Working Women and Women’s Work

By Jessica Michaels

We’ve all had this experience: you watch someone rise through the ranks and think, “Why them?’ As a passionate, ambitious woman with a direct communication style, I have the pleasure of watching passionate, ambitious men with the same direct communication style move up the ladder. At my last job, my boss accused me of lacking empathy AND doing too much “mommy-ing” of the new hires – I couldn’t win. When I was a recruiter, I sometimes struggled to get particular leaders to consider female candidates – not because they were women, but because they weren’t a “culture fit.”

In many offices, female employees are expected to do “women’s work.” The birthday cards, cleaning up the pizza lunch, setting up the Secret Santa gift exchange – if you look around, it’s often women doing these chores while the men head back to their desks. Amusingly, there does seem to be an exception: a corporate cookout. Grill duties are often male-only. Some of the men I worked with claimed it was due to proficiency – some people were great cleaners, and some were great grillers. What was funny to me was that the good cleaners seemed to be primarily in HR, and the good grillers happened to be sales and IT. (At no point has the correlation between the ability to make a cold call and the ability to grill a cheeseburger ever been explained to me.)

I didn't always notice it when it was happening. In one role I was made the team notetaker. It was my job to take detailed notes, then send them to all the participants. The problem? I am a terrible notetaker. First, I’m ADHD, and trying to focus on my notes and conversation simultaneously is virtually impossible. I’m Autistic, so sometimes I miss the sarcasm or the loaded words others recognize. Also – I have terrible handwriting! My penmanship is so bad that my signature stayed the same when I changed my name. The fact that taking notes kept me from participating in meetings was of no concern to my boss.

There is no doubt that being AuDHD makes these situations worse. Breaking through a glass ceiling to find that you’re expected to vacuum up the shards and mop the floors is challenging for anyone. Throw in some inability to read social conditions or navigate unstated expectations, and you’ve got one frustrated neurodivergent. For years it didn’t occur to me that there were unspoken gender expectations that I was being held to. I assumed that in my partner’s meeting, he was being told not to “daddy” the trainees. I was baffled when my performance reviews came in negative while people who were so similar to me were promoted.

Many of the “challenges” I have tackled in the workplace haven’t had anything to do with my skills but the fact that my personality traits lineup more with traditional male characteristics than female ones. Unfortunately, while these traits are accepted and celebrated in some men, they are almost universally despised in women. Autistic women are often viewed as cold and rude, lacking in empathy. In addition to hitting revenue targets I am on the hook for birthday cards, ordering condolence flowers, getting thoughtful Christmas gifts, arranging baby showers and anniversary lunches for my team. My employees often expect me to just “know” to do these things. My male counterpart sent a $25 UberEats gift card one time to an employee on medical leave and was practically canonized.

One of the most frustrating days of my life came when my company moved to a new building. Each manager made name tags for their employee’s cubes. I typed mine. A few hours later, I got a call from my boss asking me to come in early the following day to fix the nametags. They weren’t “pretty” enough.

The manager behind me had hand-stenciled bubble letters onto colored paper, and had “scrapbooked” symbols of each person’s interests to attach. Another manager had folded tissue paper roses to form the letters of her team’s names. When I got to work to redo my team’s name tags, I was surprised to find that most of the cubes on the floor looked like my team’s. None of those managers was at the office before sunrise attempting a craft project. When I asked my leader, he said it was because women can make things “nicer and prettier” than men. The joke ended up being on him – with no art skills to speak of, the best I could do was cut out letters from magazines and tape them. Trying my best to channel “pretty” I stapled yarn to the borders. The result looked like a combination of a preschool macaroni art and a low-dollar ransom note.

Women have challenges in the workplace that are well-documented and stubbornly pervasive. My autism and ADHD made it harder to recognize and emotionally deal with the fact that these inequities existed. I benefit unfairly from the privilege of being white, cis-het appearing, and at the time, relatively young. Indigenous women, women of color, older women, transwomen – the more layers of intersectionality you add, the less likely anyone would be able to navigate all those barriers. (Need proof? Look to the leadership of your own company. Check out the executive boards. You won’t find too many 60-year-old queer black neurodivergent women. That’s a loss on so many levels.)

These extra layers of unstated societal expectations are just an additional thing working women have to try and fight through. Many of us find that even our masked personas aren’t good enough. It turns out, to fit in at the office, we need to put on makeup, a smile and an apron.

Author’s Note: Jessica Michaels is a neurodiversity coach, captivating keynote speaker, and consultant. She enjoys humorous SciFi and fantasy and believes Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is the best series ever written. You can read more about Jessica and her work at https://coachjessicamichaels.com/.