I'm me and I have a personal hypothesis that people deal with people as individuals and I struggle with that public-personal divide, which is a theme of this blog.
I personally believe that a large part of the so-called glass ceiling is that women need to navigate establishing trust under circumstances where trust is equally important for either doing business or pursuing romance and it will often not be clear which is the case and it's nigh impossible to do all of the following at the same time:
1. Establish trust, which is ALWAYS personal.
2. Make it crystal clear this is a business relationship, not romance.
3. Do both of those without offending someone, unintentionally embarrassing them or otherwise engaging in some unforgivable gaff that will ruin the whole thing and which will close doors in your face that will never ever ever open again no matter what you do because bringing up the real reason he's hurt amounts to digging your grave deeper.
I feel like I pulled this off exactly ONCE and had I stayed at Aflac, the man in question would have proven to be an ally helping further my career -- so long as his wife didn't die or divorce him, in which case I suspect he would have asked me out and then the whole thing would have fallen apart.
I am a former military wife and I used to attend military events, including balls, where making conversation with officers and their wives sometimes happened. I'm not particularly intimidated by someone's rank.
To me, it's a matter of diplomacy that you are polite and chatty with important people in such situations and don't make them feel socially excluded or something. This seems to be unusual behavior which I don't understand, but other people have reacted weirdly to me being comfortable talking casually with such people.
When I first started working at Aflac, my desk was like three rows down from some man's office and it was my first full-time paid job and I was extremely ill. I didn't think about the fact that him having an office was significant and implied he was one of the highest ranking people in the department.
Aflac is headquartered in the Deep South, he was a Southern gentleman and extremely polite and he never did anything to signal to me that I was merely a lackey in his eyes. For a time, we passed each other frequently simply because I sat close to his office and he was always very cordial and said "Hi" and sometimes made small talk.
The department had grown and Aflac was doing well and built a two-story addition to the one-story building and moved our department to this larger space, which put his office and my cubicle on different floors and I stopped passing him frequently and eventually figured out he was a VIP.
When we worked overtime on Saturday, the cafeteria wasn't open, there were no eateries nearby and I had no car. They routinely brought in pizza for the department and fed you lunch for free if you stayed x number of hours.
So one day on a Saturday working overtime, I went to the break room to eat and all the tables were slap full except one. This man was sitting by himself because he outranked everyone.
I needed to eat. I have a medical condition. I couldn't put it off and he had always been polite to ME and he wasn't actually my boss. He was in charge of the other half of the department.
So I asked him if I could sit with him and we made polite small talk. He said my microwave meal smelled good and I said it was kind of false advertising because it smelled WONDERFUL but only tasted so so.
After that, if he ran into me, he was more comfortable talking with me. I wasn't weird about his high rank when I sat with him and no one else was even willing to sit with him that day.
I was happy to talk with him. I'm chatty anyway. But at some point I realized he would probably asked me for a date if he ever ended up single because it's lonely at the top and most people were very cold to him at work, uncomfortably aware of the power he wielded, so my warmth towards him was an anomaly even though I wasn't trying to be anything but diplomatic and my ideas about that are out of step with the norm.
And I realized that, at least in theory, I would say yes if he asked me for a date because at some point I realized he's not the uptight Christian I thought he was, no, he's merely at least a decade older than I first thought -- so his body language is conservative because he reserves his energy for working -- and when we ate at the same table he said he eats microwave meals sometimes when his wife travels.
I'm absolutely certain he wasn't trying to flirt with me and that he had no idea that remark would make a big impression on me, but my father and ex husband believed women should be chained to the stove and my ex husband objected to me traveling and claimed I was trying to destroy the marriage when I wanted to do anything that didn't have me at his beck and call when he was at home.
I could travel freely when HE was gone for HIS job, and otherwise I needed to be at home making his dinner while he was too much of an ass to CALL me and inform me he would be home late while I wondered if he was dead in a ditch somewhere because he had eight car accidents one year, and never mind he doesn't DRINK.
So that casual remark told me his wife had a life and she wasn't treated like chattel property, unlike my marriage.
Thus IN THEORY, I would have dated a man who treated women like human beings and looked damn good for his age, whatever the hell that age was, which I never actually learned.
In practice, I probably would have had to awkwardly explain that "Oh, I'm really quite ill and CELIBATE for medical reasons. Oops. Sorry."
And then one day I came into work and someone's desk was being cleaned out. There's a backstory there where I got quietly moved when he took over my team because I spoke with my boss about the fact that this man had begun calling me "doll" and such and my boss wanted to out him in an ugly way and I said "He's done nothing wrong so far. Just talk to him and worst case scenario, I get moved and never work for him."
So the rumor mill had it that he either had an illicit affair with a coworker or was sexually harassing someone and I found either possibility extremely credible. I was trying to not dance in the aisles while the entire department had a funerary atmosphere.
Two days after this man's desk was cleaned out, they called an impromptu department meeting. It was a department of about five hundred people and they were like "Let's all gather in the two story area where the stairs are for like fifteen minutes to cover something technical that's come up."
I was quite ill while working at Aflac, I was not telling people that and the factory across the street was spewing something into the air that day. I was red faced in reaction to that and not really able to coherently speak, which normally my job didn't require me to talk so most people had no idea I sometimes just couldn't manage to string a coherent sentence together.
And here comes Mr. Big, making a beeline for me and obviously happy to see me, ready to enthusiastically say HI to me and I'm like "Good lord, people are going to think I'm blushing and stammering because I'm sweet on him and I can't credibly deny that because I would, in fact, date the man if given the opportunity AND the ENTIRE department is STILL in shock over this recent scandal. This is THE WORST timing."
So I turned aside slightly. Without missing a beat, he kept walking and said nothing to me.
But now I had a new problem: I would never have any opportunity to explain why I didn't wish to talk to him that day and he would be wondering if he had offended me, etc. Because normally I was very friendly and he was probably looking forward to talking to me precisely because the firing had just happened and everyone was stressed out.
I have nerve damage to one side of my face and at the time had trouble smiling intentionally but I made a point of smiling at him the next time I passed him in the hall. He made polite noises at me and I felt like that was resolved and he knew things were fine between us and my reasons for not wanting to talk to him had nothing to do with being offended or angry etc.
After that, he was very professional in departmental meetings and didn't let on that I was anyone in any way close to him, because I had an entry level job and never worked with him, so it was an oddity and I didn't want there to be talk that would put him in an awkward position even though nothing was going on romantically between us. We continued to be chatty if there were fewer than five hundred people around.
I later won a departmental award for updating some reference sheet and making it more useful and was told it would go up on the department intranet so people could access it. I don't remember how long I waited without seeing it on the intranet before I began asking around but I spent two weeks trying to find out how something gets added to the intranet and no one seemed to know.
So I passed him in the hall one day and he stopped because he realized I wanted to talk to him but I was really not together that day and didn't know how to flag him down, so that conversation wouldn't have happened at all if I weren't already on good terms with him.
I explained the situation and he told me to email him and I did so and left out important details and he copied his secretary and made it clear he had told me to email him, I wasn't doing something wrong, and told her to see to it that it got handled.
Responsibility for updating the information on my color-coded reference sheet was assigned to someone higher ranking than me. She replaced the color coding with a jarring black background the first time she updated information on it.
Whatever. Not my problem. These people had no respect for my training in GIS which is where I learned how to make things legible, use color effectively to help you readily navigate it, etc.
Anyway, I arranged an old fashioned handwritten dead tree thank you note for him and had both her and I sign it and made sure SHE delivered it so there was no appearance of impropriety while making sure he knew I appreciated him making that happen for me.
Had I stayed at the company, I felt clear that being on good terms with him would help my career.
Unless his wife died and I got my MRS because while he was never in my chain of command and therefore wasn't forbidden from dating or marrying me, his position in the department was so high that dating an entry level employee in the same department would have been awkward socially for everyone in the department and the company likely would have encouraged us to find a solution to that situation.
How you catch that kind of lightning in a bottle a second time, I have no clue. I suspect most women don't even see this as an issue and it's likely a giant stumbling block holding back a lot of women while everyone acts like I just Have Issues when I try to talk about such things online.
Footnote
I've told some version of this story before elsewhere. The last time I went looking for it, I couldn't find it. It's possible I'm misremembering what I titled it at that time.