I’m sitting in the Arco Café in Knightsbridge and don’t know which is more overpowering: the smell of fat or the reek of fag smoke.
It’s 1981; I’m twenty-one and work as a window dresser at Harrods.
‘I can’t believe Elaine didn’t get the job,’ Fiona says. ‘We’ve got to do something.’
Fiona, who works with me on the back windows, is outraged. Our colleagues Elaine and Roger both went for a promotion and he got it. They’re equally talented but we thought Elaine would get the job because she’s been at Harrods far longer than Roger and that’s usually how things work.
‘We’ve got to go on strike or something,’ Fiona hisses. ‘Demonstrate. Contact our union.’
I stare at her. The only women I know who demonstrate are the ones at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, who chain themselves to fences in protest against nuclear arms. It doesn’t look very comfortable.
‘Don’t you see, Mary?’ Fiona says, with a withering look. ‘If we don’t do something then none of us stand a chance. The men will always get the jobs.’
I don’t really think too much about this kind of stuff. Isn’t that just how things are? The only woman I’ve known who was in charge of something was my head teacher. And that’s because it was a convent school run by nuns.
We all knew who ruled the roost at home when I was growing up: my mother, Theresa. She looked after me, my sister, brothers and dad. No car, part-time evening work as a cleaner, cooking, washing and cleaning for six and still Dad’s dinner was on the table the moment he got through the door. She was never not working.
But Dad was the one who came home from work clutching the staff newspaper with his photo on the front page. Dad was the person who put money on the collection plate when we went to St Helen’s every Sunday.
In the eyes of the outside world, he was the one in charge.
But as I sit in the café with Fiona, I think of my brothers – Michael, Joe and Lawrence – and realize how unfair it would be if my sister Tish or I missed out on a job in favour of one of them just because they’re men.
And then I think about Elaine. It’s true what Fiona is saying. There are a lot of men in charge at Harrods: in fact, it’s all men who run the display department where we work.
Berge is head of front windows, Keith looks after side while Peter heads home and interior display. Then there is David, head of ground-floor display, Andrew on the first floor, Alan on the second, Antonio on the third and Paul on the fourth. Lou is the deputy display manager (his name isn’t short for Louise) and above us all is the big boss, John.
(To be fair, there is a woman in the management offices: a secretary called Jane.)
Fiona is right. Floor after floor of men are managing women, who rarely get the chance to manage them back. Elaine has been sidelined just because she’s a woman.
And that is so not on.
‘What are we going to do?’ I say.
Within days, a few of us are stamping up and down the pavement outside Harrods’ windows but we aren’t exactly a force to be reckoned with. Most of our women colleagues don’t want to stick their head above the parapet, however much they agree with us. We try to mobilize the union but soon realize that our protestations are falling on deaf ears. Not long after, we melt into the background again.
Soon, Fiona will leave Harrods and in time I will also resign to start a freelance career in window display. Because although I’m not sure where I want to go, I know one thing after my first glimpse of sex discrimination in the workplace: I want to create opportunities that, back then as a woman, Harrods will never give me.
If you’re aged forty or above, this story might seem familiar. The world of work was a very different place even as recently as twenty years ago – and men were largely in charge. But if you’re younger, maybe you’re wondering what it’s got to do with you. There are lots of women managers in your office, after all.
Humour me. Read on. Be we Baby Boomers, Generation Xers or Millennials, I’m afraid we’re all in this together, because the world we work in is often working against us.
Take retail, my area of expertise: 60 per cent of its employees are women, and women also make or influence 85 per cent of all purchasing decisions. That means we’re usually responsible for buying everything from our old man’s pants to big-ticket items like holidays. Retail is a world that women drive both financially and practically. And yet, we’ve only got 10 per cent of the positions on retail executive boards.2
That’s kind of perverse, isn’t it? A business made up of women, sustained by women, but hardly any of us make it to the top?
It’s the same in many industries. We know about the male domination of politics, banking and engineering. But they’re also at the top of industries that, like retail, are very female-dominated. Teaching, say, or medicine.
Even in hairdressing – and if that isn’t a female-driven industry then I don’t know what is – all the famous names are male: from Vidal Sassoon, Trevor Sorbie and Toni & Guy through to John Frieda, Nicky Clarke and Sam McKnight. But can you name a single famous female hair stylist?
Thought not.
The reality is that most industries have more women at the bottom and more men at the top.
So why is this? Do women lack stamina? Or ambition? Are we too difficult to work with? Or are we just really average at our jobs?
Some people say we lack ambition, that women don’t reach for the top because we get so far and then life, family and work clash too often for many of us to devote the attention to a career that success demands.
(You know the kind of people who say that: it’s usually the ones with someone at home doing everything from childcare to picking up the dry cleaning so there’s nothing else for them to worry about except working eighty hours a week.)
Then there are those who believe the way women work means we’re not equipped to rise to the top. We might be too passive, unambitious or focused on children. You know the kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah. Enough of the excuses.
There is a reason why women don’t get to the top in the same numbers as men and it has zero to do with our shortcomings. Systemic barriers are what stop us.
Systemic barriers at work affect the whole culture and everyone working within it – particularly women. Why? Because they’re part of a working code that was created by men for men.
Even more specifically: a code created by men who were powerful in terms of their class and ethnicity, as well as their gender: white, wealthy alpha males, to be exact.
They’re the people who have pretty much had a monopoly on getting to the top for a very long time – and the way we work today is still rooted in the alpha culture they created long ago.
If you want to succeed, you need to fit the mould. So alpha men do well and so do some alpha women, myself included. For a start I’m white, and, although I came from a working-class background, I had enough talent and drive – and a few lucky breaks – to get to the top.
But I am more of an exception than the rule, and until we adapt our working culture, shifting its focus and values to reflect a more modern world and diverse society, we will still often funnel only one particular type of person to the top.
And, sadly, it ain’t usually a woman.
The effect of these systemic barriers is that although women certainly start off strong in the workplace (let’s not forget that we’ve already outperformed boys at school and are 35 per cent more likely than them to go to university), we end up lagging behind in our careers.3
We earn less: 81p for every £1 that a man makes.4 We’re also promoted less in our paid work and do far more of the junior-level jobs than the senior ones – making up nearly three-quarters of the entry workforce and holding just 32 per cent of director-level posts.5
Not exactly uplifting reading, is it?
But the world of work is like this because most businesses still have an alpha working culture. And it’s a culture that respects and over-rewards so-called ‘masculine’ qualities, like risk-taking, competition and single-minded, myopic focus. Meanwhile, more ‘feminine’ traits like collaboration, resilience, empathy and compassion are consistently devalued.
Alpha culture views most emotions with suspicion. Logic is king! Instinct: what’s that? It’s also heavily invested in dominance and the drive to ‘win’ – which often creates an office environment where people are pitting their skills against each other to compete for money or seniority.
Linear advancement up the ladder is prioritized over collaboration; single-minded focus is encouraged to the detriment of any life outside work – including family. Extreme risk-taking to prove ‘strength’, and the inability to show ‘weakness’ by admitting mistakes, become the norm.
We can all see the effect this is having. Look at the world around us. And, yet, nothing is really changing.
Of course lots of us – men and women – are ambitious, risk-taking and competitive. And not everyone, and every business, works like this. But to some degree, these dynamics are at play in every sphere of work. And they are driven by our alpha working culture. It means work often ends up resembling a battleground as we compete against each other, build strategic alliances and carefully keep track of the balance of power.
Put all this together – the structure of the way we work and the qualities that are rewarded – and most women, at best, are held back. At worst, we are excluded from the top.
But, as important as the issue of women leaders is, this isn’t just about those who want to aim high and are stopped in their tracks by a way of working that doesn’t work for them. It affects us all because the jobs we typically do are not as financially valued as those often done by men.
Take a look at the thirty lowest-paid jobs in the US. Women are far more likely to do twenty-three of them, including food server, housekeeper and childcare worker. Meanwhile men are far more likely to do twenty-six of the thirty highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer.6
Now, architects and computer engineers are important. But why are men mostly doing these jobs? And why aren’t vocational, caring jobs considered important, too, and paid better?
Even when we try to do better-paid jobs traditionally done by men, we’re stymied.
US researchers, who looked at fifty years of census data from 1950 to 2000, found that wages fell by 57 per cent when women took over jobs in summer camps and parks that had previously been done by men. When they became biologists, the wages dropped by 18 per cent.7
What happened, though, when men took over jobs that, traditionally, women had done?
You’ve got it. The pay went up.
In the 1940s, computer programming was considered ‘women’s work’ – a nice bit of typing code that was an exciting alternative to being a secretary. (Tell that to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper – one of the pioneers of programming.) And there we leave them for a few decades, quietly getting on with the job.
In the 1980s tech became the money-making future. Men moved into the industry and programming suddenly got way more complex.8 Supposedly. The nerd was born, recruitment started to favour men and pay increased.9, 10 Today women hold just one in four jobs in the industry.11
Even in occupations dominated by women, men earn more. The education workforce is two-thirds female but in the UK male teachers earn on average £2 more per hour than women.12
How on earth is all this still happening?
And if what you’ve read so far doesn’t make you thump the table with rage, I suggest you put down this book and check yourself for a pulse.
So how did we end up here? It’s simple, really: men were in charge of the formal workplace – and the way it works – for a very long time.
Women didn’t enter formal employment en masse until about fifty years ago, and today we’re almost half of the workforce.13 More than 70 per cent of UK women aged sixteen to sixty-four work.14 It’s a trend seen everywhere from Japan and Germany to the US.15
But we’re stuck in a Catch-22: we can’t get to the top because of the codes created by men, and we can’t change things if we don’t get to the top.
Some people think quotas are an answer to this – that things would improve if women were given half of all corporate board seats tomorrow – but I don’t think anything will really change until we question the culture of the way we work.
Alpha culture’s masterstroke has been to make it seem so ‘normal’ that, even as the demographics of the workplace have changed so radically, we haven’t questioned it. Isn’t this just how things are?
No.
It’s about our values, the things we attach importance to, and our behaviours. And this is expressed in even the most seemingly insignificant of ways.
Fashion – my industry – is a brilliant case in point.
The BBC is a national, publicly funded broadcaster, which represents a nation pretty evenly split between men and women. But amid all the airtime and correspondents it devotes to football, and the Premier League in particular, there is no one dedicated to talking about fashion.
Football certainly has a huge social significance. But even though the fashion industry was worth almost ten times what the Premier League was to the UK economy in 2014, it obviously isn’t considered important by those divvying up the budgets at the BBC.16
Go figure.
It’s the same in business: certain focuses, behaviours and characteristics tell us a lot about the values held by organizations. They tell us that we’re still working along traditional masculine alpha lines.
I should know. I did it myself for years.
Until I couldn’t do it any more.