Bittersweet Awards
Being a woman in STEM, I am not immune to listening to rough tales and observing the struggle between men and women in meeting rooms and when vying for opportunities. Most of us want to be a part of the solution, but have a hard time describing the exact issue or giving suggestions on how to help. A quick google search will give some ideas and although even small steps in the right direction are better than no steps, I just can’t shake the feeling that even the most numerous of these small steps simply won’t bridge the current gap that exists.
As part of a large corporation, I am grateful enough to work on a site that has a strong and active women’s network. I myself have been active in the network for nearly 6 years. I started by participating in events and then quickly escalated to leading events for a variety of initiatives – some involved community outreach, others focused on the development and enrichment of participants in the technology realm.
Last year, I was tasked with leading my own initiative, the commercial women group. In my professional role, I straddled the fence between commercial and engineering, often acting as a liaison between sales and our engineering teams to develop the right solutions. To lead something that focused so bluntly on sales, marketing, and business… a world that I was altogether fairly unfamiliar with gave me an opportunity to learn an incredible amount in a short time. It also enabled me to build and work with a team to develop events around learning more about opportunities in the commercial world.
Through this experience of building a team and a slate of events for the team to lead, I was able to achieve an overall approval rating of over 96% based on reviews of over 120 participants. It was based upon this display of leadership and eagerness to enrich those around me that I was able to earn a global women’s network award through my corporation. I was one of many women whose faces and accomplishments were promoted on International Women’s Day or #IWD2018 at my company.
I received over 50 emails from colleagues wishing me well and congratulating me on the award. I wore a smile on my face for hours. I felt so happy and inspired from those emails until a week later, I noticed something unsettling. Of all the emails I received, 4 of them were from people on my floor and only 1 was from someone on my immediate team. For reference, my floor at work is home to over 75 people. Now, don’t get me wrong – I did not expect 75+ emails from people on my floor congratulating me. It absolutely floors me that after nearly a week only 1 person on my team, who happens to also be a woman, noticed that I had won a global award.
They continued to be unaware until 6 days later. One of the guys I worked with overheard someone telling me congratulations and asked what that was about, let’s call him Norbert. Norbert listened to my explanation of the award and read the link I sent him. What he did next made my day, he forwarded the link to my manager (who for the record, definitely knew that I had won an award multiple times as I was carbon copied on multiple emails bringing my award to his attention). The content of what Norbert sent to my manager is unknown, but it prompted my manager to send out a blurb to my team about the award I had received on International Women’s Day.
I get that some of this story seems overly critical and the point of my story is NOT to say that I deserve more attention. The 50 separate emails already gave me more than enough good feelings to last a week. What concerns me more is that of those 50 emails, all except for 4 were from my female colleagues. If what I do in the women’s network only exhibits my leadership capabilities to other women, it does not ultimately help me push the needle forward in my own career. This ultimately leads me to wonder to myself: What’s the point?
Is the answer to refocus my attention away from creating opportunities for other women in the network to learn and grow? Is the answer to have more Norberts around? I don’t know. I can tell you that winning a global award and having almost no one that works with you notice the publicity from the corporation on International Women’s Day does not give me confidence that we are doing all we can to push ourselves forward. For most people, International Women’s Day came and went without much notice or worse, eye rolls. If the answer was simple, we’d have done it already. We need to start getting more creative and inclusive about how we recognize female talent and make sure that the people they work with understand the value that they bring to the team.
For me, I feel that my next actions are to show my team what I have learned through the women’s network. I need to show my leadership capabilities amongst the people I work with 24/7. Whether it is by taking the lead on a team project or providing more constructive input during meetings – every step that I can take to earn respect and gain some exposure as a leader brings me a little further into my career.