I’m the Manager, not the Receptionist
There were three men, a reception desk, four chairs, a table and a large room divider standing between me and the courier. He walked past the reception desk, past the chairs and table, and past the three men standing in his way, stood directly in front of me and declared ‘I need the receptionist to sign for this’.
I’m also in the process of hiring new team members at the moment. I sift through CV’s and I choose who I want to interview. As a formality, the CEO sits in on interviews, however I have the final say on who I hire. The number of interviews I have conducted where the candidate will speak over the top of me, direct the answers to the questions I have asked to the CEO and fail to shake my hand upon leaving is astounding. Yes, I have a notepad in front of me and take notes; no, this does not mean I am a secretary. Just last week I interviewed five males in a row. Of these five, only one made extended eye contact with me when answering the interview questions that I had asked. Three of the five only shook the CEO’s hand.
When they find out after the event that they are waiting for my decision, I suspect they feel somewhat like Graham in The Internship when he realises that ‘Headphones’ is the head of Google Search.
Stop making the assumption that a woman can’t be in charge.
Receptionists can often play a vital role in a business; they are the smiling face that greets people as they walk into the office, they are the helpful voice at the other end of the phone and they are generally the person who can assist you when nobody else can.
However, I am not a receptionist. I am a Senior Project Manager at a rapidly growing legal start up. I advise the CEO and spend a lot of time working on the strategic growth of the company. I suspect it was my gender that caused the courier to walk over to me, which makes me realise how the default position is that women are the smiling faces standing in front of the men, or the brains of any operation.
I am acutely aware of the difficulties women still face in business. While my complaints are minor compared to the strong, courageous women who came before me, they still exist. I’m still earning 77c to the man’s dollar and a majority of the domestic duties will fall into my domain. My partner will get limited paternity leave when we have a child and when he helps with the washing, his mates will joke about him being ‘whipped’.
To put the wheels of change in motion, change can begin small. It starts with a simple change in our expression. I’m in the expert witness game and present seminars to large law firms on a regular basis. It was drawn to my attention recently that I often refer to the consultants I work with as ‘he’. While it is an undisputable fact that a very large percentage of the consultants I deal with are male, by simply shifting my language from a ‘he’ to a ‘she’, I am causing the room to challenge their assumptions.
It’s a new world out there…
The face of entrepreneurship and business is changing and the perceptions of the courier and all of those sharing the business world with me will need to change too. Everyone knows we don’t all look like the bros in the Wolf of Wallstreet — but we don’t look all look like Mark Zuckerberg, either.
Sheryl Sandberg encourages us to ‘lean in’ to the conversation, but one only needs to look as far as Arianna Huffington, Weili Dai and Sophie Amoruso to see that women aren’t just leaning in, they are grabbing business by the horns and showing us all how it is done.
I’m reading #GIRLBOSS at the moment, and with all of this being said, one of my favourite quotes from it is: “You don’t get taken seriously by asking someone to take you seriously. You’ve got to show up and own it. If this is a man’s world, who cares? I’m still really glad to be a girl in it.”
As women, we need to keep showing up. We need to keep owning it. It may be a man’s world, but we aren’t going to change that by using it as an excuse. We keep fighting. We stay strong. We politely tell the Courier that the receptionist is indeed the man sitting behind that reception desk.
