Career women skirt traditional gender traps

Career women skirt traditional gender traps

By Yogita Tahil Ramani

JAKARTA (JP): Living true to their nurturer trademark, some
career women take pride in exercising their soft skills as
mediators and whispering important tidbits into the right ears.
The irony? Men are still the ones seated in the tall, cushioned
seats.

Women in the workplace, an issue as feminist-oriented as
Madonna opting for the garb of a nun, was the topic of a recent
seminar held at the Regent Hotel, Jakarta. It hardly had the
sensationalistic edge of the Material Girl draped in vestal-
virgin garb, but the noteworthy gist of each talk given did
enough to garner the complete attention of every woman and man
attending the seminar.

Women's magazine Femina and Vaseline jostled to put together
the enlightening working women's seminar-and-fashion-show package
on behavioral tactics and professionalism in a man's world.

Speakers were Hermawan Kertajaya, entrepreneur and economy
columnist of Gatra and Swa Sembada magazines; Eileen Rachman,
director of human resources consultancy firm EXPERD and Femina's
career-column consultant; and Irma Hardisurya, who is a color and
fashion expert, Miss Indonesia 1969, as well as Femina's beauty
and fashion columnist. Astronomy graduate from the Bandung
Institute of Technology, Karlina Leksono, was the moderator.

Talkative charmers armed with company-profiting ammunition,
some office women partake in every meeting possible with
intentions to smoothen conflicts and critical creases marring a
company's image or profiting potential, Eileen said.

Some wait for the right time -- they consider it thoughtlessly
selfish to voice opinions when another is being frequently
suggested. Some are ridiculously pessimistic about people
accepting their suggestions. Others believe in procrastinating
for quality work.

Then there is the matter of tact, and being brutally blunt,
even as others resort to being callously cruel in the name of
efficacy. Another option is the adoption of a self-prioritizing
defense mechanism -- women pull out all the stops when their
words are challenged or a threat is seemingly around the corner.

"Most of them have the best in mind for the company. Promotion
however, eludes them," Eileen said on interpersonal relations.

The talk given by Eileen on the working-environment-and-
interpersonal-relation nexus alongside the crucial need for
assertive behavior, was both informative and broad-based.

Personal instances, even insightful anecdotes, were injected
into the lecture on adopting assertive attitudes. Eileen
emphasized on conveying thoughts, ideas and opinion with tact,
confidence and a professionalism that edges on educated risk-
taking and constructive criticism, rather than unnecessary
apprehension.

It would be no surprise should most of the seminar
participants claim to having thought the familiar expression "it
takes a man to know a woman" (or something along those lines)
during the talk of Hermawan Kertajaya.

He began with the old tale of office ladies trudging through
life, faultlessly living up to all expectations and never getting
anywhere. Hermawan stressed initiative being the career woman's
middle name, as work was multifaceted and required an extensive
range of behaviors -- maintaining a single role alone was a very
short-sighted view of advancing a career.

Perceptively witty and biting remarks were not lost on the
audience, as they chortled through his husband-wife "customer-
retention" theory and candid expressions like "young guys are
forever promising and never delivering, older guys never promise,
but always deliver".

Laughable quotations by famed author John Gray and funny
anecdotes of two differing worlds -- pragmatic men were from Mars
and honest-to-goodness women from Venus -- had the audience in
laughing tatters.

Hermawan defined segmentation -- targeting and positioning as
zeroing in on strengths -- as working towards the noted aim and
devoting undivided attention to it. In a sentence, being
dynamically different is a characteristic of indispensability. He
added that researching backgrounds of competitors was crucial for
making the needed revisions to career paths.

Irma Hardisurya was focused. She spoke of the right
fashionable style. She elaborated on each piece of clothing with
such ease and alacrity, everything on the walking closet seemed
like office-wearable chemises.

"As many women prefer fitting into what is in, the trick is
not straddling, but finding a balance between fitting in and
revealing one's individuality," she said.

Question-answer sessions were a little dreary, except one
question by a female reporter trying to find the right clothing
answer for a closed-room meeting and a boat ride down a river.

"I really don't know how to fit in both schedules in the same
clothes," sighed the middle-aged Suara Pembaruan reporter.

The recommendations may be seen in the brightest light once
applied practically. Quantum leaps of demure fashion, knife-
gutting instincts and professionalism are well on their way in
this era twinning feminism and masochism. Just as footwear befits
the new woman of the 1990s -- they look deadly, but fit like
athletic shoes.