There Aren’t ‘Lazy Girls’ — Just a Work Culture that Doesn’t Work for Women
Ambition feels like a “dirty word” for women these days, says author and editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay. Her new book, The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning addresses the many ways in which many women have been overworked, burned out, “girl bossed too close to the Sun,” and then wondered what “success” really looks like. On top of that, this idea of hustle culture has created an unsustainable work environment, especially for women’s mental and physical wellness. (In fact, according to a recent report by menopause health company Bonafide, 48% of women believe menopausal women are seen as less productive or emotionally stable in the workplace, and are not getting even close to enough support they need at work.)
Flow Space collaborated with the media company The Meteor, in a discussion between The Meteor founder and CEO Cindi Leive and The Meteor executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, to bring to light the aftereffects of climbing the corporate ladder, and to brainstorm on how to create healthier, more inclusive, and sustainable workplaces.
Watch the full Flow Reading Space event here or read the highlights below.
Cindi Leive: The purpose of this book, is to push back on the old idea of ambition. A lot of people were kind of chucking the idea of ambition, but you decided instead that you wanted to redefine it. What is your new definition?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I decided to lean into writing a book. So everyone’s like, how are you not ambitious? Writing a book is pretty ambitious. This is a Lean In self-help group, of reformed “lean in-ers.” But you know, I think that’s a really good example of how much things have changed in the last decade in terms of how we talk about women and ambition. And I do think we’re in this place right now where ambition is seen as a bit of a “dirty word,” and you don’t want to come off as too ambitious.
One of the things I really wanted to think about was, I think the rejection of ambition is just another manifestation of being angry that men are advancing in any way in society. What is an ambition that’s not just connected to how hard we have to work, and is there a version of ambition that’s about more than just merit, success, or hustling your way to the top or becoming a CEO? And I really thought about all of the young women in my life who are ambitious, and they’re not ambitious just because, or because they’re greedy. It’s really a survival tactic. It’s an opportunity, in a way, to say, “I want to change my lived condition. I want to change the kinds of work I do. I’m creative, I have ideas, a lot of them.”
We’re not actually able to realize those ambitions, because we don’t necessarily live in a workplace culture right now that supports women’s ambitions in those ways, especially if you’re a mother, especially if you are have student debt, you’re struggling to pay rent, all of these different things. And so I felt like we were focusing a lot on the dark side of ambition, rather than the potential of ambition, and what ambition could look like when we actually have resources and support.
Cindi Leive: Let’s also talk about the “lazy girl” trend. Maybe you need to define, “soft life,” “lazy girl,” those trends.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: There is, at least, to me, something frequently appealing about like the “lazy girl” lifestyle or the “soft life.” Because you know what? Life and work can be really hard. And this is another one where I think that we fixate a lot on, these “lazy girl jobs.” I don’t know a lot of lazy women. Like, every woman I know has like, three jobs and like, when she’s like, in her “lazy era” is like writing a book or, like having a baby. I know a lot of women that want to be lazy, they just do not have the ability to be or the tools to be lazy.
It’s structural inequality that really causes us to not actually get the things we want, but it’s not because we didn’t work hard, or we didn’t have the right day planner or Soul Cycle class, or whatever else this kind of mythology feeds us.
Cindi Leive: So going right to the big question, if the day planner is not going to get us all the success that we want, what is the solution?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Collective uprising. Not a joke, though.
I know I’ve been saying, and you’ve been fighting me on this, because I keep saying it’s not an advice book. But then I think we figured out it is an advice book. There’s this kind of burned out work culture, where all of us have pretty much signed up for this exploitative relationship with work. And there’s also an emotional piece of it, because you’re like, “Oh, I love what I do. So it’s okay that I work 90 hours a week.” And how do we kind of disentangle ourselves from this?
I think that there’s also really exciting momentum that’s happening around labor organizing right now, where people are asking their workplaces these bigger questions around work-life balance and what’s a fair workplace and what’s a fair wage. But I also think that there has to be an in between. A lot of us, especially in the creative fields, don’t necessarily work in places that can be unionized. And so, what are the things we can do?
This is what’s interesting. I do think that we are in this moment of tremendous collective consciousness raising and uprising, with this opportunity for us to be talking to each other around our experiences. What can we all concretely do to make our workplaces better whether that be, somehow legitimizing your work-life relationship, right? Or figuring out a way where you can collectively organize in the workplace? Rather than saying, “I worked really hard, but I didn’t get that promotion. It must be my own fault.” It can be “Hey, did you also not get promoted?” “How much do you get paid?” “Why are neither of us being treated equally in this right place?”
Cindi Leive: You referenced work wives and just talking to other women and being in camaraderie with other women. I wonder if you can talk about that.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: There is often a culture of competitiveness amongst women. I don’t necessarily know how intentional it is, or whether it’s one of those things where you believe it and so you reproduce it. But either way, it wasn’t necessarily we were set up to potentially be in competition with one another.
Cindi Leive: There’s a really powerful passage in the book in which you talk about being mistaken for another South Asian executive in a meeting at work. And it’s an interesting story, both because, I think when you’re reading it, you really feel what it was like to be you in that moment, but you also outline after that how it could have gone better. Can you tell that story?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Yeah, I was sitting in a meeting, and it was a senior level meeting. I was sitting in for my boss, and I wasn’t supposed to be in that meeting. Another South Asian executive was supposed to be in that meeting, so it was the perfect recipe for a mistake like this. And the person calls out three people and calls me the wrong name, and everyone’s having this blink moment where they’re like, “Did what we just think happened happen?”
I felt embarrassed for the person who did it, who rather than acknowledging the mistake, moved on. The meeting continued, and I just was hoping that it was over and I would never have to deal with it again. But then HR shows up to my office later that day, and multiple people in the room were uncomfortable. They wanted to make sure I was okay.
And the truth is, this is kind of what I get into in the book, like, misrecognition has profound implications for workplace inclusion. Like, if you’re already in an environment where there aren’t a lot of people of color, and then you can’t even tell apart the few of us that are here. What does that mean, right? But I think for me, I was like, while that is problematic to me, the foundational problem is A, that there’s not enough people of color in this environment, and that B, we don’t have do enough to create an inclusive environment, where everybody should all know who our colleagues are. We should all be comfortable talking to each other.
Cindi Leive: So getting to the advice, you know, if you are a person who’s made a mistake like that in that situation, what is the right way to take ownership of it in that?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: That’s something I get into in the book. So I had a similar incident where, at a job, someone was non binary, and I couldn’t get their gender pronoun right. Like, it happened multiple times. It’s super embarrassing. I was like, what is wrong with me? And they were so gracious about it. And the thing that that allowed me to stop was having a moment to be like, “I am so sorry. I did not mean to, you know, call you ‘her.’ I know what your gender pronouns are,” and just have that moment. It’s uncomfortable for me to admit the mistake, but it makes them feel seen and included, and that how they identify matters.
What I’ve really been thinking about a lot is, we just hate having even the most, smallest uncomfortable conversation that could avoid so much of this. We’re all going to make mistakes. That’s part of why, like diversity, equity, and inclusion focuses so much on unconscious bias. We have biases, we have predispositions, and they come out of our mouths sometimes. There’s such an easy way for us to acknowledge it, and that would have been a great opportunity for us to then build a relationship.
Cindi Leive: So getting to some of your equally excellent advice on different workplace situations. You talk about managing and how we so often see it, if you’re a manager, the thing that you are going to be sort of evaluated on is, how well did you get all of those people to do the thing that you need them to do? And you suggest that there should be a totally different criteria for how we evaluate managers or ourselves as bosses.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: It’s like, nobody dreams of middle management, right? But there is this idea that as you go up, you are more bought into what you’re doing. There’s so much about, you know, being a good manager, but nothing about, how do you actually, rather than creating more distance with the people that work for you, how do you actually come closer to them while still recognizing you have to produce and deliver and create products and meet deliverables? Does that relationship have to be contentious, or can it be one that is a little bit more inclusive in terms of ensuring that your team feels seen?
What’s been sold to us a lot is this idea that, if there’s a person of color at the top, every person of color is going to have a different experience. We kind of know that’s not right. Or if there’s a woman at the top, then all the women in the company are going to get paid better. That’s not necessarily true, and an individual can’t personally be responsible for all of that, right? It really has to be a structural change.
I see a lot of exciting potential with this group. Rather than always thinking about, your next promotion, just like you “girl bossing” your way to the top, what does it look like for management to be something deeply invested in the health and wellness of the people that work for you?
Cindi Leive: Is there a really good piece of workplace advice that anyone has ever given to you?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: That is a good question. I mean, it took me also a long time to learn not to take things personally.
Cindi Leive: For me, I had to really learn to ask for advice. I think that is maybe a little bit generational, since I’m heavily Gen X, and I grew up in this hyper self-sufficient house, and then I was always really young for the jobs that I was promoted into. And so it took me a long time to understand that when people asked for advice, it read to me like a sign of strength and self knowledge on their part. And perhaps, if I tried the same, people would afford me that as well.
