August 18, 2022
Surviving in a Man’s World:
A Career Woman’s Toolkit to Thrive and Achieve Greatness
Ivannia Martinez
Aviva Publishing (2022)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-194-3
New Book Reveals How Women Can Overcome Discrimination in the Workplace
Ivannia Martinez’s new book Surviving in a Man’s World: A Career Woman’s Toolkit to Thrive and Achieve Greatness offers what Martinez calls a survival toolkit for women who want to succeed in the workplace, which even in the 2020s remains largely male-dominated.
The book opens with a compelling scene from one of Martinez’s own workplace adventures. Her company had just been restructured. She had a new boss who was new to the company while she was a seasoned employee, yet she had to reapply for her job, and her new boss was simply hoping she would quit. Martinez shares what she learned from this experience and other examples of how she learned not to be the prey to a predator boss or male coworkers.
Martinez backs up her personal stories with research on the workplace and its gender issues. Despite all the discrimination that remains, Martinez believes women can succeed if they put in the effort. She states:
“I had to put 150 percent more effort in than my male counterparts just to be noticed, 200 percent to be selected, and 250 percent to be kept in the same job. I didn’t have any problem with it, despite knowing it was totally unfair. I remained confident in my abilities and continuously sought to improve my skills and perform my responsibilities with excellence.”
Being prepared is at the heart of Martinez’s message. The workplace is like a jungle where women will be the prey if they are not prepared with the proper tools to survive. For example, women need to learn to document all their successes so they have ammunition when they are under attack from a superior trying to claim they lack the technical skills or leadership ability to move to or remain in the position they want.
Of course, not all men are adversaries, and some men don’t even realize their own prejudices toward women, but women need to be prepared to hold their own when male superiority and discrimination rear their ugly heads. Martinez goes into detail about how men try to retain dominance through activities like microaggressions, mansplaining, and bropropriating. Some of these terms were new to me. The latter is when a man appropriates a woman’s idea as his own. Often, this begins by a woman suggesting an idea, the men in the room rejecting it or interrupting her, and then later, a man raising the idea as if it were his own so he gets credit for it. Martinez provides historical examples of such situations as well as personal ones and the statistics to support them.
Men are not the only problem, however. Sometimes women hold women back. Martinez says it is her wish to create a virtual community among women, “a sisterhood that practices the ‘survival arts,’ a sorority looking out for one another that slowly but firmly starts planting our flag in lands dominated by men. And later in the future, we can build a community where we live in harmony.” Martinez has repeatedly tried to help other women and build such communities where women would help each other. Unfortunately, not all women have reciprocated. At one point, women actually pushed her out of the group she had started to help women. While Martinez’s efforts were about helping all women to succeed, some women in the group simply wanted power and to be in charge.
Related to this issue is the queen bee syndrome, to which Martinez devotes an entire chapter. A queen bee in the workplace is usually one who has thrown other women under the bus to get where she wants in her career. She has learned to play by men’s rules and will often deny that she ever had the problems other women face because she does not identify with women but rather with men. This reminded me of Stockholm syndrome where one of the oppressed joins the oppressors and then oppresses those of their own kind. Martinez has met a few queen bees in her career—women she thought, at first, might be her friends and allies, but who turned out to be only out for themselves. She shares advice on how to avoid getting stung by a queen bee and also how to create change in your organization by using pest control to eliminate the spread of queen bees. Plus, she offers her ARE model for combatting aggressive behavior in the workplace.
But it’s not all negative. The workplace usually isn’t so adversarial. Much of Martinez’s advice focuses on simple things women can do to be intentional about their careers. One of the big questions she asks the reader is “What makes you happy, particularly in your career?” She advises that a career is not about simply focusing on the path we need to take to get to our destination. We need to learn to map out not just the path but to map ourselves. We do that by defining ourselves and determining what are our skills, plus what detours might benefit us in our careers. We then learn how to map our dreams to the actions we need to take to achieve them.
Martinez also talks about how to show your value to the people in front of you, whether coworkers or managers. She shares how to be clear and concise to keep your audience’s attention, get them to believe in your strengths, and then advocate for the path you want to take. In the process, you find mentors and allies for your career journey.
One of the most eye-opening moments in the book for me was when Martinez learned from her own male employees some tools to help her. When she became a manager and met with her employees individually, Martinez was surprised by how many of the men immediately told her they wanted a promotion or additional responsibilities while the women simply waited for her to tell them the game plan. She learned that women often don’t get promoted because they don’t ask to be promoted. Martinez learned to be more assertive from this situation and also began to coach her female employees to be the same. She even mentions things she learned from her husband and son about how men operate differently from women, especially in the case of being risk-takers, and she shares how that knowledge informed her journey.
Surviving in a Man’s World truly is the survival kit every woman will want when they enter the workforce. It would be the perfect gift for young women graduating from college and for any woman who wants to take her career to the next level. Ultimately, it will allow women readers to move from surviving to thriving and to help other women to do the same. It also wouldn’t hurt if most men read it.
For more information about Ivannia Martinez and Surviving in a Man’s World, visit www.IvanniaMartinez.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
