A Bijou Rant-ette

Many years ago when I was first, a teenager, and later a young woman looking to establish myself in a career I, along with the rest of my generation, was fed an insidious myth about gender difference in the work place.

It ran along these lines. Men could compartmentalise, women couldn't. This meant that when men went to work, whatever was happening in their lives elsewhere was left at the door. They came into work, shed all their non-work problems and agendas and were able to apply themselves 100% to work without anything else affecting either their work performance or their relationships with co-workers. Women on the other hand, brought all their problems to work with them. They got distracted. They couldn't concentrate on their work or what people were saying. They cried or lashed out or drew all the other women in the workplace into their little whirlpool of worry or misery thus spreading the non-working infection beyond their own desk or section of the conveyor belt or whatever.

 

This is cobblers. It worked for a long time to keep women out of workplaces and later boardrooms, but there is no woman of my acquaintance who hasn't worked with a man who all too obviously has brought his outside problems into work with him on a regular basis. In fact a boss once complained to me about the rudeness of his staff in not greeting him with a 'Good Morning' when they met him for the first time each day. I gently explained that  the reason no-one ever said Good Morning to him before he had greeted them was that they never knew whether they would be rewarded with a smile, a grunt, or a comment along the lines of 'Well it might be a good morning for you but some of us have things to worry about.....'

 

Last week I was with a man who very obviously has something bad on his mind. It was  pre-occupying him to the exclusion of just about everything else. The something can have had nothing to do with me, and I rather resent the way that whatever it was, was taken out on me regardless. Here was someone who obviously couldn't compartmentalise and I suffered because of it. Strangely enough even when my mother was dying which is, you know, quite a preoccupying thing, I never lost my good manners. I carried on saying please and thank you and listening to what other people had to say to me. I didn't sigh heavily at them, get defensive with them or give voice to gnomic utterances which would have done nothing except make them feel inadequate, uncomfortable and in the way.

 

Funny that. You might almost have said I was compartmentalising.  But that can't be right can it? 'Cos after all only men  can do that.