Women In The Workplace

If you are a woman and have ever worked outside of your home in any type of setting, chances are you've heard at least one horror story about how women tend to treat each other in the workplace. From gossiping to outright physical confrontations, I've heard some of the best of them. It seems that sometimes when women get into work space with other women, they revert to high school like behavior. I don't know if it's a self preservation mechanism or if it's just that those women truly failed to mentally mature beyond the age of 17, but this kind of thing happens – apparently a lot.

Four years ago I left my job of nearly 5 years where I was the only woman to go into a position where (at the time) between my two teams there were several women and only one man. (Bless his heart!) Spending my first five years of corporate life with men, I hadn't really even heard the rumors about catty women in the workplace. However, when I came to my new job and told my friends what my new situation was like, (several women and one man, all working very closely together) they ALL gave me the same warnings. Watch out for the women. Don't let anything get personal, take all your ideas straight to your boss sharing with no one along the way, don't make any female friends at work because they'll stab you in the back the second you turn around. The general consensus was that if I absolutely HAD to trust anyone at my new place of employment, it should only be the lone male on the team. I teased my friends about their lack of faith in womankind and continued on my path with my female led and supported teams and never gave it any other thought.

As the years passed, I saw what my friends meant in other divisions at my company. I saw other women lie, cheat and claw to get what they wanted and needed – even if it was only attention. Somehow, someway, when I would cross back over that imaginary line from wherever I was coming from back into my own department, I knew that the women I worked with were different. I knew that those women would have my back. It was never discussed how other women in business behaved, we were never told by our female bosses that we were to treat each other a certain way, we just did. Over the years we saw some women come and go but our core group remained in tact. We all had very different personality types. Among those, we had a cheerleader, a diva, a peacemaker, a realist, an organizer, a charmer, a comedienne, a mom, a planner, and a few that sometimes shared many traits. On most days we had no problem disagreeing and sometimes even though there was tension, at the end of the day, we were still a team. We've laughed together and cried together – with that many women you can only imagine how often we've cried together. We have been through marital and financial strain, babies, engagements, marriages, separations, illnesses and job losses. Somehow the stars had aligned and the paths of all these very different women had crossed and it worked. Most of the time it even worked well.

In four years through industry ups and downs our teams have gone from 20+ to eight. Sometime we are more like siblings, some are closer than others and of course we all have our favorites – myself included. But it seems we are a closer now than ever, as we've seen the rest of our team, taken apart by the mighty bottom line.

Thursday night, winding down an extremely hectic day (preparing for ANOTHER buyout) I went into my boss's office and knew she had been crying. I asked if there was anything she needed and she began to cry. She was told earlier in the day by her boss that I had been added to the list of countless people in our company who had already lost their jobs – there would be fifty more and I was one of them. She wasn't asked, she was told.

Friday morning at 6:45 AM tears rolling down my face, I looked around at the place I call home for some 40+ hours a week - my office. The office I had grown to love. The pictures, the funny notes and sayings that lined my collage of a corkboard and the other random things that would jog my memory of some really, truly good times I have had at work. And I cried. I cried out of fear, I have never lost my job. I cried because I am a single income household with a 14 year old daughter. I cried out of anger, I knew we were facing layoffs and sought out other employment and was offered a decent package from a global company but after the EVP of our company looked me and the rest of my team in the eyes and said he could personally guarantee each of our jobs through the end of the year, I decided to hang on until late fall for the sake of my bosses and our dwindling teams. Turns out he couldn't truly guarantee anything. I cried because as of Monday, July 9th I won't have a commute, or an office, or a job.

I cried because for four really great years, my life has been touched every single day by a group of truly amazing women.

So now there are seven…