#NOTME - How I Overcame Stereotyping in My Career

Sexual harassment has been around forever. These past 5 years, it has been brought into sharp focus by the #metoo movement due to the many injustices endured by women who make their livings in “Hollywood,” and finally decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. I can’t even begin to relate to having to provide sexual favors for my wages, but I am here to share the type of harassment I endured as a young woman in the 1980’s workforce, where at certain firms’ women were not allowed to wear pants. Who said we haven’t come a long way baby! And yet I digress with a fun fact.

Working on Wall Street as a young woman had its challenges. Back then I was responsible for making sure stock traders were equipped with certain products they needed to do their jobs; direct contact was necessary with occasional visits to “the trading floor.” The layout consisted of a long middle aisle with rows of desks on either side mainly populated by men. I was subjected to “oogling” as heads spun around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist “whenever a woman approached. I was also responsible for handling outages; due to overly heated equipment rooms and telephone circuit failures. On one specific occasion, one of the sales assistants called me to report an outage. She chuckled as she told me her boss; “the head of a certain desk” blurted out to his entire section – “Cindy said if the service is not back up in a few minutes she would come down and do me on the desk”. I am paraphrasing, use your imagination as to what he actually said, but, back then that type of harassment was accepted and there wasn’t anything a 21-year-old female was going to do to stop it. I considered myself naive at the time and felt embarrassed by the comment but thankfully for me this was not the proverbial “casting couch” which I grew up learning was Hollywood’s version of the entrance fee for rising starlets to secure sought after movie roles. The unwanted attention I endured although uncomfortable, was not even close, they didn’t get to decide whether I got the part, just act like assholes while I was playing it.

Interestingly, despite the shenanigans these men pulled, none of my male bosses ever engaged in any unprofessional behavior. Which didn’t mean that I was immune to harassment, but it was a different kind, a more harmful kind, as it affected my potential for advancement. It was stereotyping.

Back in the early 80’s in New York, if you were of a certain nationality (Italian) and from a certain borough (Brooklyn) and were a college dropout that was the trifecta for getting married and having children at a young age, thereby leaving the workforce. Fast forward 40 years and living in Brooklyn comes with a certain caché and this woman never did become a young mother, by 1980’s standards. I guess times really have changed. While I don’t believe I foreshadowed those intentions, it was something I was told was holding me back and it was up to me to change the narrative.

The situation I found myself in involved two of my bosses, one who respected my abilities, and the other (the more senior of the two) who was convinced my credentials were lacking; that I was not prepared to advance without a college diploma. He literally told my direct boss that he expected to see me pushing a baby carriage in a few years and for that reason advancement was not in my future (at that time women did not normally return to the work force after having children). For someone who at the time couldn’t even see children in her future I took it as an insult, a degrading affront. I knew that my lack of a college degree was hurting me but I refused to let it define me. I chose to act on my own ambitions and not allow his lack of faith in mine make me impotent.

Oddly enough, despite his prejudicial viewpoint of me, I respected him. He set a very high bar, which many of my peers bristled at, (he reminded me of the coach who pushed you beyond what you were capable of because he wanted you to be better), he respected hard work, and he carried himself with a high degree of professionalism which I wanted to emulate. I figured I could learn plenty from him and I did, to the point of viewing him as a mentor, albeit informally.

My goal was to achieve excellence in my field and I believe I accomplished that. In the end I refused to be his cliché. I know he was proud, he was not petty in that sense, he didn’t have to be “right.” I like to think we both learned something, me – I was more than a missing credential on a resume, him – people are not just a series of checked boxes. When I think back to that time, I could have allowed his opinion of me to affect my work negatively. I could have bought into the myth that I really didn’t have what it took to succeed and adopted a defeatist attitude. Not having that piece of paper only really affected me with this first job, after building my reputation, no future employers ever asked or cared.