In recent blogs I have told you about starting a new career and about changes in office environments. One thing that has struck me recently is the absence of human resources support when sticky situations arise.

When I started my first career back in my early twenties – an era in which sexual harassment and discrimination were an employer’s worst nightmare – I was the only female in a group of men who held old-fashioned views. They knew they needed a woman in the office but struggled with how to act around one.

I was okay with that. If something off colour was said, it wasn’t due to deliberate maliciousness, it was just that they didn’t know how to deal with women at work. I had to be tough. I acted like a man and the boundaries were set. Moreover, we constantly had human resources visit our office, drilling into us what was “appropriate workplace behaviour”. Back then, in pre-GFC times, in a bull market, discrimination was considered a big issue.

All talk, not much action?

Fast forward ten years, and the spotlight is again shining on women’s place in the workforce. We all talk about females in banking, and how to have a work-life balance, but when it comes to tackling the day-to-day issues facing professional women, is human resources actually doing a good job?

A few weeks back I was called to my manager’s office. The firm had a “little problem” that needed sorting out: there was a young woman disrupting the office because she was chatting too much with colleagues to cure her loneliness, rather than doing her job.

She had been spoken to about time management but had taken this as an intrusion into her privacy and believed she had been picked on. Management felt they couldn’t get rid of her because there was now a severe shortage of women in our office. This was because management had been content to lose two amazing female staff and were too stubborn or myopic to recognise the great work they had been doing. In summary: too indifferent to lose women who excelled; too scared to lose the less competent ones.

This is not my problem: it is management’s problem

So I was asked to take time out and stay back late in order to help this young woman, giving her the attention that she wanted to make her feel good about herself. As she told me about her private life, I realised something: my manager had no training in managing human resources, nor did he know how to deal with women in the workplace. What was even worse, he didn’t want to deal with the problem: he just palmed it off onto me.

When I told my manager that that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to the woman – I didn’t want to be reprimanded later should she misinterpret my advice – he replied that, given my age, I should just deal with it in a “mature manner”.

So as I stay back every night catching up on the work I didn’t complete due to my chats with her, I can’t help but wonder: is it me who is being discriminated against and directed to take on something that no one else wanted to touch, “given my age”? I also wonder, given my successful ‘masculine’ approach to work in my early career, if men in financial services prefer dealing with women who put on a tough front. What do you think?

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