How many times have you been told to “believe more in yourself” or to “fight for what you want”, or again “be more self-confident”? These words have been out and about for so much time now that neither Disney nor TED have the bare idea of how to say it to people anymore. For women in particular this has been the challenge for some time, and now that more and more of us have entered the job market, the hardship of double-standards is starting to feel way too obsolete.
As you may know, women communicate differently from men: the first ones tend, especially when they are asking for something, to use hedges, qualifiers/disclaimers, tag questions, intensifiers and so on. For example, it is highly likely for a man to say: “I don’t like it”, while a woman would probably say “Probably it is just me, but perhaps we could improve this a bit, couldn’t we?”. This form of language is called ‘weak language’ and it developed among women as a consequence of their infamous role of submissive, delicate, unproblematic members of society.
A decision already made
Now the problem is that women are learning to be more assertive and self-confident in order to show that they know perfectly what they want, and that managers and supervisors will be more prone to accept your requests if you calmly and respectfully demand them. What’s wrong with that, you may ask? Absolutely nothing. The problem is that managers still don’t like assertive women, studies show. Assertiveness performed by women is still perceived as aggressiveness, contrarily to their male counterparts. But let’s have a closer look at it.
In a workplace where promotions are offered instead of asked, the problem of aggressivity versus assertiveness wouldn’t be here. Yet, as workloads rise but paychecks don’t, employees still find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being the ones asking for a career leap, which the gender gap makes even tougher to achieve.
What’s with the aggressivity-versus-assertiveness thing? Well, this has been around for some time now. It is the bias which leads people to perceive assertive women as aggressive, while assertive men are just, well, men.
Pink For the Boys, Cigarettes For the Girls
To be assertive means to be bold, to be confident and to deliver your positions with dignity and pride, without imposing your points on others aggressively. During the centuries, as you may understand, this quality has been associated with male figures, who often would be praised in their evident aggressiveness, letting it pass as assertiveness. This ever-lasting dichotomy man-assertiveness has defined the male character to the point that masculinity-related symbols, colours, sounds or adjectives all orbited around this idea of asserting, whether it was asserting one’s power, manhood, rights, strength, intelligence, superiority, performativity, and so on and so forth.
To give you an example of how this idea of assertiveness pregnated almost completely the male imagery, once upon a time the colour pink was the colour for manhood, while blue for the girls. Pink was chosen as the colour of men because, guess what, it gave the idea of assertiveness. Pink is a warm colour, very bold and vibrant, as the personality of a man should be. For girls, instead, blue was more recommended since it was the colour of calmness, placidity, and purity.
Therefore, assertiveness has always more or less coincided with manhood. Women who had the strength of character of being assertive themselves, would be perceived as less feminine, as if some sort of masculinity was inside them. There are a lot of female characters in literature that have been labelled as ‘bad’ just for being assertive. One example for all, the femme fatale.
The femme fatale is a character that has been around since Adam and Eve, but it was coded during the Film Noir era, in characters like Gilda or Mildred Pierce. It is usually the female character the protagonist of the Noir falls in love with, or whom he tries to resist. Cigarettes, long legs, perfect hair, stylish attire: the femme fatale has been defined as “the manifestation of the male protagonist’s internal fear of sexuality and his need or control to repress it”. However, the first definition and one trait that joints most of the femme fatale characters is ambition, assertiveness, and independence.
However, in these films the femme fatale ends up either redeeming herself by finally leaving her reckless, individualistic life for a domestic one, or dies. This narrative has perpetuated the idea that women can, of course, be assertive and ambitious, but they are not good women anymore, they become either a sexual fantasy or a cautionary tale for all the good girls around the world.
The femme fatale helps us frame out what has happened to assertive women throughout the last centuries, plus it reminds us that our role is still not clear to society today. We still have a huge problem in accepting assertiveness as a generic trait instead of a male trait.
Motivational Culture is Stepping Back
The fact that today motivational culture and life coaches insist with women to learn assertiveness, doesn’t mean it works. According to organisational psychologist and TED podcast host Adam Grant, an experiment carried out on managers and recruiters proved that they mostly favour women who ask for a promotion using the weak language over women who use more assertive language.
The experiment consisted of presenting a group of managers with female workers, who were given two scripts: one full of disclaimers, hedges and question tags, the other a cleaner, more direct version of the same speech. The result showed a clear preference of the former speech over the latter: they found the women who used it more polite and adequate. The same experiment carried out on men showed practically zero preference of one form over the other.
What’s the advice we can take away from this? That women leave the “assertiveness strategy” and get back to the weak language to get that promotion? I don’t think so. In these cases it is never about stepping back, but rather stepping forward. Education in this sense still lacks consistency, the important thing is to share the evidence that it is not “all good now”. To fill the gap, one has to know its depth, right?
