Why you need girls to stay bossy.

Who here has been called bossy?

When I do talks, I ask the room who has been ever been called bossy.?It’s never boys or men.?Only girls and women.

It goes hand in hand with ‘feisty’. (Now, as a child, I was often called ‘bossy’ but never ‘feisty’.?Feisty implies someone is small.?It’s a very effective way to verbally diminish someone. I am not and never have been small! )

I was 'bossy'.

So, what did I do to earn that title?

I said what I thought and had confidence that I was right so would ask people to do what I thought was right. In short, I behaved like a boy.?

In a girl, that’s bossy.?Especially when you are the tallest person in the class. As girls, we learn pretty quickly that people don’t like it when we are ‘bossy’ or confident or take up space.

‘Don’t say yes if someone asks you if you are good at maths’

‘Wait for them to congratulate you’

We learn that this isn’t how girls are supposed to behave and it becomes pretty deeply entrenched.

And of course, boys and men also learn that this is not how women are supposed to behave.?

Conformity is INCREDIBLY powerful.?

Google ‘conformity experiments’ for some fascinating videos of behaviour.?

If people in experiments will agree that a short line is longer than a long one, it’s not hard to see how a lifelong expectation on girls to be quiet and modest can be powerfully socially policed.

So what does this mean for the workplace?

Well, what it means is you have women who have been trained their whole lives to wait to be noticed.

That’s fine in the early years of their career, when grads of all genders are closely supervised.?But as they become more capable, the supervision declines.?And so does the visibility of women.

The gender gap in the workplace isn’t caused by motherhood.?It starts long before that point.?

It starts when women start getting good at their jobs and contributing to the company.?Where jobs hit a point of being more about keeping a ship steady and away from rocks than about noticeable wins.

The steadier the ship, the less visible it is and the fewer waves it makes.?

The better you do your job, the more invisible you are.

A catch-22 for women: wait to be noticed or be socially punished for asking to be noticed.

The issue for companies is that all this very efficient and effective talent is invisible. And being squandered.

What to do differently?

Ideally, girls would stay bossy.?And then the problem would go away.

For now, if you manage women who sail a steady ship, don’t assume their seas are calm.?

What rocks are they avoiding every day, invisibly??What disasters do they avert? You might be surprised.

Don’t assume that no visible problems in their work means they aren’t dealing with challenge.?Chances are they are delivering far greater value than the people you see wrestling the sea monsters or violently steering away from the rocks.?

They just do it quietly, and may I suggest, probably better, because you don't notice the boat swaying.