Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [14]
Three weeks into my summer there, a girl named Tracey joined the fountain-girl contingent and things started to improve for me. She was spunky and fun, completely unfazed by people who barked complaints about the one-quarter-inch-thick steaks or shouted for extra packets of wet wipes. During slow times she talked about the wild guys she dated or her favorite hobby, racing her parents’ car down back country roads. When she worked the night shift and didn't feel like waiting on people, she would stick up a sign, visible only to people coming in the front door, that said COUNTER CLOSED.
One day our lunch breaks coincided, and as we headed downstairs to the employee lounge together, walking by the manager who always checked out the employee lunch selections, I mentioned how bummed out I felt having to eat my ice cream without any toppings. Tracey gave me a devious laugh. “Oh, we can fix that,” she said. As soon as we were alone in the basement, she dug her spoon deep into her ice cream, revealing an amazing cross section. At the bottom of the bowl was a layer of nuts and cherries, topped by whipped cream, then hot fudge and finally the ice cream.
“It's an upside-down sundae,” she announced with a smirk.
I was stunned by both her nerve and her ingeniousness. From then on I ate an upside-down sundae every day for lunch, and going into work stopped being so onerous.
Only now, however, have I come to see that there are much broader applications to what Tracey showed me. Here's the real lesson: If you want to eat the cherry in life, to say nothing of the hot fudge and whipped cream, you've got to break the rules.
And that's the very first strategy of a gutsy girl. If you hope to be a star in your company and a standout in your field, you must, at times, make your own set of rules for what you're doing. You must listen to what they tell you to do and then you must twist it, toss it, or turn it upside down so that the result is brilliantly bold and different.
In many ways it's the foundation of every strategy in this book because in each case you're going against the grain of what you've always been told to do. You shouldn't, of course, just break the rules helter-skelter. Your rule breaking should be in the context of your overall mission (see Chapter 4), but the reason I'm going to talk about rule breaking first is that it will loosen you up to think about the most imaginative mission for yourself and your department.
THE RULES OF RULE BREAKING
The idea of breaking rules makes you nervous, doesn't it? After all, you've always been told that those who follow the rules are rewarded and those who break them are punished—sometimes very, very badly.
This is a “truth” that some experts say is reinforced for girls far more than for boys. Dr. Allana Elovson, a developmental and social psychologist in Santa Monica who is an expert on gender bias and has done workshops with many parents, says that the messages boys and girls get about rule breaking are very different. “The unspoken message is that ‘Boys will be boys,’” she explains. “It's okay for them to be bad. On the other hand, we expect little girls to be more civilized. If they break the rules, we come down much more heavily on them.”
In their research on sexism in schools, Myra and David Sadker found that girls are often rewarded for passivity whereas boys receive encouragement for challenging the status quo. For example, in instance after instance they saw teachers stress to students that they needed to raise their hands before responding to a question. When the discussion became fast-paced, the rule was often swept away. Boys, the researchers found, called out eight times more often than girls. Whether boys’ comments were insightful or irrelevant, teachers responded to them. However, when girls called out, there was a fascinating occurrence.