What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (51 page)

RS
: I believe the conditioning happens early and primarily in social relationships. I think one of the unfortunate misperceptions of women’s leadership is that it’s a situation that we have to start addressing when a young woman is fresh out of college and in her first day of work. The women’s leadership conversation has been bizarrely split off from a conversation about girls. But who a young woman is on the job is something that’s put into place, years before, as a girl. So what girls learn in their friendships and from other adults and from the culture is that if you want to be rewarded with friends and social privileges, like popularity, then you should not be too aggressive, you should not speak too highly about yourself, you should avoid conflict and preserve relationships above all and you should be likable and generous. And so what girls learn in their social relationships becomes a powerful template for their identities, but also for the habits that they learn about self-expression and self-advocacy. That’s where a lot of this stuff gets put into place. It’s not something that’s happening in the workplace; it’s already in play, which to me, and obviously I’m biased—we were talking about the work that I’m interested in and that I do—but to me the points of entry are in girlhood.

MS
: I 100 percent agree that this all starts in girlhood. I have two daughters, and even though they have a mother who’s the founder of Feminist.com and all I do is write about this, it’s like there’s a virus in our culture. I see it pulling on them—to a lesser degree probably than most—but it’s pulling on them and their friends, and I don’t know if it’s even improved since I was their age. And I don’t know how to stop it. You’ve been doing really meaningful work around these themes. Where do you see the most
effective entry points for change? Is there anything that we can do to get on top of this?

RS
: Yes, definitely. But I think you have to start earlier. And I feel like it needs to be okay for us to say that girls need help diverting some of the destructive messages around femininity, without having to defend ourselves against accusations that we’re blaming girls for the problems in society. It’s very reminiscent to me of the different equality debates of the seventies. Or different [conversations] around equality. In other words, as I’m sure you know, in the seventies there were some feminists who believed that equality should be understood in terms of the fact that women deserved to be treated equally, but there was something inherently different about women that needed to be accounted—like whether it was that we have babies, or that we’re more relational. Then there were people who said, “No, we deserve to be equal to men because we’re the exact same as men.” And that conflict created a lot of divisiveness in the feminist movement and, I would argue, probably delayed or thwarted outright certain initiatives or progress. So now, the age of Sheryl Sandberg, is it true that women have these particular challenges, psychological barriers to success, or is it true that society puts women in this situation where they have these barriers and it’s really society that needs to change? Of course the answer is a little bit of both in both instances, but I personally feel that I get pushback if I try to talk about the kinds of new habits that girls need to develop, because to me, I need to be able to propose the intervention without having to defend my place to begin with. I don’t feel like there’s support at the highest levels of feminism. . . . At the Girls Leadership Institute, the organization that I cofounded, what we argue is that relationships are a classroom for leadership in girls’ lives. So we try to give girls the skills to tell their friends how they are feeling, promote their own perspective, negotiate, compromise, advocate for themselves—and in doing that, build
the skills that they will then, hopefully, import with them into a work or leadership setting. That to me is the intervention.

MS
: Does this happen in an educational setting? Is there a place for this?

RS
: Yeah, I mean, it can. One of the things that I’ve done with a couple of different faculties at independent schools for girls . . . the teachers choose the particular self-advocacy skills that they want to the girls to learn, like maybe being able to deal with criticism or take an intellectual risk or practice public speaking, and then they create lesson plans that not only focus on delivering content, but also focus on teaching that skill. So maybe it’s a debate in an English class about whether or not
The Catcher in the Rye
should still be read in high schools. You’re not just learning about
The Catcher in the Rye
, but you’re also learning how to have a debate and how not to take things personally. So yes, this can be done.

MS
: The other piece is the impact of media. When I look at the pressure on girls, especially whether it’s about their bodies or just in general, what do you think is the role of media and how does that need to change in terms of creating these expectations for girls that they put on themselves? No matter how many positive messages we put in them, how do you deal with the fact that they are inundated with these harmful images in the media?

RS
: I think the media are unavoidable. My child isn’t yet of this age, but I don’t think it’s particularly effective to enforce a policy of deprivation. I think that the media is one of the first sites where girls get introduced to conventional femininity expectations. I feel like the media is the first thing that people talk about, but it’s just one of several sites where girls are going to encounter these messages about how strong or authentic they’re really permitted to be. So, to me, it just means on some level girls are going
to internalize this. And that’s not always a bad thing, as long as they can be critical of it, too. I mean, you don’t want a daughter growing up who doesn’t know how to make herself look acceptable to other people. Like, I don’t want that daughter. I don’t want a daughter who doesn’t care what she looks like, because you know what, she’s not going to be able to succeed in this world. That doesn’t benefit her. I always say to girls, you have to be able to speak both languages. If you want to do girl talk and if you want to go like this all the time and make everything sound like a question and be like, “OMG, I was kind of, like, going to say that, but I’m not sure. . . .” If you want to talk like that, that’s fine, but you also have to learn how to talk like an assertive woman, so that you can use that when it’s the right time. Likewise, I don’t think it serves girls to completely shut off from what is expected of females in this culture, because that then would ultimately be very damaging for them. That means you can enjoy some of the media, but you also have to be critical of it and you have to take from it what makes sense to you and leave the rest. I don’t want a daughter who doesn’t care what she looks like, not because I think it’s important, but because that’s what it takes to be part of our society, whether we like it or not.

MS
: In your experience, what have you seen as successful ways to get girls to trust their own voices? Even going back to the work that Carol Gilligan does—she actually found a specific age, around eleven or twelve, right in that area, where girls start to doubt what they know. Is that the age to intervene for change? Are there specific things that you think we can do as parents, educators that can prevent that loss of voice?

RS
: I think emotional intelligence. I think part of what Carol Gilligan and her colleagues are writing about in that process of disconnection that girls are experiencing was a loss of—this is what I say in my book—a loss
of emotional intelligence, essentially an erosion of being able to know how you feel and take seriously how you feel. And then, of course, to be able to say how you feel. So I believe one of the strongest interventions with girls is helping girls take seriously their own thoughts and feelings. Authorizing girls to have their thoughts and feelings—really helping girls to see that their perspective is valuable and even if they’re not going to be successful at getting what they want, that how they think and feel is all right. But that assumes that they know how to even do that, and that’s part of what the Girls Leadership Institute does—we don’t assume that girls know how to do that. We’re trying to give them back those skills to help connect them to those thoughts and feelings to begin with. So, yeah, I think emotional intelligence, developing it and helping girls to maintain it, is a big part of what parents can do. So that means empathizing with your daughter when she experiences something, rather than denying what she’s feeling or suggesting another way to feel. There are a lot of different things there.

MS
: Do you see progress? You’ve been working on this a long time. Do you feel like we’re making progress with girls, or do you feel like it’s been stagnating?

RS
: Oh, no, I think we’re making great progress. I mean, I’d like to see more attention be paid to the link between the challenges that women experience as leaders and what happens with and to girls. I think that connection needs to be made more strongly in the movement. Right now I think those who work with girls are certainly split off from those who are working with women and that strikes me as counterproductive.

MS
: You’ve been very passionate about this. What drives you? What is it that continues to fuel your work on these themes?

RS
: I don’t know. I wish I knew. Maybe it’s a past life or something. I have no idea. It just has always mattered to me, since I always had a sense of injustice and I’ve always thought about some of the expectations of girls and women. I think I was always different, always the louder, more extroverted girl, which always kind of marginalized me and made me feel embarrassed, so I think I developed a sense of outrage early on about that. It made me sad watching my female peers diminish themselves, but I don’t know. For me, I really think that there’s so much to be gained by just being able to know and say what you think and feel in your closest relationships. I feel that that’s the point, like a nexus, where if you can do that in your closest relationships, you’re developing the ability to do that elsewhere. To me that feels so clear and right to me. I know that what girls care most about is their friendships, so it’s a no-brainer.

MS
: I know you wrote the book
Odd Girl Out
, so obviously you can see at a certain age the mean-girl stuff, the bullying that goes on with girls. My girls have been on the receiving end of being, never bullied, but certainly there’s a lot of mean behavior that goes on between girls, and when I hear about it, I always know that it comes from a place of insecurity—it’s not that these are horrible children but, again, back to something distorted in girls’ conditioning. Do you think this mean-girl dynamic is something that also needs to be addressed?

RS
: Yes, I do, but part of what I’m arguing is that’s what I mean by helping girls deal in their closest relationships—that’s where that mean-girl behavior happens. Some of the female aggression that we see expressed between girls has in common avoiding direct conflict and going behind someone’s back, or turning to social media instead of a direct conversation. That’s not happening because girls are inherently cruel, but because society hasn’t given them permission to be more direct and no one’s really taught them
the skills to do it. I think we have an opportunity to give girls the skills to navigate their conflicts a little bit differently. So I think the mean-girl behavior is very much linked to the leadership problem. Because if you learn in your closest relationships that what you should do when you get upset is to give someone the silent treatment or roll your eyes, you’re going to become a young woman who does the same thing in all areas of your life. I said this to a group of girls on Friday: “You’re not going to wake up one day like Buddha under the tree and just know how to have a difficult conversation with somebody. You’ve got to learn that. You’ve got to practice. You’ve got to try.”

MS
: What about the role of technology? I can see the impact on my girls—they’re on their iPhones or on a computer all the time, and my youngest has gotten into posting pictures on Instagram. On one hand, I see it as very positive expression for both of them and it’s very interesting for me to see what they’re posting and how they’re interacting with people they know and don’t know in the real world. I know you have written on some of these themes, but ultimately, in terms of this conversation, do you see more benefits, or negative aspects of technology and social media in terms of girl’s development?

RS
: I think that remains to be seen. Right now social media plugs right into girls’ aversion to direct communications, in conflict, so if we don’t give girls the resources and opportunities to also learn that other language, as I said earlier—it’s fine if you want to go on Instagram, but that can’t be the only language you speak when you have a problem with someone.

MS
: How important would it be, do you think, to have a woman president? How important do you think it is that girls see these role models or these examples?

RS
: Huge. It’s huge. Just in the same way as African Americans rejoiced at there being a person of color in the White House. What does it mean when you see an African American president stepping off of Air Force One, over and over again on television? Slowly our perceptions of who is and should be a leader begin to change.

MS
: In terms of role models for girls, I was having a conversation with my daughters about who their role models were recently, and they were pretty challenged by the question. I have also asked other parents of girls, and it was pretty lacking. Is this just my hyper-awareness or are there not necessarily very inspiring role models that girls look up to these days?