Looking back, she says, that one incident had the potential to skew her dealings with men from then on, but she made a conscious decision not to let that happen. “I came to a crossroads. Was I going to let this affect every interaction with men, or was I going to grow an extra layer of skin and keep going?” she explains.
Around this time, she recalls, “I had girlfriends who, like me, were proceeding up in the business world and they experienced equally nasty situations at work, and some of them folded up their doll dishes and went home. Others decided to play. I’m in the second group; at least I hope I’m in the group that gets more skin cells and moves on. You can’t let situations like that spin out of control and control your life,” she advises. The bottom line to Jacobs was to keep in mind that the majority of men weren’t jerks, and, instead of harboring anger to focus on feeling sorry for men who crossed the line.
That fortitude, she believes, gave her the ability to handle future slights to her womanhood, like the time early in her career as CEO during a lunch at a Tony Atlanta restaurant with a major investor. The investor, she explains, “wanted company information I was not legally allowed to give him. At one point, he leaned over to me, with my chief financial officer sitting there at the table, and put his hand on my leg. I was wearing a skirt, and when I say he put it on my leg, I don’t mean on my wool skirt. I mean my leg. He said, ‘I know how you got to the top—you slept your way to the top.’ I was calm. I’m not sure who I was at that moment. I told the man to get his hand off my leg or I would dump my plate of food in his lap. With that, I said, ‘This lunch is over.’ And the CFO and I walked out.”
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