Member-only story
WOMEN AT WORK—SEPTEMBER 19 WRITING PROMPT
Give as Good as You Get, Get as Good as You Give
“What career advice would you give your 16-year-old self?”
First, I would tell my fifteen-year-old self to knee her boss in the groin even harder and to tell anyone who would listen what he had tried to do. That it wasn’t mature or noble to pass a workplace problem on to other women by “dealing with it” alone and that, 40 years on, she might wonder if he had ever abused the daughters she thought that she was protecting, hiding from them the knowledge their father was a would-be sexual assailant of a girl he well knew to be a minor. Odds are, if someone is a “problematic” co-worker, you’re not the only one having a problem. It is everyone’s responsibility to deal with problems appropriately before they affect others and damage the business, too.
Second, I would tell my younger self not to be too grateful for every “opportunity” but to know her worth. Specific education, experience, and qualifications notwithstanding, to ask others what they earned in similar positions and to demand raises commensurate with that if she did the job well. Sister Maria says, in “The Sound of Music,” that “when the Lord closes a door, somewhere, He opens a window.” Being laid off is not the end of the world; sometimes, it’s the…
