open letter to clay shirky (and to all the ladies)

For those who have not seen the post that this article references, please go to this page.

Several weeks ago Clay Shirky ranted about women.  The premise was a simple one – as a faculty member at NYU, Shirky gets a lot of requests for recommendations, but the men are more forceful about self-promotion, and he is worried, he says, that:

not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

For the record, I think he’s right.  I have personally been guilty of not behaving like an arrogant self-aggrandizing jerk, and I have witnessed my fellow female colleagues fail on the same count.

But let’s unpack this sentence.  First off, the statistical caveat, “not enough”.  Some women do this and do it well.  Second, “have what it takes” – one supposes this assumes a set of personality or character traits, but also a set of skills, and perhaps most importantly, the will to do this and do it well.  Some women, and perhaps many of the women Shirky encounters, do not have the self-esteem or confidence or what-have-you to put themselves forward, to be zealous advocates for themselves.  But even if women have the self-esteem and confidence, they may lack the skill-set that makes an effective advocate.  Now let’s also assume that some women have the confidence, and have even been taught the skills, but for some reason hold themselves back from advocating for themselves.

The argument has been made that women are socialized to advocate for themselves last – that it is easier for us to promote or defend our friends, loved-ones and colleagues before we will promote or defend ourselves.  It has also been written that in business women promote each other in the belief that they will carry each other forward and up – and also provide a bit of cover when women at the top want or need or must take on the roles and responsibilities they face outside the workplace.  For example, this article in the New York Times a few years ago described this behavior in the Hollywood studio system.

From there, the women fanned out to different studios, often employing one another. “There’s a little bit of an old girls club at this point,” Ms. Pascal said. By the late 1990′s, female executives, particularly Ms. Fisher, who cut her work week to as little as three days when she had young children, had smoothed some of the edges off the industry’s go-go, late-night culture. “We needed each other for cover, so we could cut out for that concert our kid was in and not seem like slackers,” said Ms. Jacobson, who has a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. (Such habits spread: even Steven Spielberg has joked publicly about the joy of taking “a Lucy Fisher day” with his children.)

That seems encouraging, on its face, and I personally have benefited from having great female role models in my industry – women who were definitely themselves and definitely women, who were able to make decisions and build businesses and influence the influential, and who were even able to marry and have children in the process.  Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t shut the door behind them – they actively mentored, rewarded and promoted younger women like me.  They have, over time, evolved in their roles, from my boss and mentor, to my friend and colleague.  Without them, I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do what I’m doing now – or the vision.

Shirky doesn’t address this part – most people don’t.  What they talk about instead are questions of supply, demand, and intrinsic gender-based qualities (that are assumed to exist).  For example, in the same Times article as above, they discuss other options, ranging from pipeline, to socialization, to drive and support, to personality traits.

Ms. Daley said the pipeline is indeed part of the explanation – only about a third of the women who come to the U.S.C. program are interested in directing – but not all of it. “There are talented girls who want to do this, but so far they haven’t done what the boys do – band together and sacrifice everything to make a small film,” she said. It’s those films that eventually find their way into the hands of studio executives looking for the next hot young thing.

Young women are less likely to get support, both financial and emotional, from their parents, Ms. Daley added. “In my experience, parents of girls aren’t as eager to give them their life savings to make a movie,” she said.

But some executives, male and female, suggested that directing might require personal characteristics that few women possess. “The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless,” said a woman who has been both a studio chief and a producer, but didn’t want her name used for fear of alienating temperamental directors. “They have a cold streak that most women I know don’t have and don’t want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film.”

It’s almost impossible to unpack everything that’s going on in these paragraphs, but let’s just do this as simply as possible:

• There aren’t enough women putting themselves into the system for development in fields, especially creative ones, that have been traditionally dominated by men.  The film, design, advertising, and music businesses are key areas where this has been a notable struggle; I’m sure there are many others.  The struggle is defined less by employment stats (number of women in field) and more by power structures (number of women breaking the title/pay/success metric barriers).
• So why not?  One reason: they don’t have the family support that ‘self-made men’ have.  Their parents don’t encourage them to take these risks, nor do they bankroll their endeavors. I’ve known a lot of women whose mothers still encouraged them to get a degree in teaching so they could work on their writing while having something sensible to fall back on; my own parents counseled me to double-major in something esoteric and something practical (though in fairness, my father always wanted me to take 6 months off to write a book and said he would do anything to help me do that).
• Reason #2: they don’t have the support of their peers.  Whether male or female, they do not have the support structure of colleagues and friends.  When I was thinking of leaving my last company, my friends were gingerly supportive, worried that making a move in a volatile economy would be a bad idea.  But another swath of my friends, interestingly my male friends, have always told me that they would work for me any day, that they would let me sleep on their couches while I looked for a new job, that I could be a literal rock star if that’s what I chose to do.  These friends have helped me talk myself into my going solo project; a lot of women don’t have these support structures. I’m incredibly lucky, and I’ve cultivated this kind of reckless belief in my abilities by recklessly believing in the abilities of my friends.  Who are, it must be said, awesome.
• Reason #3 is the one that people seem to respond to in Shirky’s post: that women don’t have what it takes.  Apparently what it takes is a maniacal personality, compulsiveness, obsessiveness, 24-hour work days, etc.  I think this one is bunk.  That’s not about gender, that’s about personality, and I wonder whether that is truly the personality make-up of all successful directors.  Any artist or creator is obsessed with their creation during its incubation period – have you met mothers?

Okay so let’s go back to Shirky’s sentence and the phrase I think actually matters here. That phrase is “behave like.”  He’s not advocating that women become ruthless bastards, he’s just suggesting we borrow some of the behaviors.  We certainly can find ourselves defined by our deeds, but the point is that we have to be our own best advocates, or as my dad said, “look out for number 1.”

Right, so what’s the answer?  The thing I find most fascinating is that when you look at Shirky’s post, taking what he posted and all the comments below, the word ‘mentor’ is used exactly once, by Shirky himself.  In my view, that is the answer – good mentors, people who completely, unreasonably believe in someone’s talent and wherewithal.  I have been accused of possessing this trait.  It came from a friend who DM’d me this a few months ago:

random realization: u are very good at exciting people toward their potential. i wouldn’t mind it if you told me what to do someday.
(That DM came from a guy.)

This is the role of the mentor.  And in my opinion is a role that is sorely missing from professional programs, creative fields and the workplace.  So, Mr. Shirky, here is what I would propose for your program, for any field, and I’ll say this – on the off chance you see it: I would be very interested in building a network founded on these ideas:

1. Move beyond advisor and recommender to cultivator.  You are growing new talent, not just reviewing it and passing it along.  See your job as training people, drilling the basics into their heads, while also forcing your students to use all those basics to put together something bigger.  It’s like teaching someone to read using a combination of whole word and phonetics: sound it out, okay now you hear the word that you are seeing, what does it mean?  okay now you know the words, how do you put them together into a sentence?  okay now you know how to put together a sentence, how do you make a paragraph? and so on.
2. Take gender out of it – give men mentors who are female, and vice versa.  In fact, I think this is incredibly important – we need to train bosses to see the opposite gender employee in a constructive light, as much as we need prospective employees to model successful behavior.  Show women and men what it’s like to have a professional relationship with an advocate of the opposite sex, and we can begin to deal with people based on categories other than the simplistic gender divide.
3. Teach: Break it down into digestible, action-oriented pieces.  When I was starting out, the people I did informational interviews with (an excellent tactic! I have been hired through that approach, and I hired someone last fall who took that approach with me), often told me that they ‘backed into’ their field.  This revealed two things: they wanted to believe it was a mystical event; and they hadn’t been thoughtful or reflective about the path they’d taken to get into their field and achieve any success in it.  They were fumbling towards their own futures, with no perspective on their pasts.  I know most of the steps I took to get to where I am now, and will happily tell you how that worked and give you insights and actionable suggestions that are behaviors not philosophies – in other words, ‘news you can use.’  Mentors need to take down the veil of mystery – it’s a lot simpler than that.
4. Practice: Drills, drills, and more drills.  Any sport requires the breaking down of a move, a play, a technique into its component parts and then reassembling them into the game, the routine, the stroke.  On Saturdays I take a writing class – we do free writing drills based on simple concepts: write this in the 1st person, now the 3rd person, now the omniscient, etc.  Then I go to the gym and lap swim – I don’t just freestyle, I do lengths of kicks, lengths of strokes, practice my kick turn, count strokes past the flags.  Our junior employees and our students need to do the same thing: on this project, only do the desk research and write a summary.  On the next project, do that but now tell me what you think that information means.  On the next project, do all that but now tell me what you think our client should do about it.  It’s the teaching hospital principle of “watch one, do one, teach one.”  Theory is great, but we have to teach people to apply it.

And that is where the last bit of advice that is always put forward really falls short for me: it’s about hard work.  Yes, it is, but what kind of work?  There is hard work and there is smart work.  Smart work is drills and plays.  Smart work is trial and error.  Smart work is raising your hand and going first.  Smart work is believing there will always be a next time.  Smart work is failing harder.

And that has to be taught.  So, Mr. Shirky – how are you, as an educator, a mentor, a leader in your field, going to teach your students how to achieve their own success?  And how can I help?