The office flirt

It gives me the grils, to be honest. Workplace flirting with a purpose was a huge feature when my career began in a stagnant Cape Town – anyone remember the days when all the head offices fled to Joburg? I made the same move when I realised that my pre-journalism career in short-term insurance was unlikely to prosper under those circumstances.

We had some stereotypical roles for women in corporates back then. There was the Good Old Girl, a woman in her sixties with fluffy grey hair, who had been holding down the admin fort for twenty years, knew where everything was and kept secrets about the boss that made me yearn to get her really drunk one night and Tell All.

There was the Office Ingénue, the feisty blue-eyed blonde who kept her fingernails incredibly long and immaculately polished, went into giggly confabs with the younger management males and almost invariably did something hoogs scandalous at the end-of-year office party. (As a brunette with an academic background, I was the Ingénue’s friend who never quite fitted into the office scene as she did.)

There was the Office Bitch (we called ours the Great White) who was a successful account exec but never got any further than the lower rungs of management, and took her frustrations out on the junior staff: “You’re late! I expect to you to work those five minutes in at lunch time, young lady!”

And then there was Hotlips Houlihan (seen any reruns of MASH lately?); the office tart, the older women called her. She wasn’t quite that (she may have slept with the boss, but only with him – her flirting was purposeful, intended to raise her status).

She wore heels twice as high as any of the rest of us, even the Ingénue, and boy, did she rock them when she walked. Her little 80s power suits were tailored to hug her form and she always had one button too many undone. She was a flirt of outrageous proportions – and we were always astonished at how the men responded to her remarks and actions, almost squirming with delight– she was like a living Jessica Rabbit (the world’s Sexiest Toon), breathing ‘honey-bun’ into their ears and using lines that sounded like they came from a rather tame-and-lame adult movie. “Oh, look at you,” she’d coo, tugging playfully at some top honcho’s tie, “You’re so TALL!” and, to our disgust, he’d melt.

Today I work behind my own desk in my own house and get increases from the stingiest boss in the world, me. But I still spend time with people in the corporate world, interviewing women in particular for stories on gender issues. I know that the wage gap is still a big issue: “South Africa has an overall gender gap of 25%, as measured by economic participation and opportunity, education, health and political empowerment, yet its gender pay gap remains static at 35%. This means women effectively earn in a full year what men earn in eight months.” And the work/life balance, two-job thing remains a problem.

I’d thought we’d got past the point where flirtation of any kind was an acceptable office tactic. But here it is again, in “Lucy Kellaway: How to flirt your way up the corporate ladder”, which was republished on 10 December from FT on biznews.com.

“To carry it off you need not only to be a great natural flirt, you must also be respected in your job and thought to be a fine morally upstanding colleague,” she writes. “Here women have a terrific advantage. This is because they aren’t carrying the backlog of centuries of predatory behaviour.” Good grief! No, just centuries of second-class status in which flirtation was a calculated means to an end.

“It is true that a flirty woman can sometimes be written off as a bimbo…” she goes on, and I’d add, no, not sometimes, often; and those women who use flirting as a business tool risk getting into very dangerous sexual waters. Men who flirt also run the risk of being hauled up on sexual harassment charges.  And even the highly skilled flirt of any gender is engaging in, as Kellaway admits, “deeply manipulative” behaviour.

It can also impact on office culture in a terrible way. The columnist adduces some accomplished flirts, male and female, whom “everyone likes”; I wonder if this is common? In my experience, both direct and vicarious, the rest of the office either resents or despises people who use this tactic to get ahead.

I also found myself wondering if she was talking the same language as me; are these ‘flirts’ actually flirting or just being charming?  The Collins English Dictionary gives these as synonyms for flirtation: teasing, philandering, dalliance, coquetry, toying, intrigue. All of these underline that powerfully sexual undertone. Which is why it’s not flirtatious of a man to say, “Hey, great new hairstyle!” in a friendly way. Charming of you to notice; nothing sexual here.

How comfortable are you with flirting in the workplace? Have you seen situations where it’s worked – or ones where it’s crashed? Be interesting to hear your stories!