Can We Stop Using this Phrase?

The quest continues to de-couple these roles.

I took a short trip to New York City last week. Some dear friends were being honored at an awards ceremony and I went to spend some time with them and celebrate their achievement. Plus, I like to dip my toe back into corporate land. Now this particular organization—founded in 1954—focuses exclusively on promoting, mentoring, and highlighting female executives in the beauty industry: There aren’t many initiatives like it. We certainly need more.

David Shrigley, “Preen Yourself,” Limited Edition Print, $3,363.64AUD, National Gallery Victoria Design Gallery

I listened to many introductions and short speeches—a few were insightful and clarifying, they were all genuinely lovely. Yet I was struck by some of the things I heard, mostly in the patterning of the remarks, and what it suggests about how we, as women, receive attention and recognition.

• First, the honorees got to choose who introduced them: Of the 10 or so women, all but a couple chose men to do the honor. It might have been a nice way to illustrate allyship, I’m not sure. Several of these men were their bosses. (One was the recipient’s husband and co-founder, and he was hilarious and delightful.) To me, at least, it put a spotlight on how we still feel most comfortable asking men to anoint us with power. No status quo disturbed.

• Even though one recipient recounted being told by a former award winner (in the bathroom, of course) not to demur but to own it, the instinct for many was to not talk about their personal accolades and accomplishments, all they had learned, and hard-won advice they could offer to all the someday wannabe recipients in the audience. The speeches mostly (not exclusively) revolved around everyone who had helped them get where they are. Team effort, team effort, team effort. I love that women are relational—and this drives me crazy. Because, yes, own it—we have far too few examples of women willing to stand out and shine, which was…the whole point of this luncheon? We all have an instinct to get into a defensive crouch before others do it on our behalf. The instinct is to cling to the herd as it’s so much safer there. Nobody wants to be the tall poppy in the poppy field. But when the most powerful women in an industry do this reflexively—the women who are tall poppies and can endure the weather up there—they underline that it’s still not safe to excel.

• There was an intense centering of families and children. One recipient used the phrase “working mother,” which made me cry a little on the inside—and not only because it inherently suggests that mothers who don’t work in formal jobs, don’t work. It made me cry because you would never hear a man describe himself as a “working father.” We really don’t need to be modifying our roles as parents in the first place. We’re parents. And many of us also have careers, or start-ups, or small businesses, or side hustles. Since the ‘70s, families have needed two incomes to stay in the middle class. Work is a reality for a vast majority of parents. It’s only the women who continue to apologize for it, who perpetuate the idea that children suffer because of economic realities and this hardship is the fault of the women. At a lunch celebrating executive achievement, I really was startled to hear how several women needed to subtly explain that their primary concern was always their children. Or at least, that their children never suffered at the hands of their ambition.

I understand why we do this; I’ve done it myself. And I probably have a reaction to this because of my own anxiety about being a mom who has frequently worked more than full time and not always been super present. I’ve certainly beaten myself up for choices I’ve made in the past that I wouldn’t make again. (As one example, I missed my youngest son’s first three birthdays, because the company’s annual retreat and summer board meeting always conflicted and I didn’t feel like I could skip…plus, hey, he was a toddler and he wouldn’t exactly realize. Still yikes. I AM SO SORRY SAM.) So yes, I get the defensiveness, and I still don’t think it helps us to keep reinforcing that we should be defensive.

If you’re on social media of any kind, it’s likely that you’ve seen a million hot takes on Emma Grede in the past few weeks. Emma has been on tour for her book, Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work and Life—I’ve been present for the entire journey, and Emma and I have become quite close. It’s been fascinating to watch how she operates in all parts of her life, and admittedly, she has taught me a lot and challenged me on some of my thinking. She’s getting lit up—pretty much exclusively by other women—for her take on WFH (not a fan), unpaid internships (relied on them as she was shoving her foot in doors), pitch structure (feels women’s anxiety about money results in them putting purpose (“I’m a good person”) before profitability when they’re raising, and it doesn’t necessarily land), and so on.

Some of the firestorm Emma’s living in is because we live in a social media landscape where the best “hook” for hitting the algorithm means hitching a ride on a trending topic (and offering a negative take); and some of this is because she’s pushing on sore wounds that we need to heal. I have more to say on her message, but the core thesis is that the systemic issues are real and confounding and we can’t wait for equity, we have to make it, from the inside out. She argues that we have more power than we want to believe—and we can and should, start with ourselves. We have to. We might hate our cards, but we’ve got to get in the game and play them anyway.

Emma is undeterred by criticism—she would call it “feedback”—but it still makes me sad. Because speaking of tall poppies, Emma is a real one: She’s an unapologetically ambitious, incredibly hard working woman who came from very limited means—she didn’t graduate from high school, much less HBS, and she’s gone on to mint many successful companies and invest in even more. The instinct to mow the lawn and put her back in her place, to strike her down…God, it bums me out. It’s also wild to watch people twist themselves in knots to deny her any credit (But it’s this, but it’s that, but it’s her husband—WTF, in particular, is that?) Instead of the perpetual playbook of knocking our stars out of the sky, we need to normalize the opposite. It doesn’t mean that Emma is the right mentor for each and everyone of us (she’s pretty clear about that)—if she’s not for you, change the channel—but she’s a pretty incredible model for many entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs of what’s possible. We need as many of these as possible! The whole point is that she doesn’t want to gate-keep, she wants a million little Emma’s, and she wants to tell the (sometimes unvarnished) truth about what it’s taken to get where she stands. She doesn’t lie to make it all more palatable. She really doesn’t perform “goodness.” I respect that so much.

(For more on all of this, see the “Sloth,” “Pride,” and “Envy” chapters of On Our Best Behavior—also, “Anger.”)

But back to this idea of women needing to center their children, because Emma’s press tour kicked off with an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Kardashian Whisperer Who Says Three Hours With Her Kids Is Enough.” The internet rightly went nuts in her defense—you would never see a title like that about an entrepreneur who is a dad—and it still underlined that regardless of someone’s achievements, a woman’s most important responsibility is to her kids…and a question around whether three hours with your kids is “enough.” (Is it not? Because three hours of quality time with each of my kids on any given day seems like a lot.)

I brought up Emma though, because she said something to me that changed the way I talk about my work with my kids—and I wish I’d adopted it sooner. As my kids have gotten older, they actually protest my work trips more—flattering, I guess? Historically, my go-to has always been to wring my hands—to tell them how horrible I feel about it, and how tough it is. “I’m sorry, I know it’s bad, I have to…” (See: “A Quick Gratitude Shift” for the flip on this last phrase.) Emma challenged me on this directly: “But don’t you love your work? A lot of people hate their jobs, but you don’t: So why lie? Why wouldn’t you lead with that to your kids?” In contrast, she tells her kids all the time how fulfilling she finds her career and that she misses them when she’s away but hopes they go on to do work they love to do someday, too—and that she doesn’t want them to ever feel bad about it. “I tell them about all the things I get to do—including that I like having some time to myself.” In doing this, she’s trying to break the guilt-apology cycle that has so many of us by the throat. “Plus,” she offered, “I think it’s a modern plight to center ourselves so aggressively in our kids lives—yes, the need us, but I think we over-state this need in our minds.”

When I got home from New York City, my youngest barely looked up when I walked through the door.

“Hi mom!”

“Did you miss me?” I asked.

“Hmmm, not really? Did you buy me anything?”

Here’s to honest answers—and telling the truth about our lives.