RHYS BOWEN: On a plane to Seattle the other
day the man in the next seat struck up conversation with me. He said, “Are you
going to visit your grandchildren?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m going to be
visiting Amazon headquarters.”
He smiled. A patronizing smile.
“Oh, you have a son working for Amazon?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m one of
their best-selling authors.”
Silence for a moment, then he
asked the question we writers get so often.
“Should I have heard of you?”
“Only if you read books,” is now
my standard reply.
He was a nice enough man. He was
trying to be pleasant, I know. But the assumption that any woman over a certain
age is traveling to see her grandchildren really irks me. As does the
perception that it had to be a male who allowed me access to Amazon headquarters.
Also the perception that any woman has to be attached to a man. I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve stood in line behind a man in a restaurant or at a car rental counter and been asked, “are you two
together?”
Would you ask that question of
two men standing one behind the other in line? I don’t think so.
Since the me-too movement I think
we all have become aware that women are treated differently. Of course most
women have known that for years. In any
job we have to be smarter, quicker and do twice as much work to be accepted. We
have become used to put-downs. “You girls”. “The girls in my office”. “Honey,
get me a cup of coffee, there’s an angel.” Would any man accept being spoken to
that way?
I
read an interesting piece recently in which a boss complained that one of his
employees took too long with clients, therefore wasn’t working hard enough or
was too slow. Then one day he was handling clients and got a particularly rude
one. The client queried everything he suggested, told him he didn’t know what
he was talking about and was generally obnoxious. It was only later that this
boss realized he was using the joint email account and the client thought he
was dealing with someone who signed the message Nicole. This shocked him. So
for a week he tried an experiment. He signed all his messages Nicole and his
employee Nicole signed all hers Martin. She zipped through her business with no
problems. He was queried and confronted at every turn. Are you sure you know
what you are talking about? Are you clear with the law on this? These were
common comments. One even asked if he was single.
My friend’s daughter is a
building site inspector for a bank. Every time she shows up she gets comments
like “Ooh look, we got us a princess.”
It is only when she starts talking in their jargon that she is accepted.
Actually she flings out hard questions at them, cites building codes and finds
things wrong. Then she gets their attention!
I’ve been lucky, I suppose. When
I worked at the BBC women were treated as equals. And in my writing life I
haven’t had any problems either—except from people outside the profession who
think that writing is a little hobby. “Are you still writing those little
books?” I was asked once. Or better still. “When are you going to write a real
novel?”
Some of these questions come from
other women, who are equally good at put-downs. At a college reunion I was
asked by someone I hadn’t seen since college, “So, have you ever actually had a
proper job?”
I replied “Not since the BBC
days. But my improper job has allowed me to put four children through college,
to buy two homes and several pieces of rental property and to live rather
well.”
Some put-downs are more subtle. On
a radio interview I was asked how I would compare myself to a literary
novelist. Bloody cheek! I replied “I
want you to picture me walking beside a literary novelist. We are going up the
steps together. We are entering a bank. And one of us is smiling.”
Nuff said.
So have you encountered
condescension, rudeness, prejudice in your professional life? How do you deal
with it?
