Jacobs says she felt she couldn’t make a scene, even though she believes she had the right to “filet the man. I represent something bigger—I am a public figure for a public company. I kept a cool head because when you call attention to yourself, even though it’s justified, that’s not best for your company or your career.”
During yet another lunch, this time with the president of a local bank that Jacobs’ firm was working with and staff members from both organizations, the president looked at her and said, “Whatever qualified you to be CEO of a public company?” “I looked at him and said, ‘Why, my breasts, of course,’” she recalls, still laughing about what transpired. The president ended up getting fired, but not because Jacobs complained; his own staff at the lunch meeting complained to higher-ups at the bank.
“The way I look at it,” she says, “is you have to forgive men like that. They grew up only around their mothers, wives, and women who bring them coffee in the office. They don’t know about us in business. They don’t get us, never experienced us.”
But she adds that with time more doors are slowly opening for women in business. In the 1970s, when she worked at a hospital early in her career doing medical technology in the pathology department, there were women who held managerial positions but only at a department level. She decided to leave that career partly because of the lack of opportunities for women, accepting a $10,000 cut in pay to take on an entry-level sales job. Ten years later, she says, she was called to interview for the president’s job at that hospital. While she had no interest in going back into the field at that point, it proved two things to Jacobs—that opportunities were indeed opening up for women, and that she made the right move by leaving a situation where she saw no chance for advancement.
Jacobs’ Discrimination Lessons
1) If you’re sure there is no room for advancement because of your gender, get out.
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