The conversation on women in beer feels all the more important in light of #MeToo and the Women’s Marches. While there are thankfully plenty of good stories to tell about women’s roles in craft beer, there are also plenty of stories of women being condescended to or, worse, being downright denigrated in rogue social media accounts.
I mean, there wouldn’t be a Pink Boots Society or WomeninCraftBeer.com if women didn’t feel like they were being treated differently within the beer industry.
I’ve weighed in previously on issues impacting women in beer such as using sex to sell, but hearing the stories about the Women’s Marches over the weekend got me thinking about a story I wrote for CraftBrewingBusiness.com about a Caterpillar VP’s advice to women, which she called “dancing on the glass ceiling.”
The VP in question is Tana L. Utley, head of Caterpillar’s Large Power Systems Division. She began as an engineer, which is relatively rare for a woman today, much less in the late 90s, and worked her way into her current leadership role. Utley presented seven tips, culled from her personal experience, for women who want to succeed in a corporate or industrial context.
A couple tips sounded like advice you might hear for any ambitious exec, like “Know Sun Tzu’s The Art of War” or “Think of your career as a capital T [make an impact in a narrow way before branching out].” However, others still stick out to me as advice that clearly indicates how different it must be to be a woman in business.
Consider her first tip: “Remember you’re always being watched.” At first blush, that might apply to men, too, but what she means is that a woman can never get too comfortable around her male peers. You can never tell when the double standard that deprivileges women will pop up.
That’s rough.
Tip four is related: “Trust equals competence times intimacy.” Here she is thinking about the ways men can be intimidated by competent women, so one needs to develop genuine friendships so one’s competence doesn’t actually become a barrier.
As a human, my injustice meter was going crazy during most of her talk. As a man, I was embarrassed for my sex. Obviously, Utley has managed to achieve a great deal of success in her male-dominated corporate context, so the men around her are at least capable of recognizing and rewarding her competence.
But the story she tells of how she achieved what she did suggests it was as much about her cunning or savvy as anything. As she experienced it, she needed to navigate not only her supervisors’ management quirks and weaknesses but their male pettiness and insecurity before a competent female.
Her title itself says so much. Not “Destroy the glass ceiling” but “Dance on the glass ceiling.” Her posture was not one of defiance and revolution. She took a much more pragmatic approach and said, “Look, you’re not going to change this by confirming these men’s assumptions about powerful [read: bitchy] women, so learn to play the game to achieve your goals.”
That might not sound like something that will inspire the youth to become the change they want to see in the world, but I bet it resonated with many of the women in the room that morning, women who understood that their careers depended, at least for now, on at least some irrational beliefs of powerful men.
But the fact that Utley was there at all demonstrated that it’s not just about “playing nice” for her. Her final tip was to mentor other women and strive to become a role model for them. Once you gain a position of leadership as a woman, you can use it to begin to change the system for the better and to bring up other competent women behind you.
She didn’t go so far as to say a female leader should privilege other women, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch. An African-American friend of mine tells of a time, decades ago now, when he became a foreman for a construction company. He began to hire other black men to his crew. When his supervisor asked him about it, he said, “Well, the company hires foremen from the men in the crews, but the white foremen only hire white fellows, so I thought if we’re ever going to have more black foremen we better hire some more black crew.”
Seems like sound logic to me. The company had, in fact, begun to talk about becoming more diverse, so his supervisor jumped on the idea and encouraged his other foremen to do their part, too. How much more important is a diverse team today than it was decades ago?
When it comes to women in beer, HR specialist Jennifer Briggs pretty much advises the same thing: Put women in power and you’ll develop a more just and equitable business.
Where am I going with all this? I guess I’m wary of men in craft beer feeling too comfortable because in general we’re such a cool industry. In the full story, I reflect on what men can learn from Utley’s advice, but in these times it seems it’s hard to go wrong if you ask honest questions and then shut up to hear the answers.
Then go out and try to change yourself so you can change your world.
If you’d like to develop marketing assets for your brewery or factory with a guy who is trying, contact me here.
Image by me.
