Do you remember Flo from Mel’s Diner? If I ordered a greasy breakfast at Mel’s and while taking my order Flo called me “honey” that would be just fine by me. Because she called everyone honey. But if I’m at one of the nicest restaurants in town, at a table full of men, at what is clearly a professional dinner, and the waiter has addressed them all as “sir” then calls me “young lady,” we are going to have a problem. Like I’m tying back my hair, taking off my earrings, putting Vaseline on my face and street fighting you kind of problem.
And you know what? My anger at finding myself in this situation last week surprised even me. I work in a male dominated industry so little things like this happen to me all the time. Like when I call a vendor for information and they ask which broker’s office I’m calling from – assuming I’m the secretary. Or when I call for help when uploading an expense report and they ask if the expense report is for me – again assuming I’m uploading it for my male boss.
Typically I ignore these subtle biased questions. Please don’t judge. I am a harried working mother and I just don’t have time to fight every battle for equality. Shame on me, I know.
But it was almost as if the dam that I had been using to hold back all those subtle slights busted wide open in the middle of the wood-paneled steak house. So I did what any self-respecting professional woman would do in that situation and continued to smile and be civil than vented on Facebook later that night like an emotional sixteen-year-old. I found it oddly gratifying to not only vent and get it off my chest but then to engage in a war of words with people who tried to make light of the situation. Doesn’t everyone know you should never mess with an emotional sixteen-year old? I was furious with anyone who didn’t agree with me on Facebook, with the dumb waiter who called me “young lady,” but mostly at myself for losing my shit.
Then I remembered a passage from Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, where she says that almost all successful women at some point feel like they are a total fraud. I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea. And I realized that while I’m a pretty confident gal 99% of the time there is most definitely 1% of me that thinks on occasion, “do I really belong here?” And I think that at a steak house with a group of mostly men whose average age is ten to fifteen years older than me that 1% was screaming the word “fraud” loud and clear inside my head. So when the waiter, who I am certain was trying to be a nice guy, called me “young lady” all I heard was: you aren’t fooling anyone.
See, because it’s never about what other people think about you that really matters. It’s what you believe about yourself that either let’s you grow wings and fly or keeps you caged up in your own self-doubt. So the next time your nasty 1% rears its ugly head just smile and say, “not today, young lady.”
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