There is a certain kind of woman.
She’s in her 50s, possibly her 60s, and she had to crawl, elbows first, into a position of power. She’s had to hide her role as a mother or forsake it completely lest she not appear committed, a team player, one of the boys. She’s had to take clients out to strip clubs and grin it. Bear it. Wear the face of a man, mimic his baritone voice, practice his swagger, his confident stride. Hide all signs of being a woman, but don’t go too far with it lest men question your sexual predilections.
And we wouldn’t want that. (/peaksarcasm)
Still, she kept a little coquettishness about her because men need to be reminded of her sex, her place, and how she should feel grateful to have it. She’s a token, one of a kind, the lone soft voice in the room. Almost always a white voice because the men in power mostly prefer their own kind with rare exception.
She worked in a time when people smoked in offices and pats on the small of a woman’s back were common. She endured so much maybe she’d become immune to it, maybe she thought this is how business was and always will be, and it takes a certain kind of woman, a certain sort of strength to bear it.
In her world, there is one of her, possibly two. Not like now, when women are legion.
You, Gen-X with your endless questions and growing distaste for the status quo. You, Gen-Y, with your numbers (there are so many of you—had we anticipated it when we birthed you?) and demands. You, with your wrecking ball, threatening to smash it all. You, Gen-Z, smiling, trampling over the ashes.
Thankless, all of you, she thinks. She’s crawled and clawed so you can run. No one thanks her for what she’s endured. No one salutes her, shakes her hand—she’s reduced to a meme of a finger single-tapping on a keyboard because the only technology she apparently knows is the abacus. Ugh, boomers. They are the absolute worst. She’s laughed at, mocked, passed over, deemed too old for type, retired, put out to pasture. Because that’s what we do to women when they’ve reached their best-by date.
We fake-smile and say: thank you, but your services are no longer needed.
I get it. I never thanked you for making it slightly easier for me (read: it was not completely easy) as there are fewer of us than the millennials climbing the ranks. I was a professional in the late 90s when my bosses routinely propositioned me. Saw me as one of the few smart girls they’d be willing to fuck. One asked if I was a virgin before he slept with the head of HR. A married man with children who was worshipped at the office for all the pussy he managed to get when pussy was far from plentiful in the industry (their words, not mine). A manager at a leading Japanese bank asked if I was considering children because they don’t hire women who want a family—even through it was blatantly illegal. Even a full decade later, when I was a consultant at a major electronics company, I had to have a male counterpart sit in on every single call with the Japanese office.
Because apparently women still needed chaperones to hold up their pretty heads.
The world became easier for me in my 30s, but I had grown up in rape culture, in a world where it was inconceivable for a woman to become president until a boomer woman who nobody seemed to like played her hand and lost to an idiot. Because even amidst the TikTok kids, the devices that are now appendages, the AI tech that can think for us, write for us, we still live in a country where a woman holding the highest office is far from guaranteed.
I get this certain kind of woman because I shared a sliver of space with her. And sometimes I get irritated by millennial women who wake up and think equity is easy. That it wasn’t clawed for. Not acknowledging the women before them had to make the kind of sacrifices that seem laughable today. Younger women who roll their eyes at the olds without realizing one day people will roll their eyes at them too. And who wants this rolling of the eyes, the meanness, any of it?
Can we quit it with the eye-roll?
I empathize as a woman who no longer holds the power of her youth in her hands. A woman who’s had to be mocked by millennials, who, are now, mocked by their younger counterparts as history always has a funny way of repeating itself even through we’re told we’re witnessing monumental change.
And while I empathize and believe in holding space for the women who paved the way, I refuse to put up with their insecurities and bullshit.
There’s a certain kind of woman who likes to remind you she’s been at this game longer than you. She demands respect for merely existing. Clear the room for she has entered! I’ve lost count of how many times a woman has told me she’s been at this thirty, forty years, and she knows things. She says this after not-so-subtly attempting to correct or trump me even when it’s clear she’s wrong. She says this when I treat her like a peer, a colleague, refusing to show deference. Because while your tenure grants you a certain level of respect, it doesn’t guarantee you all of it. Respect is earned and I don’t give it freely.
She’s a woman who has tried to adapt and keep up with her socials, but still she’s uncomfortable with two women leading in a room. When in doubt, she still defaults to the men, seeks their praise and approval because possibly this is all she knows. And sometimes we choose to be comfortably uncomfortable instead of uncomfortable. Her veiled barbs become not-so-veiled. Her discomfort with sharing space and power only forces her to recede, eliminates her from the conversation.
I’ll be honest with you—I didn’t come up with my NLP model solely on my own. I didn’t wake up one morning and think—hey, I’ll use AI technology and other tools to create consumer ethnographies! Oh no, mon amie. I got the idea from my data analyst who’s in her 20s. An analyst who randomly mentioned that she was using this cool tool to do cool stuff with consumer conversations online, and might I be interested in learning more? Instead of being embarrassed that someone nearly half my age had greater insight into how to build brands and tell stories, I thanked her for helping me remain relevant. While I built out the model on my own, her ideas, her work, her existence made it possible.
I don’t view younger women as competition—the patriarchy has done a bang-up job of already solidifying that blueprint—I see them as a means to keep me curious and fresh. They keep me humble.
I’ll be honest again—when I was in my mid-30s, I was a senior leader at a digital agency where hoards of women in their 20s reported to me. At first, I was annoyed by their demands of salary increases and exposure. The kids! How dare they! They weren’t asking for special treatment, no, they’d do the work to get a seat at the table. But I was annoyed at the request for the opportunity. It took me a year to realize this wasn’t about them, it was about me. It was about me coming up having been denied a seat and then labeled pushy and bitchy for demanding one in my 20s. It was about me infuriated at having to claw for the thing that should have easily been granted if I worked hard enough for it. It was about me having to see my gender as a hindrance when it should’ve been irrelevant. Much how I imagine people of color having to reckon with the treatment that is associated with the color of their skin. It’s the realization that in the first thirty-five years of my life, I’ve only worked with two women executives who were Black.
So, it wasn’t the women that annoyed me, rather, I was infuriated with the institutions that denied women, people of color, and all marginalized communities of power. It took me a long time to see the difference between the two, to detangle the women who were asking for equality and the institution that made us guilty for asking for it or angry for having to grant it.
While I and the women before me have struggled, it’s no reason to make others struggle. If anything, it’s a reason for us to collude and collaborate. It’s a reason for us to celebrate more than one female executive on a call. It’s a reason for us to shout finally, it’s about fucking time when everyone in the room isn’t white.
I’ve been told that I shouldn’t talk about what divides women. We already have enough to reckon with. To which I respond: are you blind? We are severely divided in social, political, and economic ideologies and belief systems. We can’t even agree that a woman should have the right to do with her body as she pleases and you’re asking me to shut up about women stepping over other women in the workplace? As if the two aren’t inexplicably connected, aren’t bound to the infrastructure that benefits from our division?
Our silence about what divides us will keep us divided.
Ours is not the struggle olympics. We all have biases, benefit from white supremacy whether we like to believe it or not. We have generational disconnects and a desire for safety and nostalgia. We fear the unknown because we’re wired for it. We cleave that to which is familiar while acknowledging the rot of the familiar. Our minor battles and infighting distracts us from the larger danger, the bigger picture.
This is not simply about women from different generations not getting along—this is about a carefully architected society that makes us feel guilty for wanting power. That pits us against one another while that society still retains its power.
I’ve always been tethered to discomfort. I make myself endure change even when it hurts and stings and cripples. And while I might not be the most beloved or politically savvy, or most popular or voted most likely to succeed, I try, every single day to detangle the garbage society that raised me in favor of one where every single fucking person—regardless of gender, age, sex, disability, blah, blah, blah—stands in a place of power.
Notes:
People! I am moving to Bakersfield this weekend so apologies for all the typos, delays, etc. I’m excited for finally settling somewhere for a while. I’m excited for Felix as he’s been MISERABLE in my current abode and it’s making me postal.
Oh, I prattled on for two hours talking about celebrity brands on a podcast.
There's a Certain Kind of Woman...
I like the way you weave this story through the generations and then make some universal points which apply to all, whether or not they want to acknowledge it, now or ever. The collude and collaborate takes more experience and wisdom than what I had at 30 and 40. That's why this article helps us all to overlay your points with where we are now, where we've been, and how much longer we think we will stay interested in a next adventure or another project.
A Board member unwrapped a peppermint from the bowl on my desk, then wadded the wrapper into bullet size and threw it at my face because his secretary had written down the wrong time for a meeting. 1993
I understand. I've been there.