Surviving in a man's world

I am in a profession which is predominantly male. Of course my previous avatar as an architect was essentially in a male-dominated profession in a country which is perceived in the West as typically patriarchal. I have never felt limited or conscious of my gender at all. Perhaps this could be due to the fact that growing up my father was such a positive influence in my life. I owe a lot of things to him and have always been a daddy’s girl. He always made me believe that I can achieve whatever I wanted and that nothing mattered as long as I was determined and worked hard.

When I started working as an architect in India, I was the only female professional in my office. There were other women there but they were support staff. After a year of working, I was given my own project to manage. Of course this came to me by default. The firm had moved to this very swanky office building that the architect was building. When the building was almost complete, his eccentric associate moved there on site with just one draftsman and two architects, which included me. The remaining staff was at the old office. One morning the architect needed someone to quickly design something for the client based on his concept sketch. I volunteered to do it and worked non-stop to complete it. I had the drawings ready by about 8:30PM in the office, two hours after the normal office hours, when the architect walked in. He was surprised to see that apart from the cleaning people, I was the only one working and that the rest of his staff had gone home. Before that the architect always thought that I was killing time working for some pocket money till my parents got me married! So when he realized that I was serious about my career, he offered me this project to manage. Before that I had worked for him for a year and he didn't even know my name!

It was a substantial sized project for me as a young architect but rather small for him because he is an eminent architect in India and his clientele included who’s who from the country. I had to deal with a lot of bias on site because they were not used to taking directions from a woman, especially someone so young. One day the client, being a very traditional Indian man, complained about the fact that my boss was sending a “mere woman” to the site. My boss was furious and gave him an earful about his gender bias and told him that I was better than the ten male architects in his office! Of course since the architect's name and projects have a lot of prestige associated with it, he pretty much dictated terms to his clients no matter who they were. Therefore this particular client had no choice but to accept me as the project architect. Later the client was proved wrong and funnily wanted me to mentor his “poor little rich girl” daughter who wasn’t motivated in life, which is a totally different story. Anyway I was furious at that time, for one because I was in my twenties and had led a very sheltered life and didn’t know what gender bias was until then.

Later I married K, who like my father has always let me be and we have a relationship based on equality. I had completely forgotten about this incident until last morning. I am in the U.S. for the past seven to eight years, two of which were spent in graduate school. I currently have a female boss. Incidentally she is a year younger than me, has had an Ivy League education and is incredibly smart. A client complained to her that he didn’t want me to work on his project and preferred a male who wasn’t a foreigner! She was livid and told the person that how dare he make such lame comments to her and that he had no choice in the matter. She told him that I was not just qualified to work on the project but was in fact over-qualified. She told him that he had no credibility and to not waste her time with such nonsense! When she told me what transpired, this time around I was not livid at all but felt pity for the man. In fact I burst out laughing at his ignorance and even made jokes at his expense. I have reached a conclusion that no matter where you go in the world there will always be losers like that who unfortunately make a fool of themselves by putting their foot in their mouths. Such people deserve pity or perhaps not pity as much as a kick in some place rather painful!