Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that if women have one superpower it’s talking—in bathrooms, over wine, at lunch, walking around the block, over G-chat. Experience tells me that men sometimes like to frame this in a derogatory way. (“Women talk too much.” “Women won’t shut up.”) But I think that’s because they’re scared of what we might say.
Twice a week I meet my friend—we’ll call her Lisa—at the gym so that we can exercise and chat. I first met Lisa when we were summer associates at a law firm. That summer, we were stuck together in a corner with little direction and email addresses personalized to “intern1” and “intern2”, respectively. At some point during our somewhat miserable tenure, we went into the copy room next to our makeshift office to find it plastered with magazine ads for sex toys. You really can’t not be friends after a thing like that.
Still, we both took different jobs (can you blame us?) and fell out of touch until a couple years later when I moved from Fort Worth back to Austin and spotted her in the parking garage of my new office building. Since then, we’ve risen up the ranks of our law firms, negotiated salaries, had babies–Lisa generously prepared our wills as a baby shower gift before my daughter was born—and bounced ideas off of one another as to how to address a sticky work situation or finagle our schedules to better fit our professional and personal lives. I know exercise is good for me, but I’ve come to suspect that my talks with Lisa are the real health benefit.
Here are a few things I’ve learned from talking to the women in my personal and professional spheres: An older female colleague told me to deal with men who try to take credit for my ideas by saying, in my best Southern accent, “That sounds a lot like what I just said.” A lawyer at another firm helped me strategize when to “announce” my pregnancy to the partners to avoid unwittingly affecting my bonus and raise. Still another taught me to keep an inbox folder of all the compliments I’ve received at work in case I should ever need to deploy it.
We tell each other honest things, too: one friend laments that all her male colleagues knock off early for happy hour, leaving the brunt of the work for her to finish. Likewise, another colleague says her male subordinates simply aren’t intimidated enough by a female boss and she has difficulty bringing them to heel. I’ve heard about men who have told women, point blank, that they’re no longer useful to the company once they have babies or, worse, that women who take maternity leave are stealing from the company coffers. I’ve learned who to trust and how to handle situations all by talking—talking to other women.
I wrote a book born of exactly this: conversations with my friends, coworkers and friends of friends.
Shared stories, shared secrets—what we now refer to as “whisper networks,” the informal social fabric used to keep each other safe…and sane.
I was a summer associate at another law firm when I reaped the benefit of my first whisper network and what sticks with me isn’t so much the behavior of the man in question, but the women who extracted me from the situation with a lot more grace and social skill than I possessed at the time.
I wrote “Whisper Network” because confiding in other women isn’t only necessary; it’s one of the great joys of my life. (Is there anything more satisfying than a marathon dinner with one—or four—of your girlfriends?) We speak to each other to share, to connect, and, as it turns out, that’s exactly the reason I write, too.
