OPINION
Stop Training Me On How To Be A Woman
My problem with corporate trainings
“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men” — Gloria Steinem
I’m done training myself on how to be a woman! I muttered as I sneaked out midway through my two-day workshop on women’s empowerment.
I didn’t have the balls proportionate to my fury to storm out of the room. Loyal to my introverted self, I scurried out of it, trying hard not to draw attention to my absence. The workshop organizers might say I was being too womanly, for a man never walks out unnoticed.
Gender-based training, or sexual harassment training, has existed in tech for as long as I can remember. But nobody really cared enough about women, let alone others, until George Floyd upended the world. With it and the Black Lives Matter protests, corporations jumped on the bandwagon to wipe out all injustices across races and genders.
Women’s problems became just one of many others in the workplace, and to tackle those many others, DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — came into being. Corporations introduced new job roles focused entirely on improving DEI stature in the workplace.
However, women continued to be notoriously low in supply in tech. They are still such unicorns that teams now have ‘DEI goals’ in hiring. When discussing new candidates or potential hires, managers often refer to the woman as ‘the diversity candidate’. Even though the depersonification makes me disgusted, I’m glad to see the numbers rising at a snail’s pace.
But their gingerly rising numbers haven’t mapped linearly to their representation in senior leadership. At 28%, dropping from 35% in 1984, we have fewer women leaders in tech than three decades ago. While we’re moving forward in mass, we seem to be moving backward in strength.
Thus, when I was nominated for this workshop, which, aside from other topics, also aimed at nudging more women into leadership positions, my curiosity, along with cynicism and caution, was piqued.
In this era of corporate DEI, such workshops are in vogue. But, considering I was nominated to the workshop by someone I respected at work, I wasn’t entirely hopeless about it. With so many women similarly nominated to attend it, sacrificing their productive hours, someone must have found some value in it.
It was a rookie mistake. I was yet to learn that my cynicism could use some more muscle-flexing. With my enthusiasm at anemic levels, I walked into the room, which was then filled with women, an hour late.
It was a woman+ workshop — one of those new-age corporate training and workshops aimed at equity across genders that now include gays, lesbians, and transgender people. However, looking across the room, all I could find was a tiny pond of women, some of whom were bustling with excitement at finding the holy grail of success in a man’s world. Seeing a room full of women was certainly refreshing. The last time I was surrounded by a sea of women was at the 2018 Grace-Hopper Conference.
I had told myself that I’d be optimistic and practice the good old Hellenistic principle of epoche, or suspending judgement. So, I sat quietly on the last table, the only one that had a seat vacant — eyes glued to the projector, ears tuned to the presenter, occasionally doodling to stay focused. I was intent on listening and not asking questions.
But an hour on, I could no longer resist my urge to butt in when the presenters started walking through some cliched statistics.
“Women say sorry more often than men,” says Pantene, along with several other studies. While we’re at it, “women also have a niceness problem at work.” And, oh, by the way, women are selling themselves short by helping people a lot behind the scenes while men make a show of it. Shouldn’t we take stock of our actions?’ asked our presenter.
Losing my restraint with each slide, I asked, “Sorry on many occasions, as shown in the ad, is used akin to excuse me, a phrase that makes our interactions more polite and civil. Why are we asking women to say less sorry and instead not asking men to say that more?”
This narrative of men vs. women had already started getting on my nerves. I could count more than enough men in my workplace who said sorry and excuse me — polite and nice men who shattered the widely held notion that niceness was a female trait. I loved working with them.
We do have a problem where we don’t recognize women’s niceness nearly as much as we do for men. While women are socially conditioned into being polite, nice, and agreeable, men are trained to go get it.
But by repeating this to women, we’re implying that women should say sorry less or tone down the niceness. It’s like telling black people that their natural curly, coily hair that has adapted over several generations doesn’t fit in a boardroom; only a white person’s straight hair does.
We will have a much more bearable world if we train everyone to be a little more polite, perhaps as polite as a woman is.
With studies and statistics to back the claim, my presenter said, “Men interrupt women. Women also interrupt women.”
How often do men interrupt other men? I wondered. By sharing the studies in the form of click-baits, I found the narrative further divisive. It aimed only at making women aware that they were being interrupted, a sort of (wo)mansplaining. But what I would have loved to see were the complete statistics.
According to a study reported on Slate, men are almost three times as likely to interrupt women as they are to interrupt other men. Women interrupt each other constantly and almost never interrupt men. 87% of the time that women interrupt, they are interrupting each other. However, the more senior a woman gets, the more she interrupts everyone.
So, the clickbait item wasn’t without merit. But what environment do we appreciate? One in which people interrupt one another constantly? Or one in which interruptions are rare, respectful, and intentional? If it’s the latter, how can we develop that environment if we don’t equally make the men aware that they’re interrupting constantly?
Confidence in speaking up and handling interruptions without losing the train of thought aren’t phenomena driven just by gender. In a multicultural environment, a cross-section of personality types, their gender, and the culture they’re from all play a role. An introverted man is less likely to interrupt than an extroverted woman. A man or woman from a hierarchical and submissive culture is less likely to interrupt than one from an individualistic society. So, making these statistics into a man-woman thing is ineffective.
“Women in power downplay gender differences” was the next revelation.
As a light-bulb moment, the woman sitting next to me commented, “Remember when Kim Kardashian asked all women to get their fucking ass up and work?” Rolling my eyes until they bulged out of their sockets, I asked, “Remember her dad’s friend, OJ Simpson, saying he is not black; he is OJ?”
The truth is, that is what power does to humans.
As Lord Acton wrote presciently in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It doesn’t discriminate between men and women.
As this 2012 study found, upper-class drivers or those driving luxury cars were more likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection with stop signs on all sides or not yield the way to pedestrians.
By saying “powerful women downplay gender struggles,” when every human does it, we’re not only asking the women to climb onto a pedestal of moral behavior, we’re also discriminating against them from the rest of humanity.
Empowering women or striving for fairness and justice means accepting them as they are. If we’re demanding that they change their behavior for better or worse, we’re no better than the male chauvinists of yesteryear.
Most of the examples discussed in these trainings are very US-centric. The studies and statistics are often drawn from US experiences. Let’s take an example.
Always ran an informational ad nine years ago: “Run like a girl,” which is often used in these trainings. It demonstrates how “like a girl” is considered insulting, and I agree with that.
However, in the Indian society I grew up in, “running or fighting like a girl” had very little relevance. We couldn’t even run on the streets or often even in playgrounds because we had to deal with catcalling or leering from onlookers.
We were a geeky society that valued grades and exams in which girls aced as much as boys. Even in high school, the heroes weren’t the athletic champions but the top scorers in the exams. And we have ~45% female enrollment in STEM disciplines.
But we had other forms of sexism. From our childhood, we were brought up to be good wives, trained to cook and clean well. For some, like me, there was a menstrual taboo practiced at home and outside. The most obstructive sexism we faced often came later, when girls became marriageable women and needed to ace both work and life.
Speaking from mine and several of my friends’ experiences, we were all advised by our family after our marriage to quit the demanding tech sector that interfered with family. Thus, from a 45% enrolment in college, we only have 30% female participation in the tech workforce.
So, what use is the run-like-a-girl ad to me?
The ad was great, and all the men in my life — my husband, my brother, and my best friends — had all heard some form of ‘like a girl’ during their boy talks. But with no men in the room, the ad’s audience was incomplete.
The ad is relatable at an abstract level to women across the world. But that wasn’t a specific example I or any woman from a non-western country could relate to. Sitting around me in the room were women from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, France, and many more. What use is a US-centric narrative for any of them?
To quote another example, the moderator discussed the studies where women were judged harshly by both men and women for their appearance. This judgement implicitly forced women to focus on their dress choices, make-up, and overall appearance at the workplace.
While I agree that the topic wasn’t without merit, its form was different in each society. I’ve worked with a few women from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Romania) who had so internalized this societal expectation to look feminine that one of them refused to carry a backpack, only a feminine handbag for her work laptop. According to her, the backpack was ill-suited for a lady.
However, at this, the women from non-western societies, particularly the Arab countries, expressed thorough dismay. Dressing up was reserved for parties. If a woman dressed up for work or school, she was considered shallow and incapable of succeeding without capitalizing on her looks. Unlike those from the west, those women faced a different kind of sexism where they were deprived of the choice to dress up.
So, while all of these examples were great, they weren’t nearly as inclusive of our lived experiences.
This is my problem with corporate gender empowerment trainings. It quickly becomes a repetition of cliches, with a divisive narrative about men vs. women with no involvement from men. Their absence also allows women to treat it as group therapy.
It’s certainly cathartic to hear someone else express the same anguish you have and narrate a similar experience as you went through. However, it goes nowhere. It’s not actionable. If what I need is a therapist, I might as well seek a good one who might also point out what kind of attachment issues I have.
We still have a very long way to go in terms of equity across genders. There are substantial problems that need to be addressed. But making it too generic and US-centric alienates most of us non-Americans in the room.
Even when we spent hours discussing how women said sorry too much, there was no mention of something that did affect everyone, irrespective of our origin or place of residence, across all cultures equally. Pay equity.
Women earn up to 28% less than their male colleagues in the same tech roles. Yet none of these workshops ever addressed the topic. With no pay transparency on the horizon, unless you happen to live in California, women don’t even have the data to understand how underpaid they are. This is perhaps the most fundamental material impact one could hope for from such empowerment campaigns, yet they all evade the topic.
This was a workshop intended to ‘empower women+’. But our responsibilities at work for these two days weren’t dismissed or reassigned. They were just suspended until we found time to attend to them. That meant, after attending the full-day workshop, we would all spend extra hours in the evening or over the weekend to take care of them. We would spend extra hours to take care of the work for which we are paid 28% less than men.
The further irony of such workshops, which tout inclusion as their tenet, is their exclusion of men. All of the points raised had men as their subjects. Men did things to women. Women were the objects. And yet, the men were conspicuously absent from any of the discussions.
They weren’t invited or nominated for such trainings. They didn’t have to suspend their work for the betterment of the workplace. They weren’t informed that they have a terrible tendency to interrupt. Instead, it was all left to the women. It was like asking the victims to behave better.
This makes one wonder if DEI isn’t Diversity, Exclusion, and Inequity.
Women don’t need these trainings and workshops to learn how to be women. We already know that; live that. This divisive narrative of men doing this to women is ineffective at best and polarizing at worst. Instead of othering the people we work with, what we all could use is some collaborative discussions that cut across genders to educate each other on how to improve our workplace.
But even more important than that, if these trainings are serious about progress and equity, we need to start with honesty in difficult conversations.
