Classifying Kylie Jenner as a Horatio Alger complicated

What does it mean to be a “self-made” person of great wealth?

It’s a question that cropped up in many minds recently when Forbes magazine proclaimed cosmetics tycoon Kylie Jenner the world’s youngest “selfmade” 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 storied Kardashian-Jenner blended family, stars of the popular television series “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” She and her sisters have proved to be successful impresarios of a lifestyle brand based on fame for being famous.

The Forbes announcement prompted critics to decry her pouty social media selfies and the vacuousness of the Kardashian-Jenner phenomenon. Yet others acknowledged Jenner is not just some lucky dope: She has been savvy in leveraging her birthright fame.

It got me thinking about women in business and the many myths of career success and failure. It made me miss a mentor and onetime collaborator of mine, Gwen Martin, who died at age 70 in February.

Martin was a manager of research at the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the U.S., which focuses on education and entrepreneurship.

Martin came to conclusions that undercut some of America’s most cherished myths about class, particularly the notion that people can readily hop up the socio-economic scale. Most do not. And it’s often not for a lack of trying.

I was one of the women Martin studied. As subjects, Martin chose professional women roughly of equal work status. Martin divided them by class background, based on the social capital and status of their parents.

Those like me who did not come from college-educated or professional parents were “Movers.” Those who did were “Originals.”

She uncovered that at some point in their careers, the Movers had nagging doubts and problems with bosses or coworkers — frustrations often mislabeled as being about race or gender.

Their early experiences explained it. 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, albeit through their own dashed hopes. The mothers had encouraged the daughters by underlining what they didn’t want for them: I don’t want you 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, even when the mothers were also professionals. By comparison to the Movers’ mothers, the messages Originals’ fathers gave were much more positive.

The fathers encouraged all of their daughters’ dreams, including to break traditional gender roles. From listening to how their fathers spoke about what they expected from a workplace, these women had learned how to function as professionals.

Original girls joined clubs college education was a given.

So what are we to make of Kylie Jenner’s “selfmade” success? Let’s give her credit for the personal talents she brings to her enterprise. But let’s also admit the ways in which such success stories feed myths about social mobility, and let’s begin a more honest and aware assessment of what really helps people get ahead in life.