Lady Business: Working Girls in male professional drag; Sad gender pay-gap stats

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirty-second issue, published June 21, 2018.
 

Fashion Police

I spent last week in Dublin and London, for a work conference/vacation combination that turned out to be a bit of a packing challenge. Normally I’m pretty good at living out of a carry-on for a week or more, but the game gets much more complicated if you’re a woman going to speak on a professional stage somewhere:
 

Next time you're at a conference, pay attention to the chairs and the folks in skirts and dresses trying to navigate them. If you do, a frustratingly common problem will become clear. Nearly every femme-identifying person I know has wrestled with tall bar stools, directors chairs, deep arm chairs, and more. Recently at a podcasting conference I watched as a woman perched herself awkwardly at the edge of an armchair that was elevated so her crotch was exactly at eye level for the audience. At another conference I saw two women convene before their panel purely to scope out the seating situation. One of them decided to change into pants.

Me me me! That Vice article, which I read mid-packing, goes on to describe “the microphone dance: If an event has a lapel microphone with a battery pack, many audio techs are completely stumped by dresses. Where to clip the mic?”

All of which I thought I had prepared for! This was not my first conference rodeo, after all: I packed two dresses, yes, but also two backup sets of pants. With pockets. I also packed a jacket with pockets! I brought as much male-influenced office-wear as possible--and once I saw the stage’s low-armchair setup, I was glad I bet on the pants. I thought I had planned for every contingency.

Then the audio tech apologetically asked me to remove my earrings. The stage mic clipped around the back of my head, you see, so anything on my head or ears could interfere with the quality of the sound.

So by the time I went on stage, I--a woman who generally prefers to wear dresses with earrings to professional events--was in trousers and jacket with no jewelry.

 
This isn’t to single out this lovely and well-organized event; I’ve faced the same clothing dilemmas at almost every single conference I’ve ever attended as a speaker. But it was a reminder that, however much our workforce has evolved, certain professional spaces are still largely designed with “man” as the default subject and audience. To fit in, women still have to make themselves as masculine as possible.

Call it male professional drag. Today there are fewer shoulder pads, as the Working Girls of the 1980s suffered through, but certain professional settings still feel like throwbacks. I recently wrote that this newsletter is largely concerned with the question of: Who gets allowed into certain rooms, and how comfortable do they feel there? Which has this corollary question: For whom are those rooms designed--and in order to gain entry, how much does everyone else have to conform?
 

217 Years and Counting

Of course, all of this fashion talk seems a little secondary when women are still centuries away from getting equal pay for equal work. In the June issue of Inc., I edited a package on the depressing state of the gender pay gap—even for women who are better-educated than their male peers:

In November, the World Economic Forum estimated that the global pay and employment opportunity gender gap will take 217 years to close. In the U.S., "no matter how you measure it, there is a gender wage gap," says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. …. More women than men go to college and grad school, and they take out larger student loans--landing them with more than $800 billion worth of the nation's $1.3 trillion in student debt, according to the American Association of University Women. But less-educated men still out-earn women with advanced degrees.

More hopefully, Inc. columnist Helaine Olen also recommended several constructive steps that employers can take to fix a gender pay gap at their companies--or prevent one from forming in the first place:
 

Examine not only your current salaries and benefits, but also what you have paid workers historically--and what promotions and raises have occurred. While some companies offer a structured review process for all hires, and rarely raise salaries outside of it, others are more ad hoc, offering employees wage increases when, for example, they receive an outside offer.

Lady Bits

--During my vacation weekend in London, I finally succumbed to the cult of Ottolenghi, the Instagram-ready group of posh Middle Eastern cafes throughout London. (Dream order at Nopi, the fancy Soho offshoot: roasted aubergine; mackerel with pistachio and coconut sambal; coffee-pecan financiers with maple-walnut cream.) The meals inspired me to dig up this excellent 2012 New Yorker profile of Yotam Ottolenghi, “the pen, prime mover, and public face of a partnership of four close colleagues who have quietly changed the way people in Britain shop and cook and eat.”

--I also saw The Happy Prince, Rupert Everett’s not-very-happy tribute to the not-very-happy final days of Oscar Wilde. It’s heartfelt and worthwhile, and I did get some joy out of playing British-actor bingo during the film. (Caroline Bingley does not share any scenes with Mr. Darcy, sadly, but there’s an amusingly dark reunion between Colin Firth and Everett, who once co-starred in a much cheerier movie adaptation of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.)

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