Copyright The New Yorker
Should women be themselves at the office? In the past two decades, self-expression has become a tacit expectation in many white-collar workplaces, with dress codes relaxing and companies professing interest in their employees’ lives and values. You got hired to do your job, the thinking goes; no use sending someone else to the staff meeting. But the past few years of layoffs, hiring slowdowns, and dwindling worker protections have left a subset of wage earners inclined to keep their cards close. “My workplace is not prepared for me to bring my authentic self to the office,” one Redditor wrote, cryptically, on r/LateStageCapitalism. In “Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work,” the author Jodi-Ann Burey argues that, for women and for people of color, being true to oneself easily morphs into a professional liability, particularly in an era of backlash against D.E.I. “Authenticity costs, and I mean cash,” Burey warns. Into this debate drops the executive coach Kate Mason, whose new book, “Powerfully Likeable: A Woman’s Guide to Effective Communication,” contends that channelling one’s “true self” at work may allow women to transcend sexist biases. Mason lays out the gendered minefield of the modern office, in which women are unfairly labelled ice queens or doormats: those who give direction are penalized for unseemly ambition, while those who radiate agreeableness sacrifice their authority. She cites the cases of two of her clients: Sara, who was scolded for writing e-mails that were too “brusque and officious,” and Sarah, who preferred to add value “behind the scenes,” lest she be seen as habitually “calling out” her accomplishments. What is needed, Mason writes, is “a broader array of communicative patterns,” and a strategy for unfurling women’s “true selves or capabilities.” By “reorienting our focus away from how we’re being perceived and instead working on who we are,” she continues, “we can amplify what is special about ourselves” and “show up as an individual rather than as the boring stereotypes from behind doors one or two.” Mason, although she may quaintly underestimate the ways that a woman can be disliked in the office, is responding to a proven paradox of gender and leadership. When female employees prioritize performance over the comfort of others, their careers suffer, but when they concentrate on kindness they’re dismissed for a lack of decisiveness or vision. In 2024, a team of researchers led by the psychologist Vanessa Burke found that women who express pride at work are perceived as chillier than men who do the same. Meanwhile, the scientist Andrea C. Vial has shown that stereotypically feminine traits like communality and empathy are seen as “nice add-ons for leaders”—cute but expendable. Mason promises to equip women with the kind of charisma you are unlikely to exude while, say, reading a self-help text called “Powerfully Likeable” in the corporate cafeteria. A former world champion in debate, she writes that in striving to be “stern, adversarial, and hyperaggressive . . . I had won the tournament but had lost something of myself.” The book scans as a form of redress—an attempt to reconcile not only the demands of the workplace with the true self but also the apparent contradiction between competitiveness and care. What We’re Reading Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some of Mason’s guidance relates to projecting authority. She cautions that explanations should be “topline” and “architectural,” because “giving too much context is an immediate signal of non-seniority.” She urges women to assemble speaking styles out of a mix of masculine and feminine buzzwords, and to aspire toward “driven warmth” or “rational compassion.” (In a Hannah Horvath-esque gesture, the book endorses inwardly defining oneself as an expert, but not the expert.) Yet much of Mason’s advice is simply about being useful, by delivering facts and opinions in a clear, elegant way. Often, I found myself nodding along with her tips: be concise, don’t overprepare, dole out information in the right order. Although “Powerfully Likeable” purports to offer women tools for self-expression, its real subject frequently seems to be how to stop obsessing over your professional identity and tell people what they need to know. But this workaday agenda has been artfully wrapped in therapy-speak. Mason’s project, she writes, was devised to relieve her own feeling of inauthenticity, and she has a menu of diagnoses for professional women who may experience the same dissonance. In her hands, the old chestnut of “impostor syndrome,” in which women fear that they will be exposed as frauds, becomes “imposing syndrome,” a private reluctance to take up space. Sections on “communicative self-care” and “presence dysmorphia” recommend mood-boosting exercises such as viewing yourself through the eyes of your best friend. The book claims that women can resist being typecast by appearing “authentically” as the “most powerful and likeable versions” of themselves; this thesis seems, in a bit of subtle customer service, to conflate the real you with the most successful and effective you. Fix yourself by becoming more yourself: it’s not a new idea, even if it’s been newly grafted onto the org chart. For decades, advertisers have tried to inculcate in women an urgent sense of lack, while simultaneously insisting that their true selves—the selves that they can access by purchasing the right products—are perfect and complete. If Mason is unravelling a double bind here, it’s less about the tension between power and likability and more about a commercial quandary: how do you inflame the consumer’s desires while also appealing to her ego? “Powerfully Likeable” brings the marketplace into the workplace, which it reimagines as a venue where women can model their branded communication styles. The pitch is not that labor standards are dismally low but, rather, that workplaces would be fairer if they understood what makes us quintessentially us. Mason isn’t the first to figure the white-collar business as a site of feminine self-creation. “Powerfully Likeable” descends most obviously from “Lean In,” by the former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, which came out in 2013 and featured a similar blend of social science and personal anecdote. Sandberg’s gift to pop feminism was the idea that one could cure the workplace by curing women, who were stymied by a lack of confidence and ambition. Her manual for tearing down the “internal obstacles” that prevent female employees from reaching the top doubled as an unintentionally lucid exploration of office sexism. Like Mason, Sandberg was concerned about the gendered trade-off between leadership and likability, even as she reproduced it in her book. She offered readers empowering slogans—raise your hand, sit at the table, don’t leave before you leave—but also made the case for delicacy. To smooth female workers’ negotiations with their colleagues, Sandberg advocated that they use “we” rather than “I” pronouns and express “appreciation and concern.” Her message was implicit, but potent: women, it’s time to own your career journey. In certain circles, the book was canonized. It spent more than a year on the Times best-seller list and prompted the formation of hundreds of “Lean In” study groups, where women could practice “peer mentorship” and encourage one another to ask for raises. Sandberg’s critics, meanwhile, pointed out that her vision was limited in predictable and maddening ways: she was a stratospherically successful Harvard graduate who’d been mentored by Larry Summers, and who seemed ignorant of the challenges facing nonwhite and lower-income women. (Soon after “Lean In” was published, Sandberg became one of the youngest female billionaires in the world.) For a hymn to the transformative power of feminine ambition, the critique went, “Lean In” was oddly unambitious, its humble aims captured in the motion named by the title: here was an attempt not to revolutionize the workplace but to adjust the working woman’s angle of approach. In retrospect, the book feels like an artifact of a fleetingly optimistic moment, and of a time when the mainstreaming of feminism—recall Beyoncé performing in front of a screen flashing the word “FEMINIST” at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards—not only diluted the concept but also pressed it into service on behalf of the free market. As Susan Faludi observed, in 2013, “Lean In” belongs to a tradition going back to at least 1920, when mass merchandisers co-opted the idioms of emancipation in a bid for women’s money. Sandberg, who described her book as only “sort of a feminist manifesto,” refreshed the old aspirational consumerism by transferring it to work. It wasn’t so much that she promoted material accumulation, though she did, but that her financial resources, which enabled her “to afford any help I need,” were a silent precondition for much of her advice. (Note the ticklishness of her allusion to the costs of child care: a wary elision of offspring is a trademark of pop-feminist self-help.) The program she espoused for less privileged women was one of emulation—a kind of “fake it till you make it” regime in which everyone behaves as if she were Sheryl Sandberg. It was a canny move of self-branding—relatability braced by an element of seduction, by jokes and encouragement delivered in Sandberg’s warm, vulnerable, and confiding voice. But if “Lean In” ’s prescriptions rang hollow even at the time, both Sandberg and the women’s movement ended up having bigger problems. Sandberg’s company, we learned, was damaging the mental health of teen-age girls, insufficiently safeguarding users’ personal information, and, arguably, destroying democracy. (As the Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks told the Times, “Not everything should be leaned into.”) Sandberg stepped down from Facebook in 2022, amid headlines underscoring her “mixed legacy.” Feminism, meanwhile, saw Hillary Clinton’s defeat, in 2016, by a man accused of sexual assault; the repeal of Roe v. Wade; the #MeToo backlash; and Kamala Harris’s loss, in 2024, to the same man. Although Sandberg’s key ideas now seem dated, her approach to self-commodification is everywhere. We’ve taken a scorched-earth approach to workplace feminism: burning away the last vestiges of institutional support and structure until only the brand remains. “All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top,” by Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill, is one of several feminist-scented offerings to rise from the ashes. It feels like a direct riposte and a sign of the times: exit company woman, enter entrepreneur. Both Brown and O’Neill worked in fashion journalism, Brown as the editor of InStyle and O’Neill as the editor of WSJ Magazine, and both, as they write, “got big-time, super-publicly fired; two ducks decanted unceremoniously out of the water.” The book combines friendly encouragement—“Well, welcome to the party, baby!” the authors crow to the newly canned—with practical advice for life after a layoff. Chapters on finding employment lawyers, securing health care, minimizing expenses, and locating hole-patching income sources alternate with stories of high-profile women who lost their jobs, including Lisa Kudrow, Katie Couric, and Oprah. “The corner office is not all there is,” Brown and O’Neill write, their tone lively and irreverent. “Real power comes from individualism. And guess what helps you come to that realization? Being fired.” Brown and O’Neill devote a chapter to managing the public narrative of a job loss: strive to leave with poise and dignity; craft an “I got laid off” announcement; solicit introductions and take as many meetings as possible to furnish “proof of life.” Another chapter recommends being direct when explaining your departure: “Keep it high and tight. Nobody needs War and Peace.” In Brown and O’Neill’s construction, the savvy, freshly unemployed woman is a memoirist, as adept at omission as she is at the arrangement of detail. And, like a memoirist, she’s often trying to expunge shame, a word that appears thirty-one times in the book. “The truth is not shameful,” they write. “It’s freeing! There’s real power in being able to say, ‘Yeah, I got fired.’ When you own it, you strip away the stigma.” Brown and O’Neill cast themselves less as Sandberg’s heirs than as her apostates. “Over here, you see, we’re a little more lean out,” they write. They entreat readers to “have an identity outside of your job, be it on social media, a sports team, or at the local pottery workshop,” but the first item on that list gives away the game. Much of the book revolves around the art of telling your story online. There are injunctions to “maintain a consistent presence across all the platforms you appear on,” and caveats that internet screeds “are just one screengrab away from immortality.” The Cool Girls’ aims are lofty: they don’t merely seek to protect your material well-being; they wish to help you find your vocational purpose, to think through “how you’ve grown” and “what you represent.” At times, “All the Cool Girls” replicates some of “Lean In” ’s more frustrating blind spots. (The authors suggest that one might save money while prioritizing the mental-health benefits of exercise by asking one’s personal trainer for a discount.) Like Sandberg, Brown and O’Neill use charm, humor, and tactful disclosure to fashion a relatable but lightly untouchable persona—they are influencers, not organizers, their vision of collectivism a faux sisterhood of similarly branded selves. Rather than departing from “Lean In,” the book updates Sandberg’s themes. Women are now supposed to lean into their reputations rather than their work projects. They’re exhorted to fine-tune their self-presentation to the public rather than to their supervisor. Whereas the 2013-era girlboss reshaped herself to accommodate her company, her present-day incarnation turns herself into a company, a twenty-four-hour amalgamation of C.E.O. and product. Once, she derived satisfaction from owning her labor; now she is celebrated for owning her story. As Brown and O’Neill attempt to reimagine job loss—to make poinsettias out of pink slips—their positivity can seem to border on delusion. Good riddance, they call to crumbling labor norms, applying a varnish of empowerment to a program that looks like retreat. Sandberg, for all her interest in proto-influencing, focussed on being liked and respected in the boardroom. The Cool Girls are even more transactional, instructing women to monetize their connections on social media. This ideological evolution from “Love Me” to “Buy Me” maps onto a culture that increasingly instrumentalizes its workers, urging them to share, in lieu of the fruits of a joint struggle, a fluency in marketing copy. “Embrace your skills, your equity, and your worth,” Brown and O’Neill whoop. When you’re a Cool Girl, you may be your own most valuable asset, but only because the rest of your portfolio is empty. The self has long been a product; what’s new, perhaps, is the clarity and complicity of the transaction. The entrepreneurial-consumerist breeze that stirred the subtext of “Lean In” has become a societal headwind, ripping away the pretense that the new career guides for women have anything to do with feminism, or even work. Instead, everything is content. In “Fly! A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom and Building a Life You Love,” Steph Wagner implores female readers to “recognize the critical importance of financial independence” and notes that nearly fifty per cent of women between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-six have no retirement savings. Wagner is the national director of women and wealth at a blue-chip assets-management company, and her investments in the subject are personal. After pulling a six-figure salary as a vice-president of a private-equity firm, she quit her job in order to become the C.M.O. (“Chief Mommy Officer”) to her three sons. Then her husband, Richard (a pseudonym), an executive at a mutual-fund company, cheated on her and announced that he was decamping to live on a ranch. Wagner recouped her losses by starting a financial-advising business oriented toward women. Across forty pages of perfect derangement, Wagner uses her personal-finance handbook to unspool her divorce odyssey, seizing the ethos that no personal tragedy is too intimate to exploit. Seemingly every person she meets has an encouraging aphorism to share. When she arrives at a hotel restaurant, only to find it closed, two female employees prepare a feast, replete with bottles of red wine, waving away her request for the bill. “It’s just what we as women do for each other,” one of them says. Her son speaks to her in a “small but resolute” voice. “Mom,” he says, “I get it. You’re like the giving tree.” Wagner is giving plenty—horoscope columnist, for one. After the personal-history section, readers are invited to determine their “money personality.” There’s the Giver (“her desire to help others can come at a cost”) and the Trailblazer (“with a clear vision and unwavering ambition, the Trailblazer exudes confidence and embraces thoughtful risk”), as well as the Skeptic, the High Roller, the Penny Pincher, and the Avoider. These dramatis personae, although they fall away soon after they’re introduced, suggest that the field of finance is not immune to influencer brain, which sorts people into targetable types, adds some prosperity gospel, pours a sense of mysticism or destiny on top, and presents the result as a panacea. It’s probably no accident that, for Wagner, the only acceptable personality appears to be Trailblazer, perhaps with a side of High Roller. “Fly,” which portrays the self as a stock to be invested in, grown, and used to generate wealth, is a guide not for laborers but for capitalists. The feminist self-help industry, professing to foreground meaning and purpose, has instead become a mirror in which our financialized society admires its reflection. The irony of this capture is that imperatives such as “bring your whole self to work” are now issued by people who seem to have no idea what a whole self is. In their world, which is also ours, selfhood has degraded into taste, preferences, demography, and outlays of attention and money. It is interpreted by market researchers with the help of algorithms and large language models; it has little to do with our inner lives, imaginations, or souls. According to the spokespeople of grind culture, the choice is clear: your individuality can make money for you or it can make money for somebody else. Buying in is easier than it should be—falling so far through the looking glass that owning yourself starts to seem like the last frontier of freedom. ♦
