An exploration of how gender-based labels in the workplace limit equality—and why it’s time to recognize women for their leadership, not their gender.
More than we realize, terms, definitions and labelling go a long way to categorize the way we view things or people. For example, when we’re born we’re immediately dressed in blue or pink to identify our gender.
This kind of labelling follows us for the rest of our lives. But it’s not always as seemingly harmless or cutesy as blue for boys and pink for girls.
Professionally, when a woman is labelled by her gender she has already been subjected to inequality. Before she’s even entered the room.
We aim to eliminate gender inequality in the workplace, but identifying a professional as “female architect”, “female engineer” or “woman lawyer” defeats this purpose.
Why not just call a woman an architect or an engineer or a lawyer? Men who are leaders in organizations and founders of companies are not referred to as male leaders, male tech founders, or male engineers. But women are. We need to un-normalize identifying women leaders by their gender.
In the New York Times article “She Wants to Kill the Girl Boss” Ashley Sumner, CEO of Quilt, explains why she decided to remove her gender from her social media profiles.
“I worry that it allows investors to see founders who are women as a separate class from the rest of the founders. I worry it allows investors to write women founders smaller checks. I do believe that women need to help inspire other women but also that identity can be used as labels to separate us.”
When we identify women leaders by their gender, more attention is drawn towards her gender rather than her leadership, her work, her accomplishments.
A woman should be appointed as CEO, not because she’s the best woman CEO out of ten other women CEOs, but because she’s the best CEO. Period.
I know the importance of celebrating our accomplishments and wins as women. Especially when they’re long overdue.
As the founder of a blog geared specifically towards career-minded women, I also struggle with this kind of labelling. I’m definitely not exempt. Terms like “boss babe” and “girl boss” are sprinkled throughout our Instagram feed.
But if we are to even the playing field, we need to take another look at this. Maybe it’s time to un-normalize it, so that our daughters don’t grow up thinking, “I want to be the best girl astronaut!” She can instead declare, “I want to be the best astronaut!”
We should talk about how we can un-normalize the “boss babe” narrative so that women leaders can be seen as leaders and attributed the respect they’ve earned.
What steps can we collectively take to remove gender from how we identify women leaders?
