Should Women Flirt Their Way to the Top? Damn Straight, Says Forbes.
Well this is sure to cause an uproar. In today’s ForbesWoman, author Jenna Goudreau posits that women who don’t flirt are ignoring “one of their greatest career assets”—a valuable strategic tool (if used effectively), she says, to climb up the corporate ladder.
“Using flirtation is just smart,” Nicole Williams, the author of Girl on Top: Your Guide to Turning Dating Rules into Career Success, tells her. “If you need someone’s help, use the tools available to you. It’s naive to think it has no place at work.” (Oof.)
The commenters are already weighing in, of course, calling Goudreau shallow (and worse). But the real question is: is she right? Consider what we’ve already got stacked against us: working women in this country still make just 77 cents on the male dollar; we face the challenge of balancing motherhood with career, and whether or not we decide to have children, many of us struggle to scale the corporate ladder. We are navigating the workforce, meanwhile, in a culture of plumped lips and airbrushed bodies that hold us to an unattainable ideal—and where, in a corporate culture that still largely excludes women, female competition is more cutthroat than ever.
Which brings us to this: If we acknowledge that we’re being judged on our looks anyway—and that they’re indeed crucial to our career success (see recent disturbing Newsweek survey)—why wouldn’t we use them, own them, empower ourselves through them? Wouldn’t that be—dare we say it—the feminist thing to do?
It’s not as cut and dry as Forbes’ “Secrets of Professional Flirting” (oof, did they really need to go there?) but it’s something to think about. And it doesn’t make you a slut if you do.
