I had a long phone conversation with a woman friend-renowned organizational change consultant. The topic of life on the road, near and dear to both of us (I head for Australia on Friday), arose, and we meandered from here to there.
At one point the chat turned to women traveling-working solo in … 2006.
Silly, naïve me. I assumed (hey it’s an area of my so-called expertise) that the phenomenon of “hitting on” or worse, though hardly dead, had been trimmed significantly in, say, the last 10 or so years—at least in the office context.
Whoops!
There were no tears or tantrums, but she regaled me non-stop and sometimes with details that I could have lived without (“sorry, but to get this you need more than the ‘overview’,” I think she said) with tale after tale of incredibly aggressive male behavior (“hitting on” and then some and some more) that routinely occurs on the job and off when she’s on the road. In fact, she implied, but did not say, that the absence of immodest “hitting on” is more or less unusual.
There is perhaps no point to this Post other than underscoring my naïveté. But at least it also underscores one of my constant themes: Life for women, including professional life for powerful women, is a far cry from life for men.
Implications? All yours …