Appropriately enough, I spent Women’s Day working hand in hand with six other women on a project which ran smoothly with everyone doing their job professionally and with a smile.  I’m not surprised, because I’ve always found women easy to work with. There were no egos and no diva behaviour; they  just got on with the job at hand.

Unfortunately, within many company structures, not all women are given the room to show their true potential. Sure, there are women in certain boardrooms, but too often they are there on sufferance, barely tolerated and having to constantly watch their backs from all the backstabbing. Bitchy behaviour between women? That’s nothing when compared to the bitchy behaviour some men are capable of.

While we still debate whether we have broken through the glass ceiling, the reality is that even once a woman breaks through it, it does not mean her struggles are over.  She has to be one tough cookie, with a thick skin, who can withstand everything that is thrown at her – the problem is that most of the obstacles won’t have to do with her actual work performance, but with office politics. And always, just under the surface, is the barely concealed antagonism directed at her simply because of her gender.

Don’t men have to put up with office politics too, I hear you ask? Yes, maybe.  But I still think that women who are anywhere in the vicinity of where the real decisions are taken, are the ones who find themselves blocked out and isolated, making their job that much harder.

The truth is that too many men still have a problem with women in management.  Sometimes I think these kind of men would love to roll the years back to a 1950s film where you would see a room full of women tapping away at their typewriters, while the most attractive girl got to be the lucky secretary who made the boss his coffee every morning and picked up his drycleaning during her lunch break.

So as we commemorate another Women’s Day and I hear the politicians give their usual spiel about the great strides we’ve supposedly made, I wonder whether they actually believe their own speeches. To me, it has now become all too familiar, repetitive rhetoric which is miles removed from what actually goes on in the real world.