Thi Lee

I love my job. As a female copyeditor for some automotive magazines, I work with mostly men every day. It’s great. There’s no cattiness, no jealousy and no gossiping among the co-workers that usually comes when working with women. At my job, there’s a lot of joking and no hard feelings. We pride ourselves on our openness and communication.

There’s almost nothing I dislike about working with men. Except one thing. They treat me like a woman.

My boss Raymond, the editor of a very successful car magazine, is the messiest person in the building. He’s a very busy man; he’s always attending meetings, on the phone, discussing stories with other editors, etc. He receives a lot of mail, too, however, the company budget doesn’t allow for him to have a personal asssistant. It’s his responsibility to take care of his workflow, but he doesn’t. It piles up week after week until he tires of the mess and eventually throws everything out.

A couple of weeks ago, Raymond’s wife had their first baby and his grandfather died a couple of days after that. It was a traumatic time for him. Raymond’s boss, Howard, called me into his office a few days after the news. We discussed Raymond’s difficult situation. Then Howard asked me to clean Raymond’s office.

I was completely taken aback by his request. I’m the copyeditor, not the cleaning lady. I edit copy. Cleaning is not a part of my job, I explained to Howard. He rolled his eyes at me and looked exasperated. He said that our main priority was to help Raymond organize his office. It didn’t matter what my job duties were, I was going to help clean. Not just me, but my managing editor, who is also a woman.

Howard didn’t mean to be overtly sexist with his request, but he was, and there is no excuse for it. The truth of the matter is, he wouldn’t have asked any of the thirty some-odd men who also worked on our floor to help clean Raymond’s office. It wasn’t coincidental that he asked two of the four female employees to do the traditionally female job of cleaning. He felt more comfortable asking a woman to do the dirty work.

He is also cheating on his wife with his secretary, who happens to clean his office and get his mail, as well. Go figure.

I was fuming. How dare he ask me to clean Raymond’s office? I thought equality had made such huge strides in the working world. The naïve and hopeful part of me died a little that day.

Maybe I should have known better. Having worked in a male-dominated field for nearly a year, I should have paid closer attention to male/female office relationships. But up until that meeting with Howard, I had been treated as an equal and as a colleague by my peers and by my superiors. No situations presented themselves that would reveal the true nature of my gender-biased work environment. As a result of this incident, I took a closer look at my job, and saw a whole new, but old, world.

In the automotive journalism field, very few women play the active, thinking role as the writer. Writers are almost always off “doing” things – traveling, driving new cars, and writing about them. Almost all women are the managing editors or copyeditors, the players who stay in the office and make sure that workflow is steady. The women act as the buffer between the editor and his writers, smoothing over disagreements, praising or reprimanding writers when their articles are turned in late or on time, correcting writers’ grammar and spelling mistakes.

Basically, we’re the mother hens clucking around their chickens, cheering them on when they do well, and supporting them when they’re in difficult situations. The men are the breadwinners, leaving the nest and finding material for the magazines. Nothing in automotive publishing represents modern-day equality among the sexes in the professional world. No wonder Howard was comfortable asking me to clean Raymond’s office.

Is the rest of the working world like this, too? I do not know, but I do know that as long as men write and women edit, gender bias won’t change in the automotive publishing business. It will always be a boy’s club until enough women are just as interested in cars as men are.

This problem by far isn’t a new one. But it was supposed to be one that was improving, or so I thought.

I never cleaned Raymond’s office. Though I apologized to Howard for disrespecting him as my boss when he asked me to perform a task, I didn’t apologize for not cleaning. We agreed to disagree. I’m slightly jaded by the whole experience, but all the wiser and smarter because of it, too.

*names have been changed
Lee is a copyeditor at a car magazine.