Women are constantly bombarded with tips on how to "get ahead" in the workplace -- and are similarly warned against practices that may be holding us back (like smiling too much). But Bloomberg Anchor Stephanie Rule suggests that women can only change their attitudes and actions so much in the name of career success.
Above all else, women must be true to themselves to get to the top, Rule said Thursday on HuffPost Live. "If you adopt a persona that you believe will help you get to the top, well guess what, eventually your true self needs to come out because if you don’t you’re going to be miserable and we’ve already seen -- just because you take up golf or just because you know a football score, it’s not going to get you to the CEO of a bank," she said.
But it's not just projecting an inauthentic or unfriendly persona that is holding individual women back in the workplace. Rule argued that it's time for corporations to accept responsibility for office gender inequality:
Be as good as you can be at your own job, and then the onus is on corporate America, at this point, to give top women top jobs because corporate America has failed women. Women should not need to put on a blue pantsuit or scowl at people or smile and tell funny jokes. Listen, when you have more than 50 percent of people graduating college [who are] women, those women should be getting great jobs and they don’t need to change who they are. Corporate America needs to change.
Considering that four in 10 businesses worldwide have no women in senior management and 68 percent of women believe sexual discrimination still exists in the workplace, we have to agree with Rule. While it's important to be aware of how you present yourself in the workplace, companies also need to step up, examine their hiring practices and encourage women to succeed.
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