I’m tempted to take off my whole outfit and start again as I stand in front of the mirror, dithering. Do the flowery trousers work? Are the rings too much? Do I need to tone the whole thing down?
I really need to decide because I’m running late.
It could be 1978 all over again.
But I’m not a teenager about to go on a night out.
I am a fifty-something mother-of-three who has run her own business for years, and is now often asked to give business talks because I’m an expert on the retail sector.
I’m doing one today at a conference and will go on stage after Liam Fox MP. He’s sure to be wearing a grey suit and most of the audience will be too. Grey suits are the accepted uniform of working men in positions of power. The most daring it gets is a purple stripe in a tie, perhaps a flash of a coloured sock.
So what I’m wondering is this: what will they make of me when I appear on the podium in floral trousers and a cobalt-blue jacket? Will I fit into the tribe?
Then I find I don’t care.
It’s taken me a long time not to care, to come to understand who I am and feel confident enough to look the way I do. I leave the house knowing that what I’m wearing is a reflection of me: colourful, confident and slightly flamboyant. This is my kind of outfit and I’m good at what I do and sure of what I’m talking about. I don’t need a suit to impress people or feel part of their tribe.
But we all grapple with questions like these almost every day. Humans are tribal. Even if we’re not a complete fit for the group we’re part of, we like to create social groups whose rules we understand and can work to.
So, to start understanding the alpha tribe a little better (and we have to understand it in order to unpick it), we must look at it in its purest form: almost exclusively male institutions.
Let’s start by rewinding a couple of decades back to when Caitlin Zaloom, an American anthropologist, decided to study the very male world of financial trading floors in London and Chicago.
What she found was a stringent pecking order, men rising up the ranks, thanks to extreme financial risk-taking and such excessive shows of bravado that two paramedics were needed on standby at the Chicago Board of Trade in case physical fights broke out.17
No. You didn’t read that wrong.
God knows if the paramedics are still there today. But I see little change from that kind of competitive behaviour in the way that industry and others still work, and perhaps that’s reflected in the fact that women still make up only 15 per cent of the financial trading workforce.18
Similarly, when MPs examined what was holding women back in the intelligence services, they identified an immovable layer of middle management with a traditional male mindset. They also saw an alpha-male management culture that rewarded those who were loud or aggressive in pursuing their career, leaving others behind.19
But alpha culture is not always found in the most obvious places. It can hide itself well too. TV production or tech offices might be full of free-thinking creatives who enjoy the onsite yoga studio and napping pods, but don’t mistake a progressive top layer for real change.
Just ask Apple.
In 2017, the company unveiled its new California ‘campus’, for 12,000 employees, which had taken eight years to build. It was so carefully thought out that even the stone covering the gym walls in the 100,000-foot fitness and wellness centre was ‘from just the right quarry in Kansas, and has been carefully distressed, like a pair of jeans’.20
Fabulous attention to detail, Apple. Imagine how long it took to dream up that one.
Strange, then, that no one managed to think about putting any childcare facilities on site. The combined minds of 250 architects and countless Apple bosses didn’t think to build any.
And what they implicitly communicated to their employees by focusing so heavily on design and gym facilities was that beauty – be it the building’s or the staff’s – was important. The ability of their employees to integrate their working lives with those minor, messy responsibilities called children was not.
But let’s be clear here: women don’t get a free pass on all this. Alpha culture might have been put in place by men, but we’re also working alongside them and, in many cases, perpetuating the status quo.
Now if there weren’t many women working, I might be able to understand why the culture of how we work hasn’t really changed over the past few decades. If, say, there were just a few of us in the workforce and the rest of us were sitting around posting pictures of cushion covers on our Pinterest boards I could maybe grasp why adapting our working culture to better reflect and reward women’s strengths might not be considered a priority.
But we’re half the workforce and only a third of its managers, directors and senior officials.21 That’s rubbish by anyone’s standards.
The workplace is still working against us and, as much as I respect Sheryl Sandberg, who argues that women need to adapt their behaviour to better suit the status quo, I’m more of a Gloria Steinem fan. ‘It’s not about integrating into a not-so-good system,’ she has said. ‘It’s about transforming it and making it better. If women have to acquire all the characteristics of a corporate world, it’s probably not worth it.’22
Too right, Gloria. I don’t want to lean into a system that is entrenched in a working world that’s quite frankly dated, limited and controlling.
It’s bloody well time it changed.
Until women have true equality in the workplace across every discipline and pay scale, we will never be able to influence the way in which we, and future generations, work and live.
But that’s not to say men have got all this sewn up. Women bear the brunt of the shortcomings of how we work today but many men are disadvantaged too. Some are forced into choosing work as a priority over family in order to be seen as promotion material. Others are as hemmed in as many women by having to ape alpha behaviour that is not an easy fit for them. And most of the men who are doing well out of the status quo are perpetuating it because that’s what they’ve been taught to do. Just as women can accept their lot and believe this is just the way it is and always will be.
But it has to change if women are to have any chance of truly staking their claim in the world of work – and improving things for us all.
Inspirational and innovative change can be found in the most unexpected places. The world of offshore oil drilling is macho, tough and risky. But something fascinating happened when bosses at two rigs in the Gulf of Mexico decided to change how they worked.
The workforce on the rigs was 90 per cent male and they lived together offshore for two weeks at a time, doing twelve-hour shifts and on call twenty-four hours a day.
Bosses wanted to improve workplace safety and performance and, to do this, decided to shift the focus from individual performance to long-term goals. In essence, they wanted to change the culture of the rigs from having colleagues competing against each other to working together.
Changes were introduced to make that happen. Workers were asked to shut down the platform at first sight of a potentially dangerous situation – with no blame attached if they misjudged it, even though shutdowns were expensive. They were also encouraged to intervene when colleagues breached safety rules. By sharing information instead of hiding mistakes, they started to be open about them and to analyse them as a way to learn. Finally, the men stopped hiding their emotions – and the toll of their job on their family lives in particular – and started to talk about how they felt.
Slowly but surely the culture on the rigs changed. The ‘biggest, baddest roughnecks’ stopped rising to the top. Instead the men who cared about their fellow workers, were good listeners, and were willing to learn did. The link between macho behaviour and good performance was broken. The accident rate fell by 84 per cent. Productivity, efficiency and reliability improved.23
The world of symphony orchestras couldn’t be more different from that of oil rigs. But it was also traditionally male-dominated because, although contenders auditioned, they were usually male students hand-picked by teachers.
Then, in 1952, the Boston Symphony Orchestra decided to find out if there was a way to recruit more women, and started doing ‘blind’ auditions by asking musicians to play behind a screen to hide their identity.24 Other orchestras followed suit in the subsequent decades and some, in addition to screens, also placed thick carpet on the audition stage so that lighter footsteps didn’t give away the gender of the auditionee. Today more than half of the players in the top 250 US orchestras are women.25
Now, an oil rig and an orchestra are specific working environments. It’s not exactly stacking supermarket shelves or running a team of sales people. But, however exotic, these examples show that the way to create a new work environment and a better business model is to think carefully about what you want to change – the working culture, the demographic of the staff – and find ways to make that happen.
They prove that, by implementing new ideas, alpha working culture can change. Radically. And they show that men – as well as women – can benefit from that change.