# How do I make my work place less of a boy's club? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 2, 2013, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-make-my-work-place-less-of-a-boys-club/651810 "2013-03-02T10:46:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![delphica](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@delphica](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/delphica)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-make-my-work-place-less-of-a-boys-club/651810/21 "2013-03-03T21:06:43Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > I’m trying to tread the line with my boss, who’s not a bad guy. I don’t want to paint too stark a picture, or he’ll sound like an extra from Mad Men. To give you an example, though, there is a woman who reports directly to him, she’s responsible for a lot of operations. That can mean that she is responsible for developing emergency medical evacuation procedures from Libya, for example, but it also means that she gets tasked with handling Christmas decorations for the office (a task that she had zero interest in). In general, she gets treated a little ‘office wife’ for her tastes and sometimes he gets pretty close to treating her like a secretary from 60s TV. This is a development professional with a master’s degree. Ah, this is a great example. I have been in that woman’s position. What I would really appreciate for something like the Christmas decorations is for a guy colleague, at my level (whether the same level on paper, or if it’s not exactly laid out like that on a org chart, the equivalent tier) would STEP UP and say he would take that on one year (ideally to volunteer to do it before it’s assigned). Maybe we could switch years. Speaking really mostly from my own workplace experience, this is a tricky issue because it’s kind of a blurry line if some of things I do, like Christmas decorations is a good example, are assigned to me because it’s my JOB (and that could make sense, if a guy had my position – which is directing administrative functions and in some ways makes me the de facto office manager since we don’t have someone with that title – maybe the guy would be expected to do it, too) or because I’m a woman (so maybe the hypothetical guy who takes my job would farm it out to a female secretary, or the secretary would have been asked to do it in the first place). And even for things where I really don’t care about the actual work (I am fine with Christmas decorations), I’m much more concerned about how this looks to more junior people, men and women, in the office. Men, I feel, especially at a junior level, don’t think about it all to much, because it seems like the default, and they SHOULD be thinking about it more. Women think about it overly much, sometimes - they’re thinking about their own career paths and wondering if they too will manage to get promoted but STILL expected to haul out the snowflakes, and that is frustrating and makes you think that yes, we’re still in 1966. Things I think you could do: - get on the same page with women who are peers (are any of the other teams’ leaders women?) and get feedback from them about how they have handled these issues and what _you specifically_ can do to back them up. - be really intentional about any tasks that are traditionally viewed as women’s jobs, or secretarial, such as taking notes at meetings, getting refreshments, decorating for Christmas, etc and make sure they are rotated among your team members. I know you said you only have one guy, but make sure he is on the rotation fairly and visibly. - make sure you are modeling behavior, language and attitudes to junior male staff (on your team, or even more importantly, on other teams). ( **gracer** made a great point - don’t let other men at the office assume you’re cool with “just us guys” conversations. Not that you’ve said anything that makes me think you do this, but I think this is something a lot of men do almost without being aware of it, and it doesn’t have to be anything as obvious as filthy jokes either.) I just don’t know how much you can do about your boss. In a lot of ways, LIFE is still a boys’ club, and at this point in my career, I would write your boss off as not worth the effort because I would file him under “old dudes don’t change.” As a woman, I feel like I need to be strategic with what I can improve, and I wouldn’t even bother wasting my time (or mental energy) on someone like that. And I might even like working for him perfectly fine, I simply wouldn’t see it as an area where I’m going to make any inroads. All that is by way of saying that many women wouldn’t expect you to “do anything” about your boss unless there were specific actions or statements on his part that were really egregious. It doesn’t reflect poorly on you that your boss is set in his ways. ---
**Author:** ![madmonk28](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madmonk28/32/20811_2.png) [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2013, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-make-my-work-place-less-of-a-boys-club/651810/22 "2013-03-04T04:54:52Z")
**delphica** , thiese are all great points, thank you. On the Christmas decorations, I didn’t step up, but I did attend the meetings and we all agreed that none of us really cared about it and we all agreed to half-ass it. In my words, “if we all put our fingerprints on the murder weapon, they can’t blame any one of us,” and that’s kind of what we did. We made a half-hearted effort, but made it clear we ALL made that effort so she didn’t get blamed. He made some comment that if Alice had been here, we’d have won the decorating contest. Of course Alice took a lateral job in the company, wonder why? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-make-my-work-place-less-of-a-boys-club/651810.md?page=1)