WOMEN HELPING WOMEN
by Jill Glist, Lambent CEO
Take this with a pinch of salt, but I’d like to share my experience of women who ask me to work extra hard for them in the context of being women who like helping women. It’s a promise that is never kept. I won’t describe the time-consuming engagement, the calls, the emails, the handfuls of qualified assistants presented, the visits to their apartments, the taking them out to lunch, to dinner. Only to have them evaporate because they were busy. They never get the assistant.
Paying for women who give back nothing is men’s work. I was unprepared. And this week for fun, and because I needed it, I asked for a phone call from two of these I’m-a-woman-who-helps-women and they never even emailed back. I probably spent 20 hours heavily engaged with each of them several years ago. It’s like a friend who asks for a loan. Don’t do it. Don’t believe a woman who says she’s a woman who likes helping women. It may be part of her own fake marketing program, her own please pay it forward to me. It’s how she lives and takes and gets what she needs. Women who like helping women just do it, like I do.
I have this Women Owned Business label on my website but I don’t know. It’s true, but does anyone care? They want me to pay a certain amount each year to keep up my membership. I paid once to get the logo, and figure ignoring the subsequent renewal requests is ethical because I’m still a woman and still own it. But sometimes it feels like bullshit. I would love to get an account from a corporation who needs to fill its woman-owned quota, even though we’re a good company in any case.
Part of the mild outrage at the women helping women scam is my own intoxication at the possibility of a successful, powerful businesswoman inviting me into her circle so I have an instant set of colleagues, role models and peers. It’s always tricky to figure out how to be that glyphed woman business owner, the stereotypic boss who’s not a bitch, how to mix authority with being a woman with being the exact person you are. In some worlds that’s called mom, and that was such a challenge I started a business.