Virginia* walked into my office and started crying almost before she sat down. When I asked what was wrong, she said, "You hurt my feelings in our last session. You called me competitive."
If she hadn't been so upset, I might have laughed at these words. Virginia was one of the most competitive people I knew. Highly successful in her work, her relationships with her family, colleagues, and friends were often rivalrous. She turned her daily run in the park into a race that she had to win. And she wanted desperately to be prettier, thinner, and more successful than any other woman in the world, including the models and actresses to whom she was always comparing herself.
Like many women, Virginia did not think of herself as either aggressive or ambitious. This was partly because, as Adrienne Harris, a NYC psychoanalyst and author once put it, despite significant advances made by women in past decades, "Competitiveness is often experienced by a woman as a damning character flaw."
But there is another part to Virginia's story, one which is harder to get to, harder to think about, and harder to understand. It has to do with how women compete, which is sometimes very different from the ways that men do it. But it also has to do with what we compete for. And it has to do with a problem that impacts both men and women: if we measure success by economic, professional or political status, then is anyone who opts for a different career path a wuss?
I thought about Virginia and many of the men and women I work with as I listened to "It's Raining Men" on NPR recently. Spurred by NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard's admittedly unscientific study of NPR's use of "women as commentators or sources in its stories," the show questioned why "only 26 percent of the sources in NPR stories were women." Host Brooke Gladstone opened the show with a question about why NPR and other media outlets' efforts to utilize more women as both sources and commentators have failed.
Gladstone and her guest, blogger and NYU professor Clay Shriky, based their discussion on Shriky's recent blog "A Rant about Women." . Among other things, Shriky says that men are good at and women "are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so."
Now, I don't like these kinds of generalizations in general, and I dislike this one in particular. For every man Shriky can find who fits this bill, I can find a woman. For just one example, I would like someone to try to convince me that many of the females whose bodies and lives are flashed across my web server all day long could not be described in Shriky's exact words.
These women are putting themselves forward; but it seems to me that they are not interested in being authorities who can be quoted in news stories and commentaries. They are more interested in being the story.
Obviously this does not mean that all women are narcissistic and vain anymore than all men are pompous blowhards. It does mean, however, that the competitive system in which we live is more than a little skewed, but not against women. It is skewed against anyone who puts family and personal life over professional success.
When I started my practice in the early 1980's, many of my clients were the first women in their families to go to college. They wanted to succeed in the professional worlds barred to their mothers' generation. They wore power suits and learned not to cry when someone at work yelled at them. Today, according to the New York Times, 56% of college students are women. Further, more of these females graduate and with higher honors than their male peers. And women can be doctors, lawyers, bankers, clergy and even astronauts.
Yet although the professional and business worlds have opened up for us, there is still a marked difference in who is in the leadership positions. Is this because of discrimination, the ongoing glass ceiling controversy? Perhaps, at least in part. But is it because, as Shriky implies, we are wusses? I don't think so. In my own totally unscientific survey, conducted over nearly thirty years as a psychotherapist in New York City, I have found a significant shift in my clients' goals.
While both men and women still long for financial success and professional recognition, they are all far more concerned about having and raising families than they were when I started practicing. And women, having attained the right to be professionals and business women, politicians and leaders, are frequently choosing to leave the stress of that world to others, so that they can focus on children.
Two recent conversations with clients reflect something I hear repeatedly these days. Mary*, in her late twenties, was moving up the corporate ladder at an amazing pace. But in her therapy all she could talk about was that she wanted to find a man she could marry. "I wish I was one of those cute, petite girls the guys fall all over. I don't want to be a successful businesswoman. I want to stay home and take care of a family."
Lily* was in her late thirties when she married. She had an established and successful career in a field she loved and was becoming one of the most respected women in her firm. "I'll give it another year," she said, "and then I'm going to start having babies. I'll find a ‘mommy job' (one that was less demanding) because I don't think I could stand not working at all. And that way Dan* (her husband) can take a less stressful position and be home with us part of the time, too. We can't keep doing what we're doing and have a family."
So I don't think men have a monopoly on being competitive or obnoxious; and I don't think women need to be more self-aggrandizing or pompous. I just think we need to figure out how people of both genders can have a meaningful family life and be successful professionals. It seems to me this would benefit everyone - men, women and children.
What do you think? I'd love to know what your experience has been in this arena!
*Not real names. Names and identifying information have been changed in all of my postings to protect individual and family privacy.
