Just had a thought for an action hero thing: 30-something woman hero is doing her ass-kicking thing. One day, her boss shows up at her door, and tells her she has to stand down, or there will be consequences. “Honey, it’s not that you’re too old. It’s just the public don’t like to see a woman of your age saving the day. It feels emasculating”.
So woman is stripped of her support team, fellow agents, and is pretty much put on the shelf. She tries to do heroing, but keeps getting cockblocked by younger women or superhero men she used to work alongside.
Just when she’s hitting rock bottom (and sitting in her house wearing pyjamas and eating ice cream), there’s a knock at the door. Judi Dench is standing there, and our heroine assumes it’s a charity collection.
“Oh no, dear,” Dench says, smiling. “We’ve come to recruit you.”
“Recruit me? For what?”
“To do what we do best: save the bloody world.”
And all at once she’s part of a covert ops team made of all the older women who have been retired and who currently are holding the reins of managing the world.
pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase
I am here for this plan.
Oh, yes.
I recently read an article about how women use the word “just” in work life and personal life more than men do because we feel we need to apologize or make whatever we have to say quick. “I’m just writing to say…” “I just want to know…” “Just checking in…”. It seems to trivialize what we have to say.
Don’t apologize or feel you need to make little of what you are saying. Say it with intention. “I’m writing to tell you this…” “I want you to know…” “I’m checking in to make sure…"
Since reading the article I’ve become aware of how much I was adding “just” so soften what I had to say, whether it needed to be softened or not.
Say what you have to say with confidence and intent. without apology. what you have to say, no matter what it is, is important.Okay, but there’s a *reason* why women soften their speech and affect–because we’re often punished if we don’t.
Like how a while back a study came out that showed men will negotiate salary offers much more often than women do, and usually obtain a higher salary as a result. So there was this raft of career advice for women: “Don’t be afraid to negotiate your salary!!”
Yeah, so then someone actually did a study on what happens *when* women attempt to negotiate salary. They trigger a backlash: in many cases the original offer is rescinded, and even if not, it succeeds at a much lower rate than negotiations for men do, and the woman gains a reputation for being “difficult.”
Women don’t negotiate salaries because we’re not idiots.
Similarly, I think a lot of the other social-hesitancy cues that women use, like using “just” or making everything into a question–we do that because otherwise we are punished. This isn’t just a matter of “be more assertive, ladies!” There’s more going on.
T H A N K. Y O U.
