Women in the Workforce - Please Stop Talking
Have you ever braced your body for impact? Maybe falling off your bike as a kid, or you and a sibling are playing hard and you know they’re going to take you down? Perhaps you’ve played sports and have experienced that moment where your body braces to hit someone else.
My whole life I’ve ridden horses. I competed as a Hunter Jumper and have done almost every other discipline, but impact and falling off a thousand pound animal from several feet in the air has been a norm for my five foot body for decades.
Bracing for impact is normal, well trained, automatic.
We teach you how to brace for impact in the equestrian world. Tuck yourself in a ball, limbs tight to your core, chin tucked, relax. Don’t tense, you’ll break something. Don’t try to catch yourself, you’ll break something. Once you land get yourself out of the way of the horse’s hooves, they’ll break something on your body.
Thousands of times I’ve been thrown from a horse and done that exact routine. Even with this routine I’ve broken ribs, ankles, wrists, hips, a vertebrae, and more. Bracing for impact, no matter how good you are, means you're taking a hit.
It’s that exact same routine I’ve trained myself to follow when I brace for the impact of sexism in the workplace.
It started subtly when I first gained influence in companies. Men would say things like, “Is your husband okay with you working so late?” and “How much time does it take you to put on that makeup every day?”
It escalated as my influence escalated: “Did you marry into your last name? You don’t look Mexican,” (always a little racism with the sexism, just to keep me on my toes) and my all time favorite, “Why don’t you just leave my office and go bake some cookies?”
My “status” as an unmarried woman was, and is, deeply uncomfortable for men in Corporate America that have not rooted out sexism in themselves. My comfortability with being an unmarried, successful woman in Corporate America is even more unsettling for them.
And each time the statements come I fall back on my equestrian training; I brace for impact. I relax, don’t try to stop the fall, and ensure nothing vital is exposed to the stampede of hooves surrounding me. Those hooves will, and have, break something in me. Broken, but not dead.
Because if there’s one thing women in our workforces have proven it’s this - we always survive the impact.
For centuries women have been jarred and beaten by sexism. Whether it’s the requirement of our attire to the wages we’re still fighting for, or the closets we’ve been shoved in to be sexually harassed (or in my case a small kitchen in a tucked away hallway), women have been bracing for impact since we left our homes to make a career.
No one has taught women how to brace for impact, by the way. We’ve just huddled together in private, trading survival tactics because our souls are set on fire with passion for the career men are so flippantly given.
Yet, as true HR professionals began to forge vulnerable and safe paths for women to not just brace for impact but hold men accountable, honorable men stood out and stood up. At the moment when HR was bloodied and bruised from the sexism battle men joined our ranks and the tide shifted.
Men began to get sick of the “not sexist by association” bit their peers were vomiting all over us. The “I have a daughter, a wife, a mother” bullshit that they threw up on our faces when we held them accountable. Other men, allies, rebels, had enough.
Men like Paul, a Detention Sergeant that believed a female Detention Officer when she said she was being sexually harassed and brought her to me despite the jail “protocols”. Paul, who never asked if I was married.
Men like Chris, a Sales Manager that witnessed a female sales rep crumble at her desk and instead of humiliating her believed her issues were legitimate and sent her to me. Chris, who never asked if my husband cared about my long hours or when I would have children.
Men like Zach, a Sales Vice President who stopped a meeting I was invited to but could not get a word in because the men were speaking over me until Zach said, “Everyone stops talking until I can hear Kayla on this.”
Men like Adam, Sam, Olu, Brian, Vadim, Jon, Steve, TJ, Michael, and so many others that decided to stop talking and listen.
Men that we don’t have to brace for impact when they’re around.
The antidote to sexism is similar to the antidote to any unconscious bias - less of your voice and more of our voices.
As men begin to realize that equality for women does not mean degradation for them, just as white people realize the same for the black community and heterosexual people realize the same for the LGBTQ+ community, the voices of women and minorities will be welcomed.
Perhaps it was the #MeToo movement, or Representative Ted Yoho calling Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch” on the steps of my nation’s capitol in front of the media, or it was a simple switch that’s flipped that has raised the war-cry to the ears of our male allies, but things are changing.
We’ll stop hiding in the private rooms of survival. Those of us that haven’t been hiding can stop bracing for the impact of being called a “bitch” because we say what every other man says, but we don’t have a penis to back up those statements.
We’ll get paid fairly not just for bringing phenomenal work to the table, but being the entire table that supports the work being placed on it.
When the majority collectively stops talking, when they open their ears and listen with the intent to hear, change stirs.
As HR, are we creating these quiet, listening spaces for minorities? As a man, are you willing to please stop talking and listen to the women around you?