Arrogant Women?
By Julie Clawson
Clay Shirky’s recent blog post A Rant About Women has been getting it’s fair share of attention – mostly of the angry and upset variety. In the rant, he asserts that women don’t have the high-paying jobs and positions of power that men do basically because we don’t sell ourselves well enough. He sees male students all the time pompously asserting themselves and even lying in order to get where they want in life. Women just don’t act like arrogant bastards, and so therefore we are still underrepresented in the professional world. He suggests, we need to just be more like men in our self-promotion. He writes-
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.
Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.
* * *
Some of the reason these strategies succeed is because we live in a world where women are discriminated against. However, even in an ideal future, self-promotion will be a skill that produces disproportionate rewards, and if skill at self-promotion remains disproportionately male, those rewards will as well. This isn’t because of oppression, it’s because of freedom.
So on one hand, I understand his point. Research has shown that often women make less than men simply because women don’t ask for raises as often as men do. We don’t put ourselves out there in risky ways, making ourselves look good no matter who it may hurt. But as a Christian I have a hard time with his suggestion that if women just became selfish jerks like men, we would be all good. Yes, we have the freedom to play that game and yes, it may actually get us more power and money, but we’d have to sell our soul in the process. I don’t want to play a bitchier meaner game in order to compete, I want to change the game itself. I would rather live in a world where being an arrogant bastard wasn’t a virtue. Sure, that might sound naive and idealistic, but it also sounds much more in line with my faith. If I want to be like Jesus, I can’t play the game “me first, screw whoever gets in my way.”
So I wonder if the professors and consultants who are putting their time and energy into helping women be able to play just as dirty as the men in a broken system would instead put effort into building a new system what difference that would make? What would it take for that to start to happen? What changes need to be made at fundamental levels to shift the way this entire game gets played? What would a system even look like where caring for the other instead of “every man for himself” was the central tenet?
Julie Clawson is a mother, writer, and speaker. She is the author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices (IVP, 2009). In addition to moderating the Emerging Women blog, she also writes at julieclawson.com.
Tags: Clay Shirky, Julie Clawson, Women
January 25th, 2010 at 12:07 am
Well said… I teach Intro to Women’s Studies and work hard to communicate to the women and men in my class that creating a new system of shared power begins with being aware of the imbalances, and then working peacefully for solutions. It’s a start…
January 25th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Julie, thanks for writing this. I’ve found myself so frustrated over this very situation–literally watching a man standing beside me doing the self-promotion thing, while in my silence I recede into invisibility. It makes me [silently] crazy! And, I’ve also watched a number of women decide to play the game.
I just keep concluding that it’s not for me. (I recently blogged about aspects of this decision @ http://quefascinante.blogspot.com/2010/01/flip-side.html).
Thanks for the encouragement to not play the game. Maybe passive resistance can find a way here, too?
January 26th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
I think the system IS starting to change. I remember reading an article in TIME several months ago about how businesses run by women were on the whole doing significantly better than those run by men, and how women are shaping and dominating new models of doing business that are based more on productivity than puffing smoke. There is a kinder, gentler workplace burgeoning under the old, rigid shell, and it’s growing because people are discovering that it simply works better, for the workers and the company’s bottom line.
I do think we women have to get better at self-promotion and negotiation, but not at the expense of becoming arrogant. That’s too high a price to pay for “success.”
January 27th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Does the world really need more selfish jerks? I thought that was what got us into this growing global crisis in the first place.
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