Why banter exclusion is an unseen glass ceiling barrier

I’ve worked in many places, from busy newsrooms, ad agencies both corporate and boutique, and home businesses; hell, I even had a company of my own at one time. The key to progression is almost always acceptance, the ability to be yourself, to make the odd gaff, be laughed at and get on with it, without feeling you are trying to impress anyone all the time – or get in trouble. If you have to worry about it, the likelihood is something’s wrong. But it might not be your fault. Sometimes hierarchies mean you are always going to be a slightly muted, supressed version of yourself. And being a boss might give you a unique position within a company, but that doesn’t always mean you are a party to your employees’ individual challenges and circumstances, and so you should always have the foresight to recognize that you might not always be right.

I should know. Back when I owned a cleaning and household services agency, Sorted Lifestyle Solutions, when Jonah was still a baby, one of my cleaners, a coterie of Polish and Lithuanian women sourced from a steady supply of EU incomers, kept stealing cheese. I found this out because several of my clients rang me, to let me know she had done a good job, but the cheese theft had them worried. What I didn’t know, when I questioned the girl – a young 18 year old with ghetto nails, cheek piercings and oft-dilated pupils, was that I’d crammed her schedule too tight to give her time to get lunch – thinking that she would be happy to be making as much money as possible. She was paid by the job, so travel time didn’t count – and being a physical job, she was hungry. To be fair, she could have taken along a packed lunch, but sometimes, when there is cheese in the fridge and you’re in charge of cleaning it, it’s just too tempting. I learned my lesson.

Eventually I sold the business to my workers (one of the girls was accused of stealing a necklace, which I doubted, but the cleaner is always the first person at whom suspicion is pointed.) I decided it was all too much of a risk (one of my clients had Warhols and Banksies) and many of the cleaners went on to have good careers off the back of it, becoming the nanny to a famous comedienne, or going on to caring or nursing professions. I still keep in touch with one or two, mainly on Facebook, but I still have fond wishes for all of them, save one or two tricky ones.

But my ability to run a business was founded on my firm belief that I would treat my girls (I called them that fondly, as I saw myself the same) as equals. After all, I was only a young woman with a young baby myself, so I tried to understand their problems as far as I could.

When eventually I went back to “a proper job”, I often felt that the same privilege was not extended to me, and that office hierarchies were too often the biggest barriers to a company’s success. Wherever I worked, there was lip service to inclusion, but too often there was an in-crowd of old timers, many of whom were shareholders to boot, and after a pint or two at the pub, they would disappear off to the private members’ club for cocktails, or worse – a strip club – and I know a thing or two about those, let’s not forget – while the lowly plebs were left behind sinking crappy beer in a threadbare bar, safe in the knowledge we were playing a game of “us and them”.

It’s always going to happen to some extent in the workplace. People become friendly and it’s not possible to do things with everybody all of the time. But what irked me most, and still irks me to this day is banter exclusion, and I do think this is a particularly, though not always insidiously male form of exclusion.

It’s clichéd to say that when men go off on their own they regress to Neanderthals and start putting their cocks in bottles (although I have to say there was a picture of one of my ex-colleagues circulating in exactly that situation) or that women talk about periods, and which boys they fancy – both are true some but not all of the time.

But it does seem to me that male banter makes for a lot of unspoken maneuvering within a business. And when women are by and large excluded from it, it becomes an unseen barrier to success. Certainly, in places where I have worked, there would be guys’ nights – mainly from the more boorish types, who would go off in search of football, beer and oblivion- and there would be much jostling for status that went on behind the scenes, which somehow seemed to be played out in promotions.

Even recently, I’ve noticed how guys are often happier to be rough and ready in each other’s company, but hush up as soon as a female enters the room. In one instance a newcomer asserted himself in the group by introducing himself to all the other men, while neglecting even to acknowledge me, upon which I took matters into my own hands and firmly introduced myself, which probably came off as being mildly passive aggressive. It was. You can break into the banter, if you try, but it might mean breaking out of your mould – or the one society places you in. And there will only be a certain amount of women who are comfortable enough to do this.

The fact is, we are who we are, and we can only do what we can do, whether it’s playing against our biology, and making allowances for the opposite sex. There is a danger in becoming too neutral in our inclusivity that we lose any character (and characters) from the workplace at all. But I would say that women, in general, suffer from being treated sometimes too carefully by men in an office environment, where we know that to play with the big guns, it can sometimes pay to be one of the lads – but at the risk of alienating some of the women. And for those who like to place women on a pedestal, I would argue are the same types (and those who feel threatened by them) who are happy enough to see them get knocked off when they don’t meet their ideals. So women do have to tread more carefully when they put their heads above the parapet and play with the big boys, because it’s too easy to be criticized as a woman if you don’t meet other people’s expectations (or, for that matter,  when you’re caught stealing cheese in a rich person’s kitchen.)