Women at Work: The Elephant in the Room
We may not talk about Bruno, but we have to talk about the elephant in the room for women in the workplace right now
I’ve been feeling a lot of things in the wake of news about a likely rollback of Roe v. Wade — outraged, depressed — but one of the things I’ve been feeling that I don’t see anyone else talking about is this: We need to acknowledge the impact this is having on women in the workplace.
Especially on the heels of everything women have gone through these past two years — the ways in which we’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, the way it’s affected our livelihoods and undone the gains in workplace opportunities that we were just establishing, the ways we’ve been called upon to provide heroic levels of care for our children and our aging parents, the increased abuse we’ve experienced (on top of already unacceptable levels of abuse) — on the heels of all of this, well, having our fundamental right to determine the fate of our own bodies ripped out from under us is, you might say, not good for morale.
And we need to acknowledge this, even and especially here on LinkedIn, a platform for so-called professional conversations. Because it turns out that just as what’s personal is political, what’s personal is professional. If the pandemic showed us anything, it’s that the lines between being at work and not being at work are blurrier than ever, and what happens to women happens to businesses, and happens to our economy. “Professional” is ours collectively to define. Women make up 50.4% of the workforce. Our issues are not niche, and what impacts us impacts organizations. The cost to everyone of adding to our collective trauma right now is astronomical.
I want to acknowledge how exponential the burden is on women of color. I think about Ann Richards saying that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels; well, white women are Fred Astaire. Women of color are dealing with everything white women are, and on top of it, they’re dealing every day with racial microaggressions, with a rise of ugliness to a degree that I as a white woman could never truly understand.
This is the part of the article where I’m supposed to offer up a solution, or “five easy ways to carry the weight of the world with a smile.” If only it were that easy, but the complexity of this moment calls for something far less glib. Here’s what I know: First, we need to name what’s happening and how we’re feeling in this moment in order to help each other feel less alone. But even more important is that we need workplaces that don’t ask us to compartmentalize our trauma but acknowledge us as whole people. We need empathetic and authentic leaders who go out of their way to acknowledge the weight women are carrying right now, who make mental health support available — and we need CEOs and organizations who have our backs.
Because we are never going back. Not back to the pre-pandemic workplace that wasn’t working for a lot of us anyway. (Surely the 54 million women globally who had to step back from their roles during Covid are a testament to that.) Let’s be frank, women weren’t at the table when those workplace norms were decided, and we’ve tried for too long to fit into a structure that has never worked well for us. It’s now time for the workplace to change. As Mary Beard put it, “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.” What's been broken should not be restored but recast. While we’ve come a long way, it took the pandemic to show us just how thin the veneer of progress actually was. It’s time to build a new, expansive workplace that finally works for us all.
Because we are never going back. Only forward.