I recently realized that some of my final courses, which were more connected to direct sales, were filled with male students; there were way more females in the rest of my marketing classes. This mirrors the workplace, where engineering and sales departments are full of male faces. It’s quite intimidating to enter workplaces where there is no one else of your own gender.
Acknowledging that females do communicate differently, it’s quite hard to feel empowered to speak up, and even when you do so, does it matter to the males? This is a question that has been circulating in my head for a while, but I haven’t found an answer.
I read a lot of essays about how females must work twice as hard to be seen as equal to males. And I wanted to doubt that hypothesis, but maybe real life is just not what we envision, when clearly our college classes already show us where our future standing in a company might be. Maybe women don’t enter these fields exactly for that reason. And this empowers the senior management of businesses to just leave things as they always were.
Maybe people think there are no females in these areas, so there’s no need to change a thing. But people should be asking why there are no females and if they might need to fix things before females dare to enter the workforce in male-dominant fields. It’s clearly not about intelligence and leadership skills. It’s scientifically sound that females add teamwork and a whole horizon of leadership skills to any workplace they enter. It can be the glue between departments.
Build it and they will come, as one marketing philosophy states. And here is your answer, dear managers: build a female-friendly workplace and we will come. And yes, this starts with free menstrual products in the bathrooms. It’s the little things that will help achieve an inclusive workplace. Maybe females need more one on one with other departments than a meeting full of men. Being an inclusive workplace doesn’t just mean hiring more women. Being an inclusive workplace means so much more.
All that said, this column is coming to an end now as my time at Camosun is done. Thanks to everyone for tuning in and trying to understand the female side of things. Maybe you are the person finally making a change in the future; I certainly hope so.
It was a pleasure to have you all along the way and I hope that another time some brave souls will pick up Let’s Talk and make it a 3.0. And hopefully that one will be about what we have achieved from this point more than all the things that are in imbalance still.
One piece of advice will always hold true, though: let’s talk, it makes things better.