Last month, I went to a conference in New York put on by the Women, Action, Media organization. During a panel on how to deal with editors, many, including me, expressed fear of being too aggressive or annoying editors. The response of the panelists was unanimous--be annoying. They assured us that what felt like "being annoying" to us would still be less aggressive than what editors were used to seeing from male writers. I was reminded of this experience by two pieces yesterday, one in the New York Times titled Do nice gals finish last?, and another in the Daily Beast arguing President Obama should "Put a Mom on the Court." Both wrestle with a central tension about the changing workplace: how do we address typically "masculine" features of business environments? Do we accept them and try to work within them to get ahead, or do we disregard them and say we need new rules? Implicit in the formulation of these questions, however, are assumptions that being aggressive is inherently masculine and that having children is a feminine concern. Neither is correct. Saying that women should continue being nice, even when that niceness hurts their personal interests, just because niceness is noble, is problematic. It's asking women to shoulder the burden of social progress at the expense of their self-actualization. Instead, we should seek to create workplaces that are more friendly to men and women with children. As Kate Harding notes, there is an "overwhelming lack of support for working mothers and respect for female ambition." Rather than encouraging women to be nice, we should recognize that a major reason why women don't engage in self-promoting, ambitious behaviors is that when we do, we're punished for it. But this doesn't mean that the solution is to stay "nice." It means that women and men need to work together to change the culture, particularly the workplace culture, so that ambition and overt confidence aren't a liability for women. --Silvana Naguib
