Working it
Jamila Rizvi’s Not Just Lucky.
In 1929, the ambitious woman approaching the librarian’s desk or turning to the clerk at her local booksellers, hopeful of recommendations for feminist career advice, had little chance of getting what she wanted. If she was fortunate she would have A Room of One’s Own pressed into her hands. Likelier were rows of malevolent books written by men. Likelier still, nothing at all.
“What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself,” wrote Woolf, who was after something similar. “I went, therefore, to the shelves where the histories stand.” Woolf finds no better guidance there. The history shelves are lacking. The career advice shelves are lacking. What is to be done?
Thankfully, decades later and despite all the odds, the world asked us to pick a hand and presented us with Sheryl Sandberg. Everything changed. Today’s women will find shelves packed with glossy samples of the genre Essential Career Advice for Women.
So what sets Jamila Rizvi’s debut book, Not Just Lucky, apart?
First, Rizvi is Australian and this is a book backed by Australian experience and statistics. Second is Rizvi’s insight into the not dissimilar skillsets of politics and media. Before becoming the editor of Mamamia — and one of Cosmopolitan’s 30 most successful women under 30 and the Australian Financial Review’s 100 women of influence — Rizvi worked as a political staffer for Kevin Rudd and Kate Ellis in Canberra. In an interview with the Walkley Foundation a few days before Not Just Lucky was released, she explained that for political staffers and journalists alike, “In the end what you’re doing is communicating and being able to persuade people to one particular point of view, or take complex subjects and explain them simply.”
Rizvi adds that both workplaces thrive on adrenaline — that “being in a newsroom isn’t unlike being in a political office when everything’s happening”.
It is the starkest difference she observes between politics and women’s media, however, that underpins her book. She explains that the biggest gap between the male-dominated world of politics and her years working mainly with women in media was the confidence of her colleagues. “The men tended to display the easy self-assurance of those who know they belong. They understood the rules of this game,” writes Rizvi.
Confidence is the book’s predominant theme. The best part of writing, says Rizvi, was the research, and the chapters on confidence, like most of the book, are a combination of facts, figures and Rizvi’s own experience. If there is one thing you take away from Not Just Lucky it’s that confidence is key. Luckily, there is a way to fake it, so to speak, until you manufacture it.
Rizvi references one of my personal favourite pieces of career advice, once passed to me with the caveat that it came from an expert wearing a lot of lip gloss. Which she does and should be free to do. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues in a TED talk that confident body language not only changes other people’s perceptions of how confident and therefore capable you are, but your own. Cuddy’s research looks at the way that positioning yourself in a more confident pose (broad, upright, expanded) affects your levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and testosterone, the confidence hormone. What she has found is that were you to lock yourself in a bathroom cubicle, let’s say, before a big meeting, and stand for two minutes, arms akimbo and legs apart, à la Wonder Woman (this is a completely hypothetical situation), your testosterone levels would increase and your cortisol levels would decrease. Voilà, golden lasso of confidence and the Amazonian bracelets o relaxation, an invincible combination. Aphrodite Aid me!
Rizvi explains that she wanted the book to feel “like I was giving one of my girlfriends a pep talk over a glass of red wine.”
“Lots of career books for women tend to be written either at the peak of their career or the end of their careers reflecting back and telling younger women how to behave, and I always found that quite alienating. I felt like their careers were so glittering and amazing that I would never replicate it.”
This doesn’t mean that writing Not Just Lucky was as easy as drinking merlot. “I write columns for a living, so I was like, so this is just 100 columns — how hard can it be?” Rizvi said. “It’s hard putting together a piece of work over so many months when you yourself are going through so many moods, so many thoughts.”
Rizvi believes that the internet has brought with it a new approach to women’s media. She explains that women’s websites now cater for a wider variety of their readers’ interests, for example motherhood and politics, sex and the economy. “I love looking through two hundred gowns at the Oscars. And I’m also going to enjoy reading about what happened in the Parliament yesterday. We’ve seen those things as being separate, as though women couldn’t possibly be interested in both. I think digital media’s really changing that.”
Asked whether she has political aspirations, she says, “I wouldn’t rule it out. I love politics, and I’ve loved it since I was sixteen years old. … I still miss it.”
A final bit of advice in Not Just Lucky is courtesy of Obama’s women White House staffers, who decided to purposefully agree with and attribute good ideas from their fellow women colleagues, in what they dubbed “shine theory”. In light of this, I asked Jamila to name a journalist, writer and politician to watch.
Hesitating only to narrow down her list, she picked Alice Workman, political reporter at BuzzFeed, Briohny Doyle, author of the novel The Island Will Sink, and MP Clare O’Neil, the member for Hotham in Melbourne. “[Clare’s] not courting the media. She’s just this very clever policy brain…. We need those people in politics. The show ponies are great but we also need the ones that are doing the serious, hard, policy work.”
Jamila Rizvi’s book Not Just Lucky is published by Penguin Books (RRP $35).
This review appears in the forthcoming July issue of The Walkley Magazine.
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