Only a Woman--On Dealing with Put-Downs.

RHYS BOWEN: On a plane to Seattle the other day the man in the next seat struck up conversation with me. He said, “Are you going to visit your grandchildren?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m going to be visiting Amazon headquarters.”

He smiled. A patronizing smile. “Oh, you have a son working for Amazon?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m one of their best-selling authors.”

Silence for a moment, then he asked the question we writers get so often.  “Should I have heard of you?”

“Only if you read books,” is now my standard reply.

He was a nice enough man. He was trying to be pleasant, I know. But the assumption that any woman over a certain age is traveling to see her grandchildren really irks me. As does the perception that it had to be a male who allowed me access to Amazon headquarters. Also the perception that any woman has to be attached to a man. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood in line behind a man in a restaurant or at a car rental counter and been asked, “are you two together?”

Would you ask that question of two men standing one behind the other in line? I don’t think so.

Since the me-too movement I think we all have become aware that women are treated differently. Of course most women have known that for years.  In any job we have to be smarter, quicker and do twice as much work to be accepted. We have become used to put-downs. “You girls”. “The girls in my office”. “Honey, get me a cup of coffee, there’s an angel.” Would any man accept being spoken to that way?

            I read an interesting piece recently in which a boss complained that one of his employees took too long with clients, therefore wasn’t working hard enough or was too slow. Then one day he was handling clients and got a particularly rude one. The client queried everything he suggested, told him he didn’t know what he was talking about and was generally obnoxious. It was only later that this boss realized he was using the joint email account and the client thought he was dealing with someone who signed the message Nicole. This shocked him. So for a week he tried an experiment. He signed all his messages Nicole and his employee Nicole signed all hers Martin. She zipped through her business with no problems. He was queried and confronted at every turn. Are you sure you know what you are talking about? Are you clear with the law on this? These were common comments. One even asked if he was single.

My friend’s daughter is a building site inspector for a bank. Every time she shows up she gets comments like “Ooh look, we got us a princess.”  It is only when she starts talking in their jargon that she is accepted. Actually she flings out hard questions at them, cites building codes and finds things wrong. Then she gets their attention!

I’ve been lucky, I suppose. When I worked at the BBC women were treated as equals. And in my writing life I haven’t had any problems either—except from people outside the profession who think that writing is a little hobby. “Are you still writing those little books?” I was asked once. Or better still. “When are you going to write a real novel?”

Some of these questions come from other women, who are equally good at put-downs. At a college reunion I was asked by someone I hadn’t seen since college, “So, have you ever actually had a proper job?”

I replied “Not since the BBC days. But my improper job has allowed me to put four children through college, to buy two homes and several pieces of rental property and to live rather well.”

Some put-downs are more subtle. On a radio interview I was asked how I would compare myself to a literary novelist. Bloody cheek!  I replied “I want you to picture me walking beside a literary novelist. We are going up the steps together. We are entering a bank. And one of us is smiling.”

Nuff said.

So have you encountered condescension, rudeness, prejudice in your professional life? How do you deal with it?