Toxic career advice and working while female
What’s the worst career advice you ever received? Was it even really about you? And, yes, I write about Barbie.
Hi friend,
Hope your last six months have been ok. In my defense, I did say that this would be an “occasional” letter.
My existential dread has been heavier than usual this year; I’m getting through it because the oppressive hopelessness is punctuated by infusions of pure joy in the form of my daughter’s giggles and fierce hugs. In those moments, attacked by her tiny, soft, loving arms, everything drops away and I stop worrying. Later, I lie in bed and try to meditate in the dark, wondering if I am a horrible person for bringing a little girl into this world, and if she will be ok.
I’ve had some heavy conversations recently with a few friends about finding meaning in life, our career paths, and professional growth. It seems, in my network at least, this is a big year for self reflection, change, and taking big bets. It’s got me thinking a lot about my own past inflection points and what they mean.
One of the worst most painful pieces of career advice I ever received was from a senior executive I absolutely idolized.
I was young, smart but not very self-aware, hardworking and inexperienced, highly motivated and desperately eager to please and succeed. I lived and breathed my job, made it my entire identity and focus, gave it my all every day. (I don’t recommend approaching life like this, but I didn’t know any better at the time.)
That’s why I was utterly crushed when, one day my boss called me into her office after a big meeting I thought had gone well, and told me that my style was abrasive and I needed to be less opinionated in meetings.
I didn’t cry right then in her office, but I certainly did in the bathroom immediately afterward, and later at home as I recalled the dressing-down with abject shame and devastation.
Looking back, I do understand what she was trying to tell me. You can’t deliver criticism and feedback in the same way to everyone. Your position in the organization matters, and you will get a lot further if you carefully calibrate your tone and approach to match the situation. It’s also a lot more effective to approach challenges collaboratively instead of adversarially: to point out something you think could be better and gain cooperation, versus telling people they did it wrong. It didn't matter that I may have been emulating the way I saw successful men behave. Women don't get away with that behavior, no matter how senior they are, and I was extremely junior.
Years later, I still need to think about calibrating my tone and feedback to the audience and situation; it’s never come naturally. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to hear all this back then, because, ironically, she didn’t take this advice when speaking to me. Instead of addressing specific behaviors or actions, she gave me vague criticism of my “style” which I took as a judgment of my whole defective personality. She missed a huge coaching moment because she didn't meet me where I was. We both lost.
It wasn’t the first time I would be criticized for my personality, voice, or “style” at work, nor the last, but it was one of the most stinging. It would be years before I would learn that women receive 22% more feedback about their personality than men do…that women are more likely to be labeled “abrasive” than men…and Asian people get more feedback than anyone else.
I didn’t see myself as a person in a larger context that might be affecting the way people reacted to me. I just saw that I had failed at existing, that I was somehow bad. It took me years to recover the confidence I lost that day in my manager’s office.
Recently, I took part in a workshop about personal branding and using your unique experiences positively at work. In a discussion session for Asian professionals, we focused on interrogating the many biases that lurk invisibly at work. Turns out, traditional 'Asian values' around personal interactions are the exact opposite of what we need to demonstrate at work in Western culture. Being nice, being really accommodating and polite, being very rule-following, and loyal: All of these things will often get you walked all over and passed over for leadership roles in an American workplace.
It can be even weirder knowing how to interact and relate to others as an Asian woman: there are so many stereotypes and expectations to navigate. Asian women get to deal with the delightful contradictory expectations of being meek and compliant, AND aggressive “Tiger moms,” AND hypersexual objects of desire. It’s not great.
I do have a few positive takeaways from that long-ago unintentional humiliation. First, coaching at work is hard. It's important to recognize opportunities to coach and to get it right. Second, specific feedback that focuses on a concrete behavior is more valuable and less likely to be biased than feedback that is general or personality-based. Third, it's important to be easy on yourself and to remember that everyone's opinion is formed based on their own experiences, mindset, and biases. You don't need to take 100% of everyone's opinion 100% to heart.
PS: Today, I am definitely not “less opinionated” in meetings. But I hope I am more thoughtful about how I contribute those (many) opinions. It’s a process.
Side quests
Textio analysis reveals major biases in workplace language. Invisible challenges faced by Asians in the workplace (McKinsey). Pinning Down the Jellyfish: A paper on the workplace experiences of women of color in tech (PDF). Asian American women fall off by 80% at corporate leadership levels. Anti-Asian violence is often inseparable from misogyny. A psychologist says there are 7 types of ‘office jerks’. Abortion bans cause swift and direct harm to women, of course. 19-year-old woman jailed because in Kansas, the fascists are winning. Keep up with fascism’s fast pace with the help of Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter. The Barbenheimer map reveals a lot about the US (h/t Catherine). Greta Gerwig’s myriad film influences. The complicated legacy of Barbie in art.
Creative juice
You know I cannot keep my mouth shut after seeing Barbie last night. I’ll try to avoid major spoilers but you can skip the rest of this letter and come back to it after you’ve seen the film. (Go see the film!)
Still with me?
OK.
There's a moment in this film where Barbie returns home to find her home has been invaded, stolen from her, trashed and desecrated and redecorated in a willful sneering mockery of all her values and a repudiation of all her community's accomplishments. In a film that was attempting to do so much, be so many things, carry such an enormous simultaneous weight of commercial appeal and subversive politics, this is a moment that took my breath away. This is why I love movies. This moment captured exactly how I felt when Brett Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court justice. At its best, this whole movie is like that: The disbelief, the sinking dread, the knife edge between hysterical laughing and crying and blank despair.
Yes, there is a seemingly infinite merch and marketing machine grinding throughout and as a marketing professional I'm fascinated, still considering whether this is a marketing masterclass or a mind-numbing experience of ad-overload (coming down pretty firmly on the former). But I'm most in awe of how Gerwig managed to even make this film at all, to dance that knife edge so consistently, to produce this apotheosis of capitalism while still savagely critiquing it.
A trending search map showing Barbie obsession strongest in GOP-supporting states gives me a glimmer of hope that the stridently feminist message is resonating. While I’m too old to be fooled that we can buy and consume our way to liberation, I do feel there is some artistic triumph here, in a new generation of kids engaging with the ways in which patriarchy harms every single person trapped within it — and fighting back without denigrating the pleasure and joy of femininity.
Bonus suggested double feature: Josie and the Pussycats.