women don't fear power, power fears women

Women Don’t Fear Power. Power Fears Women.

Reading yesterday about the abrupt firing of Jill Abramson, the first woman at the New York Times, along with the resignation of Le Monde’s Natalie Nougayrède, was like watching a ripple of misogyny move through the air in slow motion. Similar, in fact, to watching the slow, then fast, build to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s removal from office. There’s no way to examine these situations and ask, “Do women fear power and success?” Instead, the question is, “Why are powerful and successful women so feared?”

In their former positions, both Abramson and Nougayrède were notable firsts. Abramson was the first woman to head the New York Times and Nougayrède the first to be both editor-in-chief and director at Le Monde. Both women, whose tenures have been prematurely cut short, are paying the price for our very gendered ideas about power and leadership. Because they are women with power, all Abramson and Nougayrède had to do in the morning to be disruptive was get out of bed.

They are counter-cultural by definition. Both are experienced, accomplished, powerful, strong-willed, assertive, decisive and display–likeable or not– leadership qualities. Both were in the isolated position that most women with authority find themselves in. Both were navigating the high pressures of their professional lives while simultaneously challenging everyone’s – their employees’, their employer’s, the media’s – embedded notions of gendered behavior: from their “brusque,” “pushy” and “aggressive” dispositions, speech patterns, body language, ambition, confidence and more. The active coping that women leaders do in their work is qualitatively different and, frankly more onerous than their male peers, whom they are most frequently told they should simply emulate to get ahead.

So, it was with no small amount of wry humor that I read a front page New York Times headline today, “Labs Are Told to Start Including a Neglected Variable: Females,” about how medical researchers have ignored women and expected them to benefit from what men do. I’d be willing to bet a small fortune that copy editors at the New York Times assiduously purged words like “brusque,” “pushy,” and “bossy,” from their digital galleys in the wake of yesterday’s news, but no one paused to consider (or, maybe they did), the relevance of the fact that “female” is not actually a variable. Variables are adaptations to norms.
The headline illuminated not just an intractable problem at the Times, but a persistent and widespread truth – we keep expecting women to be content being seen as and understood as variations on men.

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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/05/16/women-dont-fear-power-power-fears-women/