My last post, Killer Heels, generated
much interest and there will be more to come on workplace dress shortly.
Meanwhile, triggered by current events, this week’s post is about audibility as
well as visibility, the right both to speak and to be listened to with respect
– or ‘How to be heard when your voice is softer,’ as I say when delivering
management and career development training. This can be a tall order, whether
you are project manager on a construction site, a newly promoted member of a
Board or a politician working in a tribal time warp.
"When a woman stands up, she is told
to shut up and sit down.…But I will tell you that women are tired that
different rules are applied to us in a different way." These words were
spoken last week on CNN by the doughty Barbara Mikulski, the longest serving
woman in the US State Congress who has just retired after 30 years.
Retired she may be, but retiring she is
not. Her forceful words were made after Senator Elizabeth Warren was rebuked
and then prevented from reading a 30 year old letter from Martin Luther King’s
widow Coretta at the confirmation proceedings for Jeff Sessions, the
controversial candidate for the post of Attorney General. The
unprecedented rebuke of Warren was roundly condemned by many, with Mikulski
accusing senators of selectively employing the rule book, supporting her claim
by giving examples of men who have made direct personal attacks without censure.
“I see this as a pattern of
behaviour,” said Barbara Mikulski. “Women stand up in the boardroom, the
workplace and now even on the Senate floor, where we have the same job, and the
rules, they’re applied differently to us and they were applied differently to
Elizabeth Warren.”
The challenge for a woman is not only being
heard, but also protecting her intellectual property when someone around the
table takes ownership by repeating her words - to a roar of approval. That is
when having a champion, sponsor or supportive colleague is so important. And
last week in the Senate, there were four male colleagues who stood up to the
plate after Elizabeth Warren was silenced and proceeded to read the same letter
– without interruption.
Certainly Barbara Mikulski has plenty of
wise words to share, after an extraordinary career for which she was presented
the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. She was the first woman elected to
the Senate who did not have a husband or father who served in high political
office. She was also the first woman to chair the Senate Appropriations
Committee and served on many others including Health, Education, Labor,
Pensions and the Select Committee on Intelligence. A tireless campaigner, one
of her recent achievements was to push through legislation on equal pay
for women.
Back to the importance of acknowledging and
listening to different views, with respect. When the number of women in
the Senate rose to 20, Barbara Mikulski organised bipartisan dinners for all
her female colleagues, Republic and Democrat alike, with the inviolable rule
that ‘the event was a zone of civility even when we disagreed.’ A rule to be
welcomed in workplaces on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mikulski warns that the Warren incident
will have a long lasting effect on women’s activism, referring to the hundreds
of thousands of women who have marched in protest against the newly appointed
45th President of the USA and the policies and behaviour he embodies. Like many
of the men and women I marched with in London on 21 January, I find it
difficult to believe that in 2017 we are still dealing with so many of the same
discriminatory practices and attitudes that women protested about a century
ago, but there is a growing determination to bring about change.
As I was finishing this post, Sandi Toksvig
was echoing these sentiments on BBC Woman’s Hour and talking about the
importance of women speaking for what they want and deserve to get. In
particular she called for equal pay – a topic of much personal conjecture when
she took over from Stephen Fry as host of the tv programme QI.
So what can we do? We should shout out our
thanks to the increasing number of men who are supporting the diversity cause -
including Sir Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow, Sir Ian McKellen who added their
powerful voices and presence to the Women's March London. We should provide
practical and realistic ways of assisting management to make change.
And like Sandi Toksvig, Meryl Streep,
Barbara Mikulski and Elizabeth Warren, more women should shout out for themselves,
for others who need support and to remind people of their presence. Like Rose
AnnVuich, who became the first female member of the California State Senate in
1977 and who rang a bell whenever her fellow Senators addressed the collective
members of the Senate as "Gentlemen," to remind them that the chamber
was no longer exclusively male.
This story reminds me of my time on the
board of a construction and property company. Unlike the FT columnist Lucy
Kelleway, who does not believe that women non executives should promote or
support women in the workplace, I was active in helping the company increase
its proportion of women from 13% to 30% – in addition to carrying out the usual
responsibilities of governance, audit and risk management.
On stepping down from the board after seven
years, I presented the chairman with a mason’s gavel and block with the request
that it be used to open every board meeting with the statement “Remember, the
best person for the job might be a woman.”
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