In A Rant About Women, Clay Shirky observes that women do not mimic specific bombastic aspects of their male counterparts  in order to get ahead.  This isn’t about female diffidence, Shirky argues, but the apparent inability of many of us to be self-promoting assholes.

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?

The whole article is worth reading in its entirety, but its bottom line is captured in the quoted portion above.  It would be easy to negate Shirky with some hocus-pocus female social psychology.  Half-heartedly mumble something about women being honest, forthright, social, parallel-thinking, consequence-foretelling creatures who like to maintain equality and peace and move on, right?  Wrong.  Women can and want to get ahead just as much as men do, and are equally cut-throat if not more devious in some situations, but this is about unabashed self-promotion and the social perception of such behavior.

Three things came to mind and stuck as I read this article:

1. When advising them on their resumes, I tell other women to go for the moon, hell go for the next galaxy!  Sell, sell, sell, sell everything you have and more because you know you can get there once you have the job.  I cannot for the life of me do this with my own resume.  This is very telling.

2. The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League and how proud, not scornful, I am of her.

3. How my mother and I worked our tails off and have often cavalierly stuck our neck out there in selling ourselves, how this has worked with disastrous and stupendous results, and how we deal every single day with who we have become in the process.

This last thought is what I want to explore some more in responding to Shirky’s post.

When young scientists, my mother and I just did science – we studied hard, aced our tests, spent inordinate amounts of time in laboratories doing more than we were asked to do, raised our hands to ask pertinent and impertinent questions, graduated with honors, entered competitive graduate programs, published papers – and expected that the rewards would come automatically.  Not so.  As Richard Hamming from Bell Labs said in his You And Your Research talk, “The fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, ‘Yes, that was good.’”  Fair enough.  Mom and I took our loud chutzpah and pitched our work.  I am the best representative of a certain department or for a certain conference for these reasons, mine is the ideal method to move this project forward and here’s why, I am the best-suited actor, play director or accountant because of this.  This energy worked wonders in getting ahead but, simultaneously, that’s when things started to fall apart in the interpersonal relations department.  Other people, men, women and bosses included, began to see us not as team players, but uppity blowhards because we knew we were better at something and chose to push ourselves ahead of the proverbial herd.  When guys in our peer groups did the same thing, but with lots less qualifications backing them, they were just being guys.  I tell you, Hell is other people.

Shirky addresses the Other People problem in his rant and advises, “The fact that [they] get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.”   True, but then he starts the next paragraph with “Not caring works surprisingly well.”  Actually, it does and it doesn’t.  “Not caring” is often a lonely place to be.  But that’s not the point here, either.   I’ll bet you lunch that the reality is that we women sometimes do nothing and other times  do something and don’t at all care about the reaction, popularity be damned.   The real predicament lies not in not doing or not caring, it’s in whether our behavior meets expectation at any given time.

Some examples: I used a certain tone and sales pitch to land a job once.  When I employed a similar optimistic level of enthusiasm on another project with the same manager, I was yelled at and sent back to my office.  A few months later, I was given a promotion but also told that I kept my head down too much.  In another job, one for which I was hired to be smart, a big criticism of me was that I talked too smart.  I would love to know how many guys are told these same things; I’ll bet you another lunch that that number is minuscule in comparison.  In effect, career women are expected to be assertive to get ahead but, when we are, it’s looked on as insubordination or cockiness.  Whether it occurs knowingly or not, a woman not caring about her self-aggrandizing behavior does have very real consequences on her job reviews and satisfaction and, ultimately, her job itself.  So, women do desire getting ahead as much as men, and in the process undergo some stress-filled, uncertain days nervously wondering if and when the axe is going to fall because we tapped our inner nutsack. That’s a huge surcharge.

Especially in this economy, cross-disciplinary innovation is key and college degrees do not guarantee career success.  I’ve taken risks and gone from biology to geology to 3d modeling to geophysics to project management to physics to geospatial technology to get where I am today, and I still don’t know where that is, but I get paid to be a scientist and invent technologies, it’s fun and I’m learning a lot.  So, I encourage everyone, not just women, to follow Shirky’s advice and take “opportunities which [we] might in fact fuck up if [we] try to take them on, and then try to take them on.”  This comes naturally to assertive, confident, social people who want to change the world.

But, once a woman is on that journey, channeling that aggressive behavior into immodesty to get ahead happens at great personal risk.  The weird, complex ecosystem of workplace expectations and interactions makes sure that she is rewarded rather capriciously, a lot more so than men in the same situation.  This deters some women and only makes others fight more and harder.  You want obnoxious car saleswomen?  Fine.  Then, this culture, this moody bigotry of “you’ll get ahead if you’re more assertive but to a point or only on the days when society is feeling particularly advanced” has to stop.  Asking women to change their behaviors, while excusing the fickleness of workplace responses as a given which we have to fight against, is a horrible double standard.

As hard as it is even for highly-educated, self-assured women of my generation, it’s not.  Consider my mother: A twiggy 24-year-old Indian woman in a sari and bindi in early-1960s Kuwait, leading a part-competitive, part-lazy horde of Arab nutritionists in the fight against the awful food choices of an increasingly oil-wealthy populace.  We have money, let’s eat Burger King, all the time!  So that her workers would understand her and each other and to keep them from plotting behind her back, Mom learned seven different dialects of Arabic and translated and placated over and above her actual work.  Volatile meetings, backstabs, obscene anonymous phone calls, death threats sent to the house, she withstood all of that, but what I think cut her the most was having to hand over credit for her work to Kuwaitis.  No way they were going to let a brown woman take bows on behalf of The Emirate.

America used to be like this, but it changed.  It has evolved to where someone like me has worked with and for black, Asian-American, Hispanic and white women in a traditionally-male-dominated oil industry.  It has transformed into older men working for younger women, a lot of ceilings removed.  There is a great power struggle yet among bosses, workers and colleagues, and this can never be taken as a given.  Ten or twenty or even a hundred years from now, no woman should have to say, “I guess I am used to temperamental, latent and unconscious bigotry, so I just work around it.”  Working around something is oceans away from being an arrogant, self-promoting jerk and getting rewarded for it.  I can behave like a man with the best of them.  The question is: Are they willing always to treat me like a man when I do?