In a case of life imitating blog, I have been extremely conscious lately of the fact that I am a woman in a field sometimes dominated by men.  Dealing with the male female divide in the workplace is not always easy.  It is easy with co-workers and colleagues, provided you are not worried about standing up for your point of view (which I am not).  But it is much more delicate when dealing with clients.

My first introduction to this particular conundrum came in my first year of work.  I was sitting in on a conference with a client who was preparing for a mediation in a piece of litigation potentially worth several hundred thousand dollars.  He wasn’t accustomed to litigation and was worried about how he would handle himself in the mediation.  At one point, he said “I almost wish I was a woman so that I could just burst into tears and storm out”.  Beat.  He turned, looked at me and said “I probably shouldn’t have said that while you were in the room” (my emphasis).  There was a long moment while I recalled that this was an important client, I was a junior lawyer and responding to such an outrageous statement was a delicate proposition.  With typical aplomb I said absolutely nothing at all in the ensuing uncomfortable silence.

There are those pieces of litigation which has far too many decision makers involved, with the inevitable consequence that it is incredibly difficult to get decisions made.  And when you are sitting as the only female in a room full of business men who like to style themselves as Clint Eastwood in Armani, then things can get a little surreal.  One gent will say something along the lines of “We’re all men of commerce” and I can’t quite bring myself to leave the phrase totally unremarked - “Yes, we are all commercial people, but…”

Of course I do have the good fortune of working with a great many men who share my amusement at the testosterone laden mood sometimes at odds with the rather dry transactions which the litigation concerns.  That still doesn’t mean that I won’t be one of the recipients of an email which begins “Gents,”

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 10:19 am by dan and is filed under random musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.