Putting On Your Office Holiday Party Hat in the #MeToo Moment

Putting On Yur Office Holiday Party Hat in the MeToo Moment Suits, sequins, and velvet punctuate the festive deutsches institut fr normung as I trade my red raffle ticket for punnily named cocktail. Bravely, I turn to face a room full of my colleagues and their plus-ones allamingling with holiday cheer, and wonderwhat the heck am I doing here?The office holiday party is a strange mashup of quasi-regulated fun, shop-talk, and the very human instinct to let loose which frankly, feels to me like a potential pot of trouble for any attendee, and women doubly so. So why do we all leise gussy up and go?Humans like to swap ur responsible-hats for our party-hatsPartying, aka the organized act of stepping away from the ordinary to celebrate, is human nature (hat tip Emile Durkheim). In essence, parties are social rituals we partake in to come together. Add to that ritualJohan Huizingas ideathat people are meant to play basically let go of norms and have fun and you might be thinking, Well, this doesnt sound so bad. Durkheim refers to these shared experiences ascollective effervescence, where everyone is laughing, joking and buoying each other up.Except parties and play come with both benefits and costs.Sure, its a bonding moment when, outside the confines of the office, a group discovers that Hamid, the buttoned-up guy on the data science team, has an impressive array of moves on the dance floor. But what happens when you discover something less entertaining, or even deeply troubling? Think Martha from HR who gets indiscriminately snarky after three drinks, or Colin from marketing who doesnt understand no. Like many other aspects of the holiday party, there areramifications beyond this one night.Doing the Electric Slide with the VP of Finance can change your lifeStandard operating party procedure (SOPP) dictates we celebrate with our community. Long work hours, combined with the fact were encouraged to connect with coworkers (think about the oft-asked question during recruitment in techwould you want to get a beer with this candidate?), so were blending private and public versions of self together with a healthy serving of booze at these events.And ideally, this facetime with the powers that be could be a good thing. Holiday parties are the slightly more inclusive version of a round of golf, which gives managers a chance to have qualitative feelings about us, rather than merely a tally of how many TPS reports we turned in and maybe even up our chances of promotion....except women, work, and party-hats dont mix that well (yet)Partiesmake people feel like work rules dont apply because of what they inherently are a time to step outside our everyday experiences. At work theres often a company culture of equality between men and women. So, in the workplace, everyday includes putting aside our ascribed social statuses, (like men seeing women as brains rather than bodies, and women believing they can climb the power ladder through employment rather th an sex and marriage, and everyone floats on an air of work-appropriate conversation and behavior.Which means unless were very careful, everything women are striving for socially unravels at a party.Women are still often considered objects of admiration and desire first if not at work, then certainly in society. Put us in a party and suddenly we return to being on display, where how we look and what we wearmatters, or worse, wherewe become a perk for the men. The wrong outfit can hurt our reputation (hence why I returnedthis velvet jumpsuitin favor of a very modest party dress), and the wrong actions can dictate our trajectory at the company. Whereas a man who gets boisterous when drunk or sleeps with a colleague will be seen through the boys will be boys lens (yes, still), a woman doing so runs the risk of being labeled irresponsible or sleeping her way up.The proof is in the party-hatSocially speaking, men and women arent equals. Theres a power dynamic at play, insidiously deep mis ogyny well spend decades to come pulling apart, and a lot of work left to do in the workplace being exposed through MeToo. As much as the construct of a company holiday party suggests we can wear both our work-hats and our party-hats, there are ramifications whether we like it or not. Which sucks for a couple reasons one, because it means we cant be ourselves but two, because companies themselves arent seeing an issue (and you cant begin to fix something that people dont believe is happening).So how do we change it?Maybe the first step is acknowledging the imbalance. Like Black Lives Matter before us, who continue to press society to see that saying Im not racist doesnt make a culture not racist, what if we could see that just saying, Everyone is treated equally here, doesnt make everyone at work seen as equal. Rules and sexual-harassment training havent justwhiz-bangbalanced gender inequality at the office, just like laws and classes havent eliminated systemic racism in our country . And then, the real work begins.