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1. Just to caveat on @scottjstephens' brilliant thread on military sexism (sorry Scott, couldn't help it), here's my own on countering sexism in the mostly male world of hospitality. I've managed at levels from 60-seat trattoria to 800-room hotel F&B dept, I know whereof I speak.
2. First, let's call sexism what it actually is in the workplace: a fucking cancer that, like the real thing, needs to be excised & discarded. Let me also admit that I was, early in my career, just as guilty of it as any of my male peers.
3. My industry has had to be dragged kicking & screaming into the modern era of gender relations, a fight I've witnessed firsthand, but one in which I'm proud to have been a bit player. What the boys used to say in the privacy of a service station nook, thankfully, now isn't.
4. As a manager who has always seen himself as a leader, I realized that I needed to model my behavior on what I felt my employees & subordinate managers deserved. It wasn't all that different from my former life as a soldier, I found. You're onstage, everyone is watching.
5. In the early 00's, I had a woman start as a manager. Our shared office was full of the off-color comments you'd expect from men not used to working alongside women. I'm not proud of having taken part in this, but with the new manager's arrival, we had no choice but to change.
6. I don't remember precisely when that mental switch flipped, but I needed for the new manager to not just feel safe from harassment, but also feel like a valued member of the team. I knew instantly that I'd get pushback from E: nice guy, ok manager, but an absolute meathead.
7. Sure enough, during her very first week, E made a comment about her ass. Sure, let's forget that she graduated from Cornell's hotel school & had also interned at the 4-star hotel down the street. And God bless this young lady, she shot back. "Nice man tits, E."
8. Part of me felt like I'd failed, as I hadn't prevented E from being E. Part of me admired her (whom I'll call R) moxie. She was hardly a shrinking violet who needed to be protected, but I still hadn't finished setting the conditions for zero tolerance of harassment.
9. E found another job within a month &, typically, only gave a week's notice. We ran into each other 2-3 times over the years, then he dropped off the face of the planet. I heard later that E job-hopped almost yearly for a decade, then was fired for sexual harassment.
10. I left 6 months after E, because the company's willful blindness to sexism extended to racism. "Danny, you know we can never promote you because you're not Irish." I'm not? Why didn't anyone tell me? And don't call me Danny. Or my favorite, "Orientals don't work in wine."
11. You don't have to be an ally - indeed, that term didn't even exist 20 years ago. Just be a good human being who won't hesitate to bring the scunion if the women on your team don't feel like equal & valued partners.
12. A hostess working for me had never heard of an open-door policy, so I had to explain it to her during her orientation. She was smart, hardworking, & for a few months, everything was fine, until she used the ODP.
13. My # 2 in the dept, a guy I'd vouched for earlier that year with the company's senior leadership, had been making lewd comments to her for weeks, always when no one was within earshot. My *entire* host team confirmed that behavior from my XO, directed at them as well.
14. HR told me it was my decision, so I made a decision. I sat him down & fired him, based on my investigation. He broke into tears & appealed to our personal friendship. I said you should've considered our friendship before you harassed an entire dept in the restaurant.
15. That was a professional & personal watershed moment for me, because I felt like I'd finally achieved the conditions I'd tried to set when R started working with me 10 years before. The women on the F&B team knew definitively that I had their backs. Not being a douche is easy.
16. I've taken that zero-tolerance mindset to every stop in my career the last 12 years, even going so far as pulling out of an ownership stake in a restaurant when my business partner outed himself as a sexist asshole. Expensive lesson learned: vet your business partner.
17. In my current role, I'm happy as a pig in slop that I'm not a lone voice in the wilderness w/r/t equal treatment of women on our team. Because it is a team, regardless of race or gender or anything else.
18. My advice for any new employee, male or female, is: don't be an asshole. Trash talking at work is one thing, & is damn near a tradition in hospitality. But don't let me even suspect that the trash talking crosses the line into harassment. Zero tolerance.
19. 2 movie lines:
Be excellent to each other.
Here endeth the lesson.
Be excellent to each other.
Here endeth the lesson.
