Leslie Rhue Interview, History 150 Spring 2016, Conducted by Krista Rhue, The roles of a working mother in an executive position, March 20, 2016.
This interview was done over FaceTime. Some editing was required to remove areas where the interview got off topic or where there were interruptions. Mrs. Rhue and I established a time that would be best for the both of us to talk. I used a MacBook that was equipped with FaceTime. I had a quiet space but it was a little harder for Mrs. Rhue to find one, which led to some noise complications.
Leslie Rhue was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1960. She graduated high school 1978 and then proceeded to graduate from Princess Anne Business College in 1979. She started working at Bauer Compressors in 1980, where her first job was an Accounts Payable/Payroll clerk. Two years later she was promoted to Office Manager. At age 23, she became trustee of their pension plan, which was a new benefit they started. In 1984, she installed the first computer for inventory and accounting with custom software that she helped the programmers write. After this she was promoted to Business Manager and made an officer of the company, as Corporate Secretary. In 1997, she was made Vice President of Finance, which is the position she maintains today.
According to the US department of labor, in 1980 only 45,487 women were part of the civilian labor force. This was equal to a little over 40% of the workforce. By 2012 these numbers had increased to 72,648 women in the labor force or a little under 50%. Of these women in 1980, a majority of them were aged 25-34. By 2012, the majority were aged 45-54. In 1980, women earned roughly 65% of what men earned. By 2012 this had increased to roughly 80% of what men had earned. In 1970, the majority of women in the workforce had a high school diploma but no college. By 2012, the majority of women in the work force had graduated college. In 1980, the unemployment rate for women was 7.4%. By 2012, this had increased to 7.9%. In both of these times, the majority of unemployed women were teenagers. In 1985, 59.2% of medical and health managers were women and 10.9% of industrial engineers were women. In 2012, 80.6% of social workers were women and 18.8% of industrial engineers were women.
- The interview transcript
Krista Rhue: Can you describe the gender breakdown of your company?
Leslie Rhue: The gender breakdown of our company, yes. At the executive level, two males, one female. At the director level, one female, five males. At the manager level, I’m counting, three females and probably 25 males.
KR: Okay, has the gender breakdown of your company changed over time?
Mrs. Rhue: Yes, when I first started there, there were no women in the workshop. Now there are women in the workshop.
KR: Okay, now moving to something a little more personal for you, was it difficult for you to work your way up in the business world?
Mrs. Rhue: Yes, it took a lot of hours and you had to get past the bias that people have that women are emotional. Because when I get mad I tend to cry, so you have to get past that, and it’s really annoying. Because if a guy gets mad he yells, if a girl gets mad she cries, or she yells but also cries. So yeah, it was kind of hard. I went through situations where I wanted a particular position and I was told no I don’t really want that position and then they hired somebody who took that job and I trained him, and then he became a vice-president, and then he quit on them, and I got the job. That’s how I got the job.
KR: So you are an executive.
Mrs. Rhue: I’m an executive.
KR: Have you noticed any differences in how male executives are viewed versus how female executives are viewed?
Mrs. Rhue: You just dropped off. Versus how female executives are viewed? Yeah, I still think to this day the guys have a tendency not to want to hurt my feelings. So they will share things that they don’t necessarily, they’ll share things between the two of them that they won’t necessarily share with me until I point blank ask about it. So it happens, yes. But they’re, as far as treating me differently, sometimes I feel that way and sometimes I don’t. It’s really hard to say. I’d have to give you specific examples I guess, which I don’t want out on the internet.
KR: [Laughter] Okay, have you seen a difference in the treatment of female executives and females with less power?
Mrs. Rhue: Okay, because, a lot of people tell me that I get treated better by virtue of my title. I get treated better than they do by virtue of my title. The reality is that you would hope that people would treat everybody the same, but they don’t. They simply don’t.
KR: Does this unequal treatment affect your relationships with them?
Mrs. Rhue: No. I mean, not mine no. Because I know what people are doing already. It would be like, it would be similar to, I’ll give you a real life situation for you: your brother may tell you something that he would not tell me. It’s the same thing in the business world. That somebody might tell a lower level executive something they might not tell me. Does it make sense?
KR: Yes.
Mrs. Rhue: Okay.
KR: Are CFOs usually male?
Mrs. Rhue: There’s actually, I don’t know the percentage, you’d think I would know but I don’t know the percentage, but I think there’s a pretty good mix in the CFO world of male and female. So to say usually, it’s a hard thing to say. I really don’t know the percentage.
KR: Do you feel that there has been an increase in female CFOs over time?
Mrs. Rhue: Yes, I do. There’s more women in the work force period. And women typically do not go, for example I’m in a manufacturing environment, all right? And manufacturing environments, they’re historically, if you take out that time during the world war when women went to work at the factories, then historically, manufacturing operations are male dominated. So, if you go to work in a manufacturing environment, you have to recognize, at least when I first started, that you’re working in a male dominated organization. I’ve seen that change over time, which is good because women can do a lot of the same assembly operations that men can do and some of them even more efficiently because they have smaller hands. They can get into tight places, right, but I think the most interesting thing is that with the inclusion of more women in the work force you’re starting to see women do different things, including logistics, planning, purchasing, you know besides the accounting thing, but typically people look at accounting and banking as a function that women first started getting into when women started getting into the work force. You know, like women can be secretaries. When women first started getting into the work force, it was women are secretaries, you know. They can be paralegals. They don’t talk about them being lawyers, but they can be paralegals. They can go into accounting, you know, they can be bookkeepers, that kind of thing. Anything that you think about that is part of organizing a home. A lot of times you find people lumping, at least in the 80s, lumping women into that, those type of jobs. Now you see women getting into truck driving and you know, as I said, manufacturing, assembly operations. I’ve seen, I remember having our first woman welder. That was pretty cool. You know, those are um, at least, it’s broadening where women can get into any job that they want, which is nice.
KR: Did you face any difficulties by being a woman in power and also having a family?
Mrs. Rhue: Ohh, yeah! Yeah, there’s obviously, in that situation, you know the biggest issue that I had, the biggest conflict I had was trying to figure out how to split my time between family and the job. Because when you’re in an executive role you feel responsible for the people that work for you. And in my case that’s 300 people. And I feel sort of responsible for them. So I have to weigh the needs of them to the needs of the family and hopefully I make the right decision at the right time. Plus, as I was coming up in the 80s and 90s, you weren’t allowed to take off and go to your kid’s school function. It was very difficult to get time off to go to school functions. Now a days, they encourage you to do that. Now that my kids are grown, they encourage you to do that. I actually got into an argument with my boss about trying to take time off to go see a football game because he wouldn’t let me leave at 3:30 to go see Kevin’s [her oldest child’s] football game. He told me the only thing that it was acceptable to take time off for was a doctor’s appointment, a dentist appointment, or to get your car fixed. So, I had to go get my car fixed. At the same time though, what’s interesting about it is, while yes I’ve worked with some difficult people when it comes to being a female in the workforce. I’ve also worked with some great people when it comes to being female. I’ve worked with some people that were men that were very encouraging, that were very mentoring, so you don’t, women don’t have to just have other women as mentors. They can have men as mentors as well. That’s what happened to me. I had Mr. Cofer, I had Mr. Dobeneck, I have Joe. All of them tried to help in some way, shape, or form.
KR: Since your mom was a stay at home mom, did you feel any pressure to follow that path?
Mrs. Rhue: Oh absolutely! I wasn’t prepared to be a working mom, no way! Never even considered it initially. Went through a great depression about it actually, had to go see a psychologist about it. If you’re raised one way, and that’s why I didn’t raise you to think you couldn’t do anything other than be a stay at home mom, but I also had pressure from other people in the working environment who thought that I needed to spend more time with the kids, you know. So like, you do the best you can, and then it’s pretty bad to have a coworker say, “oh well you should’ve done this or you should’ve done that.” Not only do you have that guilt initially, but then you have that, that additional guilt layered on top of it by a third party. So yeah.
KR: Has your role as a working mother changed over time?
Mrs. Rhue: Yeah, absolutely! Mother’s roles change anyway, so working mother’s roles change the same way. So, here’s the deal, when you have a baby, a baby is not mobile, they’re not in school, you can leave them with a daycare provider, and you have to do the usual things like take them to the doctor or stay home with them when they’re sick. Okay, then they go to school. Now all of a sudden you gotta deal with school parties or school functions or school meetings that you have to go to and you have to fit that into your workday. Then there’s the famous, oh what if you’re kid gets into sports? Like, for example, I work a nine to five, eight to five job, so I was lucky, and I’m being facetious, but the soccer coaches all had soccer practice at 4:30. So my kids never got to soccer practice on time because I didn’t get home until 5:30. I keep telling them I can’t be there, but they’re in the military so they get out at 4:00, so they’d have practice at 4:30 and I would do the best I could to run home, get the kids, and dump them into soccer practice. So sports? Difficult sometimes if you’re a working mom. And then when they get out of school, when they get old enough to get back and forth to school, that’s one thing, but then if you have to take your kid to school everyday that’s also fun [Mrs. Rhue is being sarcastic]. I had something like, I was trying to add it up how many years I drove kids to school. Cause it started with Rick [her middle child], I drove Rick to school for his junior and senior year, every single day. I might’ve driven Kevin [her oldest child] to school. I don’t remember that far back. But I knew I drove you to school for what? The whole year? Two years? Something like that. Four years? I drove you to school for four freakin years, wow!
End of transcript
If I could do this interview over again, I would try to do it in person. It was much harder to do over FaceTime and we had to stop occasionally so Mrs. Rhue could attend to something else in her house. I think the questions flowed pretty well and the conversation did as well. I stuck to my script for the most part, although I wish I had done a better job of asking follow up questions and gotten her to open up a little more.