We want what you aren’t. How many of these have you been dinged on?

How many of these have you been dinged on?

If you haven’t read this article from Fast Co., you’d better.

I was meeting with some creatives soon after I came back to work from my first maternity leave. We were reviewing some work and one of the creatives said to me, “…being just a suburban mom now, I’m not sure you have the right viewpoint to critique these ads, what with your high waisted jeans and all…â€. He might have made it in jest, but it came out mean. I was hurt and stunned and after saying something stupid like, “fuck you, old manâ€, I went to the bathroom and cried. That was 23-years ago.

This is a table from an article that came out last week. The article hyper-linked above. The words in each box look somewhat benign in this context..but they are not. And the the reality of the larger group of words that can be slotted into each box are painful and harmful, brutally so. I’ve been ‘dinged’ on eleven of them over the years, although to be fair, some were combined—â€she isn’t pretty enough to make up for her weightâ€. It took me about a decade and lots of therapy to learn not only how to be in that moment when confronted with these words (I try not to use the term “react†because studies have shown that if I use the term “react†in this context, that the men reading it will assume a hysterical, emotional woman reaction.), but also how to make sense of it later, to explore the real meaning and context so I can be ready the next time it happens and turn it into a productive conversation. It’s hard to do and I don’t always get it right, in fact around 4 years ago a new hire male on the executive committee told me in our first meeting that “he’d talked to everyone in the agency and couldn’t find anyone who said I brought any valueâ€, and some other stuff. He told me this literally :30 minutes after a meeting we were in, where I was told the exact opposite. It was such blatant gaslighting and yet there were moments over the next months where I didn’t handle it as well as I wanted to. Maybe it was the whiplash manhandling my brain?

“We want what you aren’tâ€. Has anything really changed in the last 23-years? As we all age, age becomes, in some ways, the biggest thing they don’t want. It feels like a lose-lose proposition and it’s fucking exhausting. Which is probably why so many women took the chance during the pandemic to run, run like the wind away from corporate America.

Which is sad for corporate America. Because, and this has been said and proven and proven and said so many times it’s both sad that it has to be said again, and disgusting that the other times it’s been said by women people actually listen to, nothings changed…but we (women) do it better, the corporate thing. “…companies led by women, or with a substantial number of women on their boards, financially outperform companies with less gender diversity at the top. Firms with female directors achieve a higher level of innovation…†blah, blah, blah.

As I sit here writing this, ironically on Mother’s Day, in the middle of a job hunt, it feels useless, like nothing will every change because jeasufuck a lot of people have put their all into this fight and for d-e-c-a-d-e-s, nay e-o-n-s. And, a lot more are putting their all into it right now. I could easily name 100 women and women-focused organizations off the top of my head who are out there every damn day fighting for all of us and yet, and yet, being a woman has never felt so shaky, unstable, under fire on all fronts.

“We want what you aren’tâ€.

Well, let’s actually be clear. Corporate America relies heavily on our bodies, our insecurities, our feet, our hair, our skin, our dreams, our desires, our uteri, our breasts, our vaginas, our toe and finger-nails, our hairy armpits, our bikini line, our periods, our menopause, our fallen arches and lifted boobs. And the wallet that our flanges carry. They just don’t want us coming along with them.