"We're going to the Oyster Bar tonight. We have an informal ladies' club." –Libby Blum
"It's not women's lib, just a bitch session." –Karen Schmidt
"We are strictly consciousness-lowering." –Libby Blum
"When I get settled in." – Joan
Spoiler alert: Joan will never get settled in at McCann-Erikson.
In Sunday's episode, "Lost Horizon," Joan is delightfully unsettled, at first, by the visit from copywriters Libby and Karen, McCann functionaries who show up with an office-warming potted plant, and then campaign to be included in her accounts — Topaz Pantyhose, Butler Footwear, Avon. In 1960, Joan got flowers from men who wanted her body. In 1970, she gets houseplants from women who want her business.
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Joan tries to leverage this newfound sisterhood later in the episode, when she threatens to bring the wrath of the EEOC, ACLU, and Betty Friedan (and by implication, the National Organization for Women) down on her new employer after being sidelined from her own accounts and — again — sexually harassed by the brutish McCann execs. "I wonder how many women around here would like to speak to a lawyer," she threatens. Not as many as she hoped, apparently, because by the end of the episode she's agreed to accept a 50-cents-on-the-dollar buyout in order to be free of McCann for good.
Remember when The New York Times published "The Opt Out Revolution," about all those high-powered women who were choosing — choosing, mind you! — to leave the workplace for the joys of domesticity? Don't believe the hype. Women who leave their careers aren't opting out so much as they are pushed out, according to Robin Ely, Pamela Stone, and Colleen Ammerman in Harvard Business Review:
"Even for HBS women who are currently out of the workforce to care for children, "opting out" is not an accurate description of their experience. Our survey data and other research suggest that when high-achieving, highly educated professional women leave their jobs after becoming mothers, only a small number do so because they prefer to devote themselves exclusively to motherhood; the vast majority leave reluctantly and as a last resort, because they find themselves in unfulfilling roles with dim prospects for advancement." (Emphasis added)
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We, the audience, see that Joan's career has foundered through no fault of her own, that she is being pushed out, because we have a privileged view into her demoralizing meetings with Ferg Donnelly and Jim Hobart. Does anyone think that's the story she'll be telling the rest of the world — or, for that matter, herself — in six months, though? Or will she recast her decision as a rational choice to take the cash and not miss out on Kevin's childhood? Joan will surely craft an "opt-out" narrative for herself that leaves her ego — and, unfortunately, the structural misogyny of McCann-Erikson — intact.
Could Joan have found a supportive sisterhood at McCann? Probably not. In 1995, Robin Ely wrote a groundbreaking and still-cited paper about "The Power in Demography" in organizations, in which she argued that women in male-dominated organizations — defined as those with few women in senior roles, not few women overall — faced particular challenges. In organizations like McCann Erikson, where leadership has but a single (white, male, wide, glittery-eyed, and soulless) face, success doesn't look feminine, not even to women. Women in such firms, Ely found, are more likely to endorse gender differences and stereotypically feminine characteristics. They usually adopt one of four strategies for dealing with the perceived disjunct between their sex and their ambitions.
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Accommodators adopt their company's macho ethos and try to live up to its demands, modeling themselves after the male leadership (albeit with an extra layer of flirtatiousness) and often denigrating other women. Joan was a classic accommodator in the early years of Sterling Cooper. At McCann, she almost immediately shifted into the company of the resisters, who "rejected as invalid their firms' assessments of women as well as their firms' prescriptions for women's behavior." Frustrated and alienated, resisters are at high risk, like Joan, for leaving the workplace. Self-blamers can neither fit in, like accommodators, nor blame "the man" for keeping them down, like resisters. Finally, some women in male-dominated firms are minimizers, who maintain that they think little about gender and that it does not affect their careers. (Our brief glimpse at the McCann copywriters suggests that deferential, ironically named Libby might be an accommodator, while pantsuit-sporting Karen is a minimizer.)
In firms where women are represented in the executive ranks — and as more than tokens — a fifth type of female worker emerges: the integrator. Integrators "drew on both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine images when describing themselves and felt reasonably confident that doing so enhanced their ability to succeed in their firms." Although she lacks female role models and mentors, Peggy has nonetheless fashioned herself as a successful integrator, knowing when to emulate her mentor Don and when to deploy feminine authority as "the voice of moms" in an ad pitch.
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Peggy is comfortable forging relationships with men that aren't buddy-buddy — you won't see Miss Olson on the golf course — without falling into a romantic, secretarial, or maternal role. This is another hallmark of the integrator, the capacity to forge "personally satisfying and professionally acceptable" relationships with male coworkers that aren't based on gender stereotypes. The coworkers in question are usually Don and Stan, but in "Lost Horizon" she bonds with Roger Sterling over organ music, roller-skating, and Bert Cooper's tentacle-porn painting, which she refuses to hang in her new office because, "You know I need to make men feel at ease." "Who told you that?" asks Roger, quite sincerely, and from the look of her in the final scene, Peggy has taken his words to heart.
How well she'll do at McCann Erikson, only Matt Weiner knows for sure (next week's promo offers little but the confusing suggestion that Pete Campbell may be marrying Sally Draper). Unlike the Freudian case studies Betty Francis is currently submerged in, organizational psychology looks at group behavior and population averages. In general, women in male-dominated organizations face challenges in moving up, maintaining a good self-image, and supporting other women. But the occasional, improbable, individual Peggy Olsons of the world can change the landscape for all of us.
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Robin Abrahams writes the Miss Conduct advice column in the Globe Magazine and works as a research associate at Harvard Business School. Dealing with an awkward work situation of your own? Write Miss Conduct at missconduct@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @robinabrahams.