Gender Blindness: It's a Nice Idea...Or Is It?

Patricia Handschiegel has an interesting piece on the Huffington Post today about women in business. The idea is the new power women ignore gender completely. I've been trying to blog about this post for a while now, and I'm struggling. Part of that is some angst about an unresolved issue in my life, part is a nasty head cold I'm trying to shake before I leave for CES and part is that I just can't decide how I feel about it.

Obviously, being a woman doesn't consciously enter into my professional decision making. I never think, "As a woman, should I write this story or accept this speaking gig or interview this person?" Who would? And I agree with the sentiments in the post that an accomplishment is an accomplishment and, like Patricia, if you asked my business role models, it'd be a mix of men and women-- although heavily skewed towards men. I work in a male dominated industry, and I tend to pick role models who I know personally. A decade of business reporting has taught me that the public rap sheet on who someone is and what they've done doesn't always square up with reality.

For that matter, most of my friends are men. My husband and I even joke that many of the traditional male-female roles in our marriage are swapped. In fact, with almost all of our close couple friends, I relate more to the man, and Geoff relates more to the woman.

So clearly, like the women Patricia interviewed for her post, I'm not intimidated by men, and I have no problem relating to them in the business world.That is a non-issue. In fact, there's nothing in that post with which I explicitly disagree.

But implicitly I have a huge problem with ignoring my gender. I embrace it. I love being a woman and everything that comes with it. I usually wear jeans, but when I have to look nice, I love wearing dresses instead of lame, boxy suits. Sure, I wish more women were at dinners and invitation-only tech events I attend, but I love that at least I'm one of the ones there. I even secretly love that my husband gets "spouse gifts" like floral monogrammed soaps when we attend conferences. It's all evidence that I've accomplished something unique and that makes me proud. It's like I've hacked the system. And that means others can hack it too.

As the gender blindness idea suggests, I never considered I couldn't achieve things in business because I was woman, and that was probably part of my success. But at the same time I don't think there's anything wrong with being proud of the fact that I can hold my own in a male-dominated world. That I've been able to make it a non-issue.

I also think that in some unknown, unquantifiable way part of my success has been because I'm a woman. How could it not be? Being a reporter and a writer is an incredibly individualistic career. It's like an episode of Survivor. You're dropped into a jungle and you have to use whatever you've got to fight your way out. Not even a great editor can cover for you for long and whatever you've accomplished is in tangible black-and-white at the end of the day for everyone to see. I've long felt like weird personality traits of mine that were pretty annoying from a human point of view, actually wound up being hugely helpful as a reporter. It was as if I was designed to do what I do.

Because it's so personal, I'd be naive to think none of that has to do with being a woman. Women connect with people in a different way, listen better than men on average, are non-threatening and are naturally nurturing.  A lot of people tell me things they don't tell other people, and all of that is probably part of why. My gender is part of me, so why would I treat it as something I somehow have to subvert or ignore?

There's incredible power in being a woman in business that we've had to deny so long to prove we're "equal." Most of the powerful women I know and respect are increasingly embracing it and using it to their advantage. To me, that's truly breaking the glass ceiling.