Fighting For the Only Woman in the Room
Why equality in competition is all I want.
It was my first week at a new job.
The job involved helping people troubleshoot minor technical problems. I was excited to get in there and learn but more so to help people who encountered problems that I was confident about solving and had certainly experienced before. I saw this job as a great stepping stone to techie literacy, as I considered myself an amateur when it came to detailed, data-driven problem solving.
The job fit well into my schedule and would allow plenty of time for writing and reading which was mostly what I cared about. Most of my family and friends laughed when I mentioned it, but I was pretty empowered by the whole thing; I felt like I gave a confident showing at my interview and made myself appear quite hireable. I remembered a situation when I was in middle school, and my iTunes account wasn’t working. I took a whole Saturday to troubleshoot and wander through the Run function on my PC until I landed on a solution. Although there was no visible sweat, I felt like I had worked through something really tough and savored the adrenaline from solving the problem. I thought that occasionally this position might lend itself to that empowering feeling.
So all this to say, I was ready to rock and roll when I started. That’s why as soon as my superior approached my group of coworkers asking who wanted to pick up a package several floors down, I quickly volunteered myself. I had no idea that it would be perceived as strange for a girl to grab a delivery. My job preceding this position was at a restaurant with an all-female serving team. Even if I wanted someone else to lift a tray full of heavy water glasses out of the dishwasher, there would be no one to do it besides me. When I was in a pickle with a testy couple or made a mistake that was clearly my fault, it was always a female manager who jumped in and made things right or gave me a real earful about how I could have avoided the whole mess. And the main takeaway from my food service days was this feeling that no one was going to do my work for me, and if for whatever reason I wasn’t feeling well or couldn’t handle the pressure, a female fellow server would take over, not a male.
Back to the office, with orange Nikes and a sweat-resistant pullover, I was even dressed for the part of heavy lifting! But before I could bound down the stairs to grab the package, my boss stopped me.
“No, no, Chelsea, let Jacob go get it.”
I looked over at Jacob, and with judgement spared, he was a wiry kid three years my junior who looked hardly capable. I was strong! I was a runner training for a 10k who went to hot yoga classes like a fiend. Sure, I have tiny little wrists and ankles, but I knew that I could handle whatever awaited me several floors down.
My supervisor repeated: “Chelsea, let Jacob get it. It’s pretty heavy.”
I kept my gaze focused, but I was hot. I said, “No, no, I’ll get it!” Then, my superior threw a real curve ball: “No, Chelsea, it’s not good for women to lift something heavy.” I shifted my thoughts and decided to abruptly respond: “Why?”
So that opened a can of interesting, feminist-fearing tropes. He said, “Mary across the hall had a baby, and she said that it can hurt women to lift something heavy,” and then, “There’s something about lifting heavy objects that’s bad for women…”
I wanted tread lightly as this was a new job, and although I disagreed, I didn’t want to seem like a drag. So I decided, “Hey, what the heck! Let’s turn this into a competition.”
I took a tally of votes from all of my new coworkers who walked into the office with the simple question, “Will lifting heavy objects hurt a woman’s baby-making capabilities?” Some chuckled, some looked at me wide-eyed, but I didn’t care about how they felt and only cared about their answer. Some said yes; some said no. A fellow female coworker said, “Well, maybe? I don’t know if it does.” I put her down as a yay. After all the back and forth, the votes were pretty close, and most people were perplexed by the purpose. While light-hearted in tone, I was dead serious about collecting this material while using a dwindling black Expo marker on a large, stained white board in the office.
With my main focus being efficiency, I decided to do a quick Google search to determine the winner. I found some sort of super rare biological problem that women can run into while pregnant and lifting heavy objects, but in terms of totally not pregnant women, there was not a detrimental effect on overall reproductiive capabilities when lifting oversized packages.
We left the topic casually accompanied by nervous laughter because I had basically set it up like a game show. No one felt any sort of repercussion for how they answered the question, but I left the tally marks on the white board that was on the wall of an office about the size of my bedroom. I eventually erased the stats before leaving for the day but thought about them as they left their greasy black residue alongside all the other notes on the board.
Being polite was a big part of my upbringing in Louisiana. Regardless of your gender, you were never supposed to make people feel uncomfortable, and the mark of a truly successful socialite was someone who could host a party and make all guests feel right at home. It felt stilted and awkward for me to stand my ground in this setting, but I reminded myself that if I didn’t say something, I would certainly be fine, but someone else might be put in this situation one day and not fare so well. All I was fighting for at this point was an altered expectation. I wanted to be held to no other standard than that of my male peers. I didn’t want anyone to coddle me or baby me or treat me like something fragile. I want to be treated the same.
A fight for feminist equality, although multi-faceted depending on the particular issue, for me, looks and sounds unremarkable in relation to a man. If I’m the only woman in the room, I don’t want to be held gingerly. If a coworker thinks I’m not strong enough for something, I want to know if that’s the reason why I’m being passed over for a particular task. But it has to be a two-way street. I want the men that I work with to be my direct competition, and I want to be able to tell them when I know they’re not strong enough or well-equipped to handle a challenging task. It’s the golden rule, right? Equality in competition and mutual respect is all that this only woman in the room wants.
