The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Does Kylie Jenner’s success prove hard work pays off?
What does it mean to be a “self-made” person of great wealth?
It’s a question that cropped up in many minds this week when Forbes magazine proclaimed cosmetics tycoon Kylie Jenner to be the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire at 21.
Self-made? Like starting a company in the garage at night after working a fulltime job and tapping out all of your credit cards to build it? That’s not how Kylie Cosmetics launched.
Jenner is a member of the Kardashian-Jenner blended family, stars of the popular television series “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”
Predictably, critics decried Jenner’s pouty social media selfies and the general vacuousness of the Kardashian-Jenner phenomenon. Yet many acknowledged that Jenner is not just some lucky dope: She has been savvy in leveraging her birthright fame.
It made me miss a mentor and onetime collaborator of mine, Gwen Martin, who died of cancer at age 70 in February.
Martin was a manager of research and evaluation at the Kansas Citybased Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Martin came to conclusions that undercut some of America’s myths about class, particularly the notion that people can readily hop up the socio-economic scale..
Martin brought clarity about women who did beat those odds to join the professional middle class. She examined the underbelly of their grit, the darker side of the attributes that helped them earn college degrees and managerial and decision-making status.
I was one of the women Martin studied. As subjects, Martin chose professional women roughly of equal work status. Those like me who did not come from college-educated or professional parents were “Movers.” Those who did were termed “Originals.”
She uncovered that at some point in their careers, the Movers had nagging doubts and problems with bosses or coworkers — frustrations that were often mislabeled as being about race or gender.
Yet repeatedly, she determined that class background was the salient factor in these conflicts. Nonetheless, the Movers were unaware of how their class backgrounds lingered and contributed.
They were self-starters by necessity. They tended to learn alone, squirrelled away with a book. As youths, they worked fast food or retail jobs and told of going to great lengths to figure out how to apply to and afford college.
Their mothers had been the motivating force for their career aspirations. The mothers had encouraged the daughters by underlining what they didn’t want for their daughters. Common messages: I don’t want you to struggle, to have to depend on a man for rent, to wind up working for tips as a waitress.
Originals tended to be influenced by their fathers. By comparison to the Movers’ mothers, the messages Originals’ fathers gave were astoundingly more positive.
The fathers encouraged all of their daughters’ dreams, including to break traditional gender roles.
Original girls joined clubs and benefited from the experience. College education was a given.
Meanwhile, in the less affluent families, those little girls were building a sense that if they were going to make it, they would have to do it on their own.
So what are we to make of Kylie Jenner’s success? Let’s give her credit for the talents she brings to her enterprise. But let’s also admit ways in which such success stories feed myths about social mobility, and let’s begin a more honest assessment of what helps people get ahead in life.