Men as office top dogs? All I see is a bunch of noisy puppies
IHAVE always enjoyed working alongside men, even at the Sunday Telegraph in the 1980s when I edited their now quaintly named women’s pages. Every day, the news editor would barrel past with his exclusively male cohort on their way to a three-hour liquid lunch, gaily chanting: ‘Women’s ghetto, women’s ghetto!’
But judging by the descriptions given at the UK Covid Inquiry last week by the British government’s former deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, about the behaviour in No10 during the pandemic crisis, working in Downing Street was truly horrendous.
WhatsApp misogyny. Untrammelled male egos. Rampaging chaos. All this certainly fitted the increasingly common phrase ‘culture of toxic masculinity’.
As yet, no man working there has publicly complained about such an environment. Did they not notice it? Didn’t it bother them? Or did they just want to keep their heads down?
It seems unreasonable to assume that all were as appalling in their attitudes as Dominic Cummings.
Of course, not all male-run offices are difficult places for women and, since most of my own working life has been within a predominantly female office environment, I’m aware that they, too, have their own cultural negatives.
When I first arrived to edit Vogue, I found myself an unwilling headmistress of a girls’ school, rife with petty feuds and rivalries.
There was always a cool girl brigade, the gang that everybody wanted to be part of while others lingered outside.
Having come from editing with a primarily male team at GQ magazine, I was stuck by how surprisingly uncollaborative and competitive with each other, women en masse could be. Years of needing to prove that they can do the job as well as anyone else no doubt takes its toll and the drive to show you are the best is fierce, no matter the collateral damage on others.
Also, women are often each other’s most stern critics. And while, particularly nowadays, they will help a junior on to the career ladder – they can ferociously guard their patch should that same junior become any kind of threat.
By contrast, my more limited experience of working with men led me to see them more like a noisy litter of puppies tumbling around the place.
Helen MacNamara pointed out that little attention was paid to how women could juggle the dual roles of motherhood and work. However, in an office dominated by mothers, the raw deal can fall on those without children. Prime holiday slots are grabbed by mothers and while nobody objects to a person taking time off for a sick child or sports day, the same latitude is not extended to non-parents wanting an occasional afternoon off.
Tis a far greater ‘bighave’ and ‘have-not’ issue than salary differences. I’m sure that while no female-dominated offices treat male colleagues in a similar misogynist, patronising and sometimes abusive way as some men treat women, it cannot be denied that women frequently consider their male colleagues as if they were like a classroom of small children.
Needing to have a watchful eye kept on them as they rush recklessly into things. Revealingly, this is a view of life that sees male colleagues, in general, as just not really as good as us.