Being mistaken for the PA

[BingBoings]

Twice this week I have been in email chains, where I have been asked to supply dates for a meeting.

The reason for this has in both cases, I assume, is that I am the only female name in the thread.

Both situations have seen large numbers of clients and colleagues copied in on emails where… I am asked if I can help give times when my male colleagues are free. I am usually senior to them.

Am I the only person this happens to? I find it half hilarious, and half embarrassing… A few months ago I was asked in a meeting if I could do coffees when I walked in…

i have no issue with managing my own diary nor is there any issue with being a PA… it’s more that I don’t see men having this issue…!

This is so eye opening and shocking. Some good advice on how to handle it.

why doesn’t this get picked up by the media
oh 😲 wait ….

Exactly, that’s the everyday sexism portion of her OP.
The asking you or your PA to set the date because you are most senior isn’t the sexist bit.

True, my response is usually 'this isn't the 1950s, you can find the kitchen/photocopier here'.

In the instance of being asked for someone else's availability I would just responds with 'we manage our own diaries, so X will come back with their availability' (unless it's a meeting I'll be in, in which case I would go back with my own availability and ask everyone else to confirm their own)

I’m a foreiner from a tropical country where the women are usually seen by tourists as sex objects.

In my last job as a TA at a primary school, we moved to a new building - there was a male inspector (not ofsted) coming and the female headteacher said in a brief meeting in front of everybody:

“maybe PositiveIntelligence can give him a tour of the building and distract him with her exotic looks and accent to make sure he doesn’t pay attention to what is not working properly”

This is a woman who prides herself in being progressive and feminist

All of the staff in the meeting were females and they though it was hilarious, no one challenged it.

I was shocked but managed to say:

“I will have to check my contract firts to see if this fits with my job role, I don’t remember signing up for this”

I wish I had come back with something a lot better but in the heat of the moment, that was the best I could do.
Some people told me I was too harsh and should have taken as a compliment 🙀

Now I work in a completely different profession which is mainly male dominated but luckly enough the majority of the SLT are females and I’ve not come accross any mysogeny yet.

When I first got together with him, my DH was telling me what he had on that day and mentioned a meeting with a "woman solicitor" I took the piss so relentlessly I've never heard him do it again. It's weird isn't it? In his defence, we are older but Christ! Not so old that "lady doctors/solicitors/accountants were a an exotic in our youth.

Now I'm remembering all the times a skill like touch typing is misconstrued. I taught myself to touch type as a kid in the 80's, on the family ZX Spectrum, the better to play games and code. (I'd put my head round the door of the school secretarial classroom, got the heebie jeebies, and ran.) Sheer instinct told me it would be useful. And it was, years later, doing research, when I could immerse myself in a problem and emerge hours later with screenfuls of code and a solution, and no clear memory of how it got there. However this deftness of fingers does not magically make me well-qualified for general secretarial tasks, any more than it does for mechanics or surgery.

At the grand old age of 54, I have seen and heard all of this in the male dominated industries I have worked in - Construction, engineering and manufacturing.

I generally laugh it off, but I have put so many men in their place. Sometimes politely, sometimes with a smile and other times we a blatant ‘sod off.

One company I worked at, we had an old dinosaur of a Finance Director, who walked into a meeting, looked directly at me (only woman in the room) and asked ‘where’s the coffee’. I smiled and said ‘it’s in the kitchen and mine is milk and a sugar, thanks’. He was very pissed off, but went and made a brew. Never asked me again.

Another meeting and the COO (who I got on really well with and described me as ‘mad as a box of frogs’ swore (said fuck) and then apologised to me directly (again, the only woman in the room). I think I responded with something like ‘Don’t fucking worry about it Steve, what’s the next agenda item?’ The whole room cracked up laughing, as the COO told me to fuck off and smiled. We still laugh about it to this day.

Some things can be dealt with, with humour and other people just need telling.

If OP doesn’t have any admin staff, she might be most “senior” as in longest time on the job, but not highest rank/position or even manager of her “male colleagues” ifykwim.

Not necessarily, I work in a big Corporate and even though we have admins their role no longer includes diary management, as they have too much else to do and it is expected that people manage their own diaries. The only exception is the CEO

I know someone who joined her Dad's company and found there was a tea rota. Only women on the rota. So the female finance director had to stop what she was doing to make the tea, but the Saturday-boy on the trade counter didn't . That lasted a day once my friend found out!

Yes that absolutely makes sense, but the OP is being asked for dates that other (male) people are free, not when she is

I disagree. A lot of posters are looking down on roles that are often carried out by women - no reason to be automatically offended by the mistake otherwise, as to be offended reinforces the prejudice towards the role. If you viewed the ability to co-ordinate projects and meetings effectively as a great skill, you might be more pleased to be assumed to be capable of getting everyone together in the right place, at the right time, with appropriate refreshments provided, so that nobody has to waste time getting coffee at the last minute. Some people seem to take a weird sort of pride in being incapable of organising anything properly.

I've only read the OP so I may have missed something, but that says she was asked to provide dates for a meeting.

From the OP

Both situations have seen large numbers of clients and colleagues copied in on emails where… I am asked if I can help give times when my male colleagues are free. I am usually senior to them.

I did a weekend training event where external trainers came in to our office. Those of us on the course were two women and about 12 men. The boss had organised sandwiches to be collected - we should have had a junior admin dealing with it but he called in sick. On the Saturday morning when the training providers (both men) came in, they asked me and the other woman to sort out coffee. We raised an eyebrow and two of the men jumped up to help. At lunchtime, they stopped the two of us ten minutes early so that we could go and collect the sandwiches. And then just to put the cherry on the cake, at the end of the day when we were all given individual feedback, the men got told what they could do to improve their performance and we got "TheodoreMortlock and "Katie," could you make sure there are pastries for the welcome session tomorrow morning, we'd like pastries with our coffee."

We made a complaint but nothing ever came of it.

Any organisation where people have to make a stab in the dark at who to talk to to organise anything must be getting something wrong. Sounds like a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth and not enough effective leadership and co-ordination! In any massive email chain, I would direct requests to co-ordinate meetings to the person who sounded most in charge of the situation.

Depressingly as a young solicitor some of the older PAs had a serious internalised misogyny thing going on and were vocal that they preferred working for the older men. The dynamic with us younger woman was awkward.

Best I had was a super handsome young male pa who was a law graduate temping but he embarked on a passionate affair with my older married female senior colleague and it all got rather messy.

I'm finding it baffling that no-one is looping in their PA/EAs properly in these email exchanges.

I'm an EA. My boss is asked for meeting times, he replies, cc'ing me with 'my colleague Tribollite will help with scheduling'. The client responds with their calenldy, cc's their PA or waits for me to suggest dates. No drama.

I'm also finding the undertone towards PAs on this thread pretty offensive. I'm in my 50s, and had years of being treated like dirt by both men and women. Times have changed and like other PAs on this thread I don't get coffees, take minutes only when it's my turn, and don't book meeting rooms. I do take on projects, strategy and analysis as well as arranging meetings for two senior people. I get a lot of respect from my team and boss but with each new starter it feels like an uphill struggle to make it clear to them I'm not their dogsbody, as that is their default attitude, rather than asking what my role actually entails.

Ok, I'll hold my hands up. I missed that. That is offensive. We might ask the most senior person on the email chain for dates for a meeting. We would never ask them for times when their colleagues are free.

Mumsnet is all women, right? I must confess that I committed the faux pas myself - telling a lecturer that I was happy that they had let her off to attend - only to find out she was the main speaker (we are talking podium here!) at the launch of sth or other (this is not the UN, but some librarian thing at the Metro/North London uni (don't know what they call themselves now). NEVER volunteer to do anything in front of men. Alas, I must observe that young ones are no better (unless they suss out that they will get into trouble if they start to behave like a version of the male characters in Industry). Funny at one uni even the German BF/soon to be a failed husband felt he had the right to boss women about "by proxy" (all done in a leftie/liberal context, which made it all the more pathetic).

But admin roles are inherently less valued.

I value the people who do admin roles.

I value the role, in that it needs to exist and performs a necessary function.

But it is much easier for me to fill an admin role than a senior leadership role, because many more people are able to do the job. It is a more common / less rare / easier to learn skill set.

In my last role, I was expected to chair meetings and take the minutes simultaneously, as well as take an active part in the discussion. It was tricky, to say the least!

Morning. Wow this thread has been busy.

Lots of interesting perspectives on this thread so far, but none that really change the fundamentals. Little-minded people seem obsessed with job titles, email signatures, and who makes who a coffee. They are easily outraged by every anecdotal instance where assumptions have been incorrectly made, and see everything as a systemic problem. The real rainmakers know that a person's value isn't defined by such trivialities. They are relaxed about it when it happens to them because they know their worth, and it doesn't change based on a job title or who makes the coffee.

Best illustration of this? The story about the Queen and her protection officer meeting American tourists out in Balmoral. They asked her if she'd ever met the Queen and she replied no, but Dick (her protection officer that day) saw her all the time. They then asked her to take a photograph of them with him. Do you think she spent that evening on MN furiously posting about misogyny? Of course not ... because she was an actual Queen! She found it hilarious, and that's exactly what that story is - a funny anecdote about mistaken identity. Real Queens don't care. Nor do Kings. Little people seethe and fume - but really it's a sign of their frustration about their own precarious insignificance - and everyone else in room knows it.

Yeah but it gets abit old if for hundreds of years it is one group that is always somehow “the little people “…

Not actually true - the mess this country is in is indicative of the fact that far too few people have any administrative competence whatsoever. It’s only easy to fill admin roles because they are looked down on, so expectations are low and generally not met, not because anyone can do them. 🤣

Riiiight, Mark. The King never had an issue with his pen.

Your point is neither relevant, nor insightful.

A few years ago, when I was working in the printing industry I was sent to a printer manufacturer to demo a machine to help us decide whether to buy it. It was a massive large format thing. The boss sent his dad with me as a chaperone because he was anxious sending me alone into a male dominated environment. The technicians and sales person kept speaking to his dad until eventually he said, I don't know why you're talking to me. I know nothing about printers. She's the gaffer. We used to get the same every time we had visitors to the company. They would talk to me like I was a minion and then get very flustered when it was explained to them that I was the lead. It was always men.