I was reading Samantha's blog and she was discussing women in business. She touched on something that is also my pet peeve and I've been wanting to discuss:
I also want fellow women to get their acts together. Maybe it's me being
too critical, but I do it out of love! I want women to succeed. The 50s-ish
woman with the wardrobe left over from the 80s with bad, unconfident posture,
the women my age who say "like" waaayy too much ... sexy wrap dresses, nails
painted red, skirts with high slits, twirling hair, chewing gum, tucking your
shirt in and not checking your backside at home so I can see your thong through
your pants, being overly demure and quiet in meetings, overusing !!!, the list
goes on and on. Of course I'm not perfect, but women need to realize how much
work we have to put into our professional appearance/demeanor in order to be
taken seriously and sometimes I just want to smack some sense into people.
I couldn't agree more! My company has a business casual dress code that is actually on the rather formal side. But I see so many women, young and old, that act like it doesn't exist. I work with a woman my age who wears sundresses to work that I'd wear to a brunch. Women wear flip flops and open-toed shoes all the time in summer. They wear capri pants and skirts way above the knee. We all want to look good, but I wish women would think like men for five minutes when they get dressed in the morning and realize that dressing sexy or casual creates distraction and takes attention away from the work you are doing. It's the same as that one guy that wears golf shirts when all the other men are wearing dress shirts. People think that guy doesn't get it. My company has a few fundraising events during the year where you can wear jeans to work if you donate $5 to the cause. I did it once or twice until I realized that I never saw a man doing it. I bet the men probably didn't even know there was a reason we were all wearing jeans and who knows what they were thinking of us. Please understand, I'm not saying that women need to emulate men because they are men. I just think men are better at obeying the dress code and making it work for them. (Granted, it is easier. All you need is a closet full of white and blue shirts). We women need to get better at projecting competence and separating how we dress for business from how we dress socially. This goes for communications too. Please stop firing off emails full of !!!! and misspelled words and lack of punctuation. Again, this does not project competence. It doesn't take that long to write out complete, grammatically correct sentences and it makes you look SO much better. And finally, I know this sounds funny coming from a paragraph full of complaining, but women need to stop complaining so much. I know there are men that do this too, but at least where I work, I notice so many more women always complaining about their job, their boss, the company, etc. No one likes a whiner! And when was the last time the whiner was chosen for that high profile position? Women have come a long way in business so far, but we still have a long way to go. We need to help the rest of the business world see us as the professionals we are!
1 comment:
Hey! Thanks for the shout-out and it's a good point about the whining. I should probably keep my bitching down, although I do try to keep it to a few key work friends:)
I've been reading your blog for a few months now, congrats on Wharton and I may be looking you up if I get an interview. After visiting, wharton seems to be my top choice right now. Have a nice summer!
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