoming considered an outdated and outmoded style of working to many, including a lot of men too!
Today’s computer oriented world is much more suited to the employment of women than years ago when work that required manual labour was too heavy for women. Even today in some industries, such as the building trade you will not find many women doing the actual manual work, although I bet there are some! Yes they do work in the trade but usually as administrators, organising the projects, managing the finances and arranging planning permission from the councils.
In other areas such as catering, nursing and teaching there is still a majority of women in these roles. However I have noticed, while spending quite a lot of time in hospitals lately, that there seem to be about an equal number of women doctors as men.
Having Children
During the sixties with Germaine Greer, burning bra’s and free love a change of attitude was generated. Then various recessions and higher expectations of standard of living saw more women going out to work to afford the luxuries of life. When my children were small, I stayed at home with them and did the things my mother did while my husband was the bread winner.
It worked well for us but at that time I would read magazines that made me feel I could not be whole as a woman unless I was holding down a full time job or career at the same time. We ‘read about’ the modern man who was able to look after children and do housework (Although I didn’t see much evidence of it!) so that there was more equality and the woman worked to share the burden of earning a living. In this new world the main problem to overcome was that men could not physically have the children so a woman would have to lose ground on the career ladder if she wanted to have a child.
At the end of the day women are still expected to reproduce as well as hold down a full time job. A woman can have maternity leave and take six weeks off after giving birth, but any mother knows that it is a massive emotional wrench to leave your six week old baby in the care of someone else while you pick up your career again. Friends I know who have been the main breadwinners and still have had children, have ended up having sick leave for stress and depression after the birth taking as much as six months to a year off. I find this interesting because to me this is about the time you need to have with your baby before you can even thinking about doing anything else.
During the eighties and nineties women were challenging men in their top jobs and often giving up the idea of children to become like men. Margaret Thatcher was one but she was of no help to the cause of women at the time of her premiership, I guess because it was too hard won. I however started my own career about this time. My children were becoming teenagers and I spent some time deciding what I could and wanted to do and eventually started my own business career offering training in Assertiveness and interpersonal skills to businesses people. During the eighties and nineties I worked freelance visiting many different companies when running training programmes. I did do part time jobs that fitted in with school hours once the children were at school but felt I wanted to be there when the children came home. In my view the most important thing to focus on was raising the children to become well balanced useful citizens and it was a full time job.
One local mother I know has recently had a lot of success by creating a business where she builds her own websites. These websites are unique however, in that she does not have to stock products to sell, she does not have to deal with any customers, she does not have to work at any specific times, or at all if she doesn’t want to, and the business earns money 24 hours a day!
Basically the idea revolves around researching what are called ‘niche’ keywords such as ‘hotels in Brighton‘ and building a very simple website that is tightly focused around that keyword and promoting it in the search engines. The website simply hosts advertisements for which she earns a small amount of revenue if anyone clicks on an advert.
Old Attitudes Die Hard
During my career as a freelance trainer, working in diverse companies, I encountered many different situations. Being a woman in business which is dominated by men it was a tough call. Sometimes when I entered the office of the person interviewing me, the senior manager would start ruffling his papers on his desk as though to say “Look how busy and important I am”. Occasionally when I met up with senior managers whose desks were free of papers they would be the ones who had a clear idea of what they wanted and whether or not I would be able to provide the service they required.
Having said that, sometimes the senior women in an organisation were a lot harder on me than the men were. Also when I was establishing the business I had a lot of help from some modern men who believed in me and thought I could do a great job. I survived the eighties recession when many other similar organisations were going out of business and eventually I became known and respected for my courses.
Inequality
As the work I did inevitably focused on the problems people faced in dealing with colleagues I had a wonderful snapshot of the difficulties and challenges that existed within a organisation. In a group of twelve managers there would generally be two or three women and they would be head and shoulders above the men in terms of abilities because they had to work a lot harder to reach the same level. At the same time they had to deal with sexist comments, sexual harassment and put downs as the men attempted to try and feel superior to them.When running my training programmes some of the male delegates would try to find ways of deskilling me so they could be top dog of the day. They rarely succeeded.
Recently I saw a programme about race discrimination and one of the points made during the documentary was that the majority group, ie the white people, did not see there was a problem with race issues although the black people experienced discrimination in many subtle ways. The key issue was that the group with the power do not usually see the problem, only those without the power experience the disadvantage. So if you are a black woman in business you may find you are doubly disadvantaged, even in today’s supposed advanced world.
During the nineties there was a new organisation started by a woman for women. The MD was so disillusioned about attitudes to women in business that she left and set up her own accountancy firm. She employed women who wanted the flexibility of having a career as well as bringing up a family and organised it so that they had flexible working hours, time off for maternity leave and part time work without losing out on the career path. It became very successful and could be seen as a model for other companies to follow.
Even the article we commissioned some time ago about ‘Five Things Women Should Know Before Starting A Business’ is condescending to say the least. And the tragic thing about it is that the person (a man) who wrote the article had no idea that it was so condescending. In fact the article is just general business advice that could apply to anyone both men and woman.
In our web design business we still find that quite often the men who we meet with appear surprised or disappointed that the consultant they meet with is a woman because paradoxically most of our telesales staff who book our appointments are men!
Women working in the computer industry may find it has the benefits of flexibility to fit in with child care and the possibility of working from home some of the time. In the more recent years it has been reported that many career minded women have given up applying for the top jobs because they find the demands on their time will not allow them to have any home life with their children. Instead they are choosing jobs with less responsibility so that they can leave the work behind when they go home.
There is no doubt that women have different criteria in the work place. They do think differently and have a more social attitude to their colleagues. Men by and large think more strategically and have an overall concept of the big picture. But that does not mean to say that women are not able to think strategically and that men can’t be sociable to their colleagues. Mostly it is dependent on the programming we place on our children as to how they develop for their roles in their adult life. But over riding all that is largely to do with hormones and the survival instincts that are built into all of us.
My own Experience
When I was trying to set up a new company with a male colleague of mine, during the meetings he would say he would go and visit an MD of a certain firm. I was amazed because I knew from experience that getting in to see an MD was not always easy, but he had no doubts that he would be able to get an appointment to talk about our work. Having said that he never did do any sales pitches and the company never got off the ground. What really struck me though, was that as a man his assumptions and expectations were very different from mine.
Conclusion
I am sure you have heard the saying that ‘behind every great man there is a good woman’. And I believe that is still true in firms today. When visiting lots of different companies as I did, it becomes obvious that there was always the highly organised woman looking after the everyday running of the MD’s or senior manager’s life.
I did find occasionally some men doing that role but the majority were women. The men seemed to spend most of their time in meetings making strategic decisions while the women got on with making sure the cogs kept turning and things got done. It seemed to me the women were the unsung heroes so that the men could maintain their sense of importance and status.
Conference in America
When I attended a conference in Ohio America the delegates were very mixed in terms of race, sex and cultural diversity. The president of the conference was black and the vice president was a woman. During the programme there were mini workshops and lots of interaction of delegates in between. The values which were stated were that ‘No one was more important or less important than anyone else. No one was better or worse than anyone else. Everyone had a right to their opinion and their say.’ And I believe that everyone complied with those values during the conference.
On the last day a vast hall was full of the delegates and people were able to stand and say whatever they wanted to say as an ending to the programme. For the first time in my life I felt the sense of equality with everyone in the room. It is something I have fought for all my life and finally that day I experienced it through my whole body and knew that things would work out.