I’m young, female, blonde, I work as a safety consultant, primarily in male-dominated industries – and I thrive on it! But it hasn’t always been easy.
Fifteen years ago I was reading a safety book called Lessons from Longford by Andrew Hopkins, surprisingly finding what he was saying was resonating for me.
Then in a short space of time four of my friends received permanent disabilities, all caused by preventable workplace injuries. At the time I was working in the HR department at a manufacturing plant, and I realised that no one in my workplace was managing safety, so I took it on and embraced it wholeheartedly.
Since then I have been a passionate advocate for safety, health and wellness in workplaces. Given that safety goes hand-in-hand with blue collar industries (which tend to be male dominated), and men are twice as likely to injure themselves as women, men are the majority of my target market.
Trying to ‘fit-in’ with the men
Years ago an employer recommended I go on a female leadership course focused on how to break through the glass ceiling.
The course presenters told me that I had to start reading the sports pages, so I could talk sport in the lunchroom and thus have something in common with the senior men in the lunchroom. They also said I should deepen my voice and I should remove the personal touch from my interactions with people at work.
I was trained not to let my voice pitch up at the end of sentences and taught techniques to deepen my voice. But after months of trying, I just couldn’t get my voice to deepen, and there was no way I was going to open up the sports section of the newspaper and actually read it.
After that mess, I thought I’d try another approach. So I tried dressing in corporate attire and only show the ultra-professional personality, thinking this would mean people would respect me.
I ended up having two very different personalities and even phone voices, the ‘work’ me and the ‘home’ me.
Fitting in by being myself
What made me realise this was a mistake was when someone mentioned to me that I would come into their office to talk safety, sit down, consult my clipboard and get straight to business. No small talk.
I wanted to talk dirt bikes with them, and about how their car race went on the weekend, and ask about their family, but I had been taught to believe this was unprofessional.
My point-of-difference is that I am a woman and that I have a vibrant personality. This is what makes people listen to me and pay attention. Unknowingly, I had been trying to shelve the very thing that would make me successful in my field.
After I started my own business, I stopped worrying as much about letting my personality shine through, and the more I did this, the more people said they hired me because of my personality. I didn’t walk in with a bunch of other suits and get down to business; I was a real person who could understand their real issues.
Not a page has been read from the sports section and my voice still sounds young but, that it who I am, and I don’t need or want to hide it any more.
Many women in their 20s may think their personality needs to be suppressed in order to be taken seriously and respected, but in my experience the opposite is true. When I learned to bring out my true self, a whole new world opened up.
I’d love to hear of any counter-intuitive advice you have received throughout your career and what steps you took to ignore it!
About the four friends that were permanently injured
1. An apprentice builder, 20 years old at the time, fell off a roof and became a paraplegic – he was never told he had to wear a harness.
2. A friend who was 19 was working on a ferry, and the rope got caught around his leg, as the ferry took off. He was amputated from below the knee – he never thought this would ever happen.
3. Another friend got early onset (art 22) of arthritis of the back due to lifting air conditioners – he never knew what damage he was doing and now speaks to as many people as possible about the dangers of incorrect lifting.
4. Finally, a 23 year old friend was fixing a machine, his foot got caught in the machine as it wasn’t locked out, and nearly lost his foot. He now has no feeling in his foot – he didn’t know about locking out of machinery.