I’m Not Your GirlBoss
On my first day working on a new project, I entered a corporate boardroom to the spectacle of two white-haired, red-faced men shouting at each other. I was 25 years old. Instead of a SWAT team, I had been chosen to defuse the situation with a smile, and negotiate a $1.5M deficit. I clarified my role as the new program manager, not the note-taker, and started battling for the respect of my business partners, for my team, for the program, and for acceptance as an equal or superior in a male-dominated IT industry. I could fill books with the stories, the successes, the defeats, the tears, and the many happy moments I’ve experienced working in this field. The point is: I know what it feels like to be a woman facing a big task, and I can certainly identify with the girl facing the raging bull on Wall Street.
However, in May 2017 when I was asked to join in on someone else’s social media PR campaign and change my LinkedIn title to #girlboss, I stopped, took the time to reply to the email request, and proceeded to express my point of view.
What I wanted to know was, why would any woman choose to call herself a girl in the context of managing people? I was also wondering: had the white-haired guys disappeared while I had been busy running my business?
And also this: Maybe the younger generation who identify with this term fight different battles?
Then I got a call from a business partner to negotiate a deal. We were talking about a relatively small amount of money — yet significant for my startup — and as I was speaking, he compared me with his daughter. I should be proud, he said, when I confronted him.
I was livid. And yet, I was still being asked to #girlboss my title?
I pondered all this, and then it sank in. These aren’t my labels, and equally importantly, I like who I am and what I’m doing with my life. I celebrate my individuality and don’t feel the need to define myself by other people’s terms. I began to reflect on the roles we’re often pressured to play to be accepted in a male-dominated business world, and instead I decided to focus on the positive: exploring the model of a powerful, strong business woman.
Yes, there’s a challenge here. Men (and women) pressure us to model some of the worst male behaviors. There’s a lot of testosterone raging in the boardroom, and men duke it out for alpha status. As women who are thrown into these charged situations, if testosterone levels are the metric of success, we’re immediately disqualified. We can combat that by rejecting our femininity and trying to come across as manly. Or, we can exaggerate our femininity, accept the labels pushed on us, and overtly sexualize our message. I firmly believe neither of these tactics help us. There’s a third path, in which we celebrate our individuality in all of its complexity, bring that to the room, and make a statement. Think Sheryl Sandberg or Madeleine Albright. These are mature, powerful women who’ve proven themselves capable of big jobs.
We’re surrounded by advertising campaigns and media that sexualizes women or reduces them to the image of a prepubescent girl. On Wall Street right now, the controversial “Fearless Girl” statue installed in front of the iconic, longstanding “Charging Bull” figure was conceived by an advertising agency for an investment firm whose leadership team is conspicuously short on women. The girl is meant to be a symbol of women’s power in a male-dominated industry, but it’s off-key: she’s an elementary-age schoolgirl in a skirt. Sure, if we’re trying to drum up support for STEM education, it’s great to embrace the target population of young girls. We love Girls In Tech and want there to be more of them, starting from a young age. But to reduce the women’s workforce to a statue of a young girl is infantilizing.
We’re also asked to buy into social media campaigns where we are pushed to identify ourselves as girls (not something that happens for men), wear clothing that reduces our ambition to a hashtag (#ambitious), or adopt other symbols that reinforce the cliché of a girl in a skirt. We’re selling ourselves short. If we accept these childish or intensely sexualized roles, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take us seriously. If we’re merely following rules and norms of behavior, and not being leaders or exerting our power, we shouldn’t be surprised if people treat us like naive girls.
I’m tapped into San Francisco’s startup scene. On a typical pitch night, there will be one or two women among a dozen men. While female pitches, like at the latest swissnex night, are usually well presented and raise the bar for everyone, at female-only pre-seed pitch nights I see that women don’t aim high enough. They’re not striving for world domination. Often, they are pitching smaller scale products or tech that’s filling a niche or reaching a market sector not previously addressed. These are great businesses but not venture-backable startups.
Data shows that women-run startups only attract about 5% of the investment capital in the industry. There’s gender bias in the investment world and in the industry at large, but women can also be part of the problem in perpetuating the stereotypes. In failing to aim high and not create strong businesses that scale, there is an unfortunate collateral effect. The women who do have viable businesses don’t get taken seriously. As a society, we need to make some changes. We need to create incentives for women to think on a larger scale. We can help by implementing programs to support businesses that actually scale, and thus attract venture funding. It’s a “build it and they will come” scenario. Raise the bar for expectations, and women will rise to it.
The pink princess brigade is not for me. That style doesn’t help us, particularly in tech. I might love cherry red lipstick and macaroons, but these are not defining symbols of my power. I’m a lot more complex than a hashtag.
