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I want to examine a situation you may face, and that is managing or working with men who resent having a female manager or coworker. They may feel threatened by having a woman manager or peer, or their background could have prejudiced them against women in business. I was one of the first women in IBM sales; this goes back many years. There was an older salesman in my office who was totally against women in sales. He thought this was the worst move IBM had ever made.

The first year I was in that office, he hardly spoke to me. He figured I wasn’t going to last; women couldn’t make it in sales, he thought, so why bother with me. For one year he observed and noticed I was having pretty good success at selling, making my quotas, winning some awards, etc.

Then one day he watched me make a presentation to a prospect, and he was impressed. He began to ask me to make sales calls with him, and we became a very effective sales team. We became good friends and laughed about those early days. But it took time for him to change his attitude toward women in sales.

Often time is the key word, and many women don’t want to give the men time to change. After all, we have our rights, don’t we? After all, we deserve our opportunity! After all, we have lots of lost time to make up and the business world owes us something, right?! That’s the world’s attitude.

But as a Christian woman that is a totally anti-biblical attitude. We don’t have rights because we’ve given our rights over to our Creator and our Savior. We are his servants.

That doesn’t mean we allow people to walk all over us, but it does mean our attitude is one of servanthood, not trying to get what’s coming to us. It means we have patience and compassion toward those men who are prejudiced toward women, even the ones who will never change. And that takes lots of prayer on our part.

I encourage you to use these situations as opportunities to demonstrate what God’s love is all about. Go out of your way to understand them; ask God to help you see them through his eyes. Pray for their benefit and let God take care of the rest. That’s the most important and effective way to deal with men who have the wrong attitude toward women in the workplace.