It’s nothing surprising or new to hear that only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs. That’s a mere three percent.
It is also not surprising to note the discrepancy between male and female power in the work place, even though women make up approximately 49 percent of the professional workforce.
And then there is also the fact women are only paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid for ?doing the same job.
The gender imbalance in the professional world is apparent, and women are speaking out against the inequality. Women, and a number of men, are pushing for equality between genders on various platforms. Think about that awesome speech Emma Watson gave for the United Nations.
Lois Frankel and Carol Frohlinger co-wrote the self-help book “ Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It: 99 Ways to Win the Respect You Deserve, the Success You’ve Earned, and the Life You Want ,” in order to speak out against the gender imbalance in the professional world. They present this idea that the so-called “nice girl” is a woman who gets walked on in both the home and the work place.
The nice girl is purely a victim of her upbringing, because she is kind and considerate of what others need and want. The nice girl is a people-pleaser and bends over backwards to accommodate others. The nice girl wants to do everything that is asked of her in order to please.
It is the nice girl who finishes last, not the nice guy.
I have a problem with t his portrait of women.
By using this image of the nice girl in order to explain why women are left out of the power dynamic in the work place, Frankel and Frohlinger make it seem as though women are empty-headed ?people-pleasers.
The image they create of the nice girl is really quite damaging to the women of today, because this nice girl seems to be inherently at fault, rather than the system in which the nice girl exists — the system where the nice girl is exploited and taken advantage of by her male peers and ?coworkers.
The argument is positioned such that women must overcome some part of their womanliness in order to succeed in the professional world, or rather that women must act more like men. But giving up and over coming womanliness does not solve the gender equality issue — it just deepens the issue.
The misunderstanding that exists between men and women only becomes more convoluted when we demand that women be more like men in order to become more successful and to deconstruct the inequality of the professional, or even domestic, spheres.
It is important to recognize our own strengths as individuals and separately from our genders.
I am a kind and caring individual, with some killer baking skills, and I am also not afraid to take action to get exactly wha t I want. And I attribute it to my status as a ?human being.
johnstra@indiana.edu
