Working Girls still act like men to get ahead

Thirty years on, the Oscarnominated film should be a museum piece but it feels all too contemporary

On the surface, Working Girl, Mike Nichols’s Academy Award-nominated film about a Staten Island secretary who longs to be a stockbroker, could not be more Eighties. Wall Street looms over the film’s horizon from its opening scene; money charges everything with an aspirational allure and the enormous, brittle bouffants are as wide as they are tall. In fact, like Tess Mcgill, the film’s heroine played by Melanie Griffith, Working Girl turns 30 this year.

Working Girl was released six years after Having It All, the book by Helen Gurley Brown that helped to spark the notion of women succeeding in both work and play. And, like Cinderella, Ms Mcgill risks love, life and home to achieve her dream: we watch as she topples her duplicitous boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), and wins Prince Charming in the form of Jack Trainer (a lovably boyish Harrison Ford), who just happens to be Katharine’s boyfriend.

The film won acclaim, six Oscar nominations and a warm place in the heart of millions of viewers. But by now, even without the hairspray, Working Girl should have dated terribly. That it still stands up as a cheering portrayal of female ambition against the odds is a sign of how little has changed for women in the workplace.

Working Girl actually feels prescient. In the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein, it is doubly uncomfortable to watch Tess fend off a lascivious executive (fittingly played by the now-disgraced Kevin Spacey) in what she was told would be a job interview. Similarly, the toxicity between Katharine and her new secretary will be all too familiar to women who have had struggles with female bosses – a phenomenon that was just this week backed up in a study by the University of Arizona.

But it is Working Girl’s core message that feels so frustratingly relevant: that women can be a force for greater professional good, if only they were allowed to work in their own way rather than aping the attitude – and attire – of the men who hire them. As Tess knows all too well, her career is defined by a structure that she must challenge in order to succeed. In her own words: “I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up.”

So she bends them. It’s because she stands out that she lands her first meeting with Jack, who grants her passage into Wall Street’s top offices. As he notes: “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”

She doesn’t flirt to crack the boys’ clubs, but is serious and softly spoken. She gets her business tip-offs from the society pages, Forbes and W magazine. Tess does things her own way, and eventually wins through.

One would hope that 30 years later, women wouldn’t still have to be bending the rules or stepping into men’s shoes – in their presentation, their attitude and how they act in the office – to get ahead. While progress has undeniably been made, the success of publications such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which in 2013 encouraged women to forge ahead in the workplace, and last year’s Quiet Girls Can Run the World by Rebecca Holman, suggests that women still don’t feel they can act as they truly want to at work.

The figures back it up, too: just 3 per cent of the chief executives of the largest 500 companies in the world are women. At this rate equal pay won’t be achieved in the UK until 2117.

Women actively benefit the workplace, but only if they are allowed to bring their own way of doing things to the office. And that will benefit men, too. In 2012, an RSA study showed that “women bring empathy and intuition to leadership”; the year before, Harvard Business Review found that women were rated as better overall leaders by their colleagues.

And this, too, was shown in Working Girl; while Tess was treated terribly by her bosses, she changes the dialogue when she finally gets her own assistant. “The rest we’ll just make up as we go along,” Tess tells her, giving both women the opportunity to throw away the workplace rule book. If only more people had followed her lead.