While attending college at Vassar, I was inspired by the tradition of empowering women and education in a female-dominated environment. After Vassar, I headed to graduate school at MIT to study business and operations research (a field that applies advanced math to study decisions made by organizations). When I started at MIT, I recall being told that only 19 percent of the graduate students were women.
Coming from Vassar, MIT offered quite a culture shock. Rumor had it that a few MIT professors still thought that admitting women to MIT was a mistake, and that female students were too much of a distraction for the male students. I didn’t think there could be a less female-friendly environment than MIT, until I landed a job on the trading floor at Morgan Stanley. There, a senior trader and I launched a quantitative proprietary trading group, which became one of the most successful in the company’s history.
Female traders were almost nonexistent at the time. There were plenty of women on the trading floor, but they were mostly employed as assistants to the traders and salespeople. Occasionally mistaken for an assistant, I was asked to get coffee and order lunch by those who didn’t know my role, and my male subordinates were occasionally forced to explain that I was their boss and not their assistant.
During my tenure in trading, I strived to understand why there were so few women at senior levels of management. After all, it wasn’t so bad on the trading floor. That’s not to say I completely fit in either. For example, my male anatomy, or lack thereof, came up in conversation with surprising frequency. Did I have the balls to do that trade? Was my dick big enough? Or, more frequently, I needed to get some balls. It didn’t take long to come up with snappy answers to these comments, and soon I was one of the boys. Or was I?
Certainly, within my small proprietary trading group, everyone established close friendships with one another. We worked long hours together and often socialized after work and on weekends. My manager and I spent an inordinate amount of time together. Building a trading group from scratch had innumerable challenges, and we spent a lot of time discussing each one. There were insinuations that we were more than friends—we weren’t.
Although everyone within our trading group became friends, when it came to those coworkers outside our small group, friendship was much tougher. Sometimes it seemed like senior management avoided contact with me and that I made them uncomfortable. But that was no problem; Morgan Stanley sponsored many outings where I could get to know senior management and show them how fabulous I was.
For example, the equity division at Morgan Stanley had its annual officers’ meetings at beautiful resorts, and these meetings provided long afternoon breaks. It would be easy to befriend senior management by the pool in the afternoon. It turns out the afternoon break was primarily for golfing. Although I had taken a golf class at Vassar, I certainly wasn’t ready to go tee-to-tee with male managers who practiced every weekend. I went jogging alone while my male colleagues enjoyed an afternoon of golf together. I promised myself I would work on my swing.
Even if my golf swing wasn’t up to par, there would be other opportunities to socialize with management. At one outing, as evening fell, I headed out to see what others were up to. “Where are you going?” I asked my colleague who was heading out of the hotel bar. It was time for the poker game, I was told.
“You’re welcome to join us,” he added as he left the bar. Join them? I didn’t know how to play poker, and with the stakes they played for, I certainly wasn’t going to ask for lessons. Instead, I headed to bed early.
It’s not that I was explicitly excluded from these events. I certainly could have played poker or shot a round of golf, but I couldn’t get much further from my comfort zone. Meanwhile, my male colleagues were chalking up lots of face time with the big shots in the department. I was determined not to let any more opportunities pass by. Not long thereafter, another opportunity knocked.
The head of my division was taking some managers out for drinks. “Do you want to join us?” they asked. Drinking? Yes, I could do that. There was one catch, I was told. The section of the club where we were headed was for men only. If I could get in, then we’d have our own private room to shoot pool.
I had long blonde hair, and like to think I didn’t look much like a man, but I wasn’t going to let this opportunity get away. No problem, I could do this. A coworker lent me a long trench coat, and another lent me a hat. I tucked my blonde locks into the hat, and felt pretty ridiculous. Is this how I was going to impress management?
At the club, words and a tip were exchanged with the doorman, and soon we were in a private room with a pool table. Now that I was inside, I merely had to demonstrate my brilliance while playing pool. I hadn’t shot pool since high school, but I reasoned I could just apply my knowledge of physics. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection—how hard could it be? I held my own.
In the years that followed, I continued to pursue outings with my male coworkers. The most memorable was an outing to a hostess bar in Tokyo. At Japanese hostess bars, a female hostess who works at the bar is assigned to each guest (all men, except for me), and your hostess pours your drinks and chats with you. At this particular hostess bar, frequented by expats in Tokyo, topless women performed pole dancing on a nearby stage.
And then there was the paintball outing. But that was too painful (literally) to describe. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy establishing friendships with senior managers, and it was difficult to watch the ease with which my male colleagues socialized with them. It occurred to me that this challenge of establishing valuable cross-sex friendships at work might extend to other women in the workplace. Thus began my research into obstacles to cross-sex friendships at work and its impact on women’s careers. I left Morgan Stanley to pursue a PhD in psychology from UCLA. (Once again, culture shock. The graduate students were mostly women, as were half the faculty, and male anatomy never made its way into conversations.)
In 2006 I published an academic paper with Anne Peplau on obstacles to cross-sex friendship at work. After publication of that paper, many people came forward to tell me their own stories of how obstacles to cross-sex friendship impacted their careers. Their stories are featured in this book (names have been changed to protect anonymity), along with new research of my own and the latest research of other scholars. I examine why these friendships at work are so important to career success, discuss the barriers keeping men and women from crossing the gender line to initiate friendships at work, and offer suggestions for overcoming these barriers.