Ten or so years ago when I was a junior copywriter, I worked on a campaign for women's shoes alongside five colleagues - all of them middle-aged men. It was an enlightening exercise, to say the least: "Let's dress women up as clowns and put them on a catwalk and take photos of them to show how FUN the shoes are!" said one, as I bit my tongue lest my thoughts shoot out my mouth.
As the only person in the room who knew firsthand about buying shoes as a woman, I've never felt so voiceless. When I did eventually muster the courage to pipe up and offer an insight, I was immediately shot down by the cockiest of them all, who rolled his eyes and told me not to "use the female card".
He got his wish: I shut up, as 22-year-olds are wont to do in their first grownup jobs. But all the promotions in the world couldn't have then made me proceed to tell that overconfident bonehead (who later on, sweaty and drunk at a work function, seemed suddenly very interested in my "female card") that he was a "hunk". Or ask if he'd been working out. Or play on his "masculine pride and natural instincts to protect the weaker sex".
Hell. No.
Yet that's exactly what Nina DiSesa would have had me do. The first female chairwoman at ad firm McCann Erickson and author of Seducing the Boys' Club: Uncensored Tactics From a Woman at the Top, her suggestions for getting ahead include flirting, flattering, boosting male egos, sugar-coating criticism of male co-workers, and behaving like a "little sister" or a "den mother" in the office. Or, as the publishers' blurb explains succinctly, how to "manipulate and seduce". (For some choice excerpts, try here.)
