ON BEING AMBI-SOCIAL, PART 2: THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD

What prompted me to write the previous ambi-social post is my observation that the women in my law firm tend to clump together.  Of the 80-90 attorneys in my firm, about 35% are female, and that 35% tend to be younger and more junior on average than the male attorneys in the firm.  Whenever we have an attorney lunch (there's free lunch for the attorneys six times a month) or other meeting or social event, the young and mid-level women attorneys all arrive en masse in one large group and eat together.

I am friendly with all these women, and sometimes I will go out to dinner with a group of the women attorneys, and sometimes they will stop by to pick me up on the way to the attorney lunch down the hall.  But the clumping together makes me uneasy.  I worry that it generates the impression that the women attorneys are not confident enough as individuals to simply arrive on their own and interact with their male colleagues or the more senior attorneys (who are more likely to be male) without the support of their group.  I also worry that the women attorneys are foregoing the chance to forge relationships with the senior members of the firm-- relationships that their male colleagues at the same level are having less trouble with because they simply show up at a lunch and plop down with a group of guys at any level of seniority and start talking about sports or some such thing.  (By the way, I don't think you need to talk about sports to be "one of the guys."  I never do.  I usually talk about my cases or their cases or something I saw in the news or some local bar association gossip.) 

That's what got me thinking about being ambi-social.  I think that the comfort level I have developed with socializing with men as "one of the guys" has directly benefited me professionally.  I joined a firm (a different one than the one I'm at now) of about 90% men when I first started learning the ropes of civil litigation-- and I think that the comfort level the more senior men had with me from just chit-chatting and socializing with me in turn led them to assign me a lot of work.  I was spread a bit thin (assigned to four different practice groups as opposed to the usual one or two) but I had the opportunity to showcase my abilities much more than people who had not forged cordial and comfortable relationships with the higher-ups. Having the opportunity to deliver results in turn helped my progress in the firm.  The social comfort level I had with the men who were above me in the hierarchy also made the work I did on those cases more comfortable and more productive for me-- because I wasn't self-conscious about giving these guys my opinion or popping into their offices to have necessary conversations about whatever cases we were working on. 

Of course, this all sounds a bit Uncle Tom-ish.  After all, isn't there something wrong with the fact that most of the power in my firm is found in male hands, and that I have to try to be "one of the guys" in order to succeed?  Well, yeah.  But that's the reality I find myself in, and even if things were more equal in my workplace, I would still have to work with a lot of men and having a certain degree of social comfort with these guys -- whether they are senior to me, junior to me or equal to me-- goes a long way towards making the working life easier.

I should also note that it goes both ways.  My husband is ambi-social too.  Although he is in many ways an Aerosmith-listening, football-watching  standard-issue American male, he is quite capable of socializing comfortably with a group of women (a fact that I noticed many years ago when we were hanging out with two other couples, both lesbian couples, and suddenly I realized that he was the only man in the room and that these were his friends). My husband now finds himself working in a female-dominated non-profit and doing quite nicely.  There was also a male paralegal in my last firm whose career tanked because he was clearly uncomfortable working with the female attorneys. 

Comments

[slickdpdx]

The "Uncle Tom" concept is a harmful one, encouraging people to marginalize themselves.

[trope]

I have nothing substantial to say yet, except that I'm really enjoying this series of posts.

[kyahgirl]

Hi, I've passed by here a few times and really like your blog.

I work in a predominantly male workplace too and have found it very useful to become ambi-social. I'm a chemist, working the chemical industry. Face it, demographics just tells you that this type of workplace is going to be mostly men. That may change over time but not that quickly.
I am comfortable being the only woman in a male group and with either taking orders from or giving orders too men.
I think its a necessary skill/trait to develop if you're going to be successful and enjoy going to work everyday.

[norbizness]

Pre-1978 Aerosmith, one would hope.

Your posts have been inspirational. I plan on exploring my ambi-creepiness in further detail.

[The Happy Feminist]

What? Pump and Permanent Vacation aren't acceptable?
That's my youth you're talking about!

[The Happy Feminist]

Actually, I lie. The Smiths and the Clash were my youth. But still.

[will]

I can see HappyF now, rocking to the Clash. But does she remember Big Audio Dynomite? E-MC2?

[The Happy Feminist]

I liked that song about the Globe! But I have to make clear right here and right now that I was and am extremely UN-hip and UN-cool.

[shannon]

The Uncle Tom concept is actually a way to improve group fitness. The Uncle Tom strategy is a way to get ahead by ruining things for other people, usually by using dominant assumptions that any member of group X that can do Y is an exception. This of course reduces the fitness of the group, and is a form of cheating- that's why there are sanctions. Not to say that HF was being an Uncle Tom in this case