Don’t inflame. Don’t emasculate. Apologize incessantly. Survive.

This was my work playbook before I learned what Allyship really means

Part 1: The Playbook

A few years ago I was taking one of my usual walks in a wooded section of my neighborhood, stopping at a nearby park bench to perform my abdominal crunch routine. Headphones on, music blaring in my ears, I kept my eyes closed to avoid looking up at the sun.

 I didn’t see him coming, but I could feel him hovering over me. His proximity took my breath away. I pulled off my headphones.

“Howya doing?” he said, looking over me, not backing away.

I shot up immediately; he still did not back away. He was in my personal space, shirtless, muscular, and imposing. 

“Howya doing?” He said again, “Whatcha doing right now? Wanna get out of here?”

I could hardly process what he was saying, let alone play out the full ramification of what he was suggesting. I don’t know how I thought to respond the way I did. 

I smiled at him while taking a step back, “I have to get back,” I said, “My husband is expecting me. He’ll wonder where I am.”

He took a step forward, refilling my personal space, “That’s alright. That don’t matter.”

The park was unusually quiet, no one else was in the area. I backed away, towards the street while he continued to walk towards me, asking me questions, “...C’mon, what’s your name?”  

I continued to smile, almost flirtatiously, even giggling a little, telling him apologetically, “I have to get back … you have a great day!” until I made my way into the street, turned, walked quickly out of his view, then ran back home.

When I got home I told my husband about what had happened. He looked at me, incredulous:

“Why were you SO NICE to him?... Why didn’t you start screaming and tell him to F&#k Off?... Why did you encourage him?” Followed by admonishments for not having been more careful, not looking around before doing my crunches, for playing my music too loudly to hear him approaching. 

I know my husband meant well; he was scared for me. But I still felt badly, like I did something wrong by almost being assaulted.

When I told my female friends about what happened, they responded very differently: “I’m sorry that happened to you,” was the most common response. No one questioned how I reacted; most said they would have done the same thing. These unspoken rules are ingrained in our personal safety playbook: 

Don’t inflame. Don’t emasculate. Apologize incessantly. Survive.

WEBINAR June 18, 2024; 12pPT | 3pET: The State of Platform Building Today: Understanding Your Options to Create, Monetize, and Protect Your Work in the Attention Economy, with Danielle Wiley of Sway Group, Ruky Tijani of Firm for the Culture, and Emily Lakin of Patreon.

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Part 2: “Advocates”

Maybe you haven’t had the adrenaline-spiking test of an imposing, shirtless man hovering over you to reinforce these rules on a daily basis, but many of us women with leadership experience in male-dominated industries know this form of self-protection cold.

The problem is, sometimes our guard is down. We think we are safe. We think we’re all working toward the same goals with our colleagues. And sometimes we’re right! 

And sometimes we’re not. 

And when we realize we’re under threat, we break out that playbook again, assuage egos, calm things down, in order to survive. We suppress our anger, because any whiff of anger or defense puts a target on our backs.

Radical Candor expert Kim Scott writes about her denial of her own victimization, which she realized kept her from acknowledging a former colleague’s victimization.

“I realized … that not only had I been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her as a Black woman in the workplace, I had also been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me as a white woman in the workplace kind of hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor, to admit that I but I had been pretending that a whole host of things were not happening that were in fact happening.

And I think the reason why I did that was that I never wanted to think of myself as a victim. And so, therefore, when I was when I was experiencing disrespectful attitudes or behaviors. I didn't choose a response. Instead, I just pretended it wasn't happening.”

For years I refused to accept that I was being victimized, rationalizing I had accomplished so much by not making excuses for myself, by rising above adversity. I wasn’t going to play the VICTIM card, even when I was being demeaned, sandbagged, even physically threatened by men at work. And I chose to ignore other women’s victimization. For me, the game was won by having Advocates.

I took a big job in tech as one of a handful of female leaders in the division. In my first week at a company offsite, one of my female peers, a very accomplished former entrepreneur in her own right, attempted to publicly share very real concerns about management’s treatment of women in a public meeting, shaking and fighting off tears as she spoke – behaviors of feeling unsafe.

I thought, “poor thing.”

After she spoke, the male GM vowed to “be better” and elevate female leadership, even pointing to myself and the one other female leader as proof, I suppose, of his advocacy. Privately, he pledged to support me. 

Months later I suspected I was being sandbagged by a male peer and went to this GM for advice. I knew better than to phrase it that way, of course–the Playbook!--so I presented all of the facts and asked him, as per Playbook style guidelines: I must be doing something wrong here. What would you do? Can you help me? 

He responded by sending my email to my gaslighter, admonishing me for not including him in my communication. Because that would, you know, make it a fair fight, bringing my oppressor into the virtual room. By resorting to this gladiatorial form of a leveled playing field, he ignored the abuse of power happening in his ranks. He gave me a paring knife and told me to duke it out with the dude holding a machete.

THIS was his form of “being better:”

I confess, I didn’t get what was happening when it happened. When I left the company, shortly afterward, I actually apologized to this GM; he had “given me a shot” was how I phrased it. And I failed to take it. I failed to win the unwinnable.

Years later, I no longer blame myself for not being so exceptional that I could overcome sexism. 

And I couldn’t unsee what I had denied existed.

Part 3: Allyship

Last month, Melinda French Gates announced her decision to leave the Gates Foundation and double down on her investment fund focused on “advancing women’s power globally.” With the announcement came a slew of press, including this interview, in which she calls out tech “bro culture” as a motivating factor behind her decision to support a new model of leadership.

"I think you get these industries where, when over time they become very male-dominated, then the guys expect that everybody's going to act the way they act. And when they don't see somebody leading or acting the way they are there, there's pushback," Gates shared in a new episode of Yahoo Finance's Lead This Way.

I commented on Gates’s post on LinkedIn, as did hundreds of others. 

A number of people, male and female, responded positively to my comment. And then I saw this:

A number of thoughts popped into my head: What’s wrong with being an English Major? What set this person off? Why did this comment feel so familiar? 

I didn’t know the commenter, but I knew that tone. It was the same tone I heard from a male technical lead when he learned I’d be leading his group and refused to take direction from “some mid-level marketer who sold a company.” As though anyone committing the triple infraction of being female, a liberal arts major, AND an exited entrepreneur negated my 20+ years of relevant experience.

That tone was angry, misogynistic, nonsensical, and unfortunately too common for me to really think too hard about it. 

But the next comment floored me:

As someone who has survived by earning advocacy – with employers, with investors, and, as mentioned, with manchildren belligerently working out their fears of irrelevance on me – I confess I was initially very confused. Was Dave talking about ME? Maybe he mistook me for someone else: Another entrepreneur whose board he was on and as such it was in his best interest as an investor to publicly defend me.  

Nope. He was just doing this because he felt it was the right thing to do. 

The feeling that followed was ecstatic, foreign. I felt a bit unmoored, wondering, what did I do to deserve this public praise for who I am, despite my imperfections (of which apparently being an English Major is one).

I didn’t need to drum up facts for why I mattered. I just did. Dave wasn’t sloganing (“Female Founders Matter!”); he wasn’t offering lip service, attempting to show how evolved he was. And I didn’t need to add my exhausted two cents of regurgitation of the FACTS behind female founder track records (Dave did that for me, further down in the comments), and he didn’t attempt to smooth it over with Bruh, as men often do after the fact (you know that game: “Dude–we good?”); in fact, he kept going with the commenter, responding to the commenter’s next illogical quip, using his own relative privilege as a successful male investor and operator to blow up the gaslighter with his own flamethrower.

For the record, Friends, THAT is Allyship.

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