Breaking the glass ceiling: oysters with the boys

For a grotesque portion of my life, I pushed picky eating to its furthest limits. I refused to eat nearly anything that wasn’t pizza, macaroni, or bread until I was at least into my teens. Now that my eating habits are more normal, my lingering embarrassment for my past as a skinny, stubborn carbophile causes me to be over-adventurous in my eating. So this summer, when my boss asked his assistant, another intern, and me if we’d like to split a dozen oysters, I eagerly agreed, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what oysters were. I assumed they were similar to mussels. But they weren’t, and when our waiter set a tray down in front of me, my stomach roiled. There they were—three raw, puss-colored oysters, glistening with an oily coat of oyster juice, and jiggling in their gnarly shells.
Jonathan Swift is said to have written, “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster,” but when I think of oysters, I think of two women: my mother and my grandmother. The experience of feeling thoroughly revolted by the sight of oysters while others—men—blithely gulped them down beside me, is one that all three of us have in common. In my grandmother’s case, she was out to lunch in the 1950s with her surgeon-fiancé and about a half-dozen of his colleagues. My grandmother had never seen an oyster either, but she told me her good Southern breeding gave her the grits to choke them down without so much as a wince. My mother, on the other hand, knew exactly what an oyster was, and was well familiar with the awful sensation of eating one (which, I would soon find, felt like swallowing a giant, chilly glob of snot). She, however, was out to lunch with a group of clients—a clannish bunch of men who worked together, drank together, and golfed together—and it was crucial that she impress them. So when one of them said, “Oh man, we have to get oysters!” she smiled and put in a generous order with their waiter. As she put it, she was “on the outs” enough as it was.
The differences between our stories—and the experiences of succeeding generations—encourage me. My grandmother was a nurse, with no reason to conceive of herself as the professional equal of the doctors seated around her. My mother was an investment banker who was trying to prove that she was just that—professionally equal to her clients, and worthy of their business. Upon reflection, it never even occurred to me that by declining to partake in mollusk-eating that day, I could have put myself “on the outs” with the people I worked with.
At first I interpreted this as a sign that the so-called “boys club” was eroding in the work place. Perhaps my generation of women can succeed in careers as themselves, and not as masculinized versions of themselves, who have to take up golf lessons or acquire a taste for beer in order to make inroads at male-dominated law firms or trading floors. Speaking with Georgetown seniors trying to secure interviews and job offers, many feel stymied by their inability to relate in a fraternal way with male interviewers and recruiters, which made me nervous that when we graduated, my female classmates and I would encounter a more subtle but very much alive “boys club” in certain professions.
Cynthia Deitch, a Women’s Studies professor at George Washington University, said that fraternal culture is typical of certain professions—especially financial ones, and often in law—but that women who graduate from college today actually tend to enter the workforce with pay and treatment that is equal to that of their male counterparts. Disparities in pay and opportunity begin to appear only as men and women begin to advance up the career ladder. Deitch suggests that women entering the work force be familiar with their rights (an employer or potential employer, for example, cannot ask about marital status, or about one’s plans to get married or have children). But the best thing she said  that young women could do is find female mentors who are further into their careers who can give advice on navigating difficult situations. Having that sort of relationship is going to be especially important as the recession continues, since the current economic squeeze makes it harder for women who are uncomfortable with their workplaces to find new ones.
My mother cleaned her plate—sort of. Her oysters ended up rolled up in a linen napkin and left under the table. As for me, I choked down two of the three oysters served to me that day. I couldn’t bring myself to join the clean plate club. But with any luck, I won’t get flak for that from the boys’ club.