Author: Kate Mason
Date: 2025
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780593797228
Quote: "We...must choose between being powerful and being likeable, and also...we're destined to lose."
This book offers little in the way of useful tips for today's 25-year-old corporate-ladder-climber. I'm not sure that useful tips for her exist. There are not a lot of opportunities for anyone to climb any corporate ladders these days.
Being female may actually work for today's 25-year-old more than it works against her, with employers and account managers trying to raise their "diversity" scores, but even when the people hired or awarded contracts are chosen for demographic reasons, being hired is no guarantee of being promoted and landing a contract is no guarantee that they won't back out of it.
Up to a point, Mason says, a young woman who pays attention to her audience may be able to impress some people as being likeable if she gains perceived "power" by being promoted, or even hired, much less by actually accomplishing something and getting a corporate superordinate to admit it. Everyone now agrees that women are capable of doing responsible jobs and earning good money. But, when they think about an individual woman, many people still choose envy over even the kind of philosophical support that might see her success as conducive to their own. The woman who jumps through all the hoops to qualify for the promotion isn't likeable any more.
A few of the things women seem to do with the goal of reducing hostility, Mason can point out as counterproductive. But everyone probably has a different list and, even when we agree that mannerisms are off-putting, there's no clear consensus on the relative badness of "upspeaking" (making each phrase? sound like? a question?) or using buzzwords.
The same off-putting mannerisms, Mason observes, still seem to be judged more harshly in female speakers than in male speakers, though generalizations are never perfectly accurate for individuals. Mason names a male TV speaker who says that nobody seems to mind his "fried" voice. Watching TV only socially, I don't recognize his name but, when the idea of "male vocal fry" was suggested, I thought of a game show host I've seen who is so not as easy to watch as Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, or Steve Harvey. Yes, when a man speaks at the high end of his voice range, and grins too much, and generally projects "oh please like me," the hand does reflexively reach for the remote control gadget, though the behavior doesn't fit a traditional pattern when a man does it, and seems peculiarly off-putting. "Pathetic Jaleel" can be read as trying to project a nonverbal message like "Please don't hate me because I'm Black," and succeeding in projecting something more like "I am not qualified for my job. I'm not having fun and neither is anyone else. If I had any sense I'd go home." Would I call his voice "fried" or just "not ingratiating, but merely grating"? I'm not sure.
I can say, though, that some of the mannerisms of insecure female yuppies are less often observed in men because they're more unfavorably perceived in men, such that few men are clueless enough to use them. Who ever saw a man wearing shoes that clattered on the floor, as if to say "I'm smaller but I'm just as noisy and clumsy as a literal bull in a china shop"?
Some things Mason suggests that women try only point up how subjective the whole topic is. When do women, themselves, feel most helpless and most powerful at work? It depends on whom she asks. Being the only woman in the room intimidates some women (they can't possibly fit in with a crowd of men) and empowers others (they can't be expected to conform to a group norm, they're supposed to stand out in the crowd).
Some things seem like common sense and should work for anyone who fits them into her style of doing her job, whatever that might be.
One of Mason's "\try this" points that I may have seen, but don't remember seeing, in a self-help book in the 1980s is: Call attention to other people's good work. Celebrate other people who are like you in some way. It's subtly self-aggrandizing (you're claiming the authority to recommend them), it's perceived as unselfish and therefore likely to be trustworthy, and it recruits the other people onto your side. When someone does it as a calculated strategy, it might be described as diabolical. If it's sincere, if you do like and can honestly recommend the other people, it's a total win-win, whether the goal is to make a very small business grow or to shoehorn yourself into a big one.
Some of Mason's observations point up an ongoing conversation among different individuals, sometimes one that's been going on for a long time. Does the choice of expensive, "traditional," less than optimally comfortable clothes show respect for your job and customers, or does it merely suggest that you're lost in some previous decade you don't even remember? (Or worse. For a very long time my city had decriminalized prostitution; high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes do not only suggest "Why on earth would anyone be lost in the 1930s?" to me.) Are you showing sincere and appropriate deference to seniority or expertise, or screaming "I don't want or deserve any respect! Please spit on me!" with excessive displays of deference? Is your way of "being friendly" with clients an admirable revival of classic Dale Carnegie business principles (remember not only clients' names, but the names of their dogs), or an aggressive display of extroversion that really annoys and alienates clients? People don't always agree on where the line between these kinds of things should be drawn.
Some of Mason's words highlight changes in word usage. The use of "role" to mean "job" may be a signal that the speaker belongs to the younger generation. Is it possible to "do a role"? Baby-boomers play roles. As Cub Scouts or perhaps as gymnasts some of us "did rolls." How, exactly, the young might "do a role," I'm not sure I want to know. Even "playing roles" in the workplace makes the speaker sound like a sociology major. This has nothing to do with race or sex; sociology majors are perceived as the lightest of the lightweights. If I used sociological jargon in the workplace it would be with a goal of signalling "I'm just a poor little rich girl whose parents sent me to college, but I wouldn't have had a chance in any of the classes you took." For me and probably for most of Mason's readers, this would be an outright lie. Calling their jobs "roles" may be trendy among the young, but it's the sort of thing that might elicit cutesipation from older people, whether the person talking about "roles" can be cutesipated as a girl or a boy.
"Job," as the word for what people do for a living, is not as old as some older people may believe. In books from the early twentieth century "job" appears as a word for a specific task an employee might do in a position or situation of employment. In the late twentieth century, when "job" was the universal word for the position or situation, some people urged the young, "Don't just do a job--have a career!" and others favored "job" even as the word to use to summarize someone's career, because planning a career seemed arrogant and hubristic in subcultures that weren't dominated by the "aggressive salesmanship" mentality. There were also jokes about exactly what house pets' "job" was and, inevitably, about taking the dog out to "do his job" or "do his business." Then there was the hatespew directed at anyone whose primary occupation the speaker considered to be useless, unprofitable, or in any case too much fun to be serious work, "Get a job!"
I can see how any of these phrases might motivate the young to want not to call what they do jobs. I just can't understand where they ever got the idea of calling what they do "roles."
The ease with which people born between approximately 1965 and 1985 fitted themselves into the culture of people born between 1945 and 1965 used to puzzle some baby-boomers. When P.J. O'Rourke spoke on a college campus where even the slang was still familiar to him, he fantasized about going back to his own college, and the time when he attended it, and finding his school friends all lost in the 1940s. When "millennials" want to have their own subculture, any fair assessment of whatever slang and fashions they adopt has to conclude that, as long as they're staying out of political extremism and hate, they're doing well. However, my sisters' demographic group's tendency to try to blend in with the baby-boomers may have served them better than any new trends that make those of us who are still working, or the generation after us, feel "old."
Mason's language, therefore, pushes an edge. As an Australian in the US she probably gets away with it; some people may see her word usage as exotic rather than trendy. Not all. We don't like feeling "old." Some of us wanted and expected to enjoy "seniority," the general condition associated with being 45 or 50 years old in the workplace, for another fifty years. When we admit to feeling "old" we usually mean feeling ill. This is not generally a way to build rapport.
Possibly we should think about getting over it. As long as we can keep up with the young on a job, we probably should; not all of us can. There is some dignity about stepping aside to hand down responsibilities to the person we've taught as much as can be taught of what we know.
There is some pleasure, nevertheless, about reporting that although Mason has done a lot of research on the situation confronting millennial women at work, and presented a lot of new material, she's not really reached any conclusions that weren't familiar to Deborah Tannen, Suzette Haden Elgin, or even Joyce Brothers. Women in the workforce today have won various protections from misogynist practices of the past, a legal right to be as successful as we want to be. Rape-terrorism and the need to care for young children are nothing like the obstacles they once were, either. Women now face obstacles to success that are more similar to the ones men have always faced: our own fitness for the work we do, our own willingness to work in groups where "social loafing" and interpersonal relationships distract us, our own vulnerability to those social relationships. There will never be an end to communication problems, and while the abilities many women have to bog down in social quagmires of "I'm sorry I apologize so often" may always slow down scientific progress, (1) slowing down scientific progress may be a good thing, and (2) at least women's endless misunderstanding and rehashing and reconciling is unlikely to destroy the planet with a nuclear war.
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