Big Brother's Red Witch, Martha, MAFS, and women at work
Why the battle of the sexes isn't something to ignore
Hello!
Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.
My cats (Nigel and Juniper) wake me up at 5am without fail every morning, including weekends. The one diversion to this was two weeks ago where they didn’t wake me up, and I had relied on them as an alarm so much that I’d turned off my actual alarm clock. I overslept to 7am and had 30 mins to get ready for work, which I only just achieved. My alarm clock is now turned back on.
I digress.
It was at 5:15am last Sunday that I remembered some amazing Christmas tea I’d had at a bougie friend’s house a few years before, and remembered it was from Fortnum and Mason.
Before I knew it, it was 5:30am and I’d not only bought the tea but also their tea advent calendar. It was a bougie move. But I figure that having nice tea to drink through the day at work will make work more enjoyable, and will power me through the dark afternoons.
I’d love to know what other bougie treats people have in their work toolkit. Please do comment, or reply and let me know, and I will share them in the next newsletter so we can all be a little more bougie at work.
Recently, I have been watching Big Brother - yes, it’s back (second year running on ITVX). The week before last was the finale, and we saw the housemates whittled down to two very opposing characters - Ali and Marcello.
Ali is a neurodiverse, gay millennial with a strong sense of justice. As a psychologist, she analysed a lot of the happenings in the house, and made a bad name for herself early on by labelling a young guy as fake. About midway through the series, other housemates ganged up on her, labelling her as a “red witch” and working together to try to vote her out each week.
Marcello is a “lad”, openly says how much he loves women and craves their attention. He says offensive things from time to time, including when he had told a female housemate that she smells like she’s on her period. On leaving, another housemate had said Marcello had said homophobic things too, but we didn’t see evidence of this in the 45 min episodes. He clashed with Ali early on, saying that she policed what he was saying, making him feel uncomfortable.
When the vote percentages were released it was clear Ali won by a lot, but in the moment when it was an outspoken woman with strong morals vs an outspoken man who wants to be free to speak his mind, I wasn’t sure which one would win. It was pleasantly surprising that so many people were standing with Ali.
I get that Big Brother isn’t the massive show it once was. I remember back in 2002 at my Friday night youth group we’d huddle around someone’s Nokia waiting for their mum to text them who had been evicted. But now, I’m not even sure of the demographic that watches; it’s nowhere near Love Island, but when I asked colleagues if anyone is watching, the only other person was a gen z woman. It was interesting to see the difference between the fans on Facebook (who backed Marcello) and the fans on Reddit (who were varied, but mostly supported Ali).
Social experiment shows like this are an important part of observing and learning what social norms are. That Ali was able to win over Marcello suggests that despite gen z being more conservative as time goes on, there is still a space for an autistic, gay woman who “polices” conversations to come out on top.
Another big event in the reality tv calendar is “MAFS” (Married at First Sight) of which there are Australian, UK and US versions. The UK version this year had a couple of “plus sized” (ie size 14) women paired with men who refused to consider women of that size.
MAFS is picked up on TikTok and Instagram much more than Big Brother (suggesting a younger demographic viewing it) and I saw a lot of talk about people reporting the show to Ofcom for the cruelty it showed the women, forcing them to be with men who put them down all the time. Many people (including my gen z sister) just dropped the show all together. The social norm that was being communicated in the show was that women who are of that size or larger aren’t attractive.
At the same time, the whole “trad wife” movement is still, well, moving, with dating app Bumble reporting that singles are thinking about their futures when they consider who to date:
There’s still this push/pull of [Barbie voice] “You can be anything you want to be!” while also living through a job market where another week of redundancies go by, and having to be grateful to just have a job let alone something you feel fulfilled by.
It seems that actually, in 2024, you can’t be anything you want to be, so why not give up on work and marry well?
I happened to watch the new documentary about the OG trad wife influencer Martha Stewart this week, and was surprised at how little I really knew about her.
I guess it’s not a shock that she is awful to work with - many successful women around that age have had to be aggressive and unpleasant in order to get to where they are. I was speaking with a friend recently who just quit working for a female-lead start up, following the owner yelling and screaming down the phone at her. There are women out there who are so celebrated externally for being brilliant entrepreneurs, but behind closed doors are horrendous to work with. While it is very true that women are held to a standard of character that many men do not get measured by, anecdotally, while I have worked with challenging men, it’s women I’ve worked with who do things like yell, give the silent treatment, and go for the emotional jugular. Is this what it takes to be successful as a woman?
But the thing that made people so wound up about Martha Stewart is that she portrayed such a perfect trad wife image, while being a very successful businesswoman. On the face of it, she had it all, and people wanted to bring her down. It’s incredible that still to this day she’s unable to be CEO of her own company.
She’s still celebrated, though, and is accessing a new generation of fans through her TikTok account.
That she still maintains a level of grace while sharing home making skills allows her to stay popular. Women are still valuable as long as you see them being ladylike, and they maintain lady skills. The documentary has literal footage of her being awful to people who work for her. But it’s OK, because she is a lady.
The last point to touch upon with this is the role of the single, childless woman. While 11th November is Remembrance day, it’s also singles day in Asia [Wiki], and I had considered using the occasion to write a LinkedIn post about what it’s like as a single woman in the working world.
You may not think single life is anything different to the lives of anyone else. The gender pay gap (which actually went up this year [Fawcett Society], meaning that women are “working for free” from 20th November until the rest of the year) means that it’s much harder to afford to live alone as a woman. When it seemed that our singles 25% council tax discount was to be taken away recently (thank goodness it wasn’t), I grumbled to a friend about how hard it can be to live alone. As a fellow singleton, she said that living alone as a woman is a privilege and no one said it’d be easy. We are pretty much the first generation of women who can live alone freely - own our own homes, have bank accounts without male guarantors etc.
But should we be sitting back and accepting things as they are, just because we have things better than women have had before?
I often wonder how much of my single and childlessness state affects how I’m seen at work. Whether you have kids or not is one of the first thing people ask, and in fact I remember one intro call with a new male leader where literally (I mean literally) the first thing he asked as he appeared on the Teams call was whether I had kids.
If people think that I am currently childless but would like one soon (I am 38…tick tock tick tock) then that is very detrimental to a career (“oh don’t promote her, she’ll go off on maternity soon!”) but equally, that I don’t have children and don’t want children, does that mean that I am seen as unqualified to be a leader? That I don’t know how to run a home, raise a child and hold down a job, does that make me any less? I do wonder sometimes.
All of this is to say that it’s really hard to know where women stand right now. People support us when we are outspoken, and it’s OK to still be mean to people at work so long as we’re a leader. More of us are looking for traditional relationships in order to escape the corporate hellscape, but good luck in finding a man if you’re large. If you reject all that to focus on a career, then you’re taking a challenging path, and one where people may still judge you harshly.
I think it’s important for us to understand the messages being given to women, especially their effect on workplace culture. While I personally feel so much better mentally working on site five days a week, the move to less flexibility does negatively affect women more, will make the likelihood of “having it all” much reduced, potentially pushing women to trad wife scenarios where they can focus on the home without work.
The Ali/Marcello type conflicts will intensify especially as companies reduce costs by removing their DEI teams. While you could argue that DEI and the work to create inclusive workplaces is everyone’s responsibility, it does take experienced professionals to navigate the “but I want to say what I want” with the “but what you say is offensive”.
The knock-on effect to men, who are untrusting of women, feeling they’re only after their money, and untrusting of HR processes, feeling that they’re being discriminated against for not having protected characteristics. As this resentment and anger bubbles up, more right wing movements will grow. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of leaders gen z will be when they get there.
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While this may come across as a “WoMEn iN MeDIA” essay written by an A Level student, I really do think we’re at an important moment in time for gender. It’s a time in which women can do so much and yet so little still.
A lot of what I’ve written has been anecdotal, and so if there is a guy out there who would like to collaborate with me on a similar post discussing what it’s like to be a man in 2024, I’d really love that. It’s not hard to pull together a bunch of headlines to create a narrative, but it’s the personal experiences that makes a piece of writing worth reading.
Links
Threads
I loved this thread about 1:1s, and how to do them well both as a manager and an employee. I think this part of explaining how work works is missing from careers education. Nintendo was my first corporate experience, and they had NONE of this kind of structure, it was very much “here’s the work, get on with it”. I look back on that time and while I had a lot of growth to do, I think if I’d understood more about how work is structured, like how managers should have 1:1s with people, and how feedback is given and received, I would have settled there much better.
Substack
Bruce comes in with a blinder again breaking down the recently published Gartner research around young people in the workplace, and making a compelling case for more work to be done around preparing young people for the world of work:
I also really enjoyed Infinite Scroll’s recent newsletter, which reports on gender topics following the recent US election, and also includes a (quite hilarious) segment where a man goes into workplaces and reads out anonymous feedback to bad bosses. Worth a read!
TikTok
This week’s career video is this fab snippet about Phyllis, an auctioneer at Slothbys. I love the focus she has on how hard she’s worked to get to where she is.
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Social Media Theme of the Week
OK you’re going to have to jump on this quickly as it’s going cold.
This trend, set to sad violins, uses the outward camera on the phone, with some text expressing an opinion, but then “accidentally” switches to the front facing camera to reveal the author. It’ll make sense when you see it.
It started as just a thing related to pets:
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But in the last 10 days or so, it’s moved to humans, with some hilarious examples. I think my favourite is this one:
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But I very much enjoyed “fracking/ Ru Paul”, “Support LibDems more”, “Santa/Rudolph” and “Tim the best server”.
How to use this idea: “people should appreciate ____ team more and give them biscuits - cut to that team”, “the canteen food is deffo better than local restaurants - cut to the canteen staff”, and if you’re spicy perhaps you could have the cleaners do one about “let’s all make sure we clean our cups up properly!”
As always, if you use these ideas please let me know! I’d love to see them in action!
Have a great week ahead everyone!
Until next week,
Charlotte