Next time, I decide. Next time I see Alexander, I’ll give him some encouragement. Smile his way and maybe even bare a few teeth if I’m feeling bold.
“What’re you smiling about, Kat?” one of the junior consultants asks as I daydream about it during one of the Zoom meetings.
“Just excited for the presentation tomorrow,” I lie smoothly, accustomed to masking my feelings at work before anyone gets a good look. “I think the management team will be pleased with our analysis.”
The junior looks unconvinced but doesn’t probe. He has too many things on his to-do list to waste time investigating how his boss might possibly have the bandwidth to be happy.
I go into the office the next day for the presentation. Having to head out early, I know I’ll miss Alexander. It sends a pang through me, enduring another twenty-four hours of estrangement. I hope he won’t read my absence as a sign of my disinterest, or worry that he scared me off with the intensity of his eye contact. The thought of making him doubt my feelings is excruciating, but he’ll have to wait until tomorrow to have his questions answered.
It’s important that I’m face-to-face for the presentation since Turpi’s management team is old school and places a “high value on the intangibles of in-person interactions.” Which means the men get a power trip from seeing how many bodies are physically strapped into their seats all day, carrying out orders like the dutiful cogs they are.
I don’t like the rules of the game, but I still have to play by them to get to the next level. Alexander appreciates that I’m a career-driven woman, finds it refreshing after the coddled finishing school girls he’s mingled with all his life. He’s told me as much in our conversations already.
I take the tube from Angel Station over to Canary Wharf, where Turpi’s headquarters are located. Canary Wharf is the charmless, soulless business district east of Central London, located on the Isle of the Dogs, a very apt name. Full of half-empty skyscrapers and half-used yachts, it’s pretty much another Wall Street, perched on the Thames instead of the Hudson.
Drained before the day has begun, I traipse into Turpi’s opulent lobby. As a consultant, I work on-site at the client’s office while I’m staffed on the case. My commuter trainers, squeaking on the porcelain tiles, are soggy from the morning rain shower. In the loo that’s almost always empty due to the lack of women who work here, I whiz through my two-minute makeup routine and take the lifts to the thirty-second floor.
Consultants are notoriously assigned the worst of the seating at clients’ offices, and Turpi has relegated me to one of the scrunched desks in the open floor plan, a sitting duck to be roped into another request that I have to say yes to because the client comes first, and pushing back would lose me points if it got back to Oliver, jeopardizing my promotion.
I swap out my trainers for a pair of tall pumps I keep under my desk. All the research shows that taller people are favored when it comes to pay and promotions. It’s one of the factors that holds women back. So for a decade now, I’ve been wearing toe-pinching heels as an equalizing tactic. My feet have become numb to the pain, and I take this as proof of my progress.
After firing off a few emails at my desk and ensuring that the juniors have printed out the presentations to the higher-ups’ liking (single-sided, size 11.5 font, 1.25-inch margins), I make my way over to the conference room.
A long, sleek table is fitted with twelve beige leather chairs. The floor-to-ceiling windows are speckled with raindrops, and the melancholy Thames is just barely visible through layers of haze. It feels like we’re suspended in clouds, but with none of the fluffy lightness you’d hope for.
Harold is sitting at the head of the table. He has the build of a former rugby player who refuses to accept that his prime is decades behind him. His sagging skin, always spray-tanned, is inflated with all sorts of fillers as he wages a war on wrinkles. Going bald is something else he’s fighting, as his thinning hair—longish, stringy, and dyed butter blonde—is always fluffed up in an elaborate effort to hide his scalp. Perhaps it’s the ridiculous hair or the extravagant pocket squares in his suits or the fact that he’s newly divorced (for the third time), but he reminds me of a parading peacock.
Turpi’s CFO and COO are seated on either side of Harold like drooling yes-men. From Leo & Sons, it’s just Oliver and me. The juniors aren’t invited to the meeting—they just circulate the meeting requests and prepare the materials.
Sitting down next to Oliver, I adjust my chair to its full height and lean in with my elbows propped confidently on the table so the men will be more inclined to take my words seriously. The only other woman in the room is Harold’s assistant, who’s scurrying in and out, delivering tea and biscuits as if we’re invalids who can’t get out of our chairs and help ourselves. It makes me cringe, and I’m comforted only by knowing that when I’m CEO, that kind of thing will never happen.
“Good to see you again in person, Kitten,” Harold says, eyeing me up and down like it’s part of his job description. “That turtleneck is as high as the Eiffel Tower.” He pounds his hands on the table, pinky rings rattling hollowly as he tosses his head back and roars with laughter.
A furnace burns under my flustered cheeks. The black turtleneck I’m wearing under my blazer is indeed quite high. The intent in dressing like a nun was to increase the professionalism of the meeting, but apparently that was very idealistic of me.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” Oliver says, perhaps trying to deflect the crass comment, or just in a rush to get through all forty-two slides in our deck.
Harold’s assistant fiddles with the projector, and the first slide of our PowerPoint deck shows up, large and illuminated, on the wall, complete with the riveting title:Phase One Recommendation to Increase Turpi’s Profit Margins and Return on Equity.
More than happy to take credit for the work he hasn’t done, Oliver walks through the recommendations to reduce global headcount by twenty-five percent.
Stats like this used to devastate me.Cut one quarter of all employees? Are you kidding?Behind that single number are thousands ofnames and stories, individual people who will have to find another way to put food on the table for their families and pay for their kids’ education.
But today I just hear it as another amorphous statistic, an eye-catching figure to please the client who’s funding our salaries and bonuses. My skin has hardened, but I’m not sorry for it. The only way to move up is by dialing down sentimentality and mimicking the unruffled approach that men have mastered for so long.
Still, I’m not going to turn into a total doormat. At the end of the presentation, I voice my argument for expanding into clean energy. “I’d like to bring up the elephant in the room,” I say, meeting the eyes of my audience to help the words sink in. “In order to stay competitive, it’s time for Turpi to start playing offense, not just defense. And yes, that means renewables. Solar and wind would result in a short-term hit to profits as you invest in the infrastructure, but in year three and beyond, it’s highly accretive. You’ll plug your losses from the bottom up and see double-digit growth in both revenue and profits.”
Harold’s orangey face twists into a smile, like he’s in on some joke that’s too vulgar for my womanly ears. “Retirement sounds pretty good in about three years,” he says. “What d’you reckon, lads?”
His compadres chortle in agreement, and the implication is clear. These three “leaders” don’t care how the company does after they’re gone—or even if it survives at all. They just want to coast along with the status quo, stripping out as many costs as possible to increase the value of their stock options before cashing out and leaving their successors to deal with the consequences.
“Green energy is just a fad anyway,” Harold goes on. “Mark my words.”
I want to point out all the flaws in his argument, but Oliver shoots me a look across the table—a look that says“Let it rest, Kat. Remember your place.”
And so that’s what I do. Bite my tongue and stay silent during the bullshit Harold is spewing, repeating to myself that I can fix this kind of thing later, once I’m calling the shots at the top of the ladder. For now, I need to stay focused on getting to the next rung. Sometimes the end justifies the means.
After we wrap up, the men file out of the room. I follow them out, but Harold pauses in the doorway, blocking my exit. “I’ve got to say, Kitten, it was hard for me to disagree with you,” he says. “The way you were batting those eyelashes.”
