"To be taken seriously by middle-aged men in suits." That one received a star or two so it must ring a few bells.If you'd asked me a year ago whether I had a problem with men when I'm out networking, I'd have said "no way". Of course, there's always a dinosaur around but mostly they know to save their outdated misogynistic views for when they're down the Masons so, at least, I don't have to listen to them.
And then I became invisible...
One morning, at a breakfast networking event, I was talking to two male friends of mine when a third man approached us with the greeting "Good morning, gentlemen." To their utmost credit, my friends gave that shrift as short as it deserved, and said character lingered for a while like a bad smell before announcing he was off to meet some other people (presumably not of the female variety). Does he think he's doing himself any favours with that approach? Or does he assume that all men are going to slap him on the back for his excellent display of humour? Thankfully most of the men I do business with have better judgement than that.
I've since heard an invitation to women to a breakfast open meeting with an aim of attracting more women into the group, accompanied by the "reassurance" to the more important people that it wouldn't be much to miss - just "florists and women and things." That was from a man younger than me so you can't even blame the dinosaur tendency for that one.
What's going on? I'm the last person to launch into an "all men are bastards" rant but suddenly these types can't seem to keep their unsavoury attitudes to themselves. Is it open season for rampant mysogyny - or have their mothers just failed to teach them any manners? And, strangely enough, it's always these types who whine about women-only networking. What do they think we get up to? Apart from taking a break from their old nonsense...
Of course, off-putting as that attitude can be (especially to networking newbies), you always have the option of moving on to someone more tolerant of your oestragen-imbued aura. But what if it's someone who can have a more direct impact on your business who's being patronising? Does it undermine your confidence? Or just waste a lot of your time until you find someone more simpatico to deal with? Is it simply a matter of the occasional one-off case or is there something more entrenched in the wider world of business support?
Do you have any horror stories? Or any great ways of dealing with such attitudes?
3 comments:
Horror stories? Try this. When I was just graduating at 23, I turned up at Business Link with a pile of confusing brochures and leaflets to ask how you start a business, telling the gentleman about the evening dresses I'd been making for people but how intimidated I felt about VAT and tax and accounts and so on.
I was verbally patted on the head. "Just get on with it for a few years, dear, don't worry about any of that."
So I did; I flapped around for ten years on my own, running a semi-pseudo-kind-of-business out of the spare bedroom and hiding behind a self-penned website before discovering Notts Business Venture, taking heart in mouth and completing the New Entrepreneur Scholarship recently. Finally, I'm actually running a business; finally I feel like I know what I'm doing, and finally I'm regaining the courage to collaborate and ask for help. What a lot of wasted time!
OH! I forgot. I have an even better one. Part of that ten years was spent jetsetting backwards and forwards to America - I loved it there and wanted to set up a life and my business over there.
My father introduced me to an acquaintance, a rich, high flying American businessman who told me he could officially employ me and thus get me the elusive visa I needed to work in the US. He was positive and interested, he flew me halfway across the country for the weekend so we could meet and I could tell him about my work. Long story short, the whole thing later crashed and burned when he began to imply that he wanted something very specific as payment...
Very interesting.... It seems to me that we are living in an extremely gendered business environment where there needs to be leadership of where the small business can go.
Think about it, but not neccessarily in male/female terms.
Sole traders and very small businesses aren't properly understood by any government. They're vulnerable to all kinds of distractions, mainly because they're not a real vocal constituency, because what they are doing is threatening to a status quo of what intelligence and knowledge is and how it can be marketed.
It's really not about whether you are female, it's about whether what you are doing is challenging to what is already out there. The female thing as a 'problem' is just the way that 'difference' of any kind is perceived as time wasting or not cost effective, wasteful, which is a cardinal sin.
But to do something really well you have to really know it and understand it. What people (and not just men) find 'threatening' are different ways of looking at old problems. What I think women have in common is that they come to things without that sense of support from the culture, when women come in to business they feel they need to explain why.
This is a great thing because it links to need why things are important, why there is a drive to do things and also how they connect to the things that really matter how to get to grips with social issues, how to understand the way things operate and how to change them for the better........
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