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122 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

any or all of those things. And most people don’t like putting others
out of their way.
Women can be especially wary about saying those four little
words, “can you help me?” at work, because they worry about being
written off as not competent or confident enough in what they do.
When I urge the women I work with to ask for help when they need
it, they say that they worry they’ll get shut down, or not taken seri-
ously afterward, or even that they might get the wrong information.
Sometimes they’ve asked for help in the past, but didn’t do a good
job of thinking through who the right person would be to seek out or
how to make the request, and as a result they got a disappointing
response that discouraged them from trying it again. If you really do
work with the advice and tools you’ve read about here, you’ll develop
a better feel for who to seek out on specific kinds of issues and how
to approach them in a productive way.
I had a good lesson in the value of asking for help in my first job
at General Motors. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, man-
aging production lines, or dealing with unions and shop stewards.
Also as I mentioned earlier, I was the only woman on the shop room
floor and not entirely welcome. I found myself managing production
and labor relations among people who would have been happy to see
me fail, and a few of them weren’t above setting me up to fail. Of
course, this was not exactly how GM described the job when they
were recruiting me on campus at Purdue University. Lucky for me
there was a person on the floor named Larry, who was in charge of
quality control and parts.
When I first introduced myself to Larry, he was quite skeptical.
“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked by way
of introduction. But at the very least, he wasn’t openly hostile to hav-
ing me as a boss. And he was instrumental in determining whether
my line would be shut down or would run successfully on any given
day. So I latched onto him, taking the time to get to know him and