The Personal is Professional

June 18, 2019

Young women today have more freedom to choose what they want to do and who they want to be than ever before. We’re in a moment of “Women are powerful!” But are we, really?

Consider the simple truth that women will never be powerful at work until they are powerful in their personal lives. And we’re not exactly hitting home runs in that arena.

Take college-aged women, whom we’re counting on to shatter the glass ceiling in the C-suite someday. In a recent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, where the expert guest was discussing her research on hookup culture on college campuses, we hear the lament of one female student:

“I think girls know when they're being used. And I think it feels bad to be used. But I think the alternative is that nobody wants to use you. And that means that you're not hooking up with anybody. And I think that that's worse.”

This, dear reader, is our future talking.

According to Professor Lisa Wade of Occidental College, author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus,this mindset comes from a failure of the feminist movement: “They [feminists] wanted women to have the opportunity to do the things that men do. And they wanted everyone to sit up and notice that the things women had been doing all along and the traits and interests that they were believed to have were also valuable. And we really only got half of that.”

She’s right. We are still, as a culture, in a desperate race to prove that women can do anything that men can do (which apparently includes having soulless, casual sex with multiple partners).  Somewhere along the line, the feminist cry of “Equality!” got reduced to the idea that in order to have the same rights as men, one has to act like a man. 

Now, to be honest, acquiring power in the world as we know it still requires one to be able to play a "male power game." Women have to know how to operate in that environment. But in our rush to prove our worth in a man’s world, we have lost ourselves, and the greatest power we have—which is the ability to say, “This is who I am, and what I want,” and mean it.

And if you can’t declare who you are and what you want to a dating partner, trust me, you’re not going to be able to say it in the boardroom, or when asking for raise. So rather than trying to contort yourself into “male” ways of acting, spend some time reconnecting with who you are, what you stand for, and what you want. And then walk, talk, and make decisions with those things as your guide.

And start with your personal life (You can’t just put on a “powerful” face at work), remembering that your greatest power comes from being unapologetically you.