"No Offense, But Maybe Women Aren't Built for This..."

A recent comment about women in the workplace got me thinking about what's really going on

I was talking to somebody about stress levels in the workplace. Burnout is on the rise and women especially report burnout at a higher rate than men.

During the conversation, this person said to me “no offense but...”

(stand by for offense, right?)

“...maybe women just weren’t designed for these kinds of corporate jobs.”

And friends, I will tell you I am so proud of myself. While internally I was feeling some very unprofessional feelings, externally I remained open to a dialogue. And we did end up having a good discussion.

Obviously, I do NOT agree with that sentiment, but it got me thinking about something that I had already started noodling on. I recently saw a commercial on television showing a woman connecting some kind of hose between a big truck cab and the trailer it was pulling. It appeared she had to approach it from a different angle to get extra leverage in order to manipulate the connection. And I realized she is having to adjust to a system that was built with assumptions about who would be performing that task. Assumptions that she doesn’t match.

Which got me thinking in general about how everything in our life is that way. What if humans were all 50% larger? Our homes, cars, appliances, even recreational equipment would reflect that, right?

Everything in our life was initially designed around assumptions about who’s doing the thing or using the thing. What if that changes?

So let’s take this back to the workplace. Way back before there were ever any office or factory jobs, work vs home wasn’t even a thing. It was just life. Completely integrated: running the family farm or the ranch or the orchard, along with the tasks of cooking and childrearing and laundry and such were all just integrated 24/7. And from my deep ‘research’ (as a young girl reading Little House on the Prairie), the only real differences among the seven days of the week was getting a bath on Saturday, so they could go to church on Sunday. Other than that, all days looked the same.

Now let’s jump slightly forward to the emergence of offices and factories.

In most cases, the man of the home went to those locations to perform a given set of tasks for a set period of time and then went back home. That work environment was designed with the expectation that the worker would focus solely on those work tasks for that duration. And it was true! The rest of the ‘work’ that this man had left behind at home, was handled by the folks back home.

Jump to today, and the work environment expectations are the same, but the workers aren’t.

So I’d like to flip the statement.

Instead of “maybe women weren’t designed for today’s corporate life”, how about:

Today’s corporate environment wasn’t originally designed with today’s workers in mind.

And yes, I dropped the gender reference because, while women do tend to have more on their plate outside of work than men, that’s not a universal truth, and, really -- the current structure isn’t serving anyone well, including men who can’t leave work for a sick kid without it drawing attention. Or who retire and don’t know what to do with themselves outside of that job.

OK, so what do we do with this? Two things.

First, we need to develop new ways of dealing with work that don’t require you to sell your soul, or sacrifice your health and your relationships, in order to have a successful and fulfilling career. This is something I’ve got a lot of experience with, unfortunately the hard way. I burned out twice in my career, and the healing and recovery process was painful enough that I’ve made it something of a personal mission to help others avoid it.

Second, we need to find ways to model and encourage changes in these work environments that allow more people to contribute in different ways, while acknowledging that each person is more than just their job assignment.

As I pull together more of my thoughts to share with you, I’d love to hear from y’all as well:

Are you seeing things shift in your world? Are you able to influence any shifts yourself, and if so, how? And most importantly, are you taking care of yourself in the middle of the grind?

Love and Light,

Pat ❤️ ✨

Crossroads Midwife | Former Technology Executive

Human Design Coach | Compassion Key Facilitator