There was plenty of talk about business around our kitchen table when I was younger. Both my grandfathers had their own businesses and my dad followed the same path. When my eldest brother finished university and was entering the world of work my dad gave him a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad about understanding money and how to accumulate it. When my next brother was at the same stage in his life he too was given a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad. So whenever I was a coming-of-age I was expecting to get that same tap on the shoulder, but it never came. Eventually I bought my own copy and read it without telling anybody.
Years later when I asked my dad why he’d done that, he couldn’t remember giving the boys the book let alone making any kind of conscious decision to not give me one. I had given the whole thing a lot more thought than he had. Maybe because I’d seen a pattern emerging.
When my older brothers reached working age they were both given summer jobs in my dad’s accountancy practice. They worked upstairs doing accounts. When I was 16 he offered me a job answering phones in reception. I not-so-politely declined. None of this is to say that my dad didn’t encourage me in my studies and my career ambitions. Outwardly he made no difference between what he expected of me and my brothers, and maybe it just so happened that those were the jobs that needed filled at the time but I had a sense of something else at play.
I grew up with 4 brothers, I went to a university that was 70% male, I started work in a record shop as the only woman among 15 men. And then I got involved in the world of business and marketing where every meeting or event I went to was a bit of a sausage party. In some ways it only really dawned on me that I was a woman a few years ago. Up until then I was able to kid myself that my experience of the world was no different from that of the men around me. But as I entered my thirties I began to realise the limitations of a world that has been shaped much more by men than by women.
Groups that lack diversity often end up with a skewed perspective on things. And that’s certainly happened in the male-dominated world of business. When women are not present in significant numbers then traits and approaches that are associated with feminine energy are also underrepresented. After announcing that I was going to write a series about gentleness almost all the emails I got from men in response made some reference to masculinity. There is an idea in our culture that gentleness and masculinity are at odds with one another. In a business world that is ruled by dominance, aggression and ruthless competition, ideals like love, vulnerability and collaboration are discounted. Not because people intentionally set out to do that but because we’ve all internalised these kinds of beliefs without realising it. These are the beliefs that make us want to hide our mistakes rather than learn from them. These are the beliefs that stop us from asking for help for fear we’ll seem not up to the job. These are the beliefs that put 16 year old girls inexplicably behind phones instead of in front of spreadsheets.
‘Survival of the fittest’ is often the defence touted when one questions the lack of gentleness in the world. But pioneering environmental scientists and evolutionary biologists tell us that actually, ‘survival of the fittest’ is not an accurate reflection of what we see in nature; it’s much more like ‘survival of the cooperative and collaborative.’ I’ve written at length about this in the past – you can read more here.
