Moments That Define My Professional Life
When I was a girl I thought my professional life would be full of raises and bonuses and promotions. Turns out it’s just been a series of butt-pinches, blow-job jokes, and humiliations.
Like many women in the United States right now, I am not okay. Since the morning after Election Day, 2016, I have not been okay. I have days — sometimes even weeks — when I am more okay than others. This week is not one of them. I have been sexually assaulted. Several times. This is not unusual for a woman in America.
I am “lucky” in that none of those assaults were truly awful (I have never been raped, I have never had to go to the hospital (for myself)), but that’s not why I’m here. I am here because I want to talk to you about the things that have happened to me while I was working, while I was trying to do what society had told me that, as a woman I was allowed to do in the pursuit of a happy and fulfilled life. I want to tell you these things, with thanks to jessicashortall and her very brave essay, ‘Everything I can remember,’ as well as Jennifer Weiner’s primal scream ‘The Patriarchy Will Always Have It’s Revenge.’
College: I am attending a women’s college on the outskirts of Philadelphia. If I want money, I have to work, so I get a job working in a bath and body store in a suburban mall. One day I am working, and I notice some men peering at me through the window. One of the men comes in. He tells me that his boss is a sheikh visiting Philadelphia for a special charity dinner, $10,000 per plate he tells me. The sheikh needs a date. He would like to take me. He will pay for a dress and my makeup and hair and jewelry and shoes and my hotel room. “Nothing is expected of you but to attend the dinner with the sheikh.” I politely decline. I call my mother to tell her because I need to tell someone. She says I was silly to decline “Think of the horses he may have bought you!”
I am now an assistant manager at a science store at a different mall. One day we receive a shipment of inflatable emperor penguins. My boss tells me to inflate one for display. While I am doing this, he smirks at me and says, “That is one happy penguin! Blow harder.” I eventually get him fired, but not before nearly everyone makes me feel bad about it because it was “just a joke” and now I have ruined his life. I soon quit.
Looking for work in New York City. I am walking south on Lafayette on my way to a job interview. I am walking along thinking about how to land this job I so desperately need when a bike messenger rides up onto the sidewalk and, as he peddles past me, grabs my crotch. It is the most startling thing that has ever happened to me. I freeze. I cannot believe what has just happened. No one says anything. Everyone just stares at me, wondering what I am going to do. My face grows hotter and hotter. Eventually I regain control of my limbs and I go to my interview, during which I burst into tears. The woman interviewing me gets the story out of me. I am mortified, convinced this means I will not get the job. I get the job.
First office job in New York City. It’s the late ’90s. I am working at a record label. It is a notable birthday of one of the executives there. His two assistants — one male, one female — agree to get him a stripper in the office for his birthday. The president is away on business, so they use his office. The one female executive hears about it, is pissed, rounds up all the women in the office (except for the female assistant) and takes us out for cake and cocktails on the company dime while the party is happening. When we return, none of our male coworkers will look at us. Everyone is whispering. It soon comes to light that the stripper the male assistant hired was a little more risque than he had bargained for. She stripped completely naked. She shot eggs out of her vagina. She forced one of the men to receive a blow job while all the other men — and that one female assistant — stood in a circle watching. The only person who is fired is the man who received the blow job.
Unemployed in New York City. I am trying to create a new career for myself in the aftermath of the dot-com crash and the post-9/11 hellscape that is Manhattan. I decide to do some culinary work and begin trailing at restaurants trying to land a garde manger position. I am trailing one night at a brand new restaurant. I walk in, and not one of the men in the kitchen will speak to me. I ask a question, no one answers. I ask for help, they pretend they can’t hear me. And then the manager walks in and says a reviewer for the New York Times is in the house. Finally one of the men speaks to me. He growls at me, “Don’t fuck it up.” I do not get the job.
I apply for a job at a new restaurant working the line. I appear at an open call. I step into the line for back-of-house work. A woman walks over to me and says, “I’m sorry, you’re too cute to be back-of-house, can you please step into the front-of-house line?” I say no. She insists. I need the job. I step into the line to become a waitress. I am hired. It is the worst job of my life. I am groped and grabbed by customers. I am harassed in English and Spanish by my coworkers. I suck at my job. I am soon fired.
I land at a cigar bar as a waitress. They soon expand to include a cocktail lounge across the street. I am asked to become a waitress there. The lounge becomes known as a place for married bankers to bring their mistresses. We keep a shot glass full of the wedding rings we find in the cracks of the banquettes (the men put them in their pockets and forget to check for them when they leave). One night I answer the phone and there is a woman screaming at me, asking if her husband is there. I don’t know what to do, so I hang up on her. It is none of my business if he is there.
I land a job at a dot-com in the early 2000s (with eternal thanks to one of my forever besties). For a special report, one of the male editors decides to write a misogynistic essay. We beg him not to publish it. He spikes it. While he is on vacation, one of the other male editors decides to resurrect it. He guts it, removing all the bits that could have made the piece squeak by as satire. We beg him not to publish it. He tells us to publish it or else. We do the best we can. The women in the newsroom are furious. It publishes and a shit-storm rains down on us all. My mother calls after she hears about it on the Today Show “Do you work for this asshole?” Yes mom, yes I do.
I leave that place to work at a large city institution. One day I am in a meeting with a pregnant coworker, one of the executives, and some outside consultants. At the start of the meeting the executive says something along the lines of “Isn’t it great that Jane Doe is here! She’s 13 months pregnant and still working! Isn’t that amazing?” I soon get pregnant. I decide to leave this job rather than deal with the institution’s famously inflexible work schedules and the long commute.
I have my child. I try to start my own consultancy. I have postpartum depression. My child will not sleep. It feels like my world is collapsing in on me. Then a friend calls. She needs some marketing help. She hires me a few hours a week. Then she quits. But, for the first time in my life, my new boss is even better than my old boss. She is absolutely amazing! She hires me full-time. I am very happy.
Except, suddenly, a lot of things start going wrong. There are whispers that the executives don’t like me and my new boss. We’re too loud, too independent, too experimental, too out there. We are not playing by the institution’s long-established rules. My boss makes a mistake. I tell her it is a mistake. She presses on. She is fired. She comes to me, “They wanted to fire you, too, but I told them I was the one that made you do the thing. You’re safe for now, but I would start looking.”
I start looking. I find nothing. My duties are increasingly diminished. First I am told that I am no longer allowed to take meetings without my new boss. Then I am told I am not to take phone calls from coworkers. If anyone tries to speak to me, I am to tell them they need to call my boss and speak to him first. Then I am told I am not allowed to speak to any of my coworkers at any time, whether for professional or personal reasons. I sit at my desk and cry. Then I am told I am not allowed to cry and if I cry I will be written up. I swear at my boss. I am written up and put on probation.
I eventually find a new job. I take a massive pay cut. I am hired to run digital, but there is a problem — the place I am working does not believe in digital. I do good work, but it is not enough. I get passed around to a few departments. The election of 2016 happens. My world finally collapses. I am passed back to the department I was originally hired into to.
My boss turns on me. He notices me crying at my desk one day in November 2016. He calls me into his office and tells me if I can’t shape up he will have to report me to HR and possibly fire me. He tells me I am working too hard, to stop taking my job so seriously. I try to do what he says.
A few weeks later he tells me I’m not taking my job seriously enough. HR is present. He tells me he thinks something is wrong with me. He insinuates that I have a substance abuse problem, or maybe mental illness. He is right about the latter, wrong about the former. Again, I try to shape up, but the thing is, I am TERRIFIED of losing my job. I become increasingly anxious and even more deeply depressed.
I start seeing a therapist, I start taking antidepressants. Somehow through all this I make a major pivot in my career. I still have the same boss, but now he is even more awful to me. He starts saying things to me like, “If you can’t make your voice sound more confident, I’m going to fire you and get a man in here to do this job correctly.” He threatens to fire me at least twice a week. He takes pleasure in reminding me I have signed a noncompete and could be forced to not work for a full year if he fires me. It gets worse and worse and worse. And then one day they (perhaps?) fire him.
I am in a better place now, but I am still terrified of what could happen. I am still anxious. I am still lacking the flexible schedule my family desperately needs. I have also lost thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of dollars due to lost bonuses, lost raises, pay cuts I have voluntarily taken to escape shittastic positions. I have lost countless opportunities, countless successes, countless wins.
These examples are just a sampling, the ones that felt most pivotal, the ones that caused me to make changes, to give up, to quit. There are others. The time I was groped during my morning commute. The time two male subordinates sat and made cat noises while their two female bosses had a disagreement. The whispers about senior-level men and junior-level women. The times I have been told to shut-up. The times I have been called a bitch.
I believe strongly that I am not alone in this. I believe strongly that the way to beat this systemic misogyny is to band together with other women at every opportunity. I believe strongly that when we take our eyes off them to fight amongst ourselves, it is exactly what they want. I believe that I can change the moments that define my professional life because of the women I know.
