A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
WHAT PRICE SUCCESS?
We’re all aware of the lack of equal opportunity and unequal pay that women come up against. The hard, often impossible choice between career and having a child. How a man taking paternity leave is celebrated but a woman on maternity leave has let the team down. Image credit: RDNE STOCK PROJECT on Pexels.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
“I was participating in something I had secretly fantasized about – the upper echelon of New York City life and culture. After years of criticizing the elitism and exclusiveness of these very spaces, I was sitting in the belly of the beast.”
This is from the introduction to The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay.
She had a strong sense that she didn’t belong, and realized later that she had bought into certain myths about what it means to be a woman who is getting ahead at work, that she had been telling herself a story.
“The real story was that the year before I had been let go from a job, which led to months of uncertainty about my career and financial future.”
In the book, the former executive editor of Teen Vogue shares the story of her personal workplace reckoning and presents a case for collective responsibility to reimagine work as we know it.
We’re all aware of the lack of equal opportunity and unequal pay that women come up against. The hard, often impossible choice between career and having a child. How a man taking paternity leave is celebrated but a woman on maternity leave has let the team down. Mukhopadhyay quotes a Harvard Business Review study in which economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote about what she called a “creeping nonchoice”. That many women are not actively choosing not to have children, just that life and career demands get in the way until one day, it’s too late.
I read “the reconfiguration of domestic labour and parenting into the ‘labour of love’ – the idea that care work is something women do naturally, not an actual skill that requires development and expertise – led to the devaluation of both women’s labour as wives/mothers and that of domestic workers,” and think back to what a friend of mine had said when we became mothers.
“This stuff about ‘noble mothers’ is all hogwash – just something they pin on us and then sit back and relax while we slog!” Harried and sleepless as I was, it had seemed like a radical thought. Too radical, perhaps, for someone who had also bought into the natural-born mothers story.
She also takes on the whole “women make better leaders because of a higher EQ” myth, citing data that suggests that women in positions of unmitigated power “can end up adopting the behaviours of male leaders”.
Which may not be quite what her female readers wish to hear, but she adds that “the suggestion that women are only better leaders because they are more nurturing or supportive, communicative or collaborative, could do with some examination. They are not always, nor should they be expected to be.”
Mukhopadhyay, like many women are beginning to do now, says while there is nothing fundamentally wrong with encouraging women to ask for their rights, this advice puts the onus on women without bringing about any change in the system that is basically rigged against them.
“Of course we should ask for more money, but relying on ourselves and our fallible managers to determine our worth is inherently flawed.”
She takes readers through the minefield that people of colour, poor, disabled, queer, and/or gender nonconforming have to navigate in their workplaces.
She describes the trajectory of success stories (and at least one spectacular fall from grace). Helen Gurley Brown (Cosmopolitan), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and her takeaways from it.
She quotes a DEI expert who makes the distinction between equality and equity. “Equality gives everyone access to the same thing, while equity recognizes that different people need different things to achieve similar outcomes, and strategies to help should be tailored appropriately.”
And she sheds a whole different light on something many of us dismiss as a funny, almost endearing trait. The Oh I can’t differentiate between people of (fill in the name of a particular ethnicity). Until someone does it to us. How can they not see how different we are? we wonder.
It’s called cross-race effect or cross-race bias, she informs us. And that the first study on this was published in 1914. Misidentification arises from a lack of exposure to different faces.
It perhaps should come as no surprise that when someone is in a position of power over you, you recognize their face more easily than they recognize yours.
But then, as her friend – the one Mukhopadhyay had been mistaken for – says, “How do we expect to be taken seriously as diverse and necessary leaders if executives can’t even tell us apart?”
There’s tons to unpack in this book. So much advice we’ve come to take as “good for us” which, really, is just fluff. Mukhopadhyay quotes psychiatrist Dr Pooja Lakshmin, the author of Real Self Care, on what she has dubbed faux self-care.
The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay is published by Random House, $39.99.
Yoga, face masks and spa days may be feel-good and they do feel good, but in the end, they don’t achieve much because they don’t address patriarchy, white supremacy, toxic capitalism... all of the factors that cause us to reach for healing and self-care.
Mukhopadhyay’s response to the question many “well intentioned but extremely nosy friends and family members” have asked about why she left a dream job, says it all.
It was a dream job, but for someone other than her.
She had determined that “at the end of the day, the money was enough for me because it was more than I had ever made, and I was getting paid for something I loved to do. Baby Samhita never thought that was going to be possible...
“I had come to believe that I was the lucky one, not the other way around.”
She leaves her readers with this question:
“What if we focused on our communities instead of just ourselves (as a deliberate practice, since often we already do)? What if we finally said, Enough is enough. I have what I need, I do not need it ‘all’, I refuse to do it all. Stop trying to make me!”