Introducing: Stop Telling Women To
Ask for what you want.
Be more confident.
Speak up.
Negotiate.
Take what you deserve.
These ‘commandments’ of female empowerment have been the background track to my life as a millennial woman. From my first ‘take your daughter to work today’ to the latest messages in my inbox promising strategies to ‘own my worth’, I’ve been singing along in my ‘boss babe’ swag.
Despite a steady soundtrack of ‘girl power’, ranging from Destiny’s Child ‘Independent Women’ to Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, I find myself today, in my mid 30s, looking around and wondering, where is the actual power?
Maybe you’ve heard these calls to action too. And maybe like me, you took them to heart.
You cut the word ‘just’ from your vocabulary.
You stopped saying ‘sorry’ when you really meant ‘excuse me.’
You practiced dropping your speaking voice so it would sound more masculine, but not so low that you slipped into a vocal fry.
You stopped ending your emails with ‘If not, no worries’.
You adjusted your voice or your words or your clothes or your hair or your body or your behavior, when the fact that you were more experienced or more educated or more credentialed didn’t seem to be enough.
But there’s a difference between being fluent in the language of empowerment and having real power.
Decades of educational gains and a lifetime of ‘empowerment’ haven’t translated into corresponding gains for women in the workforce or in leadership. And these issues of gender inequity are compounded when they intersect with racism, classism and other forms of bias and discrimination.
- Women in the US are still substantially underrepresented in nearly all positions of leadership – from business to government.
- While prior to the pandemic, women outnumbered men in the workforce, they only make up a 5th of the C-suite and have borne the brunt of economic losses during COVID – despite earning the majority of college and advanced degrees.
- Black, Indigenous and Latina women who experience the largest gender pay gaps, are also far more likely to have lost or been pushed out of their jobs during the pandemic.
- Millennial women are actually worse off than their mothers on measures like poverty and maternal mortality rates, according to a 2017 report.
‘Young women are more likely to be poor today than they were in three preceding generations,’ write the study authors Beth Jarosz and Mark Mather.
As a personal finance writer covering money and career for nearly a decade, I’ve become intimately familiar with these inequities. But what I hadn’t realized was that behind the growing choruses to ‘break through the glass ceiling’, supposedly meant to push back against these persistent gaps, the movement toward gender equity had actually stalled.
The commandments I’d internalized….
Ask for what you want.
Be more confident.
Speak up.
Negotiate.
Take what you deserve.
… were not going to change that, no matter how much I believed or repeated them.
- Because when women do speak up, they’re perceived as less likeable and hireable.
- When they do succeed, they’re more likely to experience negative judgment and backlash.
- When they do negotiate, they’re labeled aggressive and demanding and less likely than their male counterparts to receive the raises and promotions they’ve requested.
If this sounds familiar, you sound like the women I know. Women who are as competent and ambitious as they are strong and outspoken.
Women whose lived experience shows us time and time again that if gender equity were as simple as speaking up, we’d have it by now.
The fact is, internalizing overly simplistic advice like ‘negotiate more’ isn’t going to close the pay gap as long as we live in a world in which women are less likely than men to receive the raises they’ve requested. And when black women are 19 percent less likely to receive a raise than a white man.
I’m not saying there’s no value in these directives – I still negotiate everything from my next paycheck to my latest medical bill – but I am suggesting that we might be reaching the limits of their effectiveness.
We’ve become so focused on telling women the things they need to do differently, that we’ve lost sight of fixing the systems that penalize them in the first place.
The more I’ve been speaking and writing about the ambition penalties women face, from the fact that women in leadership positions are more likely to be disliked and disrespected by their peers to the fact that breadwinning women are three times more likely to be cheated on – the more I find people asking me, ‘So what can women do?’
But I’d argue it’s the wrong question to be asking. It’s the question that powered the entire 90s ‘girl power’ to millennial ‘girlboss’ movement, and got us here – stalled out on nearly every measure of gender equity from leadership to pay.
At this point, I feel like the best piece of advice I could give to ambitious women is to ignore most advice for ambitious women.
Because most of that advice, preached in the name of gender equity, just blames women for the problem. And it keeps us stuck in a cycle of reevaluating our voice and words and our hair and our bodies and our clothes and our behaviors, instead of reevaluating the systems, organizations and culture that penalize ambitious women.
So with that in mind, I’m excited to introduce a new series, ‘Stop telling women to _____’, debunking some of the myths behind things like ‘the confidence gap’, the ‘investing gap’ and the idea that women are somehow less committed to their careers, while bringing more nuance and context to popular advice like ‘negotiate more’ and ‘speak up’.
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Because it’s not that women aren’t negotiating or speaking up or practicing the other ‘commandments‘ of empowerment, it’s that they’re doing so within a network of institutions that undermine and penalize them when they do.
And it’s these conditions, not the behavior of women, that need more of our attention if we want to move past the hashtag friendly version of empowerment and make meaningful progress on measures of equity.
