Subtle Sexism Still Pervades the Workplace

A woman manager was being considered for another job in her department. The man interviewing her praised her work but finally said he just didn’t feel comfortable with her.

He never said it was because she was a woman; he mentioned other factors. But she was left wondering, and the job went to someone else.

Statistics show dramatically how few women are getting into top jobs in business, but statistics don’t offer much insight into why. Personnel experts believe that the problems begin well down in the ranks, where women may never get on the fast track required to position themselves for promotion. “No replacement charting,” is how one respected human resources chief at a major bank puts it. The women just don’t get into the job rotation plans used to bring people along.

This was far more prevalent a decade or two ago, he explains. But the practice hasn’t disappeared. There continues to be concern among male executives about preparing women for advancement who may wind up becoming mothers and dropping their careers. “Men often write the script (about what a woman will do) before it happens,” he says. At the same time, lack of corporate child-care facilities sends a message to women that that’s what they’re expected to do.

He also makes reference to the problem many women call “the comfort factor,” a sense many women say they get that men they work with aren’t as comfortable dealing with them as with male colleagues. It may be imagined in some cases, but many personnel managers who hear and try to deal with such complaints believe the problem is real.

Depends on Age

“It depends on the date of birth of the manager,” says one Los Angeles executive. The older managers too often still see the woman’s place as being in the home. In fact, most of them are the only breadwinner in their family. Younger male managers normally have less trouble accepting women in a career role, including reporting to one.

This comfort problem, often left unexpressed, reflects itself in attitudes about how women should behave. They often can’t be as aggressive as a man without getting some criticism, for instance. They find male colleagues less likely to share valuable experiences with them or pass along tidbits of information they pick up around an office. Women are seldom in the golf foursome.

One woman executive tells of an immediate supervisor who she knew was looking around for another job and appeared to make some effort before he left to maneuver her out of any chance of succeeding him. She has no idea why and, in fact, it could have been part of the fear some managers have of being replaced and shown up by a strong second in command of either sex.

A woman who is a career counselor tells of a masters program class she attended where affirmative-action programs involving women were the topic of discussion. Several of the men in the class, from heavily male-dominated industries such as aerospace, simply kissed off discrimination as a problem, one of them referring to a woman in the room as “honey” in the process.

Tougher to Compete

The feeling of not being taken seriously contributes to women’s perception that they have a tougher road than the men they compete with. They say they often feel men believe they’ve been hired or promoted mainly because of affirmative action. Or that some of the men look on them more as possible dates than as colleagues. “The office is not a single’s bar, and I don’t come here for my social life,” declares one.

One female editor puts it this way: “It’s hard to pin down, but we’re aware that some men don’t expect anything much from our input. On occasion, I’ve been sure I was saying something intelligent, but the words were being transformed into a cartoonist’s zzzzz’s before they crossed the conference table.” Trying to overcome this may lead a woman to try too hard in such situations, she believes.

Women have made progress in many fields, of course, and many experts believe that the stage is set for major advances in the next half decade. Still, the bank human relations chief believes that the only way it’ll really happen is with pressure from the top. “You figure out pretty quickly you’re not going to change the managers’ feelings. Rather you have to force them.”