International Women’s Day March 8, 2025
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is Empower, Inspire, Elevate. It is a call to action to uplift the women around us and ensure they live where they feel valued, supported and safe. The 2025 theme is “accelerate action.”
Why do these terms risk negative language when used to describe a woman? Terms like “pushy” “bossy” “demanding” “overbearing” “arrogant” “opinionated” “rigid” “aggressive?” are often used. Several of the women I serve in my business have experienced this frustrating phenomenon, mostly in their professional lives, but sometimes personally as well.
These women are typically high performers: exceptionally competent, clever by nature, strong willed and deeply committed to accomplishing what they set out to do.
Ideally, they’d be revered as an employer’s dream worker, but instead they may face pushback, blocking, unreasonable demands, and criticism from supervisors, colleagues and partners. Eventually they become disheartened and exhausted from jumping through an endless performance hoop.
One of these women became my client. She was a Senior VP in the oil and gas sector and was assigned an extensive re-organizational project that, to complete, required the collaboration of several senior operations people. They were leaders, but in a lesser role than she. These individuals, male, consistently undermined the project by not providing data, not meeting deadlines, refusing to implement the system changes required. They basically stonewalled the progress of her team.
Finally, after months of trying to resolve it on her own, she went to the COO to explain the problem, hoping he would put a stop to the nonsense. His response “Well, you know (her name), we really just don’t know what to do with women like you.” He suggested that she try asking the (male) leaders more questions about their families, showing them her “softer” side. He thought maybe if they felt more comfortable talking with her about their personal problems, they’d also talk about their work problems. Essentially, he dismissed the issue as “her” problem.
The Oxford dictionary defines strong-willed as “determined to do as one wants even if other people advise against it.” Sentence example: She was a fiercely independent and strong-willed woman. Further information provided by Oxford indicates that the term was applied chiefly in the 19th century with “disparaging implications to women demonstrating the qualities and character regarded as distinctively masculine, or who take an attitude of revolt against the restriction and disabilities imposed on their sex by law and custom.” (Oxford dictionaries.com)
Does this 19th century explanation still fit to explain the experience of the female VP in an oil and gas company in the 21st century?
The language we choose to express ourselves comes in part from our belief system which is created from our culture and experiences. The term strong-willed may conjure up a certain negativity because we’ve learned to think of it, at least for women, as a character flaw. Is that the case, or is this merely a bias against what’s not considered to be suitably feminine?
Despite the strides forward made by women in every occupational sector, the traditional views of what’s appropriately “feminine” seem so covertly ingrained that 50 years after the “Mad Men” era we can still bump up against them in the office of an oil and gas company.
Thankfully, many younger men today do not have a gender bias and don’t even recognize it as an obstacle for women their age. But the reality is that it continues to exist and due to its’ covert nature is difficult both to name and confront.
Before writing this article, I polled a significant number of people in my email list: clients, colleagues, friends and family (96% were women). I asked them to provide their response to this statement: “She’s a competent, strong-willed woman.” I invited them to respond with the immediate descriptive words that popped into their mind – both positive and negative. The results, not surprisingly, were that 2/3 of the respondents included negative descriptors for the term “strong-willed woman.”
The descriptors listed in the first paragraph of this article were used repeatedly. And one woman said, “Strong-willed is a trigger word…I didn’t spend a lot of time on being competent, but all sorts of things came up for me about strong-willed.” Another’s negative list was bitch, self-centered, control freak, ruthless, full of herself.
On the other hand, nearly everyone commented that “competent” felt positive to them. It made them think of someone who is a good leader, a fast learner, motivated, confident, knowledgeable, follows her values, committed, capable and intelligent. The results of a poll I did with my clientele seems to bear out that thinking. I close with a few quotes from the respondents:
Hi KJ. Here are my thoughts off the cuff: “Competent” – she gets things done with minimal fuss. She is confident in her abilities and knows her worth without needing to puff up her image. From that place of confidence, she goes about her business with grace and ease. It is acceptable for women to be competent.
Much to my consternation, I have difficulty with “strong-willed.” My immediate associations are: being pushy and demanding, not sensitive, not listening, needing to shut out external feedback in order to barrel through with a plan. And yes, there’s a sense that she compromises her femininity by being strong-willed. I wish it were not so. Although I have examples of strong-willed women who do not exhibit these negative qualities, I think my earliest and most enduring examples are of women who had to generate so much energy to exert their will that it comes off as hard.
“Interesting. My first reaction was negative. But when I substituted “person” for “woman” I had a more satisfactory reaction. The use of woman denotes that the fact she was competent and strong-willed was somehow unusual or weird, when in fact it should be quite normal.”
The comment directly above is from a male in his late sixties. Notice his use of the phrase “it should be quite normal.”
This gives me hope that the career conundrums continuing to be experienced by today’s women will eventually be resolved, maybe not in my lifetime, but surely in that of my granddaughters.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Kathleen
