VII. ARE YOU READY TO DO MEN'S WORK?

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road---unless you fail to make the turn.” -Ed “Too Tall” Jones

Are you a trailblazer? It takes a strong woman to do Men’s Work. Its not always physical strength that’s required, but rather, that which the English call ‘intestinal fortitude’. It is not always the nature of the work itself that’s the greatest hurdle, in non-traditional employment. It can also be the ambience of the work place. What should a woman consider before choosing a ‘man’s job’? What is the difference in the mentality needed?
Say you decide to leave your job at the hair salon, where your boss, also a mother, always understood if you needed to leave for an hour to pick up your son from school and take him to baseball. A customer, Art, offers to train you to repair air conditioning units. The pay is much better, plus you would have benefits, a set schedule, and no weekend hours! Art is a nice guy, although most of the girls are nice, you won’t miss the catty atmosphere that sometimes tainted the air at Ruby’s Cut ‘n Curl.
At first, you are subjected to a few chortles as the manager, Mac, and the all-male parts team work through all the double-entendre they can summon related to your requests for various hoses, clamps and screws. Some of the old time customers are even worse. You muddle through and the teasing subsides. You also survive the filthy unisex bathroom in the service department.
On your third day at work, you listen to your cell phone messages during your lunch hour (you can’t take calls at work, like you could at Ruby’s). It’s your son, Freddy, calling to say that his best friend didn’t show up for school, and you were counting on your son hitching a ride with him to scouts. When you tell Art, he looks at you blankly, not getting the connection. Nobody leaves the service counter at Art’s before the next guy is on duty. Nobody.
You often wonder if Art is pleased with your work. He doesn’t say much. You spend part of your time at the rather grubby sales counter, and part of it in a small service cubicle by yourself. You love doing the repairs. Each one’s a puzzle and you get a great feeling of accomplishment when you solve it, but you often wonder if you’re learning or working fast enough compared to others.
Art gave you the blank look again six months later when you said your mom had offered to take you and Freddy with her on a 3-week cruise to Alaska. You’re still months short of earning your first week of vacation.
You’re thinking you might have to go to part-time. You realize you might sacrifice benefits. You try to chat with a couple of the guys about your difficulties, hoping they’ll work with you on some plan to pinch hit for you when you need it, but they just shrug and say, “I guess you’ll have to ask Art.” You finally do ask Art if you could get off duty at three each day. That is not an option. You last about 3 more months but can’t pull it together. One day, when Art seemed to think you should be finished with the fan installation you were doing, and Freddy left his lunch in the car, you quit, with tearful apologies. Art is pretty chafed that he took a chance on his first female technician and spent all this time training you. He thought you were just about ready to go on house calls, and now has to get someone else. He tells Mac. “This time, I’ll get a guy.”
When you go back to Ruby’s part time, you’re immediately impressed with the empathy you receive as you tell your story to both coworkers and clients. At Ruby’s you know that you can deal with almost any situation that arises by working with the rest of the girls to find a solution. Ruby herself would pick up Freddy if it came to it! You soon miss the money, though---only half what you made at Art’s---and the challenge. You start wishing you had planned things better and had put everything in place to do the job right when you had the chance. You wonder if you should find a teenage girl to pick up Freddy after school, take a class in HVAC and give it another shot somewhere else.
This little tale is meant to illustrate the following: Men’s Work often includes less part-time opportunity, less scheduling flexibility, less vacation flexibility, less tolerance of outside/personal life influences. There is often more of a sense of isolation on the job, more expectation to work independently. There is less opportunity for decision emanating by consensus, group support and reinforcement of action. There is less structure, more flexibility inherent in many of the jobs typically sought by women.
Accentuate The Positive
It is important that women who take jobs traditionally held by men realize that they are paving the way for other women who hope to have more options that they can count on to support their families in the future. They have a responsibility to be committed to performing the job as well as, and as reliably as, a man. They must be prepared to both meet the job description and adopt the style of the existing work context. The hiring of a woman in the Men’s Work world is sometimes viewed by the employer as an experiment. He has shown his optimism by the hiring itself. Now the pioneering woman should do all she can to make the experiment a success.
While reform is certainly needed in all sectors of the job market, and while the mentality of the job environment should reflect the needs and working styles of both men and women, we are certainly not there yet when it comes to “Men’s Work”. We can expect change to take place gradually. If we accept that women have more sensitive natures than men, and that they work differently to men in some ways, then we can see that compromise in the non-traditional workplace would consist of some increase in sensitivity on the part of the workplace, and some decrease in sensitivity on the part of the women pioneering the occupations. The decrease might have to come first. Expecting politically perfect accommodations, could result in the slamming shut of doors just beginning to open a crack. If you want to do the work, you must accept that male-dominated environments will, for the time being, have male atmospheres. The modus operandi will suit the male nature.
Not long ago, in a London newspaper, I read featured two incidents in one glaring headline: “Women Take One Step Forward and One Back”. The one step forward was the promotion of a 51-year-old mother of six to a top position in a major London corporation, Tesco. The one step back was a lawsuit being brought against Merrill Lynch by a woman suing for 7.5 million pounds, claiming sexual discrimination, bullying and unequal pay. 22 bankers all backed Merrill Lynch’s contention that the woman was “out of her depth” professionally, and “did not have the leadership skills or other qualities necessary” for her marketing job. The newspaper immediately interpreted the second occurrence as a step back for women. Especially as the suit came on the heels of a one-million pound award to a female Merrill Lynch Lawyer who claimed a colleague “made lewd comments about her cleavage and invited others to do the same” (the British reporting almost made it sound as though it happened over tea and biscuits). Even though, when such litigants prevail, some future disrespect might be deterred, there is a price to be paid by women generally, as companies nervously wonder if they should risk someday having to pay a hefty price for a careless mistake or misstep. While a case like this may need to occur to create parity for the individual victim it is not an advance for career-womankind.
Success Is The Best Revenge
While, in this day and age, women should not tolerate abuse, neither should they be especially touchy as they define inappropriateness, especially if they want to gain ground in the non-traditional job market. When working in a context of men unused to considering their presence on the job, there will be mistakes, awkward moments, maybe even an irksome or startling one here and there. Sometimes confusion might result, while men struggle with their youthful training to be solicitous and helpful to women, risking the implication that a woman cannot carry her own weight as well as a man. Over time, if her behavior is consistent, and she does carry her own weight, she will be treated increasingly as a person on the job, not a woman on the job. If women constantly accentuate the differences and sensitivities, progress for women in non-traditional employment will be slowed. The goal is that the gender difference becomes invisible, or at least unobtrusive, at work.
Another part of making this happen has to do with a woman’s demeanor at work. Parlaying her sexuality to her advantage or exploiting her femaleness, even in subtle ways in the workplace, will only cause eventual disruption of the work atmosphere. This is no place for her to boost her ego regarding her womanliness. For her own sake, and that of the next woman to apply, she should save this behavior for her personal relationship(s), and then, enjoy it all she likes! There is no doubt that men and women are different, but the place to ‘vive la difference’ is not at the office or job site.
Some men might feel threatened by increasing numbers of women entering their fields. Their own jobs seem slightly less secure than they used to be, as more women assume responsibility for family support, and more women take work seriously. On the other hand, other men are beginning to want more personal time to enjoy interests and family life, and, so, there will, over time, be less dichotomization of male and female roles. Ideally, men will, more and more often, enjoy the benefits of having help with the breadwinning and more personal time. Women will have more confidence and satisfaction in the workplace, less guilt at home. These changes in attitude will take a long time. Be prepared for a mixture of responses from the men you have chosen to work with. Try to be tolerant and take your time before reacting. Be larger than the small incidents that challenge you. Be thick-skinned, resilient, and flexible. Take pride in being a woman who is a little ahead of her time.
On the other hand, while you are staying aware, and making adjustments for the sensitivities of the men you are working with, do not lose sight of your goal---to be successful at the job and advance in your work. Do you know that women actually tend to feel guilty when they do so well that they overtake their co-workers on the success track? Women sometimes go so far as to suggest that another, more senior, worker be given a new responsibility. She would rather keep good feeling among her colleagues than accept the opportunity to show what she can do. This phenomenon would likely be even more apparent when a woman is in an almost all-male, competitive environment. Making this mistake would also differentiate you on the job, in a negative way. Accept any progress quietly, graciously, and without self-effacement. That is how you will best gain respect over time.

“...You can’t get ahead without passing people.”- Marilyn vos Savant

The woman pioneering Men’s Work needs to be reliable, resilient, thoughtful, and thick-skinned. She needs to take pride in being a woman who is a little ahead of her time. she needs to adjust to the conditions of new territory. If that sounds like you, do it for yourself, do it for all of us, but if you don’t think you can, step aside and let someone else blaze the trail.

PLAN To Have It All
“The difference between what we are doing and what we are capable of doing would solve most of the world’s problems.”- Mahatma Ghandi

All working women are challenged to keep the rest of their lives, apart from their job, running smoothly, but once a woman decides she has the temperament and determination to take on Men’s Work, she needs to be especially careful to arrange her life into a condition that allows her to get the job done.
Is this more of a task for her than for her male co-worker in most cases? Yes. Is that fair? No, but that’s the way it is, and it may take some real strategizing for some women to arrange their lives into and around their very best job opportunity. Be ready to juggle, maneuver, bend and stretch.
When my oldest daughter was finishing middle school, a luncheon was held for the girls of her small graduating class. One of the mothers gave a presentation while the girls had tea and sandwiches in their white ruffled dresses. The theme of the speech was “You CAN have it all”. I still mean to tell this woman (Lynn H.) what an impact that afternoon had on my life, and how often I’ve recalled her words to my girls and my friends.
The girls were about thirteen at the time, thinking about the party to come that evening, and I doubt they paid full attention. They’re all thirty now and if they weren’t listening, its time they get this message!
Lynn was an attractive attorney, wife, mother of two, and active in local politics. (She also happened to be a good golfer and tennis player, too!) She was a real rarity in our community—one of the few moms employed outside the home. She was trying to tell the girls that they did not need to choose between career and family any more than a man had to. They could anticipate having satisfaction in each area of their lives—career, children, relationship, and more—but that it took careful choices to have it all.
Many women are married, have children, and work, but many of those slog through the workday filled with guilt that the kids don’t have a parent at the soccer game. Some women are married with children, but long for the satisfaction of some work outside the home. Some ‘have it all’ but find it to be much too much. With the housework and family duties, they can’t imagine the luxury of reading time or other personal pursuits. Lynn was a living example of a woman who understood the art and science of planning life. She had it all. I have used the inspiration of that afternoon to derive a formula to maximize the chances for career success in the context of real life. Here are the main points she made, with elaborations. Keep in mind, she was addressing girls who were young enough to start from scratch and build their lives from the ground up. Those of us who have already built rather complicated structures of ours can use the advice to remodel, improvise, and make the best of our situations.

PREPARE AND ESTABLISH
It seems obvious, but without knowing what you want, it is not possible to set goals. Once goals are set, you must strategically place yourself exactly where you need to be to get the best preparation, develop the best contacts, and secure the best position possible.
Researching jobs, finding the source of the best possible education/training to do the job of choice, selecting the best locale for employment in your chosen field, refining your profile to suit the particular job you want---all of these go into preparation to have your destination career.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Most women want many things from life. Patience and wisdom are required at a young age to assure that a woman takes timing into account in making her choices. Many of us wish we had traveled more before settling down. Some of us know we should have established a solid career that we could later build on before having children. Many of us wish we had made our minds up about what really mattered to us before we selected our mates!
The more patient and careful a girl can be especially in making decisions that, to some extent, will affect the course of her life (e.g. mate, kids), the better. This is very easy advice to give, very hard to take. You need this advice most when you are young, and yet when you are young, you are least inclined to accept it.
Even if you didn’t get the timing quite right in the past, even if you now have four kids, are divorced and renting, it is not too late to use careful timing to your advantage. Intuitively, most of us know what we should take care of first in our lives. With maturity, we actually do begin to deny our impulses and do first things first more often.
I have known and admired women who knew that they needed to prioritize and dwell on their children during the young years, but who regretted not developing careers before families. A couple of them found time--- nap time, late night time, borrowed time, to prepare for careers that they could begin once the kids were school age. With determination, they were successful, and, with careful planning, their families wound up feeling proud, not shortchanged.
Have you ever noticed that for every old, insightful-seeming maxim in existence, we can come up with another that means just the opposite? For example; ‘Strike while the iron is hot’ versus ‘Haste makes waste’, or ‘He who hesitates is lost’ versus ‘Good things come to those who wait’? Well, the fact is, they’re all true, and what makes the difference is timing!
How do you time your life correctly? How do you make the right moves, focus on the right things, at the right times? I am a believer that you actually know, intuitively, based on living inside your own skin all of your life, what you should be focusing on at any given time. You can go to a counselor to dig out and help you face what you already actually know about yourself and your best course. Chances are, he will be facilitating the process of you being honest with yourself. With concentration, perhaps aided by reading and studying, you can learn to avoid procrastination, and you can learn to control your impulses, be more patient and stick to plans. You can ‘parent’ yourself, stop making excuses, quit wasting time, and admonish yourself to do what you know you should be doing at any given time in your life. For all that “women’s intuition” is famous, women often do not trust their intuition.
Research is beginning to substantiate our natural ability to turn the experiences and knowledge we have gained in our lifetimes into good decisions without deliberate exhaustive analysis or repetitive rethinking. Daniel Goleman, researcher and author of Emotional Intelligence, makes the case that our gut is "intelligent"; it knows things ahead of our rational mind. It certainly seems likely that there is an area of the brain that extrapolates information from all our previous inputs to enable us to make good decisions without all-new information. Dr. Antonio R. Dimasio and others at the University of Iowa College of Medicine have actually identified the part of the brain---the frontal lobe---which specializes in intuitive decision making. Their research shows that we intuitively know what isn’t working well for us.
Be sure that you listen to the voice inside you, not just the loud voices all around you. With fewer distractions, focus on your own inner gauges and steer yourself each day, as you know is truly best. There will be a right time, and time enough, for everything you want to do with your life.

ORGANIZATION IS KEY
It’s all about time management, time conservation. The more of the big, important things you want from life, the more efficiently you must learn to deal with the hundreds of small tasks that make up the mechanics of life. The more systems you can put into place so that these things occur automatically, the less you will have to focus on them and take attention away from your career (and children, and husband, etc.).
If your life is relatively simple, then you only need to organize your domestic and personal scene so that little time is wasted on unimportant but intrusive details of daily functioning.
Regardless how complicated your scene is, many things can be done with next to no thought. Bills can be automatically paid, irrigation timers can be installed, ovens and coffeemakers can be pre-programmed, chore routines can be set in stone, taxes can be deducted, palm pilots can jog your memory, personal trainers or math tutors can show up three times a week, gifts and flowers can be prearranged, and a kid can pop a chicken in the oven at 5 every Tuesday and Thursday! Housework shortcuts are an art in themselves. Many books have been written about the art of speed housekeeping. All of these devices help you to manage niggling details, avoid frustration and procrastination and get past the mundane, so that you can use time to create new successes.

FIND THE RIGHT PARTNER!
Notice the exclamation point on this subheading. Most of us would agree that its pretty ridiculous when a man and woman marry and then it turns out that one wants kids and the other doesn’t. This sort of issue should be resolved before people attempt to build a life together. Likewise, life partners need coordinating goals. Each needs to actually want the other partner to achieve his/her aims, and be willing to facilitate and exert personal energy to help make them happen. They should each own the other’s goals as surely as their own and participate in their execution by giving genuine and heartfelt support. That means actually adjusting one’s own goals and movements to the degree necessary to enable the goals and movements of the other. This artful designing of dual-career life to facilitate two sets of goals is not easy. As I recall, Lynn H. needed her husband, also an attorney, to have the flexibility to attend school ball games some weekday afternoons, and he arranged his life accordingly. Your husband may need to mind the kids every Saturday so that you can pursue your real estate career on that prime market day. You may need to be home every Wednesday evening while he’s out of town.
If it’s too late for you to find that ideal partner and you’re going to make the best of the one you have then you’ll just have to pay extra attention to this next section!

TRAIN YOUR PLAYERS
I’ve become convinced that almost all kids, many husbands, and some friends, will take from you all the services and goods you are willing to give, no limit. Nature wants children to have as many resources as possible to advance the species, so children are born with an almost unlimited appetite for attention. We, their mothers, create the limits in order to accustom children to the harsh realities of the world (not to mention, save our own sanity so that we will be around to make dinner tomorrow). Unfettered, kids can come up with more needs than you ever imagined.
It’s hard to get the family used to participating in its own care. Each new behavior is a hard battle won. For this reason, you want to make sure that each modified behavior is a lasting modification. Don’t battle to have the dishwasher unloaded each and every time. Establish a workable routine that will become second nature to your players.
Do not think of delegating chores, and sharing the duties of domestic life, as shifting the weight of your responsibility. Think of it as teaching self-reliance and training great new partners of the future. Your son might marry the first female President of the United States. Its time we had a First Gentleman!

STICK TO YOUR GUNS
Now I must tell you that I happen to know there were times when Lynn’s daughter, Sarah, wished that Lynn baked more chocolate chip cookies, especially in our community of stay-at-home moms and privileged children. I also happen to know that now, at 30, Sarah is an attorney herself, and credits her mom with inspiring her to be all that she could be.
The trick is to honestly internalize a good feeling about the choices you have made to improve the quality of life for yourself and your family. Don’t waste energy and arouse your own guilt by constant second-guessing and doubting of your decisions. If you’ve already thought your situation through, and acted in good faith when you started on the road to your training or career goal, then move forward with determination and complete all the steps of your plan.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”- Laurel Thatcher Ulirich

Expect there to be difficulties doing something new that seems alien to your family, friends, and yourself. Human beings are reluctant to change. Family members might actually fear changes that disrupt long-standing patterns, no matter what the eventual benefits. Children are especially inclined to express embarrassment if a parent is unconventional. Remember that, even if your kids come first, you are a person, not just a parent, and you have a right to choose the work in life that you want. Stay strong and remain sure of yourself when kids or others make you feel beaten down, as they might. Keep telling yourself that change and adaptation can be good for everyone. You cannot please all of the people all of the time. Cast yourself as an example of a person who does not give up. As Marilyn Vos Savant (apparently, the person with the world’s highest I.Q.) said, “It has been my observation that being beaten is often a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.” A non-traditional goal might be harder to achieve, require more adjustment by those around you, and therefore arouse more complaint. You have the opportunity to rise to the challenge and teach your family a valuable lesson in perseverance by your success.

We’ve taken a look at a myriad of factors that might, to some degree or another, explain the status of women in the work world. In the long run, women will collectively benefit from changing their employment profile. Today, each woman can take more control of her future by considering hundreds of jobs she never before thought of doing.
Whoever you are, whatever you are now doing, you have choices. As you read about these non-traditional jobs, be open-minded. Be particular. Be fearless. Get what you want.