Pants!

I have to admit, thanks K for posting this, because I am a huge fan of pants for women at work. The chance to wear pants to work for women was a huge leap forward in American society (yes there are still cultures and religions that don't believe females should wear pants). But pants can sometimes give us that extra boost of confidence needed in a meeting full of men, well depending what card you're playing.

My favorite combination of "nice" and "casual" are the high waste, light material pants that look great with a blouse or even a simple v-neck shirt tucked in. Although I can't afford to pay this much money for pants, here's exactly what I'm talking about from Anthropologie:

Coco rocks the pants

Coco Chanel built her brand by providing simple, comfortable clothes for women. As a leader in the pants revolution, she is famous for rocking the pants in Venice to better climb out of gondolas - a girl's gotta do, what a girl's gotta do. Thank you, Coco Chanel, for owning who you are and bringing that inspiration to women in a beautiful and stylish way.

"Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door." -Coco Chanel

A new age of sexism

Sexism has changed since the days of Mad Men. One thing the Egotist
touches really well on is the subtle nuance of sexism that you find in
the advertising industry. A man can no longer just grab your ass or
openly sexually harass you; instead, when you say your opinion, he
thinks you're a bitch. He sees you as emotional and less strong than
himself. In many subtle ways, women simply aren't expected to be as
good as men in the workplace. The fact that 1 woman to 15 men hold C/
VP level positions in our industry proves it. That's pathetic. So how
do we become that 1 lucky woman? We play our cards.


In high school, I had one teacher who was a blatant chauvinist. He
thought I was less smart than my male classmates. I used to get so
angry in class whenever he would say things like "K, do you know the
answer? No you probably don't." He would openly mock me and other
girls in the class. At the time, I didn't know how to handle him. I
was 16 and still hadn't quite grasped the fact that I'd hit puberty
and was now regarded as a woman (with big boobs no less).
It got to the point that I couldn't take his criticism and mockery any
more. I walked out. I stood up, and said "I can't deal with you," and
stormed out of the classroom. In retrospect, that's really not a way
to get an A, but at the time I didn't know any better. I hadn't yet
grasped that I was different than men. No that's wrong, not that I'm
different, but that I'm considered different. I had to make a change.


I learned how to play my cards. I took on a new attitude: friendly,
flirtatious and slightly sarcastic, but not enough to offend anyone. I
learned how to tell people what I was thinking in a non-threatening
way. That lesson has translated over to the work world, and it's
helping me tackle the boys club in advertising.


Welcome to Playing with Cards: A blog about being female in today's
Advertising World.

The Realization

The Egotist article upset me my first read. I felt two things, first that someone finally said out loud how I feel, and two deflated. I have been trying to fight against this exact mentality my whole life with not only work but school, friends, etc. As the daughter of a very independent strong woman, I have always heard her voice in my head "you can do anything a man can do". It's amazing how I chose one of the industries that this still does not stand true. After my second read of the article I focused on my mother's quote again, and I realized, yes this article might be true, but there are ways around it. That the one woman out of fifteen men who is a C/VP director ended up there somehow, so I can too.

At nine years old someone decided I should sign up for baseball. Here's the catch, there was no female team. So I was signed up for little league with every other boy in my town.

The key to my short lived baseball career was a specific event that occurred when I was in the outfield.The boys on my own team started throwing rocks at me. I was really quiet when I was little, so I can't imagine I was being loud and annoying. So why were they throwing rocks at me? And why did no one tell them to stop? And then I started crying, and came off the field.

When we went back to the bench, I sat by myself, like usual, waiting my turn in the batting order. I was upset and confused. All I wanted was to be a part of the team and do well like everyone else. That's when Paul a "boy of all boys" character came and sat next to me. I will never forget what he said, "you know, you just have to play the game, go with it".

That was it, from that day on I realized I was in a boy's, not man's, but a boy's world. The only way to get in with them was to play. I did not pursue baseball, but I made sure I was always as quick as them with jokes, music, movies and being "chill". Like the Egotist article points out, this industry is a fight for woman, and If I am going to keep up, I am going to have to play my cards.

Welcome to Playing with Cards: A blog about being female in today's Advertising World.

Welcome to Playing with Cards

I came across an article posted by The Boston Egotist the other day
called "Your Subconscious is a Real Don Draper." It struck a cord with
me, as I realized someone was finally putting into words what I'd
already thought was true. This thought started a conversation between
T and me. We both felt how difficult it was to be women in the
industry. Seven beers later, we had a blog concept. We want to discuss
how women "play their cards" in the advertising industry to be
successful, from inspiring stories to discouraging ones, articles,
interviews, etc. Welcome to Playing with Cards: A blog about being
female in the advertising industry.

Please enjoy the Egotist article below:

"Your Subconscious is a Real Don Draper"
Early last fall, Felix wrote an editorial about creative directors.
Specifically, he wrote about female creative directors. Or the lack of
them. A discussion arose in the comments section regarding the
likelihood of females to be promoted in the advertising industry –
which is to say, people discussed it not being very likely at all.

Noted in both the editorial and the comments were male admissions of
female colleagues who were smarter or more talented than their Y-
chromosomed counterparts, but bore lesser titles. Several explanations
were offered for this imbalance, including blatant misogyny and family
or lifestyle priorities. One commenter even suggested a trickle-over
effect of female stereotypes in ads infiltrating the agencies that
created them.

Across most industries, women still hold fewer C or VP-level positions
than men – about one to every five, statistically. In advertising –
whose more general ranks are actually dominated by females – that same
ratio is closer to one to fifteen. Families, lifestyle preferences,
misogyny; whatever you want to call it, none of those explanations are
a good reason for that level of discrepancy. It’s just an
embarrassingly ugly flaw on the face of our industry.

By the rulebook, we call this stuff sexism, but the symptoms of that
sexism have clearly evolved beyond the textbook definition.
Unanimously, we agree that grabbing random, unsolicited ass in the
workplace is wrong, and its occurrence today is rare (and fiercely
punishable). But as other industries head towards balance in
leadership, the advertising industry still seems to be patting itself
on the back for adopting the most surface-level tenants of workplace
equality. We adopted an equal-opportunity employment clause. We said
no-no to sexual objectification, at least its blatant or non-branded
version. We became comfortable with our male employees wearing girls’
pants. But did we ever ask ourselves what the actual roots of those
behaviors were? And then work to tackle those? If we haven’t, we might
as well come out and call ourselves misogynists – cause that’s kinda
what those numbers are saying.

Roots aren’t easy to get at, allegorically or otherwise, but a
discussion with a female friend made me think I’d surfaced at least
one. This girl, a high performing twenty-something in a mid-level
position, was discussing the double-edged sword of outperforming
people’s expectations of her in the workplace. On the one hand, she
enjoyed the sensation of catching her male co-workers off guard with
her high aptitude for awesomeness. On the other hand, she felt
uncomfortable that the accolades always seemed to come with a side of
shock, like her ability to excel was unexpected – an emotion that
never seemed to be reproduced when the men in her office experienced
similar success. She wondered out loud whether the bar for her had
been subconsciously set lower than that of her male coworkers – with
whom she shared a job title.

This idea was fascinating to me, and even more so when two other smart
women confirmed similar experiences in their own work environments.
While the “shock” reactions of their co-working counterparts were
effectively harmless, they did hint at an odder phenomenon (and
potentially one of those roots we’re talking about).

In jobs and in life, we typically perform to the level of expectations
set for us by a variety of cultural factors. This is why you often see
correlations between education and income levels, geographic location
and age of marriage, etc. In this same way, a company’s employees
perform to the level of the bar set in front of them. Those three high-
performing gals really didn’t care where the bar had been set for
them, because they were in the habit of setting their own – which a
small portion of the population excels at. But if they had been using
the bar set for them, they may very well have landed under the boys.
The boys sharing the same job title.

It’s a tough question, but one begging the asking: Do you honestly
have the same expectations of the females you work with as you do the
males?

I can’t say that I do. I have no idea why. God knows it’s
unintentional, but to deny that sentiment is hovering there – and that
it may have influenced my actions – would be ignorant.

If I don’t have expectations for women to perform on the same level as
men in advertising – and don’t express those expectations aggressively
through workplace culture and communication – science suggests I could
literally be holding them back. No, I’m not looking at women and
seeing babies and aprons – that would be sexist. But I’m also not
seeing a CD. So what’s the word for that?

I think it’s something like, “one in fifteen higher ups in advertising
are women.”

Think about it. Hack some roots. Let’s fix this.