It’s 2018, but on the eve of International Women’s Day, the conversation was still about the glass ceiling at Food Industry News‘ annual Shmoozefest.¹

It goes to show you how clueless I am that this seems absurd. When I saw the Shmoozefest topic I thought, “Surely we’re beyond this?” Of course, I recently reported on Caterpillar VP Tana Utley’s advice to women in traditionally male-dominated industries. I guess I thought maybe the restaurant industry would be different than manufacturing. A little more forward-looking.

But look at this panel lineup:

• Carin Stutz, EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Red Robin Restaurants
• Marla Topliff, President, Rosati’s Franchise Systems
• Kathleen Wood, Founder, Suzy’s Swirl

These women are restaurant industry vets who came up the old-school way, which is to say the hard way, working their way from entry-level posts to increasing authority and, ultimately, the top levels of management.

If they believe there’s still a glass ceiling, then we should listen.

Of course, the fact that they lead these huge, successful organizations goes a long toward showing how fragile that ceiling is. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more work to do.

Glass Ceiling Breakage Advice

Here’s what stuck out to me, as a male, about last night’s Shmoozefest panel.

#SorryNotSorry

Carin Stutz told the women present to stop saying “I’m sorry” before they speak. She described it like a verbal tick that undermines their voice before they’ve even begun expressing their view.

Think about this. Energetic, creative, competent, intelligent, spunky, and athletic girls are still growing up to be apologetic, passive women.

How is this possible?

As a parent, I think about how I’m raising my boys and how I treat their female friends. I think about what media narratives I expose my children to.

As a consumer, I think about what kinds of entertainment I pay money for.

As a small business owner, I think about how I interact with female clients and subject matter experts.

We’ve all got a cultural responsibility to expect women to have smart, productive, creative, useful insights into their businesses. That is, we’ve got to assume they have as much to contribute as any male in the room.

Until they prove us wrong, I suppose, but in my experience, women in leadership had to get there by being better at their jobs than the men around them. If a male and female leader each offer an opinion, and one of them is ill-informed or wrong-headed, I put my money on the female, frankly.

And we should all assure the women around us that they don’t need to apologize for knowing what they’re talking about.

Women Have to Speak to be Heard

Kathleen Wood told a story about her days managing a store at Wendy’s that went something like this:

I had been working there for a long time, and Wendy’s was going through tremendous growth. It felt like everyone was getting promoted. I worked my butt off to get top position on all the key performance metrics, and I thought, “Okay, surely I’ll get promoted any time now.”

Then one day my regional(?) manager said, “Kathleen, I have great news!” and I thought, Yes! This is it! I’m finally getting promoted! Then my manager said, “I want to introduce you to Howard. You’re going to train him, and then he’s going to be your new boss!”

I was devastated, and I should have been professional, but I lost my cool. I stepped back, put my hands on my hips, and just shouted, “What? When’s it going to be my turn?”

My manager looked at me and said, “Are you kidding me? There isn’t a single person in this organization who knew you wanted to advance in your career here.”

There are several things you could take away from that interaction, not the least of which is the men not assuming that their star manager, who happened to be female, would have similar career ambitions to them.

But Wood’s takeaway—and the principle that helped her rise up the ladder and eventually start her own business—was that she needed to speak up if she wanted to be heard. She could not just assume the men around her would view her like her male coworkers.

Women Need Allies Who Have Their Backs

It was also Wood who told how she and another female colleague conspired to be heard during leadership meetings on majority-male teams. She would approach her colleague before the meeting and explain the idea she wanted to introduce. Her colleague would say, “All right, I got your back.”

Then, during the meeting, she would throw her idea out. If someone else changed the subject or threw out a competing idea before Wood’s had been duly addressed, her colleague would pipe up and say, “Hold on a minute! Wendy, could you tell me more about . . . ”

In this way, they managed to get their voices heard and their ideas fair consideration.

There’s no reason a male colleague couldn’t play advocate or ally in the same way. It’s on us men to be worthy of that kind of trust.

Boys Will Be Boys?

Marla Topliff emphasized that women need to be clear with male colleagues about what kind of speech and behavior they will tolerate or is appropriate. “You have to get comfortable saying, ‘No, that’s not okay,'” she said.

I felt conflicted by the story she told, though. She said her leadership team is mostly men—and all family, to boot. She’s made it clear what kind of talk she will and won’t accept, but they seem to treat it as a matter of who’s in the room.

When she enters the conference room, she said, they’ll often clam up, and she might say, “I probably don’t want to know what you were talking about, do I?”

I’m sure on her way through the glass ceiling she’s learned to pick her battles, but this feels like a compromise the president of a company should not have to make. The implicit assumption is not that far from “boys will be boys.”

In other words, men are going to say vulgar and sexist things about women.

As a man, I’m not comfortable setting the bar that low. Think of the defense of Donald Trump when the Access Hollywood tapes came out. People called it “locker room” talk as if to say, “It only sounds bad because other people heard it.”

But would it be acceptable for a man to say and believe such things about women even if we didn’t know he said or believed those things?

We cannot—nor should we try to—police beliefs, but we can expect that our male leaders have more positive, respectful attitudes about their female peers (or, y’know, all women).

Girls Will Be Girls?

I spoke later with a woman leader who said that the women in her organization can be just as bad as the men, sometimes, and that seems like a fair point. We’re getting into the touchy territory of what kinds of attitudes should be considered appropriate or “normal,” and of course there will be a range of comfort levels.

I think we can expect our workplaces to be generally speaking places of respectful talk about everyone, male or female. And we have to recognize that derogatory comments made from a position of power, social or economic, have a different status than those made from a subordinate position—that’s what the glass ceiling is about, after all.

But I would like to believe we can all rise above objectification and sexualization of each other. You can talk with your friends about your date or your feelings toward someone without dehumanizing them or making them a mere object of your fantasies and desires.

I mean, . . . right?

Join the Boys’ Club, then Become the President

Marla Topliff’s closing comments reflected her earlier remarks. There is a boys’ club, and it can make career advancement difficult. So, she said, “You have to join the club, then become the president of the company.”

In other words, even with the deck stacked against them, women have tools within themselves (as well as their allies) to still succeed, and all the panelists agreed that the more women who do shatter the glass ceilings in their organizations, that is, the more women who become leaders, the more restaurant cultures will begin to change.

 

I’m no expert at this, but if you’re looking for someone who works well with all kinds of people to help you share your story in print or online, contact me.

 

¹ There seems to be some disagreement on the interwebs about the best way to spell this term. I might personally go with “schmoozefest,” but I didn’t print the flyers, so I defer to the event organizers’

Photo by Max Ostrozhinskiy on Unsplash