Girls and Boys and Men and Women and WORK.

Last
week, on International Women’s Day (awwww
shit, this sounds like it’s gonna get

 PMT-y) I thanked the men in my life
for being exquisite examples of gender equality in action. The guys I drink
with, and eat with, and talk with, and email, have never- not once- ever made me feel that I am less than
capable of achieving anything that they, too, dream and crave and expect.

I’ve
lived quite an unconventional life- okay fine,
I continue to lead quite an unconventional life- and I thought any resistance I
encountered on my path to world domination was because of the fact that I live
equally as content come prince or pauper, never looking at a bank statement, I move
to a different country annually, I say vagina quite a lot.

It
never occurred to me, probably because of this extraordinary male company I
keep, that anyone would object to me based on my gender.

I
don’t bandy around the word feminism on
this blog because historically I’ve not felt like I have to. I think it’s
pretty bloody obvious that as I hurtle from one adventure to the next, snogging
boys and negotiating salary and four-day weeks and generally Marco Polo-ing the
fuck out of my destiny, that I feel
as unrestricted as the next person- be it male or female.

And
that’s all feminism is, I think. Are the
boys doing it? Then I am too. Oh,
that rule doesn’t apply to them? Then me neither. But I don’t pretend to be a man in order to have the same
rights as them- I’m unapologetically female, just, you know, with the same
entitlement as a penis.

So
far, so common sense. 

Our
working lives aren’t, in my mind, a question of how to be a successful woman.
Or man. Our working lives are an extension of our actual lives and thus an
issue of how to be a successful human
being. That’s genderless.

So when
I read recent interviews and watched videos of Facebook top-dog Sheryl Sandberg, about how more women need to get themselves into the world’s more
powerful jobs to represent other women, I laughed.

The
reason more women aren’t pursuing the kind of job that Sandberg has is because they don’t want it. Balancing a billion
dollar paycheck with a family and all that impossibly shiny hair is many a
woman’s worst Working Girl nightmare. She doesn't speak for me.

But then, many men don't want what she has, either. Whereas Don Draper was once the dream, collectively
we’ve mostly realised that work-life balance is success. Not the best car or
highest rate of fear amongst juniors. My best male mates taught me that. Not a lot of people want what Sheryl is preaching, girl or boy.

AND THIS
IS WHERE THE BIG REVELATION COMES IN.

My whole
“two fingers to the Man” attitude stems from a total incomprehension about the
metrics we use to define success. More money. Bigger office. Longer hours.
Responsibility. The glorification of busy. My entire social group largely
eschews these things in favour of say, flexible hours, creative control,
choosing who they work with and being their own boss. That’s success.

When I
investigated Sandberg a little closer, I realised that what she is actually saying, though, in encouraging more women to demand to be heard at the top of their game in
some of those big fancy offices that typically are occupied by men, is that we
have the power, as women, to change
the basic definition of success for
everybody.

Women can
bring different skills to the table, and if we do that then we can change the
way the table looks. That’s what her new organisation Lean In is
all about: changing what the world of work means to us. And men, statistically more likely to be the boss than we are, can’t do it alone. They want to change
what “success” is too, but can’t do it without us.

Boys are
good at some stuff, and girls are good at other stuff, and it takes all of us
to stand together, side-by-side and say HEY, THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE.
THIS IS THE HAPPY MEDIUM. THIS IS SUCCESS.

We can
change so much, but we’ve got to make a bigger fuss about doing it. Put on the
power suits (or not) and infiltrate the enemy and change it from within. I’m pretty sure
that is what Sandberg is essentially saying. The enemy is absolute not men, of course- the enemy is the core, key value set we continue to hold even though these values are outdated and irrelevant to us.

I invite
you to become as obsessed with the entire Lean
In movement as much as I have, whether you are male or female. Suddenly I
feel a responsibility, as a feminist, as a woman, AS A HUMAN BEING, to be
accountable for our everyday working lives- after all, we’re there so bloody
much- and to tell you all how very wrong I originally was about this woman’s intentions,
and how very right they are for all of us.

We don’t
have to act like men to see a shift in values, but we do have to step up
alongside them, with them, to shift
the career landscape and our value system all
together, for everyone.

There’s
going to be a workplace revolution, and I, for one, want a piece of it.

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