October 4, 2013 • 21 mins
In the final installment of the "Lean In" series, Cristen and Caroline explore why "bossy" is a negative term typically applied to women and girls. As we strive for career advancement, how can women square success and likeability in the workplace, and is it time to reclaim "bossy?"
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from House Top
Works not Color. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and this is our fourth and
final episode in our special series on the book lean In,
Women Work In the Will to Lead by Facebook CEO CHERYLS. Sandberg,
(00:28):
and we hope that you have enjoyed the series so far. Caroline,
do you feel like a more empowered career woman now?
I yes. Researching for these episodes, in a combination with
reading lean In, I feel more educated about career matters.
But more than that, I have been so excited to
see people's feedback. Yeah. Like, you know, the minute we
(00:51):
published the episode on negotiating salaries, for instance, we got
this flood of feedback, particularly on Facebook, from women being like,
oh my god, thank you, or wow, I wish i'd
known this two years ago, and so do I Exactly. Yeah,
it's been It has definitely been fun interacting with people
and hearing about these experiences that a lot of us share.
(01:16):
So for this final installment, we're going to talk about
the word bossy because with our first episode in this series,
we started at the threshold of the workplace with salary
negotiation and now hopefully we've taken you through to the
corner office. Congratulations, we're all powerful women in beautiful pants
suits from Jay Crew. And let's talk about bossy. Yeah,
(01:41):
I and I have no shame in saying it was
an incredibly bossy child. Oh yeah, yeah, and I I.
You know, we're going to get into the connotations of
this word and what we really mean when we say it,
and maybe what we should say instead of bossy. But no,
I have no shame. I I was a bossy child
in every negative sense of that word, and so negative
(02:03):
sense in terms of not being fun to play with. I.
I was an only child. Um, so I tended to
get very like, you go do that, and and don't
do that. I want to do that, and no you can't.
You can't play with that because that's mine, And then
we're yeah, yeah, that was very I tended to boss
kids around. Yeah, I have my boss the streaks. I
(02:23):
think partially due to homeschooling, because I was really used
to self directed learning. So with a group of Simon's
in college, for instance, I really wasn't a big fan
of them and prefer to just kind of lay out
my own plan and forge ahead and people would like
to follow along. Then great. Yeah, well you know what
(02:46):
It's interesting though, like as I mean talking about moving
from an elementary school setting to a college setting, you know,
and then into the workplaces, whereas we're talking about today,
you know, I really kind of feel like I've taken
my bossy childhood brat tendencies and kind of transition those
(03:07):
into the workplace. And I feel like, you know, the
past few jobs I've had, I've been able to, for instance,
like go to meetings and actually help not delegate because
I'm not a boss one day, but you know, maybe
actually help focus meetings and things like that. It sounds
like you assert yourself. Yes, I am able to be assertive. Um.
(03:29):
And that the thing is the fact that assertiveness and
bossing nous can essentially be sort of the same thing.
We just obviously treat bossy as a much more negative term. Um.
But let's dig into how gender it is. Because we
felt like bossing this was a good place to end
(03:50):
things because it's almost exclusively used as a pejorative for
authoritative women, because as we've talked about in this sear
yas before, women are constantly being socially penalized for being
assertive and thus being called just bossy or another B
word exactly, And that's one of the reasons why, for instance,
(04:12):
I think it's so great that Tina Fey called her
book bossy pants, which I think is also a job
at this gendering of bossy. Well, so where did our
our use of the word bossy and boss even come from.
Let's look at the etymology. This is from Etymology online
in the fifteen forties. It meant swelling, projecting, and rounded.
(04:36):
I don't know, I picture like a boss's stomach anyway,
and like a boss tweed stomach, right exactly. Well, so
that that's bossy. Where it's coming from that it's it's
swelling and projecting, and that's from the word boss, which
is actually from Dutch bass. I'm probably saying that wrong,
but B A A S, which is a master of
(04:57):
a Dutch ship. It's like a word a Dutch ship's captain.
That's kind of neat. Yeah. Um, Well, then fast forward
to two and we have meaning what we think of
today in terms of being domineering and fond of ordering
people about. And then it's also a common cow name.
So there we go. So maybe bossy instead of bessie.
(05:21):
But one thing I wasn't able to find though in
tracking the etymology of bossy is where it took this
turn from just being a person fond of ordering people
about to a woman in particular. Um, but these days,
I mean, I think it's pretty commonly associated with women.
(05:42):
I don't I don't know that we hear too often
about bossy boys or bossy men. It's just oh, he's
the boss, who's the boss? Oh, he's the boss, who's bossy?
Well she's bossy? Yeah, I mean you might you might
hear bossy in relation to small young boys maybe, uh,
but yeah, you showed on here in relation to any
(06:04):
adult men. And that was brought up over and over
again by a lot of women who were critiquing the
use of the words, such as uh. Britain's Claire Balding,
who said you come across words all the time, that
her everyday sexism. She says, I was described as competently
bossy and bossily competent by a male journalist and I thought, gosh,
(06:26):
BOSSI has never used of a man. A man would
be called assertive or confident or quick or bright. Yeah.
Over at the current conscious lawyer Kathleen J. Wou echoed that.
She said, one of the reasons women seemed to hit
a wall in their careers goes back to a word
they've heard consistently since elementary school. Bossy. There's something visceral
(06:48):
about that word. It's everything a little girl shouldn't be.
And her friends, parents, and teachers all scolded her when
they perceived she was being bossy. So side note, really us,
did your parents ever call you out for being bossy?
Do you remember knowing that bossy label? No? But I
think I don't know what made me hyper aware of it.
(07:09):
But I remember having a friend over, an elementary school
friend over, and we were playing in the front yard
and everything was going right. We were having a good
tim climbing trees and stuff. Uh, and I did something
and she got this look on her face, and I
was like, sorry if I'm being bossy, because I was
kind of. I don't know, I don't know. I don't
(07:29):
know how I became aware of it or who even
if people ever even described me that way, But I
described myself that way even as a kid. That's amazing
how we absorb those kinds of things as kids so
quickly without or even knowing it. To continue talking about
Kathleen Woo, she also wrote that um, a woman's success
(07:50):
often comes at the cost of not being very well
liked by men or by women, and she says that
that has a lot to do with the traditional women's
roles verse as traditional men's roles in society. That if
a woman transgresses, you know, and she does assert herself
at work or wherever, in the store wherever, she doesn't
(08:13):
actually get to be very well liked because of it,
whereas a man might be admired for it. And this
is something that Elizabeth Berger, who is the author of
Raising Kids with Character and she's also a psychiatrist, probably
would say traces all the way back to childhood, as
with the instance of you Caroline kind of internalizing that
bossy label because she was talking to Kathleen Debony with
(08:36):
a Daily Beast about Deboni's uh, supposedly bossy daughter, and
she said, actually labeling little girls as bossy is incredibly sexist,
because she says, the urge to push other people around
is deeply ingrained in human nature. But the same presentation
and a boy would be applauded as vivid and courageous
(08:59):
and does irving of praise. So we see this pattern
over and over again, whether it's on the schoolyard or
in the boardroom. Right. But what I like about Davini's
piece for The Daily Beast when she's referencing her quote
unquote bossy daughter, she does kind of admire her daughter
for her behavior. And so we're talking about how boys
would be admired for a behavior whereas girls would not.
(09:20):
But she talks about how, okay, okay, my daughter might
re a little demanding or bossy with her friends, but shoot,
she might become the next Hillary Clinton because she's simply
saying what she wants. I mean, because she's asserting herself. Yeah,
because I think a kid could easily still do the
basic things of sharing and getting along. A lot of
(09:42):
times you put kids in a room, one of them
is going to emerge as the leader. And I wonder
if it happens to be a girl that emerges as
that person, if she's just knee jerk called bossy. Yeah, Well,
because you call someone bossy, there is that ingrained get
of connotation, you know. And I think it was I
(10:02):
think it was Daviny who who commented that, Hey, you
know some of those girls might take it and be
okay with it and still advance along that same assertive path,
but some might internalize that negativity and just shrink shrink
from it. Yeah, which is something that we certainly don't
need to do. And Cheryl Standberg and Lenan talks about
(10:26):
the insecurity regarding these fraught issues of success and likability
because a lot of times, like we're saying, they can
often be at odds for women in the workplace. Um
She stites a two thousand three Columbia Business School experiment
of a Heidi versus A Howard, which found that students
(10:48):
perceptions of a fictional business person profiled as either Heidi
or Howard changed drastically depending on the character's gender. Success
of lik ability strongly correlated only to Howard, whereas the
more successful Heidie got, the less students liked her, both
male and female students alike. Right, And the women in
(11:11):
these types of studies often get the negative descriptions like
she's not well liked by her peers, or we assume
she's too aggressive, not a team player, maybe a little political,
or she can't be trusted, or she's difficult, and so
Sandberg writes our stereotype of men holds that their providers
decisive and driven. Our stereotype of women holds that they
are caregivers, sensitive, and communal. So, like with the bossy thing,
(11:35):
if we view women as you know, transgressing normal social boundaries,
then they're difficult, whereas men are just you know, strong.
And so what do we do to avoid being disliked?
To avoid all of those admittedly unsavory titles such as,
I mean, I wouldn't want to be told, well, listen,
you can't be trusted, Kristen, you're too difficult, you're a
(11:58):
bit political, to which I'd say, well, you've probably been
listening to my podcast. Um. But seriously, though, to avoid
being disliked a lot of times, we will temper our
professional goals. We're sort of undercut ourselves. And she quotes
in the book Ken Auletta from The New Yorker who said, quote,
self doubt becomes a form of self defense. And this
(12:22):
also seems to tie back into our episode on the
imposter syndrome and the fear in the workplace and how
that serves to hold us back from our potential in
that way. And this I'm sure only amplifies all of
those issues right. And she also quotes Deborah Gruenfeld, who's
(12:42):
a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Stanford and
Greenfeld says, our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership
qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in
a double bind. When a woman does anything that's signals
she might not be nice first foremost, it creates a
negative impression and makes us uncomfortable. And the thing is,
(13:05):
I don't I don't think that Sandberg is trying to
say that in order to get ahead, you can't be nice,
even though there is that a whole business advice book
called Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. But I don't.
I don't think that you have to sacrifice interpersonal warmth
in order to get a raise. It's just being more
(13:27):
cognizant perhaps of not sacrificing our chances of getting a
raise by wanting to be too nice. Does that make sense?
And so, transitioning completely off of what you were just
saying in her book, Lenan Sandberg does suggest that understanding
how to negotiate and get a seat at the table
by combining niceness with insistence um is probably the way
(13:51):
to go, and that often requires smiling frequently, she says,
expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals,
and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed
to taking a critical stance. And a lot of those
things echo what we said in our negotiation episode, where
you have to approach it slightly differently if you're a
(14:13):
woman as opposed to a man, and you know, make
the negotiation more about the good of the group as
a whole rather than just for yourself. Yeah, and I
really appreciate that approach because kind of like the reason
why we titled the negotiation episode how to Negotiate like
a Woman. The solution to all of this stuff isn't
(14:35):
we'll just act like a man. You don't have to
sacrifice any any type of femininity that you might have,
or or niceness or or things like that. It's simply
reevaluating our approach dealing with fear issues, seems like, and
you know, coming at it from places of truth and authenticity,
(14:57):
because that what she's talking about in terms of smiling, frequently,
expressing appreciation and concern taking in general, more communal approaches
resonates a lot in my experience at work, because in
times when I might be working really really hard and
I'm very determined and I have a goal that i
want to accomplish, but it's a lot easier to accomplish
(15:18):
that if I'm smiling, even if it is fake sometimes
and not to you, the Caroline, I was gonna say, um, yeah, sure, Caroline,
we can do that topic. No, but do you know
what I mean? Because if there are times when, especially
if you're dealing with difficult manager or even a difficult
(15:38):
coworker that you don't have a close relationship with, where
you've gotta play nice. And I say play nice in
terms of the aspect of combining niceness with insistence. And
you know, when I first read this, I don't disagree
with Sandberg at all in this regard that you do
(16:00):
have to combine niceness with insistence, you know, smiling frequently,
et cetera. Um, My first instinct was like, well, that's obnoxious,
Like why should we have to do that, Like why
can't I just be direct? Which you know a lot
of times I just am, And I'm sure a lot
of times people are like, what's up her butt? But
I would rather be direct than like beat around the
(16:21):
bush and be overly polite. But the more I thought
about it, the more I was like, Okay, Okay, it's
not like it's just women who have to do this,
you know, Like I would be just as miffed if
a man walked up to me and was like, hey,
stop smacking your gum as a woman, you know, like that.
(16:42):
Obviously that's just a silly example and has nothing to
do with work. But like I mean, I think I
think being polite and being insistent but kind and friendly
is good advice for anybody in the workplace. Well, and
if your m O is that combination of niceness with
insistence that gives you maybe more leverage for those times
(17:04):
when you have to be firm and you have to
bulldoze a little bit and you have to be demanding. Yeah,
because that does lay the foundation for people to think, Okay, well,
she's she's never been unfair or cruel or mean or
hardhearted to me. Um, so obviously this thing is important
and this is what she needs. Hopefully that would be
(17:26):
the well, and all of this would be undergirded by,
you know, a legacy of solid work. You know, that's
what always hopefully at the end of the day speaks
for itself, and then you have all of these other
things on top of it to tie it together. Because
work is so not just work. Yeah, you're you're juggling
(17:47):
a lot of personalities. And one thing that I tell
my father this all the time. I'm twenty nine, you know,
and I tell my father this all the time. I
just told him last weekend when we had dinner together.
I was, like, you told me when I was in
elementary school and I was doing group projects, and I'm
so angry because these other kids were not doing it right,
and they weren't, you know, putting in the same effort
(18:09):
that I was. You told me way back then that, sister,
this is life, and you're gonna have to get used
to it. And when you're a grown up and you
have a job, it's going to be even worse. You're
making such strong right now. I hope it's not always worse, No,
(18:30):
but you know what you mean. Yeah, Like advice like
that about dealing with other personalities, being open to dealing
with other personalities, and being flexible enough in your own
personality that you can approach maybe uncomfortable situations with a
smile and with kindness, you know that. I think that's
(18:51):
that's a good jumping off point for office relations. Well,
I'm going to toss something out there that might sound
a bit radical. I think maybe we should reclaim bossy. Interesting.
I wonder if there is a way at least two
sort of flip the script on it in a similar
(19:12):
way that women have reclaimed the B word that I
can't stay on this podcast, right, Yeah, I don't. I
don't disagree. I I wonder if we made a conscious
effort to when we wanted to call someone bossy, if
we made a conscious effort to replace it with a
word like assertive, and see how we felt in our
(19:33):
brains when we said that, because I think that would
be kind of like a personal test almost for how
we really meant it, Right, did we really mean that
as a positive? Like because you can say about someone
else she's she's assertive and it's a positive, you can
also mean it as a negative. I think bossy, on
the other hand, always has a negative connotation, So I
don't know, maybe replacing bossy with a word like assertive,
(19:55):
you can kind of judge. Wait, okay, maybe like check yourself,
how am I you sing this? I like that like
that thought experiment, and I think in real world terms too.
The more Sheryl Sandberg's we see, the more Tina Pha's
writing books called bossy Pants, the more outspoken, powerful, assertive
(20:18):
bossy women, the better it's going to be. Yeah. Hopefully
over time, Yeah, I mean I think, um, hopefully, decades
from now, it will seem silly that we talked about
the negative connotations of a word like bossy, and hopefully
people will be joking around calling each other bossy and
it won't be a negative thing. So we want to
(20:41):
hear from all of our bossy listeners out there. Mom
and Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
send your letters. This does conclude our four part series
on lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. You can connect more
with Lenin Milenan Foundation at len In dot org or
going to Facebook dot com slash lean in, or there's
(21:05):
a huge community of women talking about these kinds of
workplace issues every single day, and of course share your
stories with us as well. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
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(21:26):
Our user name is stuff mom Never told You. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, doesn't have
stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you from House Top
Works not Color. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and this is our fourth and
final episode in our special series on the book lean In,
Women Work In the Will to Lead by Facebook CEO CHERYLS. Sandberg,
(00:28):
and we hope that you have enjoyed the series so far. Caroline,
do you feel like a more empowered career woman now?
I yes. Researching for these episodes, in a combination with
reading lean In, I feel more educated about career matters.
But more than that, I have been so excited to
see people's feedback. Yeah. Like, you know, the minute we
(00:51):
published the episode on negotiating salaries, for instance, we got
this flood of feedback, particularly on Facebook, from women being like,
oh my god, thank you, or wow, I wish i'd
known this two years ago, and so do I Exactly. Yeah,
it's been It has definitely been fun interacting with people
and hearing about these experiences that a lot of us share.
(01:16):
So for this final installment, we're going to talk about
the word bossy because with our first episode in this series,
we started at the threshold of the workplace with salary
negotiation and now hopefully we've taken you through to the
corner office. Congratulations, we're all powerful women in beautiful pants
suits from Jay Crew. And let's talk about bossy. Yeah,
(01:41):
I and I have no shame in saying it was
an incredibly bossy child. Oh yeah, yeah, and I I.
You know, we're going to get into the connotations of
this word and what we really mean when we say it,
and maybe what we should say instead of bossy. But no,
I have no shame. I I was a bossy child
in every negative sense of that word, and so negative
(02:03):
sense in terms of not being fun to play with. I.
I was an only child. Um, so I tended to
get very like, you go do that, and and don't
do that. I want to do that, and no you can't.
You can't play with that because that's mine, And then
we're yeah, yeah, that was very I tended to boss
kids around. Yeah, I have my boss the streaks. I
(02:23):
think partially due to homeschooling, because I was really used
to self directed learning. So with a group of Simon's
in college, for instance, I really wasn't a big fan
of them and prefer to just kind of lay out
my own plan and forge ahead and people would like
to follow along. Then great. Yeah, well you know what
(02:46):
It's interesting though, like as I mean talking about moving
from an elementary school setting to a college setting, you know,
and then into the workplaces, whereas we're talking about today,
you know, I really kind of feel like I've taken
my bossy childhood brat tendencies and kind of transition those
(03:07):
into the workplace. And I feel like, you know, the
past few jobs I've had, I've been able to, for instance,
like go to meetings and actually help not delegate because
I'm not a boss one day, but you know, maybe
actually help focus meetings and things like that. It sounds
like you assert yourself. Yes, I am able to be assertive. Um.
(03:29):
And that the thing is the fact that assertiveness and
bossing nous can essentially be sort of the same thing.
We just obviously treat bossy as a much more negative term. Um.
But let's dig into how gender it is. Because we
felt like bossing this was a good place to end
(03:50):
things because it's almost exclusively used as a pejorative for
authoritative women, because as we've talked about in this sear
yas before, women are constantly being socially penalized for being
assertive and thus being called just bossy or another B
word exactly, And that's one of the reasons why, for instance,
(04:12):
I think it's so great that Tina Fey called her
book bossy pants, which I think is also a job
at this gendering of bossy. Well, so where did our
our use of the word bossy and boss even come from.
Let's look at the etymology. This is from Etymology online
in the fifteen forties. It meant swelling, projecting, and rounded.
(04:36):
I don't know, I picture like a boss's stomach anyway,
and like a boss tweed stomach, right exactly. Well, so
that that's bossy. Where it's coming from that it's it's
swelling and projecting, and that's from the word boss, which
is actually from Dutch bass. I'm probably saying that wrong,
but B A A S, which is a master of
(04:57):
a Dutch ship. It's like a word a Dutch ship's captain.
That's kind of neat. Yeah. Um, Well, then fast forward
to two and we have meaning what we think of
today in terms of being domineering and fond of ordering
people about. And then it's also a common cow name.
So there we go. So maybe bossy instead of bessie.
(05:21):
But one thing I wasn't able to find though in
tracking the etymology of bossy is where it took this
turn from just being a person fond of ordering people
about to a woman in particular. Um, but these days,
I mean, I think it's pretty commonly associated with women.
(05:42):
I don't I don't know that we hear too often
about bossy boys or bossy men. It's just oh, he's
the boss, who's the boss? Oh, he's the boss, who's bossy?
Well she's bossy? Yeah, I mean you might you might
hear bossy in relation to small young boys maybe, uh,
but yeah, you showed on here in relation to any
(06:04):
adult men. And that was brought up over and over
again by a lot of women who were critiquing the
use of the words, such as uh. Britain's Claire Balding,
who said you come across words all the time, that
her everyday sexism. She says, I was described as competently
bossy and bossily competent by a male journalist and I thought, gosh,
(06:26):
BOSSI has never used of a man. A man would
be called assertive or confident or quick or bright. Yeah.
Over at the current conscious lawyer Kathleen J. Wou echoed that.
She said, one of the reasons women seemed to hit
a wall in their careers goes back to a word
they've heard consistently since elementary school. Bossy. There's something visceral
(06:48):
about that word. It's everything a little girl shouldn't be.
And her friends, parents, and teachers all scolded her when
they perceived she was being bossy. So side note, really us,
did your parents ever call you out for being bossy?
Do you remember knowing that bossy label? No? But I
think I don't know what made me hyper aware of it.
(07:09):
But I remember having a friend over, an elementary school
friend over, and we were playing in the front yard
and everything was going right. We were having a good
tim climbing trees and stuff. Uh, and I did something
and she got this look on her face, and I
was like, sorry if I'm being bossy, because I was
kind of. I don't know, I don't know. I don't
(07:29):
know how I became aware of it or who even
if people ever even described me that way, But I
described myself that way even as a kid. That's amazing
how we absorb those kinds of things as kids so
quickly without or even knowing it. To continue talking about
Kathleen Woo, she also wrote that um, a woman's success
(07:50):
often comes at the cost of not being very well
liked by men or by women, and she says that
that has a lot to do with the traditional women's
roles verse as traditional men's roles in society. That if
a woman transgresses, you know, and she does assert herself
at work or wherever, in the store wherever, she doesn't
(08:13):
actually get to be very well liked because of it,
whereas a man might be admired for it. And this
is something that Elizabeth Berger, who is the author of
Raising Kids with Character and she's also a psychiatrist, probably
would say traces all the way back to childhood, as
with the instance of you Caroline kind of internalizing that
bossy label because she was talking to Kathleen Debony with
(08:36):
a Daily Beast about Deboni's uh, supposedly bossy daughter, and
she said, actually labeling little girls as bossy is incredibly sexist,
because she says, the urge to push other people around
is deeply ingrained in human nature. But the same presentation
and a boy would be applauded as vivid and courageous
(08:59):
and does irving of praise. So we see this pattern
over and over again, whether it's on the schoolyard or
in the boardroom. Right. But what I like about Davini's
piece for The Daily Beast when she's referencing her quote
unquote bossy daughter, she does kind of admire her daughter
for her behavior. And so we're talking about how boys
would be admired for a behavior whereas girls would not.
(09:20):
But she talks about how, okay, okay, my daughter might
re a little demanding or bossy with her friends, but shoot,
she might become the next Hillary Clinton because she's simply
saying what she wants. I mean, because she's asserting herself. Yeah,
because I think a kid could easily still do the
basic things of sharing and getting along. A lot of
(09:42):
times you put kids in a room, one of them
is going to emerge as the leader. And I wonder
if it happens to be a girl that emerges as
that person, if she's just knee jerk called bossy. Yeah, Well,
because you call someone bossy, there is that ingrained get
of connotation, you know. And I think it was I
(10:02):
think it was Daviny who who commented that, Hey, you
know some of those girls might take it and be
okay with it and still advance along that same assertive path,
but some might internalize that negativity and just shrink shrink
from it. Yeah, which is something that we certainly don't
need to do. And Cheryl Standberg and Lenan talks about
(10:26):
the insecurity regarding these fraught issues of success and likability
because a lot of times, like we're saying, they can
often be at odds for women in the workplace. Um
She stites a two thousand three Columbia Business School experiment
of a Heidi versus A Howard, which found that students
(10:48):
perceptions of a fictional business person profiled as either Heidi
or Howard changed drastically depending on the character's gender. Success
of lik ability strongly correlated only to Howard, whereas the
more successful Heidie got, the less students liked her, both
male and female students alike. Right, And the women in
(11:11):
these types of studies often get the negative descriptions like
she's not well liked by her peers, or we assume
she's too aggressive, not a team player, maybe a little political,
or she can't be trusted, or she's difficult, and so
Sandberg writes our stereotype of men holds that their providers
decisive and driven. Our stereotype of women holds that they
are caregivers, sensitive, and communal. So, like with the bossy thing,
(11:35):
if we view women as you know, transgressing normal social boundaries,
then they're difficult, whereas men are just you know, strong.
And so what do we do to avoid being disliked?
To avoid all of those admittedly unsavory titles such as,
I mean, I wouldn't want to be told, well, listen,
you can't be trusted, Kristen, you're too difficult, you're a
(11:58):
bit political, to which I'd say, well, you've probably been
listening to my podcast. Um. But seriously, though, to avoid
being disliked a lot of times, we will temper our
professional goals. We're sort of undercut ourselves. And she quotes
in the book Ken Auletta from The New Yorker who said, quote,
self doubt becomes a form of self defense. And this
(12:22):
also seems to tie back into our episode on the
imposter syndrome and the fear in the workplace and how
that serves to hold us back from our potential in
that way. And this I'm sure only amplifies all of
those issues right. And she also quotes Deborah Gruenfeld, who's
(12:42):
a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Stanford and
Greenfeld says, our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership
qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in
a double bind. When a woman does anything that's signals
she might not be nice first foremost, it creates a
negative impression and makes us uncomfortable. And the thing is,
(13:05):
I don't I don't think that Sandberg is trying to
say that in order to get ahead, you can't be nice,
even though there is that a whole business advice book
called Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. But I don't.
I don't think that you have to sacrifice interpersonal warmth
in order to get a raise. It's just being more
(13:27):
cognizant perhaps of not sacrificing our chances of getting a
raise by wanting to be too nice. Does that make sense?
And so, transitioning completely off of what you were just
saying in her book, Lenan Sandberg does suggest that understanding
how to negotiate and get a seat at the table
by combining niceness with insistence um is probably the way
(13:51):
to go, and that often requires smiling frequently, she says,
expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals,
and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed
to taking a critical stance. And a lot of those
things echo what we said in our negotiation episode, where
you have to approach it slightly differently if you're a
(14:13):
woman as opposed to a man, and you know, make
the negotiation more about the good of the group as
a whole rather than just for yourself. Yeah, and I
really appreciate that approach because kind of like the reason
why we titled the negotiation episode how to Negotiate like
a Woman. The solution to all of this stuff isn't
(14:35):
we'll just act like a man. You don't have to
sacrifice any any type of femininity that you might have,
or or niceness or or things like that. It's simply
reevaluating our approach dealing with fear issues, seems like, and
you know, coming at it from places of truth and authenticity,
(14:57):
because that what she's talking about in terms of smiling, frequently,
expressing appreciation and concern taking in general, more communal approaches
resonates a lot in my experience at work, because in
times when I might be working really really hard and
I'm very determined and I have a goal that i
want to accomplish, but it's a lot easier to accomplish
(15:18):
that if I'm smiling, even if it is fake sometimes
and not to you, the Caroline, I was gonna say, um, yeah, sure, Caroline,
we can do that topic. No, but do you know
what I mean? Because if there are times when, especially
if you're dealing with difficult manager or even a difficult
(15:38):
coworker that you don't have a close relationship with, where
you've gotta play nice. And I say play nice in
terms of the aspect of combining niceness with insistence. And
you know, when I first read this, I don't disagree
with Sandberg at all in this regard that you do
(16:00):
have to combine niceness with insistence, you know, smiling frequently,
et cetera. Um, My first instinct was like, well, that's obnoxious,
Like why should we have to do that, Like why
can't I just be direct? Which you know a lot
of times I just am, And I'm sure a lot
of times people are like, what's up her butt? But
I would rather be direct than like beat around the
(16:21):
bush and be overly polite. But the more I thought
about it, the more I was like, Okay, Okay, it's
not like it's just women who have to do this,
you know, Like I would be just as miffed if
a man walked up to me and was like, hey,
stop smacking your gum as a woman, you know, like that.
(16:42):
Obviously that's just a silly example and has nothing to
do with work. But like I mean, I think I
think being polite and being insistent but kind and friendly
is good advice for anybody in the workplace. Well, and
if your m O is that combination of niceness with
insistence that gives you maybe more leverage for those times
(17:04):
when you have to be firm and you have to
bulldoze a little bit and you have to be demanding. Yeah,
because that does lay the foundation for people to think, Okay, well,
she's she's never been unfair or cruel or mean or
hardhearted to me. Um, so obviously this thing is important
and this is what she needs. Hopefully that would be
(17:26):
the well, and all of this would be undergirded by,
you know, a legacy of solid work. You know, that's
what always hopefully at the end of the day speaks
for itself, and then you have all of these other
things on top of it to tie it together. Because
work is so not just work. Yeah, you're you're juggling
(17:47):
a lot of personalities. And one thing that I tell
my father this all the time. I'm twenty nine, you know,
and I tell my father this all the time. I
just told him last weekend when we had dinner together.
I was, like, you told me when I was in
elementary school and I was doing group projects, and I'm
so angry because these other kids were not doing it right,
and they weren't, you know, putting in the same effort
(18:09):
that I was. You told me way back then that, sister,
this is life, and you're gonna have to get used
to it. And when you're a grown up and you
have a job, it's going to be even worse. You're
making such strong right now. I hope it's not always worse, No,
(18:30):
but you know what you mean. Yeah, Like advice like
that about dealing with other personalities, being open to dealing
with other personalities, and being flexible enough in your own
personality that you can approach maybe uncomfortable situations with a
smile and with kindness, you know that. I think that's
(18:51):
that's a good jumping off point for office relations. Well,
I'm going to toss something out there that might sound
a bit radical. I think maybe we should reclaim bossy. Interesting.
I wonder if there is a way at least two
sort of flip the script on it in a similar
(19:12):
way that women have reclaimed the B word that I
can't stay on this podcast, right, Yeah, I don't. I
don't disagree. I I wonder if we made a conscious
effort to when we wanted to call someone bossy, if
we made a conscious effort to replace it with a
word like assertive, and see how we felt in our
(19:33):
brains when we said that, because I think that would
be kind of like a personal test almost for how
we really meant it, Right, did we really mean that
as a positive? Like because you can say about someone
else she's she's assertive and it's a positive, you can
also mean it as a negative. I think bossy, on
the other hand, always has a negative connotation, So I
don't know, maybe replacing bossy with a word like assertive,
(19:55):
you can kind of judge. Wait, okay, maybe like check yourself,
how am I you sing this? I like that like
that thought experiment, and I think in real world terms too.
The more Sheryl Sandberg's we see, the more Tina Pha's
writing books called bossy Pants, the more outspoken, powerful, assertive
(20:18):
bossy women, the better it's going to be. Yeah. Hopefully
over time, Yeah, I mean I think, um, hopefully, decades
from now, it will seem silly that we talked about
the negative connotations of a word like bossy, and hopefully
people will be joking around calling each other bossy and
it won't be a negative thing. So we want to
(20:41):
hear from all of our bossy listeners out there. Mom
and Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
send your letters. This does conclude our four part series
on lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. You can connect more
with Lenin Milenan Foundation at len In dot org or
going to Facebook dot com slash lean in, or there's
(21:05):
a huge community of women talking about these kinds of
workplace issues every single day, and of course share your
stories with us as well. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is our email address, or you can also find
us on Facebook or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast
and for kicks, you should check us out also on Instagram.
(21:26):
Our user name is stuff mom Never told You. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, doesn't have
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