Emily Heist Moss asks: Why is the Way to Succeed in Business to adopt traditionally masculine behaviors? Is there an alternative?
A few months ago, during salary negotiations for a new position, I finally had an opportunity to take my own advice. In the past, I’d told female friends that, when confronted with professional hurdles, they should “think like a dude.” Talk to your male friends, I tell them, channel their swagger! Do they worry about coming off as bitchy? No! Do they worry about whether people will like them? No!
I tried it and it worked. I was thrilled. I felt powerful. I felt like I finally understood the intoxicating high of big-spenders and brash Wall Street sharks. I felt like a BAMF, like I owned the room. Who’s the boss? I’m the boss.
But there’s a flip side to that feeling, and as I came down off the high, other emotions crept in and sullied my epic win bubble. I felt like an asshole. I felt selfish. I felt like I was the opposite of a team-player; I was a me-player. Why did I feel the need to throw down with false bravado? Why couldn’t I have gone in to my negotiations and played the hand a little closer to my true self? Why is the Way to Succeed in Business—as every self-help book and young-professional success story calls is—adopting traditionally masculine behaviors? Is there an alternative?
*****
I’m at drinks with three of the brightest women I know. They are rain-makers, thought-leaders, deal-strikers, rising stars. As our drink sessions often do, this one evolves into a lengthy conversation about work-place behavior, from mentoring younger colleagues, to performance reviews, to presenting to the powers-that-be. Though our roles are varied, we are all aware that our success hinges on walking a certain fine line between hard-assery and people-pleasing. Sheryl Sandberg has a term for this state-of-mind: “relentlessly pleasant.” Relentless: You want to get shit done. Pleasant: You get shit done with a smile on your face. As decades of research have shown, women who are perceived as aggressive or demanding are penalized for their behavior in a way that their male peers are not. Keep on smiling.
The four of us are discussing Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on how pulling a “power pose” can increase testosterone and cortisol levels and improve odds for success. Taking up physical space suggests power and powerful people get their way. Power posing comes more naturally to many men; picture that guy on the subway who thinks he needs to spread his legs three feet apart. Some professional development curricula for women even include lessons on power-posing. Be more like men and you’ll win more battles.
“But what if,” says one of my friends, a successful consultant, “we’re operating on the wrong premise?” We all look at her, confused. She continues, “Why are we teaching women to ‘be like men?’ Shouldn’t we also teach men to adopt the best that femininity has to offer?” I found myself nodding as she gained momentum, “I mean, we’re half the population, right? Success is measured in masculine terms, but it doesn’t have to be. What if we taught boys to sit like this?” She demonstrated a prim posture, tucked back in her seat—the exact opposite of taking up space. “What if we emphasized collaboration and emotional intelligence, and looked to hire, promote, and praise people with those qualities instead of the ambitious, assertive ones who are always gunning for themselves?” What if?
It’s hard for me to imagine the world my friend is describing. All of my training and reading suggests adopting more “masculine” traits to advance my professional career. Be assertive. Be aggressive. Be ambitious. Be bold. Be dominant. Be loud. To call these traits “masculine,” is, of course, problematic in and of itself; plenty of women exhibit them and plenty of men don’t. That said, these are traits we cultivate in boys and do not in girls. Decades later, we reward assertive people—mostly men—even though we’ve been telling girls all along to not be aggressive and demanding.
But, to my friend’s point, what if we upended the whole board game? What if we looked at the things we do cultivate in girls—friendliness, teamwork, organization, creativity—and we agreed, henceforth, that those were desirable traits? What might the upper echelons of the world look like? What would Congress look like? Or the Fortune 500 list? This is all a big thought-experiment, of course, and there’s no way to magically enforce our new standards on the decision-makers of the world. But maybe it’s time we take a closer look at the behavior we reward and ask ourselves if it’s really in the best interest of our communities and our companies.
*****
As discussed in Sandberg’s Lean In, research shows that, on average, women use “we” in interviews more, and men use “I.” To an interviewer, it appears that she was a member of a team, and he singlehandedly saved the world. Interviews want the one who gets shit done, right? What if they didn’t? Instead of teaching women to make “I” statements and mimic the rewarded behaviors of men, what if we taught the interviewer to take a more nuanced approach? What if, from time to time, we valued the team player?
Black women often feel pressured to wear their hair in “professional” hairstyles to succeed in the workplace. But “professional,” in these situations, is code for “white.” In the short term, many women do straighten or relax their hair because they find it creates an easier office experience for themselves. We are only reinforcing the idea that there is only one way to win, and we are defining “winning” by who is currently at the top of the leader board. This is short-sighted.
If you take the long view, we want a world where success can be achieved on a range of paths with an array of personalities wearing any number of hairstyles. We do not want people to feel they must suppress their true selves or don a cape of fake bravado to climb the ladder. What if we didn’t expect people to copycat to climb, and instead asked them to be the best versions of themselves?
Role/Reboot regular contributor Emily Heist Moss is a New Englander in love with Chicago, where she works in a tech start-up. She blogs every day about gender, media, politics and sex at Rosie Says, and has written for Jezebel, The Frisky, The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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