
Glass Walls: Partial Solution to The Glass Ceiling? - Mz
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/glass-walls-partial-solution-to-glass.html
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crazygringo
> _The nice man from the stairwell appeared and was clearly making a beeline
> towards me to talk to me. Not good. Not good at all. This fool, who is still
> feeling all warm fuzzy over talking to me in the stairwell, is going to talk
> to me like I 'm his best friend._

I'm completely confused. I rather enjoying making friends with people at work,
male or female (and regardless of "rank"). If you've met someone before, and
people are "milling about in an open space", why on earth wouldn't you give
each other a warm friendly hi? Why is he suddenly "a fool" in a situation that
is "not good at all"? And assuming he's still feeling "all warm fuzzy" (what
does that even mean?) As a man, I almost feel insulted by all the assumptions
being made here, and the idea that my own natural socialness might one day be
so misinterpreted.

Maybe something's missing from the story, but I can't even begin to comprehend
a place where a friendly hi between two people who met and chatted in a
stairwell, or elevator, or lunch line, or any of the other 100's of places you
run into coworkers at all levels, is somehow a bad thing. I mean, if the
dude's some kind of a creep, then I get it, but the author says he's a nice
guy.

Total confusion.

~~~
pdonis
Evidently you didn't read the part later in the post where it turns out the
man was an executive and the author was an entry-level worker. That makes a
_big_ difference.

Also, the occasion was, as you are told in the post, two days after a
supervisor was fired because of a sexual harassment scandal. That makes a
difference too.

~~~
johnbm
"I'm worried people might think something's going on between me and So and So.
So I'm going to act in the most suspicious way possible around them and assume
nobody has my superior observation skills, especially not those men who keep
perpetuating the glass ceiling by treating women differently."

Logic.

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Spooky23
I guess I work in a different universe where people behave themselves better.

If anyone talking to anybody in private front of a group of people is a
potentially salacious event, the level of paranoia and tension in that place
is out of control. At one point, all of my direct reports were women -- if
they felt anxious to have a private conversation with me in my office or
stairwell, that's a huge problem, and I couldn't have been effective at my
job.

~~~
Mz
An extremely popular man was fired two days earlier (for either sexual
harassment or an affair or both). Tensions in the department were crazy high
that week. It was not a normal situation. That was a factor in my decision to
not speak with him at that time.

~~~
facepalm
I hope it was sexual harassment, or can you really be fired for having an
affair?

~~~
SwellJoe
In many companies the policy is that people in positions of power can't have
relationships with their underlings. i.e. a VP having sex with their executive
assistant would probably cross the line into unethical behavior on a number of
fronts. Even if both parties entered it willingly and with no coercion or
implied retaliation for saying "no", there may be questions of favoritism
among other employees. The assistant would never be able to rise within the
company without that doubt creeping in about their competence.

So, if it's not the official policy in an office, it is probably still grounds
for action, since most offices expect a certain level of ethical behavior
toward coworkers.

~~~
existencebox
As someone who has been first working alongside and later as overseeing
engineer for my fiancee (both as programmers over the last few years), this
saddens me a little bit. Not to suggest that I don't see why things like this
might cause problems, but that for me (and for my boss, who is a researcher
along side his wife) it's been an overwhelmingly positive and productive
experience.

~~~
unreal37
Working alongside your gf or wife is one thing. But if she reports to you, do
you get to decide her annual review rating? Do you decide her raises? If she's
not doing her fair share of work, do you warn her and then fire her?

There are reasons why managers can't generally have relationships with a
direct report. HR at my company forbids it.

~~~
existencebox
There may be some truth in to that. I do contribute to her annual review and
am responsible for making sure she's completing work effectively, but I don't
decide raises or determine firing, which are probably the most powerful
capabilities one can have.

That being said, perhaps this is a way to work around the normal pitfalls,
where if there is a potential conflict, the person in question can be a
"practical" manager, but perhaps not a "supervisory" manager. Those are
horrible words for it, but I mean in that one manager would be actively
overseeing the work, and the other would be a lower level of involvement
check/balance against the former. It may be more manpower to do this, but it's
generally how the engineering teams here work out anyway; that there are the
engineers who have been here longer overseeing the new hires in the work, with
a more uninvolved formal supervisory structure as well.

(This has other problems, I'll openly add, but has allowed for a situation
like mine to exist, so it does make me look twice.)

Sorry for the essay, this ended up being a lot longer than I had originally
intended.

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facepalm
I must admit I don't understand why that guy couldn't be seen to be your
friend in front of an audience.

If that is not possible (for whatever reason), how does it help women?
Presumably men can be friends without problems, even in front of an audience.
So there would still be an unsolved issue and disadvantage for women.

~~~
Mz
I plan to write more about this. Part of the problem was that two days
earlier, another man in the department was fired over something having to do
with an inappropriate relationship to a woman. The entire department was
walking on eggshells. I felt it was just extremely bad timing. Another part of
the problem is that I had an entry level job and he was very high in the
department. So we had very little opportunity to work together, thus it would
read as "social relationship" \-- again, two days after another man was fired
for his behavior towards women.

There were other factors. I plan to go into more details in future articles.
In this case, I just wanted to talk about the fact that the glass walls of the
stairwell fostered a sense of conversational privacy with zero fear of sexual
or romantic intimacy occurring. You need conversational privacy to establish
trust and do business. But you need a lot more than conversational privacy to
pursue romance or sex. The lack of visual privacy mattered to our comfort
levels. This man became someone who trusted me and likely would have done a
lot for my career had I stayed with the company. That opportunity to talk
freely (in the stairwell) without fear that one of us might misinterpret or
misbehave was a key moment in the establishment of that trust.

~~~
facepalm
I can see how it would make feel women slightly safer as it would reduce the
risk of touching. But it seems to me romantic feelings could still develop
easily. On the stairwell, you could ask the other person if they want to go
for a coffee or meet after work.

Actually the glass walls these days seem to be more necessary for the men who
have to insure against accusations of sexual harassment. I've heard for
example that professors at universities always leave their door open or try to
have other people present when they meet students, to avoid any such
accusations.

Of course that might help a little, if men need not be afraid of sexual
harassment claims there is less need to avoid women in a professional context.

~~~
jrells
The one thing most emphasized to me by my university regarding teaching was to
always keep my door open during office hours, for precisely these reasons. An
open door (or glass wall) avoids any he-said she-said situations.

------
rayiner
One of the reasons I advocate that achieving an even mix of men and women in a
workplace at all levels of the hierarchy is valuable for its own sake is
because it diffuses the Gray Zone to a great degree. My hunch is that if there
wasn't a pink collar ghetto and a systematic power dynamic favoring men, the
awkwardness of having an unmonitored interaction would be diminished.

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trhway
> At some point, I felt kind of stupid standing in the hall talking for so
> long and asked if he wanted to come sit at the table in my room. He wisely
> declined.

WTF? worked at Sun where we had offices and never had any issues coming into
women's office or with women coming into my office. Would close the door on
many occasions, especially if were talking in general (read - critical about
Sun) instead of specific work topic. Never heard other people, managers as
well, being afraid of doing it. Some people of different sexes shared offices.
Following the logic of the article it was Sodom and Gomorrah.

I mean, some hear man and woman laughing from behind closed door and think
"they are at it again", and somebody, like article suggests, would think "they
are doing _IT_"... Why would we allow the later people to rule our lives?

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incision
_" >It fostered a sense of being able to talk without worrying that it might
be misinterpreted as romantic intimacy."_

I'd never considered this in detail before, but I'm nearly certain that this
is why I prefer those stylish glass-walled conference rooms wherever possible.

Though, I'm not particularly concerned about romance, rather the kind of
paranoid / narcissistic managers who can't bear not to impose themselves on
any (opaque) closed-door meeting.

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Crito
I think that opaque glass walls are the best. My office has opaque glass walls
on two sides which, in addition to making good writing surfaces for dry-erase
markers, allow me to see the fuzzy outline of people as they walk by my office
and allow me to see when other people are in their offices (as the glass walls
will light up.)

The opaque glass walls provide a sort of literal privacy that cubicles or open
office spaces don't _(such that I don 't have to guard my screen when working
on some projects, I don't need to excuse myself to the bathroom if I need to
adjust my belt, and I can stretch out after sitting for too long without
feeling self-conscious)_, but retain much of the general air or atmosphere of
a more open work environment.

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MattGrommes
This kind of story freaks me out because I know that not in a million years
would I be able to navigate these kinds of inter-personal situations. Knowing
from eye contact and a shrug that somebody didn't want me talking to them but
that we were cool and it wasn't personal. Wow.

I've had many jobs and I've always just talked to whoever of whatever gender
or place on the org chart. I've had to make an intentional study of how to
deal with people and still in 35 years I learn there's so much more to figure
out.

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Mz
I promised some follow up writing on the last thing of mine someone posted to
HN, so here is a first installment on that promise.

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ph0rque
Thanks Michele! As I was reading the Gray Zone post in order to see what the
pretext for this post was, I kept thinking that something like google glass
would prevent some of the problems. A less techy solution is the glass walls,
as you discuss in this post.

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ericb
I can't help but think of the law of unintended consequences.

I imagine entrepreneurs reading this and wondering "can I postpone hiring our
first woman so I can avoid this source of awkward situations and liability for
as long as possible?"

I have no idea how to fix this...

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bsder
Glad to see this, but I always assumed it was fairly standard knowledge for
anybody in mixed situations to avoid closed doors.

I know that when I taught college classes most of my fellow professors (male
and female) were religious about this.

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cushychicken
I find the notion of different kinds of workplace privacy an incredibly
perceptive observation on Michele's part; I think the glass walls theory would
solve a lot of problems by removing environments where bad behavior is enabled
due to lack of observation.

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PeterisP
I hadn't wondered about the reasons, but in most recently built office
buildings I've seen that almost all the small intra-office "meetingrooms" have
glass walls. They insulate sound, so the meeting contents are private but it's
very public about who is meeting whom and if anything other than talk is
happening - say, escalated conflicts would also be visible.

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Tycho
I thought glass walks was going to be another metaphor... Ie about
transparency of wages across employees (perhaps in an anonymous fashion).

