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The other day I had lunch with an old friend. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time and so it was a bit sad that he was so determined at first. He had just been told by mistake that one of his colleagues had a taxi card as a work benefit for a whole year.
I couldn’t let it go.
“But you can either demand that your boss get one too or you can stop thinking about it,” I said at the end. “You sound like a crying child.”
“You’re right,” he replied and laughed to himself because one of his many positives is his self-irony.
What is it really with guys and status? Why do they let it take up so much space in their lives?
A long time ago, I myself had a colleague who constantly compared the two of us. We could sit down and read an article and I suddenly realized how distracted he was and stopped listening. Instead, he looked at my cell phone. “Do you have a new mobile? When did you get it? “Other times it could be:” Are you going to have that room? It has bigger windows than mine “or” Are you called to the meeting with X? It’s not me. “
I liked him. We work well together in many ways. But in addition to our duties, it was as if he constantly had a side project: reading hierarchies and monitoring his place in them.
It is often said that women are hypersensitive to how they are treated in work life. That we are concerned about noticing contexts in which we are not allowed to participate or are not told. That we watch over wages and demand millimeter justice. That in a tender way we attach great importance to situations in which we feel that we have been overlooked.
It’s probably one of the biggest myths I’ve encountered in my work life.
My God, if men and their surroundings can be men. And no I don’t mean to men, but most of the people I’ve met who have been so concerned about rankings is clearly men.
There are great dangers in not being cunning, and women have a lot to learn from that masculine stance.
It may not be that strange. From the mine in the schoolyard, through the hockey rinks and soccer fields, through military service job training, and then into office environments, loading aisles, and hospital aisles, they learn to feel and move in hierarchies. An ingenious system in which you constantly measure power, strength and influence.
“It’s actually kind of funny,” my lunch friend said as he himself had a coffee and began to wonder why he was so frustrated by that taxi card: “In fact, I’ve always had the feeling that I have an invisible ladder next to me. I still know if the person I’m talking to is one step up or one step down the stairs. And I also know how to show that I know it ”.
The stairs were there. He said he hardly needed to think about it.
That was probably what he suspected.
Now you can think that I want to place a kind of heroic halo over women? No way. It’s true that I can get incredibly tired of the masculine. holding on And she is often touched by the fact that many women just roll up their sleeves, focus on what needs to be done, take responsibility for the whole thing without worrying so much about whether it will benefit or harm them.
But there are also great dangers in not being cunning and we have a lot to learn from that men’s team spirit. We should not be so thankful and foolish that after millennia we finally come to forget that we forgot to guard the spot on the stairs.
Read more Åsa Beckman’s chronicles, for example about why women continue to dye their gray hair or if why one can turn to poetry when someone has died.
