Don’t call girls ‘bossy’
Label rebukes leadership qualities while enforcing double standard
Editor’s note: Today we introduce Living Me to We by Craig and Marc Kielburger. The Canadian brothers founded the international charity and educational partner Free The Children and the youth empowerment movement We Day. Their column will look at life, family, environmental and giving issues. It will appear every Tuesday.
“When was the last time you heard someone call a boy ‘bossy?’”
Sheryl Sandberg lobbed the question at us over chicken and vegetables at her dinner table. Sandberg is Facebook’s chief operating officer, and a billionaire. We racked our brains for an incident — from the playground to the boardroom — but we’ve never heard a boy called “bossy.” And in that revelation lies a clue to why only 17 per cent of corporate boards, and less than five per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs, are women.
In myriad ways our culture tells girls and women to curb their ambition. It’s more than the gender divide at the toy store, the “Miss Popular” cosmetics kit for ages six and up. It’s also and especially: “You’re so bossy.” And it’s the subtle, almost mundane stereotyping that lets us congratulate ourselves on “how far we’ve come” without acknowledging a massive setback: We rebuke leadership qualities in young girls and praise them in young boys.
Is this double standard slowly crushing the next generation of female leaders? The thought scares us a bit, not just because Marc is the father of two-year-old Lily-Rose, who will surely encounter gender bias in her life more frequently than we’ll even notice. But also: We work with thousands of girls seeking to make a difference who need to know that they can.
Businesses with the most women on their boards outperform those with the least female representation by as much as 84 per cent, according to a 2011 report the women’s business organization Catalyst. Clearly, having more women in C-suites is an economic advantage. But evidence suggests we are content to ignore it.
The Girl Scouts of the United States and Lean In, a women’s leadership organization co-founded by Sandberg, have conducted and collected research: A huge gulf still exists between the social perceptions and treatment of boys versus girls.
Parents are more likely to overestimate the crawling ability of a male baby and underestimate the crawling of a female. At home, girls do more of the chores than boys, but get paid less allowance for it. Assertive or opinionated behaviour will earn girls reproach for being bossy, but boys get respect for being a leader. And if a girl shouts out an answer without raising her hand in class, she is more likely to be reprimanded than a boy. These are just a few of the double standards identified through this joint research.
By the time a girl hits high school she will be 25 per cent less likely to say she likes taking a leadership role.
Rachel Simmons, co-founder of the Girls’ Leadership Institute and author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Mariner, 2011), worked at a girls’ summer camp as part of her study on how aggression manifests in women and girls. Simmons asked campers why they wouldn’t express opinions — or even shake hands — firmly, and found girls feared others would not like them if they did.
And therein lies the problem with bossy: Girls fear it makes them less likable.
Simmons encourages girls to examine how they diminish themselves in conversations, advising them to “stop apologizing” before they speak. Parents need to consider the chores they give their children. Does your daughter always clean the dishes while your son mows the lawn?
In the classroom, Simmons found girls tend to take more time to think before raising their hands. She suggests teachers pause before taking answers to give female students more chance to participate.
These and other tactics have been incorporated into a new awareness campaign called “Ban Bossy,” a partnership between Lean In and the Girl Scouts that launched March 10. The campaign includes social media presence (#banbossy) and strategies to help girls flex their leadership skills.
Sandberg has some advice for those who label assertiveness unfairly in childhood: “That little girl isn’t bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills.”