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CHANGE YOUR WORDS

Boost Your Brand

“Your time is now. Work on purpose and with purpose. Never get stuck. Pursue your passions. Make bold moves. Beware the status quo. Leave a gentle footprint.”

—SWEETGREEN

I’M STANDING FIFTY-PERSON DEEP IN a line snaking down the block at sweetgreen, a farm-to-table, on-the-go salad shop in the Flatiron area of New York City. The sweetgreen manifesto hangs prominently near the entrance, an inspirational beacon beckoning us into a fragrant store filled with organic kale and humanely raised, hormone-free roasted chicken. I come to sweetgreen and endure the wait not only because of the locally sourced produce, but also because of the vibe. There’s something uplifting amidst the spicy sunflower seeds and baked falafel balls. The sustainability-meets-SoulCycle empowerment message resonates with me. “Our delicious and healthy food aligns with your values,” reads the “Our Story” page on the sweetgreen website.

Today every brand, like every comic book superhero, has an origin story—from Warby Parker eyeglasses to TOMS shoes to the quinoa I’m consuming at sweetgreen. We women each have our stories too. We need to define them, own them, and sell them. Most of us aren’t walking around with a personal manifesto tattooed on our backs, so how we present ourselves to the world, not only in person but also online, has tremendous impact. We know our LinkedIn profiles and curated social feeds represent what we stand for and care about. We may be cautious or even precious about what we post, wanting to craft a certain image. But there is another piece to how we outwardly present ourselves and control our message—and it’s as obvious as it is subtle. The language we use in person and in email sets a tone, and in just a few words it can convey our confidence or our insecurity. What we think may be a friendly, conversational style can inadvertently be harming us. Without realizing it, we women sometimes sabotage ourselves, our brand identity, and our professional currency with small words and phrases that qualify what we say and diminish our power before we even begin.

OWN YOUR POWER: NEVER SAY SORRY

“Sorry.” It’s a word that my dear friend and former colleague Jo Flattery, forty-three, a smart, seasoned, incredibly likable PR maven in New York City, used to use a lot. It worked for her. “It can take the tension out of the room,” Jo tells me as we sit eating our sweetgreen salads.

Jo has a warm, earthy vibe that is as disarming as it is honest. She is masterful at scoring major press hits but is equally astute at assuaging combustible egos. Jo’s former boss would bring her to meetings with the tough clients because she is intuitively skilled at making alpha males a little softer and gentler. “I am the pony that cools down the horses. I am a Gemini and a middle child and am always looking to make the peace,” Jo says smiling, dimples flashing.

Jo’s style is unfiltered, but not brash. After years of listening to Jo use “sorry” as a way to deflect seeming too forward, I started using it. It worked like a charm. It was a lovely social lubricant that made what I say silkier, softer—perhaps easier to digest. A few years earlier I had left a job at a start-up where my boss had told me I came off as too abrasive. Because I worked remotely in New York and the company was based in Boston, much of my communication with my colleagues was over the phone. “They just don’t see the real you,” my boss would tell me. “They don’t know you like I do and see your smile or your body language.” It was supposed to be professional constructive criticism, but it felt personal.

Feeling insecure about how I was being perceived at work, I began trying out Jo’s “sorry.” People never accused Jo of being bitchy or abrasive. Was it because she was blonde and petite? Or was it the language she used? Maybe it was a little of both. So I started apologizing.

I got a new gig at Grey advertising and took my “sorry approach” with me. I was working with a lot of young hotshot guys, and it easily slipped into my vernacular. No one seemed turned off or threatened by my direct approach or accused me of being bossy because, well, maybe I wasn’t so direct anymore. My “sorry” became almost deferential: “Sorry, how do I share my plan with the team?” It became my way into conversation. “Sorry, can I ask you a question?” Ironically, a shampoo ad produced by Grey while I was working there immediately ended my apologizing. I was now suddenly sorry for using “sorry.”

The Pantene ad that launched in 2014 shows how women use the apology as a subconscious technique to downplay power or to soften what they want to say. In the ad, we see women in different scenarios constantly apologizing. At work, a woman sitting in a conference room looks up and says to a man standing over her, “Can I ask a stupid question?” At home in the kitchen, a mom says “sorry” as she hands her baby over to a man who seems to be her husband. And “sorry” is used with strangers: A man bumps into a woman as he sits down next to her and stretches out. He knocks her knees but she apologizes. A woman gets into a car with a guy who appears to be her friend. They start talking at the same time, the woman says, “Sorry, you go first.”¹

The women apologize not for being rude or hurting someone, but for asking questions and simply taking up space. What I had thought was a breezy approach to engagement suddenly became loaded with lady baggage. “Sorry” isn’t just an apology for a screw up, it’s also a way to make sure you aren’t accused of being bossy, bitchy, or too aggressive. It’s filler; it’s a crutch; it’s a way to appear gentler when you are asking for something. It’s a power deflator that sucks the energy away from what you are saying.

AMY SCHUMER IS NOT SORRY

Amy Schumer took on the “sorry” state of how women speak in a May 2015 sketch on her show Inside Amy Schumer, where she skewered our propensity to apologize. The scene is set at a “Females in Innovation” conference during a panel with top innovators in their fields, including Schumer as a scientist who studies neuropeptides. The other women on the panel are equally accomplished: There’s a Nobel Prize winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a woman who invented a solar panel water filtration system, and a woman who built a school for child soldiers. The sketch opens with the panelists apologizing for correcting the male moderator as he introduces each of them incorrectly. He screws up, but the women apologize. Then they apologize for talking over each other. Pretty soon the sketch becomes more ridiculous, devolving into a scene of “sorrys.”

“Sorry, I hated that.”

“Sorry, I wish I hadn’t said that.”

“Sorry, is this coffee? Sorry, this is my fault.”

At one point a stagehand delivers a cup of coffee to one of the panelists, who had clearly asked for water, saying she’s allergic to caffeine. He delivers it anyway and, in the process, spills the coffee on another panelist. The woman writhes in pain on the floor, blood gushes from her legs, and she apologizes. The other women join in. It becomes an absurd symphony of “I’m sorrys,” leaving the male moderator completely confused.²

DON’T DILUTE YOUR MESSAGE

Tami Reiss, CEO of tech company Cyrus Innovation, saw this sketch, as did many of the women with her at a brunch for the League of Extraordinary Women. They discussed how they fell into the habit of using these “shrinker” words even though they knew they shouldn’t. They also spoke about an article that had recently run in The Washington Post, “Famous Quotes: The Way a Woman Would Have to Say Them in a Meeting.” In this spoof, reporter Alexandra Petri gives iconic quotes the lady treatment.³

“Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Woman in a meeting: “Dave, if I could, I could just—I just really feel like if we had liberty it would be terrific, and the alternative would just be awful, you know? That’s just how it strikes me. I don’t know.”

“I have a dream today!”

Woman in a meeting: “I’m sorry, I just had this idea—it’s probably crazy, but—look, just as long as we’re throwing things out here—I had sort of an idea or vision about maybe the future?”

“Let my people go.”

Woman in a meeting: “Pharaoh, listen, I totally hear where you’re coming from on this. I totally do. And I don’t want to butt in if you’ve come to a decision here, but, just, I have to say, would you consider that an argument for maybe releasing these people could conceivably have merit? Or is that already off the table?”

Tami says the conversation about how women are not comfortable being direct is not new to her. At work events, including those that advised women on how to attract business investors, women had been encouraged not to undermine themselves and their businesses with words like “we think” and “we hope to.” It was becoming all too obvious that something needed to be done—an effective means of alerting women that they were softening their language when instead they should be speaking directly and with confidence. What if there was something like a spell-check for “sorry,” Tami suggested to a friend sitting next to her at a girlfriends’ brunch. What if she were to make an online tool that would highlight those trigger words? The women at the brunch loved the idea. One even agreed to do some pro bono PR when it launched.

In December 2015, Tami released the “Just Not Sorry” Gmail plug-in that alerts you when you type certain words including “just,” “actually,” “sorry,” “I think,” and “I’m not an expert . . .” The plug-in underlines the words as you type. If you hover over the words, it explains how you may be undermining your confidence in your message.

“It’s a mindfulness exercise,” Tami says. “It makes you conscious of when to use the words and when not to use them. We designed this as an awareness exercise, and we knew it would take off with women.”

What surprised Tami was that it took off with the press too. Within a day of its launch, everyone from BBC News and NPR to NBC’s Today show was talking about “Just, Not Sorry” and calling Tami for interviews. It struck a nerve.

“This is a way of saying to women, you are consciously stepping in your own way,” Tami says. “If your default is to say ‘sorry’ and use undermining words, by eliminating even half of them, you would be more respected.”

BEYONCÉ: “SORRY, I AIN’T SORRY”

No doubt we are in the zeitgeist of “sorry,” and if we needed any more confirmation of its popularity, we need to look no farther than our reigning culture queen, Beyoncé. In April 2016, Beyoncé released Lemonade, an album with song lyrics wrapped in innuendo that begged for examination. Had Jay-Z really cheated on Bey? Beyoncé’s song “Sorry,” with a literal chorus of “Sorry, I ain’t sorry,” seemed to be outing her husband’s infidelity but making clear that as a fierce and independent woman, Queen Bey would never apologize.

The fiery song inspired Lena Dunham, the actress, writer, and director behind the TV show Girls, to discuss her near-pathological relationship with “sorry.” Weeks after the Lemonade debut, on May 25, 2016, Lena Dunham posted a piece on LinkedIn titled “Sorry Not Sorry: My Apology Addiction”:

I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry. And this has never been more clear to me than in the six years since I became a boss. It’s hard for many of us to own our power, but as a 24-year-old woman (girl, gal, whatever I was) I felt an acute and dangerous mix of total confidence and the worst imposter syndrome imaginable. I had men more than twice my age for whom I was the final word on the set of Girls, and I had to express my needs and desires clearly to a slew of lawyers, agents, and writers. And while my commitment to my work overrode almost any performance anxiety I had, it didn’t override my hardwired instinct to apologize. If I changed my mind, if someone disagreed with me, even if someone else misheard me or made a mistake . . . I was so, so sorry.

Perhaps it’s telling that Dunham, the Millennial emblem of modern-day feminism and unfiltered fearlessness, is also not immune to the instinct to apologize. It’s a habit that plagues even the bravest among us.

PLAYING BIG

All of these “sorrys” do add up, says Tara Mohr, author of Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message. Mohr, a career and personal growth coach, teaches women how to find their voices, ignore their inner critics, and carve out meaningful careers. “Sometimes we say we’re sorry out of habit and it’s unintentional, but sometimes we do it because we have a sense that we need to soften what we’re saying or ensure that we come across as non threatening and as a nice girl,” says Mohr. “We are acting out a double bind trying to straddle the middle to make sure we don’t offend anyone.”

Mohr says research shows we assess a person’s warmth in a very quick and immediate way. It’s the first thing we size up. We are feeling their vibe. Do we like them or not like them? But competence, on the other hand, is something we ascertain over time.

“It’s an evolutionary concept. People are really assessing friend or foe,” Mohr says. “We focus on warmth in that first interaction, and then when we are feeling that we like that person, there is more room to demonstrate competence. The key is how to communicate warmth without dumbing yourself down.”

Mohr talks about using a bookending approach: Open and close in a warm and personal way in a meeting or over email.

“At the beginning of the meeting, take three to five minutes to chat about the weekend or pets or something to make that human connection, and then show your competence. But close with something warm and friendly to convey your emotional warmth and accessibility,” Mohr says.

Navigating work emails, where the goal is to sound friendly but professional, is exactly where all of this can fall apart. Recognizing this, Jo Flattery has changed the way she’s communicating online.

“It can be hard to make a personal connection over email,” Jo says. “Plus, with the deadline-driven world of news and client management, I found myself apologizing a lot, often when I didn’t do anything wrong. It was out of habit. At first I had used it to ease the tension, but then I found myself using it as a transition word. The real lightbulb moment came when I was working on a project and sent a group email to say ‘Sorry, here’s the situation’ about something that I had nothing to do with and which, frankly, wasn’t even awful.

“A man on the project, who became a good friend and mentor, called me right away and asked me why I was apologizing for something that didn’t even have any merit. And he said, ‘Never say you’re sorry in an email. Don’t create an electronic trail. If you screwed up, it doesn’t matter. Just say, here’s the situation.’ After that, I became much more aware of how easily I would take the fall for something that had nothing to do with me or something that was just totally out of my hands. I stopped intentionally writing ‘sorry,’ although I find myself still having to delete the occasional ‘sorrys’ that slip in. When I have to apologize now, I do it in person or I’ll pick up the phone. I don’t do it over email.”

Aside from “sorry,” there are other little things that Mohr says minimize our language. Even the smallest words pack tremendous punch and effectively shut down our power. The disclaimers “just,” “actually,” and “almost” may soften our tone, but they crush our confidence. Mohr recommends scrutinizing your sentences and scrubbing your email for qualifier phrases like “I’m just thinking off the top of my head . . .” or “I’m no expert in this, but . . .” She says delete the qualifier and just say what you want to say. Also, check for instances of sentences or phrases like “Does this make sense?” and “Do you know what I mean?” You shouldn’t imply that you are incoherent. Instead, you can say, “Let me know if you have any questions about this.” You can close in a personable way at the end, just don’t distract from what you are saying. When the intent of your email is straightforward and clear, you are more likely to get a response.

THE DOUBLE BIND: LIKABILITY VS. COMPETENCE

Much has been made about the double bind that women face. There is considerable research that explores the conundrum, including a 2007 Catalyst study, “The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t.”⁴ The title says it all. Women are in a corner, and it’s not the corner office. The study found that women in business are perceived as “too soft, too tough, and never just right.” When women conform to gender stereotypes and appear nurturing, they are not viewed as strong leaders. But when women take on typically male leadership traits such as being assertive and direct, they are seen as too strident and not personable.

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and best-selling author who writes and lectures about gender and language, writes, “A double bind means you must obey two commands, but anything you do to fulfill one violates the other. While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be.”⁵

The double bind is the ultimate dilemma. It essentially shows that women who are likable are not perceived as competent and that women who perform well in their jobs are not well-liked. And likability goes a long way. Studies find that it’s not the smartest person in the room who will always get the job—it’s often the one people like the most. This became even more apparent during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when language, gender, social norms, the double bind, and all that we thought we understood about the sanctity of presidential elections played out and exploded like never before.

The campaign seesawed from the absurd to the ugly, with Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz arguing over whose wife was hotter and whose penis was bigger—the bizarre and shocking locker-room banter reached extraordinary new lows, even for politics. It was a campaign where Donald Trump shamelessly called women dogs, pigs, and bimbos and ruthlessly degraded Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for her looks, her skills, and her gender. He attacked his female political opponents too. “Look at the face—would anyone vote for that?” Trump said during an early Republican primary debate, mocking GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who was on stage with him at the time. At a rally a few months later, he told a crowd that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” when Barack Obama beat her in 2008.⁶

Trump’s toxic language not only insulted women, but it also offended Muslims, Hispanics, and African Americans. No one was spared, aside from Trump’s base of working class white men. Trump was called unhinged, a demagogue, and a fascist, but while the media repeatedly took him to task for his hateful and misogynistic language, nothing stuck.⁶ He made Ronald Reagan—the original Teflon President—look downright sticky.

Ironically (but not surprisingly), while Trump was posturing, inciting crowds, and throwing red meat to his supporters, it was Hillary Clinton who was perceived to be too shrill, too untrustworthy, and too inauthentic. She’s the one who people—even women—said they didn’t like.

No doubt, there will be Harvard Business School case studies about the 2016 election. As I write, I imagine entire university curricula are in the works dissecting and analyzing Trump’s appeal. They won’t only focus on how Trump tapped into the subtle or not so subtle racism and anger brewing in the country, they will also reflect on how masterful he was at playing and pandering to the public. It can be argued that no one but The Donald could ever get away with that kind of inflammatory public rhetoric and performance. But try to imagine a woman in Trump’s leather Oxfords. Take away the toxic language and leave just his bluster and arrogance, and still there’s no way that a woman could inhabit that persona—even a piece of it—and succeed. Not a chance.

IF YOU CAN’T FIGHT IT, OWN IT

No one personifies the double bind like Hillary Clinton. She is the torchbearer for the rest of us. In her tasteful pearls, pantsuits, and kitten heels, Hillary is the poster woman for the “damned if you do, doomed if you don’t” dilemma. For the more than twenty-five years she’s been in the public eye, Hillary has been shouldering the unfairness, double standards, and gender stereotypes of what a woman in leadership should or should not do. As First Lady in 1993, she was excoriated for taking on national health care—a massive policy move that was not part of the typical First Lady job description. She tried to pivot from the traditional First Lady role and expand her reach, but it was an epic fail for the entire Clinton administration. Americans weren’t ready to see Hillary Clinton or any First Lady driving policy. They hadn’t hired her to do that—in fact, they hadn’t hired her at all. And it didn’t matter to voters if Hillary had the chops to take it on; it was not her business to take it on.

Madame Pivoter

Hillary’s defining moment came a couple years later in 1995 at the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, where she spoke about the abuse of women in China. The powerful words were unexpected from a First Lady: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”⁷ Now she had a platform she could own—it was authentic and linked back to her days in Arkansas and her experience fighting for women’s issues.

And then five years later, in another first for a First Lady, Hillary ran and won public office, securing a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Even Hillary’s advisers couldn’t have imagined her running for office and running back to the lion’s den of the Capitol after her husband’s second term ended. After all, this is where a large swath of its members had spent the past eight years viciously attacking her and President Bill Clinton. As the first woman to be elected as a senator from New York, she was making all kinds of history—and after twenty-four years as a politician’s wife, she was now a politician in her own right. For eight, years she served, enacted legislation, and by all accounts was a respected U.S. Senator.

In 2008, Hillary pivoted again, this time running unsuccessfully for President. She lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama but ultimately left her distinct mark—eighteen million marks, as she would say at her concession speech. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”⁸

The Hillz—A Social Media Sensation

In her next gig, serving in President Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Hillary emerged as an unlikely social media star. As she globetrotted, she became popular in the geek chic world of social media, even inspiring a meme—Hillz—after she was photographed checking her BlackBerry and wearing sunglasses aboard a military C-17 plane bound for Libya. The shot launched the Tumblr site Texts from Hillary Clinton, in which the Secretary sends snarky texts to everyone from actor Ryan Gosling to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She was the badass, wonky Secretary of State who had visited 112 countries and logged a whopping 956,000 miles.⁹

Skip ahead to the 2016 race. A seasoned veteran with more scar tissue, mileage, and experience than arguably any politician in modern history, and yet Hillary’s campaign needed to reintroduce her to the electorate—as the friendly, warm, trustworthy grandma. The irony was not lost on Hillary; after all of these years, how could the voters still not know the real her? The campaign initially wanted to reimagine how Hillary was portrayed. They knew they were swimming upstream with many voters who just couldn’t kick a certain image of Hillary—a complicated, tarnished image wrapped in scandals and controversies that had been baking for decades. So the campaign needed to do a massive makeover and roll out Hillary in all of her genuine, human awesomeness. But the narrative just never took. Instead, the sense that she was not likable, not trustworthy, not authentic, and couldn’t connect persisted. What was dragging down Hillary’s candidacy was subtle but pervasive.

So they decided to shift gears. If you can’t fight it, own it. During the primaries, we saw Hillary finally reconcile the public’s perception of her with humor. This time around, Hillary outed herself for not being a “natural politician.” Despite two successful runs for the U.S. Senate and two more campaigns for President, Hillary ironically admitted the obvious—that she was uncomfortable campaigning and, unlike her husband, she was just not very good at it. In fact, her inability to connect on the public stage became a de facto campaign strategy: Parody your unlikability to make yourself more likable.

Jimmy Kimmel “Mansplains” to Hillary

Clinton took to late-night TV to roll out a more human Hillary. In one sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jimmy “mansplains” to Hillary what she needs to do to get elected and he offers his help to make it happen. The sketch opens with Jimmy asking Hillary if she knows what “mansplaining” is.

Hillary answers, “Isn’t it when men speak to women in a patronizing way?”

“Actually, it’s when men speak to women in a condescending way, but you were close,” Jimmy corrects her.

He asks Hillary to give a stump speech so he can critique her style and give her tips.

“Stop shouting,” Jimmy says before she gets through her first line. “You come off as too shrill.” Hillary overcorrects and Jimmy jumps in, “Speak up, we can’t hear you. You’re like a mouse up there; and you know what would be nice? If you smiled. Show some teeth! Oh my God, with the sour puss! Try to have some fun, this is like your dream—pretend like you’re enjoying yourself!”

Hillary takes the advice and smiles, and then Jimmy scolds her. “Don’t smile like that, it’s too forced, it looks like you’re faking it. Look happy. Just be careful with the face. You have to ask yourself, do I want to be President or do I want to be a Lakers girl?”

The sketch is a spoof of the impossible double bind and the scrutiny that Hillary so famously endures. Kimmel gives Hillary conflicting advice. She should be assertive but not too assertive. Happy but not too happy, otherwise she risks seeming disingenuous.

Finally, Hillary gets exasperated and says, “It’s like nothing I do is right.” And Jimmy agrees, “Yeah, you’re not doing it right. I can’t quite put my finger on it . . . It’s something. It’s that you’re not . . .”

“A man,” Hillary answers.

“Yes! That’s it! You’re not a man, but that was really cute the way you did it,” Jimmy says.¹⁰

This sketch defined the primary season of the Hillary campaign. Her Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders, the socialist-leaning senator from Vermont, was beloved by the public and hardly scrutinized. No one made a fuss about his rumpled clothes, messy hair, or manic gestures on the podium. His homey-ness and “I-tell-it-like-it-is” vibe resonated, particularly with young people. Even though Sanders would make far-fetched policy promises that he couldn’t possibly deliver, no one criticized his angry, finger-thrusting delivery. But Hillary got continuously critiqued—not for the content of her speeches, but for her tone of her voice during the speech.

THE XX DILEMMA

Robin Lakoff, author and professor Emerita of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley, says we are conditioned to like politicians a certain way—and that way is very alpha male. The bombastic, confident, and finger-wagging style shows us who is in charge. It can be seen as exciting and even thrilling in its manliness.

“The tougher he is, the better we like him and the more we trust him. We call him ‘authentic,’ regardless of whether he is or not, or whatever we think that word means, because what we really mean by ‘authentic’ is ‘fitting the expected stereotype,’ Lakoff writes.¹¹

Hillary couldn’t compete with that. Her style is more cerebral than emotional. Beating her chest and pounding the podium to make a point would never fly—not just for Hillary, but for any woman. Lakoff has a revolutionary idea about what we Americans need to do to get over this whole double bind business when it comes to disrupting the natural bias we have against female leaders. She says it’s on us to rethink how we listen to and evaluate women and to recondition what we think is “better” and even normal.¹²

Lakoff compares this to the stereotypes about women in professional sports in a pre-Title IX era. Female athletes were often dismissed for “playing like girls.” They didn’t have the same strength or ability or generate as much excitement as the guys. Their games weren’t worthy of watching or financially supporting. Many would argue that this bias continues even decades after Title IX, but it is evolving. Serena Williams, U.S. Women’s Soccer, and mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey have shown us that female talent is worth watching and is lucrative. We may still view women’s sports through a slightly different lens than the way we watch the men’s, and that’s okay. Different, Lakoff says, is still good. Similarly, she argues that we need to reframe how women in leadership are assessed, and we need to learn new ways of listening and hearing women.

“The problem does not reside in Clinton’s style, or in anything she does or does not do. It rests with us, her audience. We do not know how to listen to a woman speaking in public or private, but especially in public and most especially when seeking a symbolically powerful position. We, her audience, need to change our style—our style of listening and our habit of expectations. This is a lot to ask, but it is what we have to do for our country,” writes Lakoff.¹³

Many women understand the double bind. You don’t need Hillary Clinton’s national presence to find yourself under a microscope and in a similarly uncomfortable position. Women leaders are held to the double standard of having to be competent and well-liked in order to “fit.” Men are not expected to be likable and are not admonished if they aren’t likable enough.

At that tech start-up where I worked, I felt like my personality was under scrutiny. I had always had an assertive manner, but there I was told I came off as abrasive. It was suggested that I be gentler and keep my head down. For years, I had worked the phones as an NBC booker and then as a producer convincing people to share their stories with me. I was also a public speaker and knew how to effectively communicate. Or at least I thought I did. I couldn’t help but think that if I were a guy, the way I delivered my opinions wouldn’t have been so scrutinized and I wouldn’t have ruffled so many feathers. Of course there’s no way to know this. Maybe they just really didn’t like me, and my ovaries might have had nothing to do with it. But research shows there may be something more that’s underlying how I was perceived.

Kieran Snyder writes in Fortune that there’s a common perception at technology companies that women are much more likely to receive negative personality criticism than their male peers. Snyder’s study on employee reviews at twenty-eight companies confirmed this hunch. “Words like bossy, abrasive, strident and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead; words like emotional and irrational describe their behaviors when they object.”¹⁴ Women are told to pipe down.

But this doesn’t only happen in technology companies; it happens in Hollywood too.

GET OVER ADORABLE

Academy Award–winning actress Jennifer Lawrence wrote a much talked about essay in fellow actress/director Lena Dunham’s feminist newsletter Lenny Letter in October 2015. Lawrence discussed not only the vast gender pay gap in Hollywood, but also her fear of speaking up and not being liked. Women, she wrote, are conditioned to keep quiet and play nice.

In her essay “Why Do I Make Less than My Male Co-Stars?” Jennifer Lawrence writes about the disparity between her salary and that of her American Hustle male co-stars. “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need,” she explains.

Like so many women, Lawrence didn’t speak up because she wanted people to like her.

“I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled,’” she confessed. “This is an element of my personality that I’ve been working against for years, and based on the statistics, I don’t think I’m the only woman with this issue. Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? . . . Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?

“I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that,” she concludes. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It’s just heard.

“Again, this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn’t completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress in a negotiation as a ‘spoiled brat.’”¹⁵

BRATS, BITCHES, AND OTHER NAMES

Women don’t want to be thought of as brats or bitches. But fear of speaking up can cause us to not speak up at all. After my job at the tech start-up, I started paying much more attention to my word choice. I decided to dial back my assertiveness. I started to hedge. I looked at other women—those nonaggressive types—and tried to mimic their tones. I didn’t want to be viewed as aggressive or bossy, so for a few years I started to say “sorry.” A lot. It worked beautifully. And then, like Jo Flattery, I stopped.

As women look for new job opportunities to pivot in our careers or to grow the ones we already have, we reach out for advice and guidance. We may be networking, cold calling, and emailing people who we hope can help us. But as we present ourselves to the world, we must not make the mistake of diminishing our personal brand with language that whittles our perceived confidence and reduces our power. As Beyoncé told ELLE magazine in an April 2016 interview about her business and launching her new clothing line Ivy Park, “Power is making things happen without asking for permission.” And, one could add, without saying sorry.¹⁶